Chaucer's critique of medieval society in the Canterbury Tales

Canterbury Tales

The General Prologue. The main point of the pilgrimage in the General Prologue is found in the lines 3-23; 29 individuals set out on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket at Canterbury. Each pilgrim tells stories; disclosures of personal prejudices and past events -- and some confessions and foolishness as well -- are the tales within this story.

Chaucer's description of the fellow travelers in the group was the poet's way of reviewing the values and social particulars of the Middle Ages; it should be noted that Chaucer may have heard " ... many a preacher censure pilgrimages as the occasion for pleasure and licence and unseemly behavior" (Hodgson 2000). Three supporting ideas: a) Chaucer mentions that secular pilgrims have " ... girdles, belts, and cords" but others do not; normally in the Middle Ages, the Prioress, the Monk, and Friar would wear girdles, belts and cords but in the General Prologue they do not. Why not? The girdles in this era stood for " ... chastity, faithfulness, truth, righteousness, and spiritual preparedness," and by omitting these "ecclesiastical girdles, belts, or cords" Chaucer suggests there are lax spiritual values represented (Besserman 2014); b) Chaucer "struggled to write under accepted [Catholic] guidelines of the day, while his creative self was attempting to emerge" (Hubbard-Brown 2009). Hence, breaking away from total adherence to Church values, he panned The Prioress (nun), saying that while she was "right pleasant, amiable," she was also "at pains to counterfeit the look of courtliness" -- in other words, she was fake (Nicolson 2015); and c) The Friar was a " ... begging friar" who believed that "... instead of weeping and of prayer men should give silver to poor friars all bare"; he loved profit which is borderline corrupt juxtaposed to what a friar is supposed to do ... (Nicolson 7-8).

The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale: The main themes in this tale are marriage and power. Alisoun has been married five times and she reveals that with her very healthy sexual appetite, she was able to control her husbands through " ... the use of her body" (Trudeau 2005). She gained financial wealth through husbands who had means. Three supporting ideas: a) After her 4th husband mysteriously died (he had a mistress) she got married to a very young man strictly for love, a dramatic switch; however, he used his body to have power over her; b) Alisoun justifies her sexual adventures by recounting the Biblical story of the Samaritan woman at the well who lived with a man out of wedlock; and c) Alisoun also thought that because the Bible says be fruitful and multiply, she was okay to sleep around.

The Miller's Prologue and Tale: Chaucer created a character in Absolon, the squeamish parish clerk, who has a feminine side but is not easily categorized. That is the main point of Absolon: he is feminine and he has no experience in matters of romance; he wears children's clothes and yet he is an adult; he approaches Alisoun with love and gifts and his kiss (she sticks her read end out the window for him to kiss) with Alisoun could be "homophobic or misogynist" (Walker 2002). Three supporting ideas: a) In the Prologue he acknowledges that he was drunk but " ... if I slander or mis-say, blame it on the ale of Southwark" (the Inn), a pathetic and funny excuse for his behavior (Chaucer 2012); b) as more evidence of his naivety he is " ... entirely incapable of adjusting" to proof of what a real woman's body is like when Alisoun's "rough" pubic hair is in his face, he "short-circuits into violence" (Walker 2); and c) it seems that Chaucer is using Absolon to parody the classic hero in literature; Absolon is "a deliberate mocking" of the chivalric hero (Walker 7).