The Role of "Quiting" in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
In Chaucer’s, The Canterbury Tales, many characters express the desire to "pay back" some other pilgrim for their tale. The function of "quiting" gives us insights into the ways in which Chaucer painted the social fabric of his world. The characters of the Knight, the Miller, and the Reeve, all seem to take part in a tournament of speech. The role of "quiting" in The Canterbury Tales serves to "allow the characters themselves to transcend their own social class, and class-based moral expectations, in order to gain power over people of "higher" social strata."(Hallissy 41)
Throughout each prologue of the first three tales, we can see a clear description of the social rank of each speaker. The Knight is clearly the person to start the Tale cycle, as he belongs to the highest class of all the Pilgrims. By following the Knight, the Miller usurps the Monk’s privilege to tell the next tale, and begins one of his own. The Miller is allowed by the Host to use the pretense of being drunk, and proceeds to tell a story which goes against social conventions by poking fun at the rules and regulations of a higher social class. The Reeve then follows the Miller’s Tale with one of his own. Osewold tries to "quit" the Miller’s Tale by telling the story concerning Symkyn. The progression from the Knight to the Miller to the Reeve, gives us a picture of three very different class-levels. Through their speech, however, the lower-class characters of the Miller and Reeve are allowed to comment and pass judgement on people without fear of the socially-constructed class system.
In his Prologue, the Miller seems to be driven by a kind of anger directed at the ending of the Knight’s s...
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...o meaning within the world of the mind. A lowly Miller has as much right to "quit" a Knight as anyone does. The battle instead, becomes one of inner strength, where the contestants are not defined by social roles, but by the quality and passion of their beliefs.
Works Cited and Consulted
Brewer, Derek. Tradition and Innovation in Chaucer. London: Macmillan, 1982.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. In the Riverside Chaucer. Larry D. Benson, ed. Boston: Houghton, 1987.
Cooper, Helen. "Deeper into the Reeve’s Tale, 1395-1670." Pp. 168-184. In Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Delasanta, Rodney. "The Miller’s Tale Revisited." Chaucer Review 31.3 (1997), 209-231.
Hallissy, Margaret. Codes of Conduct in The Canterbury Tales. Connecticut: Greenwood, 1993.
As the Miller’s personality is developed by his dissimilarity to the Knight, so is the Reeve by the Miller. Therefore, Robin’s enjoyment of life shows just how little Oswald receives from the same. For instance, the Miller’s large frame and excessive drinking show his delight in small pleasures. The Reeve, however, is “a sclendre colerik man” who controls his beard and hair (in opposition to the unruly strands that grow on a wart on the miller’s nose) as manipulatively as the accounts of the farm on which he works (I 587). The Miller mastered the bag-pipes for entertainment in his spare time while the Reeve trained with more practical tools: “In youth he had learned a good myster: He was a well good writer, a carpenter” (I 614).
Each pilgrim claims to have a tale good enough to match, or "quite," the previous tale told. The constant presence of competition in the tales—which often takes on an odd tone, as the combatants treat it more as a debate over whom the gods will or should choose to support and guide to victory— is echoed by the "route" of travellers telling them. And yet, as each character boasts of his or her tale, they constantly hedge their own bets, warning of the possibility that they might err in some way as they tell their story, and asking their company to absolve them of their flaws in advance. The most striking example of this is the Miller. The drunk, boorish Miller interrupts the pecking order, leaping over "better" men such as the Monk and the Man of Law in order to share a tale with which he plans to "quite the Knightes tale." When told by the Host to know his place, he threatens to leave the company unless he is permitted to tell his tale, and has to this point come across as brash and very confident in his abilities. However, when the Host relents and allows the Miller to have the floor, he backtracks: "But first I make a protestacioun, That I am dronke--- I knowe it by my soun." While the Pagans in the Knight 's tale blame failures on Fortune, the Miller, far more plain and earthly than the Knight or any of his characters, has a more practical scapegoat in mind: the
Happiness has always been a desirable goal throughout our lives, but each actions we take might just affect the happiness of others. When humans seek happiness, we always seek for things that make us feel alive, or things that brings us the greatest comfort. Our contentment comes with the act of selfishness since we choose to prioritize our happiness above all other. We willingly classify happiness in two different types of meaning, both physical and mental happiness. People ought not be in title to happiness because it is classified in general as a physical desire by many people. Contentment is always known to be a physical satisfaction in life instead of a self-inducing satisfaction for life.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales: Riverside Chaucer Third Edition. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,1987. 3-328 Secondary
Tatlock, John S.P., and Arthur G. Kennedy. A Concordance to the Complete Work of Geoffrey Chaucer. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1963.
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, (written c. 1387), is a richly varied compilation of fictional stories as told by a group of twenty-nine persons involved in a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury, England during the fourteenth century. This journey is to take those travelers who desire religious catharsis to the shrine of the holy martyr St. Thomas a Becket of Canterbury. The device of a springtime pilgrimage provided Chaucer with a diverse range of characters and experiences, with him being both a narrator and an observer. Written in Middle English, each tale depicts parables from each traveler.
Mandell, Jerome. Geoffrey Chaucer : building the fragments of the Canterbury tales. N.J. : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed Mack, Maynard et al. W. W. Norton and Co. New York, NY. 1992.
The questions that are asked when exploring the concept of happiness should begin with desire to know if it is a pleasure based in our basic and primitive emotions. Next, is happiness motivated by pure desire? Does a mental state of contentment produce happiness? Does happiness come from a simple, physical feeling? Maybe happiness is a combination of all of these.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales: Riverside Chaucer Third Edition. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,1987. 3-328 Secondary
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