The Power Struggle in The Clerk’s Tale Essay

In the late 1300s Geoffrey Chaucer began wrote The Canterbury Tales, a story which follows the religious journey of twenty-nine people, who represent many aspects of Medieval society, to the Canterbury Cathedral in southeast England. While on the pilgrimage the host of the tavern, where all the pilgrims meet, suggests that the pilgrims each tell a story for the group’s entertainment. Chaucer intended for all the voyagers to tell two stories, but he unfortunately died before he could finish the book and only got to write one story apiece. However, the goal of the storytelling contest is to tell the most moral story possible, and the one who wins receives a free meal, which the rest of the pilgrims will pay for. Although some of the other stories have good moral messages, “The Pardoner’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” are on different ends of the moral spectrum. “The Pardoner’s Tale” focuses on a pardoner who preaches against greed. While “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” exemplifies what all women want in their relationships: power. Although both “The Pardoner’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” demonstrate the value of the opinion of elders, the stories differ in their moral values and their storyteller’s values.

“The life so short, the craft so long to learn” (Famous Quotes). The Canterbury Tales is enriched with humanistic merit that allows the reader to sharpen his or her own craft of life. Specifically, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Clerk’s Tale” are embodied with multiple struggles of life that pertain to life in the present. Despite seven centuries of society constantly evolving, the two stories’ plots can still be further analyzed through similar themes about relationships that pertain to modern society and how rhetorical strategy allows the audience to relate to the narrative characters.

Throughout the Canterbury Tales, various characters are introduced and tell a tale, each of which tells a different story. All of the tales are unique and address different issues. “The Miller’s Tale” is the second of the many stories and varies from all of the rest. As seen from the “General Prologue,” Chaucer clearly depicts the Miller as a crude, slobbish man who will say anything. This reputation is held true as the Miller drunkenly tells a story full of adultery and bickering. Despite the scandalous nature of “The Miller’s Tale,” the story also displays some of Chaucer’s prominent beliefs. As “The Miller’s Prologue” and “The Miller’s Tale” are told, it becomes evident that Chaucer is challenging the common roles and behaviors of women, and he is also questioning the effectiveness of social class.

The prologues that link the various Canterbury Tales shift effortlessly from ponderous drama to light comedy. The lamentable tale of Griselde gives way to the Host's complaint about his shrewish wife. This prologue

Such an intense reaction to the Miller’s tale—in which someone of the Reeve’s vocation is bested by a younger, more virile man—seems based upon the Reeve’s sudden need to defend his manhood against another man’s slander. By telling a story in which a carpenter is bested by another man sexually, the Miller has wounded the pride of the Reeve, who now must display a story in which a miller is dominated by another man to defend his masculinity. As Angela Jane Weisl explains in “‘Quiting’ Eve:Violence Against Women in the Canterbury Tales”, the need to reclaim his ego informs the Reeve’s desire to “become[] powerful and thus, violent, masculine” through his warning to the Miller that he might endure corporeal harm (123). By having the Reeve devise to reassert dominance over the Pilgrim Miller in such violent ways before the tale has even begun, Chaucer prefaces the clerk to share the same anxiety over requiting the tale’s miller through sexual

In terms of literary quality, Chaucer went great lengths to give all elements a bit of attention. The work is primarily about a knight who is pardoned from a rape on the condition that he acquires the answer to one of life’s

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem The Canterbury Tales a young Chaucer tells of the people he meets on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett in Canterbury. One of the most vivacious characters on the pilgrimage is The Wife of Bath. Both the Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale share a common theme of a woman’s control in a relationship with a man. The Wife of Bath and the old hag in her tale share a similar perspective on what women want most in life. In the prologue and tale the reader is exposed to the idea that what women most desire in life is to have control over their husbands and lovers. This tale and its prologue are linked through the way that Dame Alice, the Wife of Bath, fashions the old hag in her tale after herself.

Being a work filled with an unprecedented “wealth of fascinating characters”, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales has been translated and retold in many versions over the years (Cohen 7-8). Unavoidably translations and retelling require choices made by writers and editors of how to represent things and what to include, which can easily change aspects of the original story. The most difficult retellings may be versions written for children as writers not only have to deal with modernizing the language but also simplifying stories which feature adult themes, including corruption of the church, sex, marriage, adultery, for a younger audience. This essay will look at children’s versions of The Canterbury Tales retold by Barbara Cohen, who uses

Women should be at one with their being and be able to speak on social and psychic truths. Chaucer is an author that goes against what would be considered normal for this time period. He attempts to write as a female to represent a female perspective and enter into debate about the role of a woman. Stated in the text, “We can argue straightforwardly that women were marginalized and subordinate, that women lived and suffered under patriarchy.”(Treacher133). Women were viewed as being inferior. Are we to believe and follow the views created by men and for men? Chaucer is a man who creates a story told by a woman for woman and men. He seeks to show that women can speak up and does not need approval by men, “But that the Queen and other ladies as well implored the King to exercise his grace, so ceaselessly, he gave the Queen the case and granted her his life, and she could choose whether to show him mercy or refuse.” (Chaucer157). In the example, the King and the Queen represents at a higher power how a male and female is to be equal. It is shown that the Queen’s opinion and a woman’s opinion in general are just as important and purposeful as the King’s opinion. Chaucer uses the scenario of two powerful authority figures, the King and Queen, as an example for others to follow. The idea of the queen being able to make decisions concerning the knight, and the husband passing his power to his wife shows an equal relationship. The king and queen was used as a symbol that

Geoffrey Chaucer’s famous medieval classic, The Canterbury Tales, offers its readers a vast array of characters. This God’s plenty features numerous unique and challenging individuals, but there is one specifically who stands out as particularly interesting. The immoral Pardoner, who, in a sense, sells away his soul for the sake of his own avarice, puzzles many modern readers with his strange logic. Already having laid his considerable guilt upon the table, this corrupted agent of the Church attempts to pawn off his counterfeit relics for a generous price. His actions are slightly troubling and mysterious, but his shameless misdeed is easily explainable if a reader chooses to interpret the man as a symbol rather than a fully formed human

In the Canterbury Tales a variety of characters are mentioned, many of which fit into well-known societal roles. Some of these characters, however, are quite hypocritical and do not follow the standards set upon them either by themselves or by society. Two wonderful examples of this hypocrisy can be found in The Knight’s Tale and The Tale of The Wife of Bath. A pair of knights that appear in The Knight’s Tale displayed this regarding chivalry while The Tale of The Wife of Bath showed hypocrisy towards consent.

Chaucer’s The Knight's Tale offers rhetorical parallelisms that are represented through the characters and the respected deities within the story. These parallelisms are revealed by the actions and descriptions of each individual. They are not limited to, but extend beyond Arcita and Palamon to Theseus.

There is no question that contradictory values make up a major component of The Canterbury Tales. Fate vs. Fortuna, knowledge vs. experience and love vs. hate all embody Chaucer's famous work. These contrasting themes are an integral part of the complexity and sophistication of the book, as they provide for an ironic dichotomy to the creative plot development and undermine the superficial assumptions that might be made. The combination of completely contradictory motifs leads to the unusual stories and outcomes that come to play out in the tales. And these outcomes draw focus on the larger universal issues that in many cases transcend the boundaries of vernacular periods to all of

The Medieval Period in history brought along scores of fables about everything from knights engaging in courtly love to corruption in the Catholic Church. The Canterbury Tales written by Geoffrey Chaucer expertly encapsulates many of the great motifs of the era. The Tales are a series of stories and descriptions of characters of all social classes that were composed in the late 1300’s. Chaucer utilizes a multitude of literary techniques to convey his personal views of people, and ultimately, what they represent in society. The author uses such devices when depicting two morally contrasting characters, the Parson and the Summoner, that are documented in the Prologue.

      In the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes the men and women of the Church in extreme forms; most of these holy pilgrims, such as the Monk, the Friar, and Pardoner, are caricatures of objectionable parts of Catholic society.  At a time when the power-hungry Catholic Church used the misery of peasants in order to obtain wealth, it is no wonder that one of the greatest writers of the Middle Ages used his works to comment on the religious politics of the day.