Chaucer sets up Criseyde's behavior, from first love to betrayal, as a reflection on woman's perilous social state. In so doing he questions the judgment passed on her by a male-centered society and religion, even though it is represented in his own…
Green, Richard Firth.
Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 201-20.
Throughout TC Chaucer uses the social play of "luf-talkying" as a vehicle for irony and as a means of establishing man's inability to attain an ideal. Troilus plays the love game too earnestly and so is both truly comic and, in terms of final…
Constance is not, as Delany (1974) claims, a character who embodies and recommends self-degradation and abject submission to power in all its forms. What is important is that Constance discovers in the course of her experience that Providence, not…
Griselda's several robings and disrobings are used to suggest the difficulty of knowing the constant reality behind shifting appearances. The behavior of Griselda and Walter becomes more coherent through the different meanings they see in clothing: …
In the Merchant and MerT Chaucer objectifies his own cultural bias against women and his own interest in financial profit. The Merchant is like January (Janus was the god of merchants), and Chaucer (born into a family of merchants) is like the…
Chaucer uses "the winds of Fortune" as a metaphor to organize the genre and to define the characters. Troilus' perception of Fortune shifts from the divine to Criseyde, assuring his fall. The narrator opposes Pandarus' attitude in accepting the…
Benson, C. David.
Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 308-15.
Guido's "Historia Destructionis Troiae" uses an objective historical tone, mixed with outbursts of personal lamentation. From this Chaucer developed his narrator, a philosophical historian who is affected as a man by his own story, to accent in TC…
In CT Chaucer defines and redefines "myrie tale." Ultimately it is neither mere entertainment, nor pure instruction, not even sentence and solace. A truly "myrie tale" must be "fructuous," i.e., truly edifying. Only ParsT fits, for poetry is…
Havely, Nicholas R.
Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 337-45.
The Friar's varied activities are recounted in terms that have both commercial and non-materialistic applications. Ambigous diction points toward deeper questions about the use of wealth and, together with the sexual innuendoes and the enumeration…
Chaucer and his fellow pilgrims saw Madame Eglentyne as the Virgin's handmaiden, reflecting in her foibles and virtues the Queen of Heaven, whose "amor vincit omnia" (love conquers all). Support for the existence of the Marian echoes includes the…
Nolan, Charles J.,Jr.
Chaucer Review 13 (1979): 363-72.
Pity blends the language and structure of amorous and legal complaints. Legal bills, like "The Bill of Complaint" in the second part of Pity, have a tripartite structure: address, statement of grievance, and prayer for remedy. Recognition of this…
Chaucer increases Boccaccio's emphasis on the social situation of the lovers to dramatize the separation between personal and public lives. Pandarus, ever conscious of the social context, trains Troilus as the "literary" lover. The action reflects…
Recent proposals that Alisoun and Jankyn may have murdered her fourth husband are analyzed and rejected. Their quarrel arises not from mutual guilt but from Jankyn's suspicions about Alisoun, and from his association of murder and female lust. Such…
If the Pardoner is taken as a hermaphrodite, it is easier to approach the question of how he can explain his false practices and still expect his listeners to be taken in by them. According to late medieval writers, the hermaphrodite's dual nature…
A previously uncollected analogue emerges in the form of a joke in Kansas. Structural parallels include the motivating action, the consummation in a tree, and the refusal of the husband to believe the evidence of his own eyes.
By constantly breaking the dramatic illusion, the Nun's Priest forces his audience to consider the implications not only of his storytelling but of storytelling itself. The interruptions of his narrative, the comparisons of chickens and people, the…
Benson, Donald R.
Chaucer Review 14 (1979): 48-60.
Rhetorically nearer to exhortation than to encomium, the didactic structure of this passage (4.1267-1392) rises in a series of contradictions that confuse doctrines and undercut ironic perceptions. None of the proposed assignments of the passage…
Kelley, Michael R.
Chaucer Review 14 (1979): 61-73.
Antithesis is the major source of PF's aesthetic unity. It arranges the poem's structural levels in a pattern of oppositions: antithetical word pairs are joined by antithetical arrangements of style, description, characterization, plot, narrative,…
There are in CT examples of the late medieval attack on the symbolic attitude. The literal use of the Song of Songs in MerT, and the Wife of Bath's scriptural interpretation, are respectively examples of the mockery and parody of analogical thought.
Chaucer achieves maximum concentration on the moment of denouement by organizing his characters into two parallel and static triadic sets. When the characters are in their triadic configurations, no action takes place. The resolution of tension by…
The conception of the action of RvT in three dimensions is designed to provide more than narrative realism. By reducing the miller's area of influence, Chaucer represents metaphorically his being cut down to size by the students.
The Merchant's language snares the reader into displaying bad taste. It accomplishes this by making May a sympathetic character and by allowing the reader to belong to a select group which sees through the deceptions of the tale. However, the…
