Geoffrey Chaucer View and Change on Judgement

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Recommended: Short note on Geoffrey Chaucer

As humans, it is a natural tendency to judge everything. We discriminate people, and judge them by who they are. Teenage girls judge other girls by what they wear, how they look, and how they present themselves socially. Do we do this on purpose? Of course not, but when we get bored with ourselves, we have to judge other people and compare. When we start this judgment process, we also form certain opinions towards that person or an organization. Geoffrey Chaucer is one of these people, but he actually did something about it. He had problems with some social aspects during the 1300s which included the church, gender differences, and hypocrisy. He wrote about these problems in a set of tales widely known as The Canterbury Tales. The first is The General Prologue which describes a pilgrimage to Canterbury that many people endure, but on this specific journey, twenty-nine different people travel together to Canterbury. He uses two types of satire to relinquish these opinions, juvenile and horacian. A general definition of satire is saying one thing, but meaning another. The author Cynthia justifies my definition by stating, “Chaucer reminds us that behind all the jokes are the serious truths that he and his pilgrims believed in.” (Werthamer, Cynthia C.).Juvenile satire can be very enraging to whomever it is targeting; on the other hand, horacain satire will make everyone laugh. By using both of these types of Satire, he expresses his concerns in The General Prologue, The Pardoner’s Tale/Prologue, and The Wife of Bath’s Prologue/Tale.
First of all, both types of satire are used in The General Prologue. His use of satire is primarily expressed through the characters. For example, the Knight is perceived as perfect, he follows the chiva...

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...the truth, which is what everyone should do. However, according to Toswell, “What they all share, however, is a sense of the impossibility of pinning Chaucer down to any one meaning, any one approach; he slides away, probably laughing.”(Toswell, J, M.).

Works Cited

Baragona, Alan. "Chaucer and War." Journal of Military History 1(2001):170. eLibrary. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.

Bloom, Harold. "Road Trip." New York Times Book Review. 15 Nov. 2009: 13. eLibrary. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.

Brewer, W, Gwen.. "What women want: The wife of bath and the modern woman." Human Quest. 01 Jul. 2001: 3. eLibrary. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.

Toswell, J, M.. "Chaucer's pardoner, Chaucer's world, Chaucer's style: Three approaches to medieval literature." College Literature 3(2001):155. eLibrary. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.

Werthamer, Cynthia C.. Canterbury Tales. Barron's, 2004. eLibrary. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.

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