This essay analyzes the character of the Prioress in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, exploring the tension between her professed piety and her observable human weaknesses. Drawing on the General Prologue and the Prioress's own tale, the paper examines her social ambitions, dress, oath, jewelry, anti-Semitism, and childlike demeanor as indicators of a deeply contradictory personality. Scholarly perspectives are used to assess whether her materialism reflects vanity or circumstance, and whether her devotion to the Virgin Mary is genuine or performative. The essay concludes that the Prioress embodies a recognizably human struggle between spiritual aspiration and worldly desire.
The paper demonstrates character analysis through contextual interpretation: rather than judging the Prioress by modern standards, it situates her behavior within the social and institutional structures of medieval convent life, aristocratic culture, and Catholic religious practice. This historicizing approach allows the writer to balance criticism with contextual empathy.
The essay opens with a thesis framing the Prioress as a contradictory figure, then moves systematically through her social mannerisms, clothing, oath, jewelry, tale prologue, and anti-Semitism before closing with a synthesizing conclusion. Each paragraph treats a distinct element of her character, making the argument easy to follow. The conclusion ties all threads together by affirming that the Prioress's contradictions mirror universal human flaws.
In Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Prioress's tale delves into the piety, propriety, and prejudice of a senior nun. Her tale examines the murder of a young, innocent choir boy who was killed by the town's Jews for singing aloud in praise of the Virgin Mary. Much attention is placed on the words and sentiments — especially the anti-Semitism — expressed by the Prioress in terms of assessing her character traits. Nevertheless, her social skills, dress, and physical appearance also reveal much about her character, particularly that she is a human being who strives to maintain piety and spirituality but remains subject to human desires and weaknesses (Stone 58).
In the General Prologue, the reader is afforded glimpses of the paradoxical nature of the Prioress's personality. She is a figure caught between the spiritual world she professes to inhabit and the aristocratic world she cannot seem to leave behind. This tension — between genuine devoutness and worldly vanity — is the central concern of any serious assessment of her character.
She is quick to point out her proficiency in French (Chaucer 124) and her pristine table manners (Chaucer 128), two indications that she is quite sophisticated and desires to be accepted by the aristocracy. That she possesses such refinements is notable, but that she finds it necessary and appropriate to identify these as strong character traits directly evidences a lack of true piety, since genuine piety would manifest in a sincere interest in more spiritual matters (Murphy). Furthermore, she did not acquire her French in Paris but in a school in London — an additional indication that she is trying too hard to impress an aristocratic world to which she does not truly belong (Murphy).
It is important, however, to consider the view that the Prioress likely served as the head nun or assistant head of an abbey (Zatta). Her duties would have included managing the abbey's internal affairs and maintaining contact with the outside world (Zatta). She probably came from a prosperous — perhaps aristocratic — family with several daughters, making marriage unlikely, or from a fringe aristocratic family that could not afford to pay a proper dowry (Zatta). It stands to reason, within this worldview, that she would have possessed more material goods than might seem appropriate for a nun (Zatta). Therefore, to characterize her as merely ostentatious and materialistic risks losing sight of both the world she was born into and her role as the convent's link to secular society (Zatta).
The choice of wardrobe for the Prioress has been interpreted as demonstrating that she valued vanity more than a good Christian should (Power 77). There is a consensus among Chaucer scholars that the Prioress preferred to prove her good breeding by leaving her forehead visible beneath her veil, rather than wearing the veil so close to the head that the forehead was concealed — as was proper and truly pious according to the standards expected of a nun in the Middle Ages (Hourigan 44). Some, however, defend the headdress worn by the Prioress as proper within the rules of convent life and medieval literary convention (Hodges 46).
The selection of her jewelry is equally revealing, though in this instance her choices appear to reflect a genuine spiritual sensibility (Lynch 440). The emerald is the stone associated with the month of May, widely held to be the birth month of Mary, and it has consequently come to be seen as representative of the virtue of chastity (Lynch 440). It is natural that the Prioress would place great emphasis on chastity and wish to signal her commitment to a chaste lifestyle by wearing the emerald (Lynch 440). The emerald was also believed to protect mothers during childbirth (Lynch 440). The stone therefore represents, at once, purity and motherhood — the duality associated with the Virgin Mary, whom the Prioress longs to exalt (Lynch 440).
The Prioress's ruby represents the Crucifixion and the subsequent martyrdom of Jesus, a correlation that is lost on neither Chaucer nor the Prioress (Lynch 441). The pearl referenced in the Prioress's tale depicts virginity, a symbolism owing to its whiteness (Lynch 441), as well as Mary's perfection as one born without the "stain of Adam and Eve upon her soul" (Lynch 441). Taken together, the gems portray the virginity, martyrdom, and perfection that define what the Prioress sees in the Virgin Mary and sets as the ideal for herself (Lynch 441).
The character of the Prioress is quite a study in contrast for a number of reasons. First, she is a victim of circumstance: born into a wealthy family and then placed in a convent, speaking French and wearing fine clothes does not make her a bad person, but it does appear inappropriate for a nun to harbor such preoccupations. She possesses an earnest love for the purity and perfection of the Virgin Mary, yet she is overcome by her own immaturity in expressing that love.
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