Love In The Miller's Tale

Through The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer shows how love is portrayed in a completely different light based on whether you are a part of the lower or upper class. Through his descriptions of Emily in “The Knight’s Tale” and Alison in “The Miller’s Tale”, Chaucer envisions woman as the source of two different types of love based on the social class she belongs to. The upper class version of love would be presented as something noble in the way the male goes about trying to earn the woman’s love. In the upper class version love it takes far more of an effort to win the girl over and it must be done in a polite/kind manner. The lower class type of love contains far more primal tactics, in which the male does not have to try very hard to have the woman leave behind her current partner for the new male. The way that the lower class thinks somewhat resembles the attitude which animals have towards their partners, in that the woman would

While Alison and her interactions with Nicholas and Absalon contain vulgar and obscene language, Emily’s interaction with Palamon and Arcite takes on a much less informal tone. The use of gods and their influence on love is not apparent at all with Alison in the Miller’s Tale. Instead, her interactions involve fate and events that are often portrayed in a casual and joking manner. In the Knight's Tale, the influence that the gods have on love suggest that the Knight’s view of love is that of a high class individual. In contrast, the Miller’s tale suggest that the Miller views love in the context of a lower class and in that sense has a completely different idea of a relationship. Ultimately, this shows how the morals of each social class shapes the interactions between people and how the actions taken by each individual based on the morals lead to a different concept of