Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Like the Decameron of his predecessor Boccaccio, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a set of stories organized around a framing device. Instead of taking shelter from a rampaging plague, Chaucer’s theme is more light-hearted: a group of travelers tell stories on their way to Canterbury and back, and whoever tells the best story wins. Yet unlike Boccaccio’s rigidly structured stories, which deliver on their initial promise of a hundred, all evidence indicates that Chaucer never planned to finish his tales; that he set out to create an unfinished work. Complicating the matter further, Chaucer also died while writing the tales, meaning the work is unfinished not just by design, but by accident.

To speak then of an overall theme to the stories may not be the correct way of approaching Chaucer’s work. Rather, the stories contain what scholars term centers of meaning, concerns so important to such a number of tales that they become fundamental to the meaning of the collection as a whole. Gender is such a theme: Chaucer, to a far greater extent than Boccaccio, is sympathetic to the plight of women and writes stories that showcase not only the intelligence and dignity of women, but also their suffering. This is not the same suffering as in Boccaccio when a woman is stripped naked and left for dead on top of a tower. Rather, Chaucer shows the suffering of everyday women and shows how such suffering should earn the greatest praise in a Christian society. As Christopher Cannon says in the introduction:

“If suffering is taken to be a positive good (if, like Christ, Christians are most virtuous when they can endure great hardship), then the medieval ideal of marriage (in which the wife must endure whatever demands her husband makes on her) makes women especially good in Christian terms. If there is a power imbalance in these religious tales, in other words, it is actually all in favour of women: to precisely the extent that the men in these tales cause women to suffer, they are actually helping them to be better Christians than those men could ever be.”

Rather than justifying women’s oppression, “Chaucer is simply bringing together two fundamental truths for a Christian society and emphasizing their inherent connection.”

Another sphere of meaning is the power of language, as exemplified by the famous nun’s priest’s tale about Chanticleer and Pertelote. To Chaucer, language amounts to action, and we can see this in the way Chanticleer escapes the fox’s mouth by making him talk. The act of convincing is another important theme in Chaucer.

This is going to be a shit post because that’s all I got for Chaucer. I don’t know what else to say about the guy, which is odd considering I really enjoyed the tales in high school. Now, though, they were pretty uninteresting. I'm unsure if this post would have benefited from my having read the tales in the original middle English rather than in translation. I felt that the distance between Chaucer and modern English is a vaster expanse than, say, Shakespeare and modern English, if because of nothing but nonstandard spelling. I’ll mention a few quotes I enjoyed, and simply hope for a better post next time on Erasmus and Thomas More. Sorry.

Stray Observations

“Love is a mightier law, upon my soul, than any made by any mortal rule; For love, all man-made laws are broken by folk of all kinds, all day and every day. A man is bound to love, against all reason.” Oh hey, doesn't this sound like Brothers K?

“We don’t know what we pray for here below, but, like a man drunk as a wheelbarrow, who knows he’s got a home where he can go, but doesn’t know which is the right road thither –– for when you’re drunk, then every road’s a slither, yes, in this world, that’s how it goes with us; all frantically seeking happiness…”

“People aren’t always on their best behaviour as fire is––for fire is always fire.” Great line.

A lament about the rocks that may kill her husband as his ship returns home: “ ‘Eternal Lord! Thou who foreknowest all, and guidest thus the world with sure control, thou makest nothing, so men say, in vain. But lord these rocks, so hostile, black, and grim, which rather seem the work of a foul chaos than any creation of a God so perfect…why has Thou created so irrational a work, which neither south, north, west, nor east benefits either man or bird or beast.”