The Pardoner's Prologue By Chaucer

“Chaucer was writing at a time when there was no tradition of personal poetry in a later Romantic sense: a poet never made his individual emotions the subject matter of his poetry.” (Woolf) Chaucer is often times regarded as the father of English literature. He is also widely considered one of the most significant, if not the top poet of the Middle Ages. One of his most incredible texts is known as the Canterbury Tales. This is a collection of over twenty stories that were written in Middle English during the time of the Hundred Years’ War, toward the end of the 14th century. This text is argued as having made a variety of contributions to modern society, one of those being the literary use of English rather than French or Latin. The Canterbury
Tales also held an incredibly significant impact when it comes to the social influence that they had on the development of a few major social institutions. Chaucer is known for his use of satire, both Juvenalian and Horatian, to attack institutions which he deems unfit. His satiric approach is an element that seems to influence almost every text that he writes, and Canterbury Tales is definitely no exception to this. Within this collection of stories, Chaucer forms an attack on three major institutions, these being the power of the church, the power of the patriarchy, and the idea of gender roles. Chaucer was one of the most forward thinking individuals of his time, developing arguments that many others were terrified to think, he just managed to do it by operating through a system of storytelling. Within Chaucer’s text The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer combines elements of both Juvenalian and Horatian satire in order to develop coherent attacks on the ideas of the church, the patriarchy, and the societal gender roles of his time.
Throughout the entirety of the Pardoner’s Prologue, Chaucer uses a very strong form of satire to display the incredibly hypocrisy prevalent within the Roman Catholic Church.
When it comes to Chaucer’s issues with the church, it is not so much his issue with the institution of religion itself, or even religious people, what he despises is the hypocrisy, strive for power, and greed. In order to express his distain with these aspects of the institution, he uses a satiric approach within both The Pardoner’s Prologue and The Pardoner’s Tale. He does this by taking a figure that is supposed to be displayed as fundamentally religious, and causing him to do things that are incredibly corrupt, a sort of scaled down version of what the church as a whole has begun to do. “I stand, and when the yokels have sat down, / I preach, as you have heard me say before, / And tell a hundred lying mockeries more.” (Pardoner’s Prologue, 125) Chaucer felt as though the church was beginning to develop into an institution that was using its religious abilities to convince people that money would be enough to save themselves from their sins, a representation that was satirically displayed by the corrupt religious figure The Pardoner. Chaucer did not necessarily despise the church, or even the religious figures within it, he just felt frustrated by the church’s allowance for individuals of this kind. “The nature of Chaucer’s satire of the pardoner . . . is not directed against false pardoners or
against pardoners of any particular establishment, but against the state of institutional decay which made the existence of the pardoner possible.” (Kellogg) Chaucer uses his satiric abilities, alongside the development of his characters to express his controversial opinions without any fear of real, harsh repercussions.
Chaucer’s attack on the patriarchy develops primarily within the Wife of Bath’s Prologue in which he uses a satiric presentation to describe the easy manipulation of men. The Wife of Bath is a character that, from the very beginning becomes controversial. She actually begins her prologue by stating that one of the seven sacraments is actually a big joke, and completely pointless. The wife of Bath is Chaucer’s way to express his opinions regarding the patriarchy without actually having to take any of the negative repercussions of a theory like the one she presents. The Wife of Bath essentially destroys the idea of the patriarchy with her presentation involving the destruction and manipulation of men, ideas that Chaucer himself would never be able to pull off. “Chaucer allows the Wife of Bath to express radical ideas on gender theory and to tell a tale that demonstrates some of what she has theorized.” (Carter) Chaucer does not quite understand precisely why the patriarchy exists. He does not understand the intense separation of the genders, and his dismantling of this patriarchal idea is something that he fights for across multiple texts within Canterbury Tales. He begins this argument with the wife of Bath, by initiating a theory that states that men can easily be manipulated by women, and that women are inherently just as intelligent, if not more intelligent, than their male counterparts. “You knowing women, who can understand. / First put them in the wrong, and out of hand. / No one can be so bold –I mean no man— / At lies and swearing as a women can.” (Wife’s Prologue, 123) This character’s prologue and tale are Chaucer’s way of beginning to take steps away from the Aristotelian ideal that women are never going to amount to as much as men.
The attack on traditional gender roles is conducted by Chaucer within the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, described by the Wife’s ability to do whatever she likes as well as her boldness in rising to speak her mind in front of a group of religious men.
The final institution attacked by Chaucer is the one revolving around the idea of gender roles. This idea is one that is also attacked satirically through his development of the Wife of Bath. The wife of Bath is essentially the go-to character when it comes to the representation of feminist ideals, which is precisely why Chaucer is often times regarded as the first feminist. In order to combat the idea that women are made simply to marry and reproduce, Chaucer develops the argument through the Wife of Bath that essentially destroys this idea through her attack on marriage and her ability to challenge men. “The form of her counterattack takes is that of appropriating the instruments or institutions of masculine power. Both the public world of storytelling and the story itself are by definition male-dominated, and the Wife, as we know, has strong feelings about that.” (Leicester) The fact that the Wife of Bath has the nerve to stand up in front of a car full of religious men and speak her mind is a challenge to traditional gender roles in itself. Not only that, but the Wife of Bath outwardly challenges a man when the Pardoner dares to speak up about her preaching and she responds firmly to him. In response to the Pardoner’s comments
about marriage, the Wife of Bath replies, “’You wait,’ she said, ‘my story’s not begun’ / ‘You’ll taste another brew before I’ve done; / You’ll find it doesn’t taste as good as ale. / And when I’ve finished telling you my tale / of tribulation in the married life / in which I’ve been an expert as a wife…” (Wife’s Prologue, 123) The Wife of Bath is a character that Chaucer develops to embody a variety of feminist ideals, most prominently, the idea of gender roles, helping to broaden and change the way women are viewed, however slight the change may be.
“So much study has gone into the rhetorical workings of Chaucer’s satire that almost anyone who reads Chaucer is now acutely aware of the persona or narrator in each poem.” (Howard) Chaucer utilized the Canterbury Tales to fight issues that he never would have otherwise had the opportunity to challenge. Chaucer was a very forward thinking individual, despising corruption, hypocrisy and unbalance within the social society. Chaucer used his satiric project to develop characters such as the Pardoner in order to make relatable and challengeable small-scale representations of issues, in this case the church. He also uses his satire, though, to create characters that can state things that he himself is not allowed to say. The wife of bath is Chaucer’s example of this, with her challenges of the institution of the patriarchy as well as the development of gender roles within society. If Chaucer were to make observations such as the ones displayed by both the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, he would have faced an awful amount of backlash. However, he had the ability to hide behind the characters that he developed, claiming that he was nothing more than a typographer, merely recording what these individuals were saying, allowing him to challenge these things freely without any sort of fear of negative repercussions.