The character of the Pardoner in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is a complex one, full of contradictions and ambiguity. On one hand, he is described as a "noble ecclesiast" (Chaucer 691) and a skilled preacher, capable of moving his listeners to tears with his sermons. On the other hand, he is also a con artist, selling indulgences to people who believe that they can buy their way out of sin. This duality is central to the Pardoner's character, and it is the source of both his power and his corruption.
The Tulsa Massacre of 1921 was a tragic event in American history in which a white mob attacked and destroyed the thriving Greenwood District, also known as “Black Wall Street”, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The event resulted in the deaths of hundreds of African American residents and the displacement of thousands more. This massacre was a direct result of tensions breaking after the Great Migration, a movement of approximately six million African Americans from the southern to Midwest and Northeastern states. Effects of the Great Migration led to an enormous cultural and social change in the midwest and northeastern states, as the African American population increased by over 40% the culture in states like Oklahoma changed drastically. However, this increase in the population caused competition in the job market to increase, and as tensions rose, anger from the racist white community was directed toward people of color.
The Canterbury tales are full of many tales where there are good and evil people. There are sins that are being or have been committed in the past. Some of the deadly sins mention in the The canterbury Tale is lust and pride. Lust can be found in the tale through the wife of bath who is an “expert on marriage.” The wife does not see anything wrong with being married five times because she cannot understand that it is a sinful thing to be committing adultery.
All the punishments are awful. However, when Dante describes the punishments of those who committed violence against god he clearly shows his anger towards these people through the punishment he gave them. Those who are: simonists, fraudulent, magicians, diviners, and fortune tellers. The punishment for all the fraudulent is to be boiled in pitch and furthermore to have devils jab them with pitchforks. As for the other sins they have four punishments any of them could get such as: Face down in holes while their feet burn, being integrated with others forever, to wallow in ordure, and lastly being covered with sores and scabs from head to toe.
Perfection is Not for Mortals Is it possible to live on this planet without being a hypocrite? Is it unavoidable in a morally strict environment? In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer sets high moral standards for his pilgrims to follow. Neither the Pardoner, the Summoner, nor the Friar come close to the dignified spiritual example set by the Parson.
Chaucer also utilizes the literary device of a parody, by parodying the rooster and chickens of the barnyard to a king and other members of the royal court. While life outside the barnyard is described as monochromatic, the rooster Chauntecleer is described much like a king “His comb was redder than fine coral…and his color like the burnished gold.” (Lines 39-44). The choice to use chickens to represent nobility in itself says a lot about how Chaucer views the court, considering that chickens are not very bright animals. By using chickens to parody members of the court, Chaucer is easily able to mock medieval education and the learned traditions of the medieval court by likening them to facts that simple chickens could comprehend.
Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber”, a re-writing of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale “Bluebeard”, deals with male authority and female obedience with a focus on the sexual relations between male and female. The masculinity the two husbands express, however, are quite different. The Marquis, the first husband, looks at the unnamed narrator as an object, whereas Jean-Yves, the second husband, cannot illustrate any sort of male gaze. He is blind. We can see the crucial connection between sightedness and blindness, and male erotic identity throughout the story.
Geoffrey Chaucer has greatly influenced English literature with many of his works. He comprised more than twenty tales in his most famous collections The Canterbury Tales. There are several of his many tales that expresses love, marriage, and romanticism to display an important message. The Merchants Tale in particular refers marriage and love between the characters. First, the story introduces the narrator Chaucer, whom tells the story of a knight.
During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church had a great amount of power because it was the only one at the time. As expressed in The Canterbury Tales, it even oversaw the court, so one could propose that the Church had exponential power. They seemed to rule the economy and hold a lot of land. Kings and queens were even preceded by the Church. Supposedly, in those times, the Catholic Church was a source of great hypocrisy or a good number of its people were.
The Pardoner, from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, is the world’s most obvious and shameless hypocrite. He spent his entire life preaching that the love of money is the root of all evil, and even tells a tale of three men whose greed for money leads to their own demise. Despite knowing this, the Pardoner himself admits that he only preaches for money and goods. The irony of his tale has to do with the fact that he promotes an idea or moral, which his very own livelihood contradicts.
In relationships between men, the older male was the “pronounced [masculine] of the elder [and] is indicated by his greater size, his beard, and a large cane; the boy, by contrast is depicted beardless and considerably smaller than his older partner” (www.reading.ac.uk) Some people believed that “male love was held to be an apprenticeship for manhood” (3) and not in a matter of naturality, said Andrew Calimach in the book, Lovers’ Legends The Gay Greek Myths. He also says that is was a “a way to learn about warriorship, culture, and proper behavior” (3), which molded the two partners into better, well trained people. The men that weren’t homosexual mostly tended to marry young teenagers (around the age of 15) after around the beginning of their menstrual cycle.
In the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer utilizes the immoral character of the Pardoner to tell the utmost moral tale through satirical devices, presenting the true greed and hypocrisy that runs throughout the Church, regardless of it attempt to cover it. Chaucer introduces the hypocrisy within the Church through the characterization of the Pardoner, as he is explained to be a man with, “flattery and equal japes./He made the parson and the rest his apes” (“General Prologue” 607-608). “Japes” are tricks, alluding to the Pardoner’s relics, as they are fake; yet, the Pardoner still sells these relics to the Church members as genuine treasures. This creates dramatic irony, because the character of the Church body is unaware of the situation bestowed
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories that are verbally created as the Host requests that each pilgrim tell a story on the journey to Canterbury. Although this ultimately leads to conflict amongst the pilgrims, the entire spectrum of human personalities is presented by showing each character's qualities, flaws, and hypocrisy. In order to show multiple layers of perspectives, including that of the pilgrims, Chaucer as the narrator, and Chaucer as the writer, The Canterbury Tales is written as a frame narrative. The use of a frame narrative allows Chaucer to convey his own values in humanity by observing and reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of human nature.
According to William E. Mead ‘the evils of matrimony, […], were a favourite theme in the Middle Ages’ . This means that marriage was a recurring topic and especially marriages that had trials and problems to overcome. Indeed, in the Canterbury Tales Chaucer uses for some of his tales the setting of marriage. In this essay, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and the Franklin’s Tale will be used to demonstrate how Chaucer represented marriage and what possible functions could it have. With functions I mean in the texts as part of the plot as well as how marriage functions as a plot device.
In “The Canterbury Tales” Chaucer illustrates the corruption of the church through the religious characters in both the tales and the prologue and their obsession with money. Illustrating the fact that medieval England, the church had a big impact on the lives of people due to them being able to “read” the bible. In many cases, this was uses to manipulate people into giving their money to church. Throughout the tales, people are shown to stand up to the church and beat them at their own game and this provides the ideal response to church corruption.
