The 'Clerk's Tale' and 'Envoy,' the Wife of Bath's Purgatory, and the 'Merchant's Tale'

Description: Argues that the Clerk's Envoy "generates a unifying theme which runs through" MerT--the possibilities of "perfection and imperfection in marriage, expressed as paradise and purgatory"--an echo of the concern with "purgatory" in WBPT. Explores the "double irony" Chaucer achieves in the Envoy by welding his concern with wifely obedience to Petrarch's assertion of moral constancy, and shows where the language, imagery, and themes of marriage, paradise, and purgatory run throughout these materials.

Chaucer Subjects: Clerk and His Tale; Merchant and His Tale; Wife of Bath and Her Tale; Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations; Style and Versification