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the canterbury tales in middle english
INTRO TO canterbury tales in middle english
the canterbury tales explanatory essay
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Summary and Analysis of The Merchant's Tale (The Canterbury Tales)
Prologue to the Merchant's Tale:
The merchant claims that he knows nothing of long-suffering wives. Rather, if his wife were to marry the devil, she would overmatch even him. The Merchant claims that there is a great difference between Griselde's exceptional obedience and his wife's more common cruelty. The Merchant has been married two months and has loathed every minute of it. The Host asks the Merchant to tell a tale of his horrid wife.
Analysis
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 further illustrates how each of the characters informs the tale he tells. The travelers largely tell tales that conform to their personal experiences or attitudes, such as the Merchant, whose awful marriage is the occasion for his tale about a difficult wife. In most cases the influence of the narrator on his tale is apparent, but the authorial touch lightly felt. The Merchant's Tale, for example, gains little from the prologue's information that the Merchant is disenchanted with his own marriage. Only a few of these tales exist largely as extensions of the characters who tell them; the Wife of Bath's Tale is the most prominent of these stories.
The Merchant's Tale:
The Merchant tells a tale of a prosperous knight from Lombardy who had not yet taken a wife. But when this knight, January, had turned sixty, whether out of devotion or dotage, he decided to finally be married. He searched for prospects, now convinced that the married life was a paradise on earth. Yet his brother, Placebo, cited...
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...y. January's repeated insistence that their intercourse includes a rationalization that a man and wife are one person, and no man would harm himself with a knife, an unpleasant phallic image. January uses May only as a sexual object; he hammers away upon her, bringing her only pain and boredom.
The Merchant's Tale also stretches the conventions of fabliau through the climax of the tale in which Pluto and Proserpina intrude upon the sexual intrigues among January, May and John. Proserpina and Pluto discuss the virtues of men and women in marriage, coming to the conclusion that few men are commendable, but absolutely no women are worthy. Their intervention in the situation gives divine sanction to the condemnation of women, purposely giving January his sight so that he can condemn his wife (although in a mordant twist, January can literally not believe his eyes).
For example, the third juror states in his monologue “Yeah, well I've got one. He's twenty. We did everything for that boy… When he was sixteen we had a battle. He hit me in the face. He's big, y'know. I haven't seen him in two years. Rotten kid.”(page 18) This quote alone proves that juror number eight
Smith, William (1997) “Useful or Just Plain Unfair? The Debate Over Peremptories; Lawyers, Judges Spllit Over the Value of Jury Selection Method” The Legal Intelligencer, April 23: pg 1.
Feminism is the conviction that members of both the male and female gender should be treated equally in all situations in political, economic and socio-cultural settings. It involves activities put in place in support of the interests and just treatment of females. One major way through which feminism manifests itself in the society today is through books and movies. Authors and movie directors depict feminist in their works by using events and characters to bring out how women are looked at and treated in the society. Over the years, Feminism has gradually changed in terms of its nature and the characteristics of the people who took up the belief of feminism (Lyman, 264). Feminists have gradually changed from being about equal rights for men and women to a whole range of complex issues, with the emergence of issues such as radical feminism and the improvements in the amount of knowledge and power that feminists hold (Harnois, 122). This paper takes a look at aspects of feminism present in America and in Britain by analyzing selected situations from two books, The Maltese Falcon and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
Parry, Joseph D. "Interpreting Female Agency and Responsibility in The Miller's Tale and The Merchant's Tale." 80.2 (2001): 133-67. Academic Onefile. Web. 16 May 2013.
In contrast, in the Merchant's Tale the reader is shown the disgusting details of January's motives and subsequent marriage. May's character is more fleshed out, the assaults against her explicitly shown. We may feel sorry for the carpenter but January never gets our sympathy.
In the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which gives them greater powers of perception but also causes their expulsion from Paradise. The story creates a link between clear vision and the ability to perceive the truth‹which, in this case, causes mankind to fall from a state of blissful ignorance to one of miserable knowledge. In the Merchant's Tale, vision and truth do not enjoy such an easy relationship. Vision is obstructed at both the metaphorical and the literal level, and the subversion of the fabliau genre challenges the idea of truthful representation. The Merchant's Tale destabilizes the notion of representation itself, problematizing man's relation to truth.
A jury is a panel of citizens, selected randomly from the electoral role, whose job it is to determine guilt or innocence based on the evidence presented. The Jury Act 1977 (NSW) stipulates the purpose of juries and some of the legal aspects, such as verdicts and the right of the defence and prosecution to challenge jurors. The jury system is able to reflect the moral and ethical standards of society as members of the community ultimately decide whether the person is guilty or innocent. The creation of the Jury Amendment Act 2006 (NSW) enabled the criminal trial process to better represent the standards of society as it allowed majority verdicts of 11-1 or 10-2, which also allowed the courts to be more resource efficient. Majority verdicts still ensure that a just outcome is reached as they are only used if there is a hung jury and there has been considerable deliberation. However, the role of the media is often criticized in relation to ensuring that the jurors remain unbiased as highlighted in the media article “Independent Juries” (SMH, 2001), and the wide reporting of R v Gittany 2013 supports the arguments raised in the media article. Hence, the jury system is moderately effective in reflecting the moral and ethical standards of society, as it resource efficient and achieves just outcomes, but the influence of the media reduces the effectiveness.
The Clerk's Tale seems to strike most readers as a distasteful representation of corrupt sovereignty and emotional sadism; few can find any value in Walter's incessant urge to test his wife's constancy, and the sense that woman is built for suffering is fairly revolting to most modern sensibilities. Nevill Coghill, for instance, described the tale as "too cruel, too incredible a story," and he notes that "even Chaucer could not stand it and had to write his marvelously versified ironic disclaimer" (104-5). It seems, however, even more incredible that a great poet should bother composing a tale for which he himself had little taste; that is, there must be some point, however strange, to the ordeal of Griselda. One of the words Chaucer frequently uses to describe her character is sadness. The word obviously had a very different meaning in fourteenth-century England from what it has today: In Chaucer it does not denote a depressed moral or psychological state, but a way of reacting to events which takes them thoroughly seriously without letting them disturb one's internal composure. This kind of sadness can best be understood in terms of the biblical models Griselda follows. She explicitly echoes the Stoic resolve of Job when she declares, "Naked out of my fadreshous, ...I cam, and naked moote I turn again" (871-2) [this quote needs a / to show line breaks and should use spaced periods with square brackets for ellipses]. But the allusions to Job may momentarily throw the reader off the trail of an even stronger biblical model: the story of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac
The jury system is essentially a descendant of Great Britain, the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. Colonialism played a significant role in the development of the jury system globally. However, despite colonial influence, judicial systems across the world have taken their own way. As a result, the jury system has developed and changed to suit the needs and social conscience of different countries. Across the world, juries examine and decide the facts in a jury trial, the accuracy of the testimony, the guilt or innocence of criminal defendants, and liabilities in a civil litigation. Today, many countries such as Britain, United States, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Australia, France, German, India, and so on practice jury trials. These countries will be the issue of discussion in this paper.
Today juries are much more diverse. Men, women, and people from diverse backgrounds are called to jury duty. Although the origin of the jury system is not clear, history has shown that William the Conqueror from Normandy introduced a similar system to England around 1066 CE (Judiciary of Vermont 1). After the American Revolutionary War, the jury system became the American ideal of justice. This essay will explore the history of the American jury system and illustrate how it has evolved over the course of the American history.
Otto, A. L., Penrod, S. D., & Dexter, H. R. (1994). The Biasing Impact Of Pretrial Publicity On Juror Judgments. Law and Human Behavior, 18(4), 453-469.
The jury plays a crucial role in the courts of trial. They are an integral part in the Australian justice system. The jury system brings ordinary people into the courts everyday to judge whether a case is guilty or innocent. The role of the jury varies, depending on the different cases. In Australia, the court is ran by an adversary system. In this system “..individual litigants play a central part, initiating court action and largely determining the issues in dispute” (Ellis 2013, p. 133). In this essay I will be discussing the role of the jury system and how some believe the jury is one of the most important institutions in ensuring that Australia has an effective legal system, while others disagree. I will evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of a jury system.
In the United States, jury trials are an important part of our court system. We rely heavily on the jury to decide the fate of the accused. We don’t give a second thought to having a jury trial now, but they were not always the ‘norm’.
videotaping of a real life jury as seen in a small criminal courtroom. The case
“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.