With each tale, there are different events that occur in order to reach the main topic of these tales. Within the Knight’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Tale, and the Pardoner's Tale, Chaucer does a phenomenal job in having these tales represent the societal problems of his era. Geoffrey Chaucer uses the Knight’s Tale to explains how love can corrupt the trust between two cousins. The knight is telling the story of Palamon and Arcita, two prisoners of wars that are locked up in a prison in the city of Athens. One day, the two look outside the prison window and see a fair young lady called, Emily.
For instance, it is one of the only tales that revolves around men. There is mentioning of women, but as Kruger explains it, "... women are evoked only to be excluded" (129). The absence of women suggests infertility, and thus, projects literary barrenness. Moreover, Kruger believes that the relationship between the three men is a parody of the sworn brotherhood and heterosexual love triangles found in the Knight's Tale, which also disturbs the heterosexual model of writing. Chaucer, with this tale, intended to show the dangers of the attachment to the physical and the disregard for spiritual, allegorical interpretation.
In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” the knight’s punishment for raping a girl is to set out on a year long journey to find out what women desire most. This story is sexist portraying women in a negative light. The tale portrays women as tricksters and seducers.
In the pardoner's tales, the moral is how greed can destroy people. Whereas the moral in “The Wife of Bath Tale” applies to rape. In “The Pardoner's Tale”, Chaucer explains,“ No longer was it death those fellows sought, For they were so thrilled to see the sight, the gold was so beautiful and bright” (171-174). “And with that poison he could kill his friends. To men in such a state the Devil sends Thoughts of this kind, and has a full permission To lure them on to sorrow and perdition; For this young man was utterly content To kill them both and never to repent” (246-251).
What do women yearn for most? At times, most women cannot answer this ancient question. A substantial amount of women prefer money, never ending youth, to be wed, to be widowed, to be respected, or to be pampered; the list is infinite. In The Wife of Bath’s Tale, King Arthur’s knight rapes a young maiden; the punishment at this time was beheading. Yet, the King allowed the Queen to choose the consequences that the knight will suffer.
The Wife of Bath and her tale are the most similar out of all the tales because they both share a domineering outlook over others. In the general prologue she is told to have had five husbands and is described as a looker, “Her face was bold and handsome and ruddy,” (Chaucer 39). In her prologue she goes more in depth of her time spent with her five husbands. Wife of Bath talks most about how she gains control over her husbands. For instance, her fifth husband was the controlling force in their marriage until he made the mistake of hitting her and telling her he would do anything to keep her with him and said, “My own true wife, do as you wish for the rest of your life…” (335).
“Seeing is not always believing.” -Martin Luther King Jr. ("Seeing"). In life, what people see is not always what they get. Appearances can be deceiving and keeping up with expectations does not always occur.
He also utilized fabliaux to fill his stories with multiple sexual accounts that poke fun at the rules of courtly love. Chaucer’s humor had three main components – mockery, irony, and sadism. John, an older carpenter, with a young wife, is at the center of “The Miller’s Tale.” Chaucer mocks John for marrying a younger woman and the fact that their relationship does not follow the rules of courtly love. Courtly love suggests that jealousy strengthens relationships and equates to love.
Beowulf and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” are both narratives in which gender acts as an important theme within their individual communities; both have underlying meanings when it comes to defining what the role men and women in a good community should be. Or in other words, both stories paint a vivid picture of the role of women during the medieval time period, by suggesting that one gender had more power over another. However, these two narratives take alternative paths when expressing their views; Beowulf conveys its message through what is missing, while “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” incorporates satire and uses explicit narrative when telling the experience of a woman that is highly different from other women in her time. Furthermore, another difference that is appealing to the reader’s eyes, besides the way the two narratives reflect to women’s role in medieval times, is that men become the hero in Beowulf, while “the wife”, so a woman, becomes the authority figure in the story of “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” I want to first introduce the two main differences between the two narratives and then I will explain how regardless of the differences, both of these narratives’ main goal is to show that women had less power and a good community back that time was male dominated.
The black rat, an invasive specie, was brought here from Asia (Aaron1) by pirates and/ whalers in the 17th and 18th centuries (Charles1) and has caused destruction of crops, extinction of small animals, and carries many diseases. because it is capable of destroying up to 30% of crops annually and caused the extinction of small animals. (Aaron2) Many problems have arised due to the destructive behaviors of the black rat. “According to U.S. fish and Wildlife one problem that has occurred is that the rat-borne diseases are thought to have taken more human lives in the 10 centuries than all the casualties of all the wars and revolutions combined.”
Men and women both have the capability to deceive each other; yet, in the fifteenth century, a patriarchal society would blame women the most when it comes to dishonesty. In “The Wife of Bath's Prologue” and the “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” of The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer gives women the opportunity to defend their gender against the dominating male sex. Both texts describe the negative social views of women and how the Wife intends to correct them through her own gender perceptions plus the story of a young knight who learns the difference between truths and lies from a hideous, aging hag. Men should stop lying about women’s deception for both are equally capable; nonetheless, some lies are necessary for the truth to emerge, particularly,
On the other hand, in the tale she tells a story about a Knight who takes the maidenhood of a young girl which almost causes him to lose his life and about women gaining sovereignty. The Wife of Bath fifth husband, King Arthur, the Knight, and the Wife of Bath will be placed in Dante’s hell in the Inferno. The
Brubacher, Jeffrey Reynold, Herbert Chan, Ming Fang, Doug Brown, and Roy Purssell. "Police Documentation of Alcohol Involvement in Hospitalized Injured Drivers." Traffic Injury Prevention 14.5 (2013): 453-60. Web. 25 Oct. 2015.
Overview of ‘Courtly Love’ Courtly love, also called fins amors or refined love, is a notion of love which has no affiliation with marriage. This does not mean married people were excluded from courtly love; they just experienced it with someone outside their marriage. The concept was first introduced in medieval literature, but it eventually caught on in the royal courts.
The Wife of Bath: An Analysis of Her Life and Her Tale The Wife of Bath’s Prologue stays consistent with the facts that experience is better than the societal norms, specifically those instilled by the church leadership. Chaucer uses the Wife of Bath to display the insanity of the church, but through switching and amplifying their view of men and chastity onto the opposite gender. The church doctrine at the time held celibacy in an idolized manner, forgetting the inability for humans to ever reach perfection, or live up to this standard. They also did not hold women in a high regard at all, again this is where Chaucer flips the role, as the Wife of Bath describes her five marriages in her prologue, essentially describing each as a conquest, where the result is her having all control.
