The Canterbury Tales essays

The Canterbury Tales essays In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, a group of pilgrims travels together to Canterbury and along the way tell one another stories to pass the time. Chaucer makes use of these stories and the people who tell them to comment on the society of his time, suggesting certain things by his choice of which pilgrim tells what kind of story. Some of the pilgrims are clerics, and others are government workers or members of the public. They represent a cross-section of the society of the day, as do many of the characters in the stories they tell. One of the persistent images in these stories is an image of women, which varies from the submissive to the more aggressive and which is found in both the pilgrims and their stories. In "The Franklin's Tale," ideas about women are expressed in the usual terms but in a different way, combining different traditions to produce an image of women and marriage as both an instance of male dominance combined with the courtly love tradition which so infused much of the poetry of the time. The image created of women is that they are decorative and virtuous, and this is also an element in the courtly love tradition. The traditions included by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales are different and more expansive, for the tales include a number of women from different classes. These woman are lustier and more accessible, as a rule, with one of the primary representatives being the Wife of Bath. Love in these stories is an ongoing battle between the sexes, sometimes in the courtly love tradition (as in "The Franklin's Tale" in which Dorigen and Arviragus are obsessed with meeting the requirements of courtly love, or in the description of the Squire in the Prologue, who also deliberately pursues the traditions of courtly love). The Wife of Bath is a lusty woman who also uses the courtly love tradition in her story, though she deliberately toys with it as she te...