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"The Miller's Tale," a short story by Geoffrey Chaucer, deals frankly with sexual and bodily subjects. Chaucer is never obscene, he allows the reader to use his imagination to determine what some of the events actually mean. The tale is a "fabliau," which is a short story in verse that deals satiracally and humorously about sexual or monetary deception. When Chaucer describes the characters, he creates a unique theme for each person that helps the reader determine their role in the story. For example, he describes Alisoun as being a young, playful, and attractive girl that enjoys showing off what she has. "And by hir girdle heenu a purs of lether Tasseled with silk and perled with latoun." These two lines let us know something about her sexual side. The purse is a symbol of a woman's anatomy. Alisoun's purse is covered in silk and other trinkets which leads the reader to believe that she wants attention and would be willing if the right man came around. Another passage describes an interaction between Nicholas and Alisoun. "Fil with this yonge wif to rage a...
Chaucer uses characterization by introducing it in an irony way. For example, on The Wife of Bath the theme lust is demonstrated throughout the tale by showing us that the woman got raped by the Knight because he couldn’t control himself. The way she dressed provoked him to his actions. As a result, he was sentenced to
A fabliau is a short comic tale, chiefly in French, that is written in verse and usually consists of lewd humor. The title comes from the diminutive form of the word “fable”, and the earliest example of such poetry was found during the twelfth century. In the reading, “The Fabliaux” by Nathaniel E. Dubin, there is a collection of short poems that tell amusing stories, such as one of a girl who cannot stand to hear lewd language and a priest who fools a peasant into believing that his own eyes are deceitful.
In The Miller’s Tale, Chaucer introduces a romantic drama between a carpenter, his wife, her lover, and her suitor. This chaotic narrative belongs to the fabliau genre, as it depicts a fantastical and crude story that seems to deal satirically with the concept of love. However, Chaucer complicates the satirical narrative with the character of Alisoun. Instead of creating a traditional adulteress in the carpenter’s wife, Chaucer allows Alisoun to exist in multiple forms and produces a multidimensional character. Through the use of the male perspective, comparisons to animals, and Alisoun’s defiance of social boundaries, Chaucer frees Alisoun from becoming a stock character, as her many contradictory characteristics transform her into a complex
Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" should be tragic, because a lot of horrible things happen to the characters. The carpenter's wife is disloyal to him, sleeping with others and making fun of him with Nicholas. Also, he is depicted as a fool. However, readers get a humorous feeling from the story, rather than feeling sorry for the carpenter's unfair life. Chaucer makes the whole story come across as comic rather than tragic. This humor is created by the Miller's narration, the use of irony, the cartoon-like characters, and the twists of plot. These elements combine to produce an emotional distance which enhances the comic effect.
Cornelius, Michael G. "Sex and Punishment in Geoffrey Chaucer's 'The Miller's Tale.'" Human Sexuality. New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2009. 95-104. [ILL]
The Miller takes his position in Chaucer's stories very well. A large man that likes to wrestle, the Miller is a loud and boisterous person. "At wrestling, never failed he of the ram. He was a chunky fellow, broad of build." The Miller is obviously a large man. Chaucer also goes into full detail when describing the Miller's wart," And broad it was as if it were a spade. Upon the coping of his nose he had A wart, and thereon stood a tuft of hairs, Red as the bristles in an old sow's ears" Chaucer continues to describe the Miller in full detail. Thus far, the author has nothing good to say about the Miller. After Chaucer is done butchering the Miller's physical appearance, he then proceeds to comment on the Millers character. "He could steal corn and full thrice charge his fees;
It is important to notice that Chaucer meant this story to be comical not serious nor moral. The first definition of porn from Merriam-Webster is the depiction of erotic behavior such as in pictures or writing intended to cause sexual arousal. In this story there were no pictures nor writing to cause sexual arousal. Yes, of course there were bits and pieces of sexual relations and activity, but not the point where it caused sexual arousal. The narrat...
The Wife of Bath, with the energy of her vernacular and the voraciousness of her sexual appetite, is one of the most vividly developed characters of 'The Canterbury Tales'. At 856 lines her prologue, or 'preambulacioun' as the Summoner calls it, is the longest of any of the pilgrims, and matches the General Prologue but for a few lines. Evidently Chaucer is infatuated with Alisoun, as he plays satirically with both gender and class issues through the Wife's robust rhetoric. Scholars and students alike have continued this obsession with her, and as a consequence Chaucer's larger than life widow has been subject to centuries of scrutiny. Indeed, she is in the vast minority amongst the Canterbury bound pilgrims; apart from the in-vogue Prioress she is the only female - though she appears in no way daunted by the apparent inequality in numbers. It seems almost a crime to examine masculinity in her prologue and tale, but as I hope to show, there is much to learn both about the Wife and about Chaucer from this male presence.
The moral compass of mankind has always piqued the interest of authors. The Middle Ages was a time of immoral behavior, corrupt religious officials, and disregard of marital vows. Geoffrey Chaucer used The Canterbury Tales to explore his personal views of this dark time. In particular, he crafted “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” “The Prioress’s Tale,” and “The Shipman’s Tale” to portray the tainted society, using women in all of them to bring forth his views. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer depicts women as immodest and conniving beings to suggest the moral corruption of the Middle Ages.
In both the Miller’s Tale and the Wife of Bath’s Tale, Chaucer uses his characters and stories in order to project various stereotypes to the reader. Although varying a tad bit throughout the book, the tone that seems to be drawn from the stories is that women are manipulating, sinful, and power hungry, while men are considered gullible and rash. Its through understand and analyzing these stereotypes that we can fully understand what Chaucer’s stories are trying to convey to us.
The relationship between the Miller and the Miller’s Tale is close, for the tale is a reflection of the teller. The Miller’s tale is a fabliau, a genre best described as a short story full of ribald and humor. The Miller’s tale consists of events of “cuckoldry” (Chaucer 1720), “foolishness” (1718), and “secrets” (1719). Telling such a story, the Miller can immediately be classified as a man of low social status with a vulgar sense of humor full of shrewdness. However, as the tale continues, it reveals the unexpected soft side of the Miller as he sympathizes with the distressed woman trapped in the norms of society. Thus, the Miller’s characteristics of obscenity, deception, and sympathy drive the plot of his tale.
Chaucer, in his female pilgrimage thought of women as having an evil-like quality that they always tempt and take from men. They were depicted as untrustworthy, selfish and vain and often like caricatures not like real people at all. Through the faults of both men and women, Chaucer showed what is right and wrong and how one should live. Under the surface, however, lies a jaded look of women in the form that in his writings he seems to crate them as caricatures and show how they cause the downfall of men by sometimes appealing to their desires and other times their fears. Chaucer obviously had very opinionated views of the manners and behaviours of women and expressed it strongly in The Canterbury Tales. In his collection of tales, he portrayed two extremes in his prospect of women. The Wife of Bath represented the extravagant and lusty woman where as the Prioress represented the admirable and devoted followers of church. Chaucer delineated the two characters contrastingly in their appearances, general manners, education and most evidently in their behaviour towards men. Yet, in the midst of disparities, both tales left its readers with an unsolved enigma.
“The Miller’s Tale” opens with a blunt challenge to authority. When the Miller breaks with the hierarchy and demands to tell his story before the Monk, Chaucer makes the authoritative structure abundantly clear. Though the order of story-telling among acquaintances is a seemingly insignificant, far removed from the rigid hierarchy of medieval England, Chaucer is sure to fundamentally
Chaucer used controversies to create character. He wanted his characters to teach the readers something new about life. The Wife of Bath and the Pardoner demonstrate Chaucer’s way of creating characters based on the sexuality of the medieval period.
It is not hard to apply Chaucer's description of the greedy doctor to today's medical system, nor is it difficult to find modern-day people with equivalent personalities to those of many of Chaucer's other characters. However, it is the institutions of his time as well as their flaws and hypocrisies that Chaucer is most critical of; he uses the personalities of his characters primarily to highlight those flaws. The two institutions that he is most critical of have lost much, if not all, of their influence; in many instances, the Church has only slight hold on the lives and attitudes of the people as a whole, and the strict feudal system has entirely disappeared. Few institutions today are as clearly visible and universally influential as those two forces were in the Middle Ages, so, if Chaucer were writing his tales today, he would most likely turn to the hypocritical attitudes of the general populace and the idiosyncracies of our daily lives. He gives some emphasis to these in the Tales (for example, he mentions the prioress's ladylike compassion for even the smallest creature in the Prologue, but has her tell an anti-Semitic tale later), but, in today's American culture, he would be most likely to criticize businessmen, middle-class parents, and the demand formust instantaneous gratification.