Sneaky Satire
(A Critique of Chaucer’s use of Satire to Reach the Intended Audience)
The writings of Geoffrey Chaucer have been praised throughout Europe and the Middle Ages. His writings have been known to be controversial compared to others during that time period. In his writings, he used something called satire to get his point across. Satire is defined as this: the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices. There are two types of satire that Chaucer uses: Horatian and Juvenalian. Horatian satire is the kind of satire that is playful and joking, while Juvenalian satire is much more harsh. Chaucer will use satire to critique three different institutions in his writings: the church, the Patriarchy, and the class system. The first institution that Chaucer criticizes in his writings is the church. In this time period, the church was full of hypocrisy and corruption. In his writings,
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The Patriarchy is the idea of men and women in the middle ages. In this time, women were not seen as equal to men, because men sat above women in the Patriarchy. It was socially acceptable, and even encouraged, for men to beat their wives with sticks if they ever “misbehaved”. Chaucer’s harsh criticism of this is evident in “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”. In this writing, the wife of bath is telling of her many husbands and how badly she has been treated by them. The wife of bath is harshly criticizing this Patriarchy, which is Chaucer’s way of criticizing it. In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”, she tells a story of an old woman who is criticizing a young man and his mistreatment of her. On line 292, she says “But gentleness, as you will recognize, is not annexed in nature to possessions, men fail in living up to their professions; but fire never ceases to be fire.” Chaucer uses the Patriarchy to harshly criticize it and voice his opinion of