Masculinity In The Canterbury Tales

In this paper, I will explore various discourses that shaped the understanding of male gender in medieval England and the notion of masculinity in Canterbury Tales.

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, he introduces a character known as the Wife of Bath. It is her turn to tell the stories, and her tale begins discussing her past marriages in the prologue. Married five times, the Wife of Bath tells us about her own marital issues, and the way she was able to manipulate the gender roles to her own advantage. As interesting of a character as she is, I find Chaucer created the Wife of Bath to deliberately introduce the issues gender roles play in our society. I believe that the role the of the Wife of Bath in the tale was purposely written by Chaucer to twist the traditional gender roles of the time, satirizing how gender plays in society.

In Canterbury Tales, Chaucer reveals hypocritical qualities in the Pardoner through vivid characterization, tone, and morality. The Pardoner's total lack of respect for the Church's expectations and the congregation allows Chaucer to display flaws in society. Chaucer is able to demonstrate scams and illustrate hypocrisy in the Church, and society in general through the techniques he uses in Canterbury Tales.

While on the way to venerate Saint Thomas Becket’s remains, the entertainment of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims falls upon the requiting of stories between the different estates. However, this requiting quickly turns malicious, the Host’s simple proposition evolving into an aggressive show of social dominance that includes the boasting of both literal and metaphorical rape. The normalization (or, borderline reverence) of aggressive manliness contributes to the creation of both rape culture and compulsory heterosexuality. Consequently, when a man does not dominate a woman—or, does not use his masculinity to humiliate another man—he is seen as weak or effeminate, subsequently placing his sexuality under scrutiny. Such is the motive behind John and Aleyn’s rape of the miller’s wife and daughter—to make Symkin seem weak, and to gain a reputation of superior masculinity. Thus,

The Pardoner use deceit and lies to pray on the poor and innocent, his characterization represents the churches misuse of its vast power. Chaucer fortifies this idea when he describes the Pardoner as “And thus I preach against the very vice/I make my

The world is full of hypocrites and in the story “The Pardoner’s Tale”, Chaucer writes about a man who is living a life of sin. The Pardoner’s tale is an epologia of a pardoner who has the power from the church to forgive others for their sins but makes a living out of lying and tricking his audience. Throughout the Pardoner’s Tale he preaches about greed, drinking, blasphemy, and gambling but in the Pardoner’s Prologue he admits to committing these sins himself. The pardoner is really just a 14th century con artist who makes a living by his own hypocrisy.

Both the Pardoner and the Friar are portrayed as quick-thinking charlatans. Chaucer does seem to admire the Pardoner’s skill, and skilled he is, but his actions do not befit a man of the cloth. The Pardoner is spoken of as using bogus relics to con “poor up-country parsons” out of their hard-earned cash. These small hustles netted him “more in a day than the parson in a month or two”. When choosing his occupation, I’m sure the Pardoner did not see the light of the lord but rather, dollar signs. Chaucer goes on to say that yes, the pardoner did preach rather well and his stories were quite splendid, however that might be on account that he could “win money from the crowd”.

In the story, “The Pardoner’s Tales”, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the character the Pardoner in descriptive way. He describe the Pardoner’s corruption teaching and the way the Pardoner act in the tale. The religious that the Pardoner teaching is corrupted and very selfish, greediness, and gluttony. This thing are all opposite to what the real church religious is teaching. In the story, he tricks the people to buy his fake relics and other things by using the church’s believe. The Pardoner act and his teaching are all corrupted because of the church. It shows the side of greediness, gluttony and selfishness which highly reflect into himself and his believe.

The Pardoner and Summoner appear together in “The Prologue.” They further illustrate an example of Chaucer’s awareness of a defiled Church. Chaucer provides humor to his description of the Summoner in that “he’d allow – just for a quart of wine - /Any good lad to keep a concubine” (Chaucer 20.) This means that a person who disobeys the Church without seeking repentance can easily bribe the Summoner, in that he will overlook the situation. Chaucer writes about the Pardoner that “by his flatteries and prevarication/ Made monkey of the priest and congregation” (Chaucer 22.) This is another direct insult to the Church at the time.

Through travels on the countryside, the hills are filled with the Pardoner’s sweet “honey tongue” (Chaucer 141, line 732) as he rides to sell church pardons for forgiveness, or so it seems. A man of the church should have a holy mission to serve his lord and spread the prosperity of the church. The Pardoner, on the other hand, uses his title and ability to achieve devious deeds. No matter how many times he claims to have acted morally just, this man always has an ulterior motive to quench his greed. A man such as the Pardoner has drifted so far away from the path of being noble.

Thesis: The Pardoner is a hypocrite, who speaks against the exploitation, gluttony, and exaction he commits his self. However, by unfolding the story of his own dishonesty, the pardoner actually instills others not to follow his exemplar. Chaucer makes it possible to shrewdly disapprove the exploitative practices of the Catholic Church in his text with the pardoner’s character, while supporting the basic religious beliefs that the church stood for. Chaucer portrays the pardoner as someone who takes advantage of his status in society and uses it for manipulation of ordinary people. "

Elspeth Whitney has written extensively on the topic of the Pardoner as a phlegmatic man, suggesting that the pilgrims’ confusion about his gender identity can be explained through their belief in the theory of bodily humors. She states that, “the apparent incoherence of the Pardoner’s sexual and gendered identity can be resolved if we attend more closely to medieval rather than modern categories” (359). Since the concept of identifying a person according to sexual orientation did not exist in the Middle Ages, attempting to classify the Pardoner in this way is not appropriate. Whitney believes that Chaucer’s physical descriptions of the Pardoner indicate that he is a phlegmatic male, which “Chaucer and his audience would have understood to indicate a degree of sexual ambiguity” (360). Further, she states that “Medieval medicine associates male phlegmatics with sexual dysfunction, including lack of potency, nocturnal emissions, same-sex desire, and infertility, and with identifiable physical characteristics marked as effeminate, including soft flesh; lank, light-colored hair; the inability to grow a beard” (360). This description neatly matches Pilgrim Chaucer’s: the Pardoner “hadde heer as yelow as wex,/But smothe it heeng as dooth a strike of flex” (GP 675-676), and “no berd hadde he, no nevere sholde have” (689). Whitney reinforces her argument by pointing out that the

After reading The Canterbury Tales I learned a little about each of the characters in the Prologue. There was one character that stood out to me than any of the others was the pardoner. He work for the church. Pardoner performs his church duties for the purpose of making money; he wasn’t a nice man. Unlike Parson, who helped the church because he cared and wanted to, Pardoner would do everything for his own good. The parson uses his position in the church to provide help to the poor, the sick, and the grieving. If Pardoner would tell a story, in the beginning he would try to show the reader that he is better than anyone else and does things to help people. This is not true at all. Throughout the story the reader would learn who the Pardoner

During the medieval times corruption in the Catholic Church was prevalent. As corruption was prevalent during Chaucer’s time so was a Pardoner’s practice of selling indulgences, becoming one of deception and greed. Similar to the upper class focusing their time on becoming the richest and most powerful. In many of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer would use satire to criticize different social classes. For example, the middle class, those people who worked for their possessions. He satirizes religious hypocrisy in such tales as the Pardoner, in which a middle class man, showing the corruption of the Pardoner’s job. Through his description of the Pardoner as being a man who is disitful, greedy, and hypocritical, Chaucer uses

Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale," a relatively straightforward satirical and anti-capitalist view of the church, contrasts motifs of sin with the salvational properties of religion to draw out the complex self-loathing of the emasculated Pardoner. In particular, Chaucer concentrates on the Pardoner's references to the evils of alcohol, gambling, blasphemy, and money, which aim not only to condemn his listeners and unbuckle their purses, but to elicit their wrath and expose his eunuchism.