Chaucer's 'The Merchant's Tale': Tender Youth and Stooping Age
- Author / Editor
- Kloss, Robert J.
Chaucer's 'The Merchant's Tale': Tender Youth and Stooping Age
- Published
- American Imago 31 (1974): 65-79.
- Description
- Argues that MerT reflects delusive male infantile fantasy, reading January as ego, Placebo as id, Justinus as super-ego, and May as an idealized mother figure. The Merchant's encomnium of marriage and Damain's courtly behavior are extensions of January's infantilism and the garden is a fantasy of female genitalia, reinforced by January's regressive narcissistic blindness, oral imagery in the Tale, and instances of psychoanalytic "reversal."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Merchant and His Tale.