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The canterbury tales in middle english
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The canterbury tales explanatory essay
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Summary and Analysis of The Merchant's Tale (The Canterbury Tales)
Prologue to the Merchant's Tale:
The merchant claims that he knows nothing of long-suffering wives. Rather, if his wife were to marry the devil, she would overmatch even him. The Merchant claims that there is a great difference between Griselde's exceptional obedience and his wife's more common cruelty. The Merchant has been married two months and has loathed every minute of it. The Host asks the Merchant to tell a tale of his horrid wife.
Analysis
The prologues that link the various Canterbury Tales shift effortlessly from ponderous drama to light comedy. The lamentable tale of Griselde gives way to the Host's complaint about his shrewish wife. This prologue further illustrates how each of the characters informs the tale he tells. The travelers largely tell tales that conform to their personal experiences or attitudes, such as the Merchant, whose awful marriage is the occasion for his tale about a difficult wife. In most cases the influence of the narrator on his tale is apparent, but the authorial touch lightly felt. The Merchant's Tale, for example, gains little from the prologue's information that the Merchant is disenchanted with his own marriage. Only a few of these tales exist largely as extensions of the characters who tell them; the Wife of Bath's Tale is the most prominent of these stories.
The Merchant's Tale:
The Merchant tells a tale of a prosperous knight from Lombardy who had not yet taken a wife. But when this knight, January, had turned sixty, whether out of devotion or dotage, he decided to finally be married. He searched for prospects, now convinced that the married life was a paradise on earth. Yet his brother, Placebo, cited...
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...y. January's repeated insistence that their intercourse includes a rationalization that a man and wife are one person, and no man would harm himself with a knife, an unpleasant phallic image. January uses May only as a sexual object; he hammers away upon her, bringing her only pain and boredom.
The Merchant's Tale also stretches the conventions of fabliau through the climax of the tale in which Pluto and Proserpina intrude upon the sexual intrigues among January, May and John. Proserpina and Pluto discuss the virtues of men and women in marriage, coming to the conclusion that few men are commendable, but absolutely no women are worthy. Their intervention in the situation gives divine sanction to the condemnation of women, purposely giving January his sight so that he can condemn his wife (although in a mordant twist, January can literally not believe his eyes).
For example, the third juror states in his monologue “Yeah, well I've got one. He's twenty. We did everything for that boy… When he was sixteen we had a battle. He hit me in the face. He's big, y'know. I haven't seen him in two years. Rotten kid.”(page 18) This quote alone proves that juror number eight
The way in which Januarie bases his search for a wife on concern for his own salvation and economic interests is menacing as it is a foreboding image for the rest of the marriage. His main interest lies in what he should do to ensure he experiences Paradise both alive and dead and thus highlighting his selfish nature. The economic concerns he shows for the match not only highlight this, but also his threatening lack of emotion that he is prepared to commit to the marriage. Rather than a child, he hopes for an heir, seeing only economic opportunity in any offspring. His fiancée can hope for little love for herself or any children.
Within the larger context, the tales can be divided into groups. These ‘fragments’ are each cohesive, not in the least because of their treatment of a single overarching question or issue, as is examined in detail by structuralist critic Jerome Mandel, in Building the Fragments of the Canterbury Tales. Using Mandel’s premise as a beginning, one can further conjecture a structural similarity between the fragments; for the immediate purposes, a similarity between Fragments I (beginning with the Knight’s Tale) and III (beginning with the Wife’s Tale) is worth noting, in which an opening tale poses a serious question and partially addresses it, and a pair of lighter tales follows, each playing off the other to further examine the question. As the fragments progress, moreover, the questions as they arise encompass the previous question. Thus, the Wife of Bath’s Tale serves an important didactic purpose in encompassing the Knight’s, and heightening the level of the dialogue as Alice, the Wife of Bath, exams the validity of the question the knight poses in its entirety.
Parry, Joseph D. "Interpreting Female Agency and Responsibility in The Miller's Tale and The Merchant's Tale." 80.2 (2001): 133-67. Academic Onefile. Web. 16 May 2013.
Alison in the Miller's Tale and May of the Merchant's Tale are similar in several ways. Both are young women who have married men much older than themselves. They both become involved with young, manipulative men. They also conspire to and do cuckold their husbands. This is not what marriage is about and it is demonstrated in both tales. What makes the Miller's Tale bawdy comedy and the Merchant's tale bitter satire is in the characterization. In the Miller's tale we are giving stereotyped characters. The principals are cardboard cut-outs sent into farcical motion. The Merchant's Tale gives us much more background and detail of the character's lives. The reader is more involved and can feel their situations. Here we will focus on the two women of each tale and how they demonstrate this difference.
In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath (Alison) teaches her audience what it is women most desire through her tale. The tale she tells resembles the tale of Dame Ragnell. These stories are analogies, perhaps both arising from a similar folk-tale source. Both stories are set in the magical Arthurian times when the fields and forests teemed with gnomes and unearthly creatures. Although both stories have the same moral and end on similar note, there are some vivid differences that we simply cannot overlook.
The book Acquittal by Richard Gabriel states, “juries are the best judges in the system. They are not elected, they don't have the high-powered microscope of appellate review or the stern, disapproving-schoolmarm precedent looking over their shoulder, and they have no interest in the outcome of the case.” For this reason, we can come to the conclusion that the use of juries in a trial is the best for all involved in the legal system. While juries, “are the best judges in the system”, lawyers, jury consultants, and jury scientists are the reasons they are viewed this way. It is their job to make sure that not only their client, but everyone has a fair and unbiased trial.Making sure that “the best judges in the system” are fair and unbiased takes a lot of planning, research, and effort. You must research the jurors, understand how they think, what their morals are, and how they would view this case. “It is a constructed reality, cobbled together by shifting memories of witnesses, attorney arguments, legal instructions, personal experiences, and beliefs of jurors.”(Gabriel
In The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, the stereotypes and roles in society are reexamined and made new through the characters in the book. Chaucer discusses different stereotypes and separates his characters from the social norm by giving them highly ironic and/or unusual characteristics. Specifically, in the stories of The Wife of Bath and The Miller’s Tale, Chaucer examines stereotypes of women and men and attempts to define their basic wants and needs.
All jurors in this particular case participated and took an active role, yet J1, J4, J7, J8, J12 were the most vocal. J1, J4, J7, and J8 had very strong personalities and naturally appeared to want to be active in the deliberations. J2 appeared to have a strong personality as well, but soon made their mind up about the situation. J1 and J7 as will be discussed later on appear to be the most similar and often support and defend each other throughout the jury deliberation. J12 was active merely because she had to out of self-defense. J12 was the only juror that did not agree with the majority’s conclusions about Ducic and constantly had to defend herself and provide rebuttals with little support from the other jurors. Nevertheless, it appears jurors with strong opinions on the case participate more in the ...
The Clerk's Tale seems to strike most readers as a distasteful representation of corrupt sovereignty and emotional sadism; few can find any value in Walter's incessant urge to test his wife's constancy, and the sense that woman is built for suffering is fairly revolting to most modern sensibilities. Nevill Coghill, for instance, described the tale as "too cruel, too incredible a story," and he notes that "even Chaucer could not stand it and had to write his marvelously versified ironic disclaimer" (104-5). It seems, however, even more incredible that a great poet should bother composing a tale for which he himself had little taste; that is, there must be some point, however strange, to the ordeal of Griselda. One of the words Chaucer frequently uses to describe her character is sadness. The word obviously had a very different meaning in fourteenth-century England from what it has today: In Chaucer it does not denote a depressed moral or psychological state, but a way of reacting to events which takes them thoroughly seriously without letting them disturb one's internal composure. This kind of sadness can best be understood in terms of the biblical models Griselda follows. She explicitly echoes the Stoic resolve of Job when she declares, "Naked out of my fadreshous, ...I cam, and naked moote I turn again" (871-2) [this quote needs a / to show line breaks and should use spaced periods with square brackets for ellipses]. But the allusions to Job may momentarily throw the reader off the trail of an even stronger biblical model: the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac
Black man named "Frog" James. He was accussed of the murder not because their was
The two tales, told by the Wife of Bath and the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales, have parallel plots. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” begins with a lusty knight standing before his king’s court because of unjust acts he committed with a young maiden. Before the king can execute the knight, the queen objects and offers that the knight’s life is spared if he can find the answer to what women really want. The knight embarks on his journey to discover the answer (“The Wife of Bath’s Tale” 167-68). Similarly, “The Clerk’s Tale” takes place in the kingdom of Saluzzo, Italy under the control of Walter, the marquis. The people of Saluzzo eagerly advised Walter to find a wife to ensure an heir to the throne. Walter finally finds the standard, beautiful woman in poverty named Griselda. She values hard work and humility, and Walter chooses to marry her. However, she must take a vow to Walter never to complain and to be loyal despite whatever the future may bring. Both plots revolve around the noble class and the differences among the social structure of the time because of the variety of characters portrayed in each tale. The two tales’ plots are d...
A common definition of misperception theory describes it as “the gap between the world as it actually exists and the world as it exists in the mind of the perceiver” (Duelfer and Dyson, 2011). This definition is however, dependent on one crucial assumption, that there is both a single objective reality and multiple subjective realities. The key differe...
“South Africa ditched juries amid fears of racial prejudice among jurors and a reluctance on the part of many people to serve” (Fuchs), which most likely brings up the problem we have here in the U.S. Law professor Peter Van Koppen provides a perfect example of a common situation and compares it to our criminal justice system which sums up my stance on the ruling out of jury trials in the U.S., “Van Koppen pointed out that you wouldn 't want a panel of lay people acting as doctors. So, why would you want regular people deciding the fate of defendants? The work done by a jury isn’t that different from the work of a scientist like a doctor, he wrote. ““A scientist must make inferences about states of affairs that cannot be observed directly, inferring from the evidence that can be observed. And that is precisely what a jury must do: make a decision about the guilt of the defendant based on the evidence presented at trial. That is a scientific enterprise that surpasses the intellectual aptitude of most laypersons who are called to jury duty””
Whitney Houston was an American recording artist, actress and fashion model born in a rough neighbourhood in the projects of Newark, New Jersey in 1963. Se is the third and youngest child of John and gospel singer Cissy Houston. Whitney was married to husband Bobby Brown and they had a daughter called Bobbi Kristina Brown. I chose Whitney because she was amazing; her voice was amazing and so was her acting. Her voice had so much emotion and she could give a song a feeling that anyone could relate to. Whitney Houston was famous for her electrifying live performances throughout her career, which gave her the chance to show the spectacular range of her unique voice. She started out her career by singing alongside her mother Cissy Houston at night clubs in New York City where she was discovered by Arista Records. At age 22 Whitney released her debut album which became the best-selling debut album by a female artist. Her second album called ‘Whitney’ became the first album by a female artist to debut at number one billboard 200 albums chart. Whitney appeared in her first starring role in ...