Canterbury Tales Analysis
The Canterbury tales analysis
“all his pilgrims are severely distinguished from each other. The matter and manner of their tales and of their telling are so suited to their different education, humor and callings, that each of them would be improper in any other mouth”
John Dryden
It is said by Dryden that all of the tales are made for their narrators, but not only for them but also for the author, each of those tales show somehow the author’s life and his problems or thoughts towards important issues at the moment that can go from political, religious, moral up to marriage, the relation between men and women and so on. Chaucer can be seen as very sarcastic author but one of his main characteristics (not precisely good) was his obvious misogynous personality that is also portrayed in many of the tales he narrated on his book such as the bath’s wife, the mythological and biblical references as the one of middas’ wife, or the twisted versions in the monk’s tale of Hercules and some others where women or female characters are always the guilty or villain. Though we can clearly see the relation with the tales and the author’s life we most highlight something very interesting, the way he addressed an specific character for each topic to make every reader what was going on, this could be his indirect way of portraying himself in the book.
For the first example we can take one of the longest tales, the monk’s tale, on which the author narrates the story of a monk who travel to different places and that one day on one place people was telling him that his physical beauty must not be waist on chastity and that way of living that instead he should get married and live like a normal man would do, of course with a good wife on his side, but though people thought that way the monk had another perspective of marriage and women. While he is telling people in town some stories with a feedback intention hidden we can appreciate that he had a very different opinion form the
“all his pilgrims are severely distinguished from each other. The matter and manner of their tales and of their telling are so suited to their different education, humor and callings, that each of them would be improper in any other mouth”
John Dryden
It is said by Dryden that all of the tales are made for their narrators, but not only for them but also for the author, each of those tales show somehow the author’s life and his problems or thoughts towards important issues at the moment that can go from political, religious, moral up to marriage, the relation between men and women and so on. Chaucer can be seen as very sarcastic author but one of his main characteristics (not precisely good) was his obvious misogynous personality that is also portrayed in many of the tales he narrated on his book such as the bath’s wife, the mythological and biblical references as the one of middas’ wife, or the twisted versions in the monk’s tale of Hercules and some others where women or female characters are always the guilty or villain. Though we can clearly see the relation with the tales and the author’s life we most highlight something very interesting, the way he addressed an specific character for each topic to make every reader what was going on, this could be his indirect way of portraying himself in the book.
For the first example we can take one of the longest tales, the monk’s tale, on which the author narrates the story of a monk who travel to different places and that one day on one place people was telling him that his physical beauty must not be waist on chastity and that way of living that instead he should get married and live like a normal man would do, of course with a good wife on his side, but though people thought that way the monk had another perspective of marriage and women. While he is telling people in town some stories with a feedback intention hidden we can appreciate that he had a very different opinion form the