The Naughty Miller Geoffrey Chaucer is one of the most well known English authors of all time. The Canterbury Tales is easily one of the greatest works in the English language. He is oftentimes called the “father of English poetry” because of his marvelous works. He was born into the working, middle class in the 1340s, and had a father who provided an education for his son with everything he made. In Chaucer’s early years, he was a well known government official administered under three kings. Although he was not part of the nobility, he connected with a handful of noble advocates. When he travelled to Italy, Chaucer was heavily influenced by Dante, Petrarch, and Giovanni. Although he never finished the tales, it is still acknowledged as one …show more content…
But with more investigations, the plotlines can be followed and are very similar. Blamires states: “But this stretching and decidedly philosophical romance [The Knight’s Tale] is notoriously followed by the Miller’s Tale, a piece of comic wizardry focused on the capacity of heedless youth , armed with cunning imagination, to inflict ingenious sexual and intellectual humiliation of the sentimentally incompetent, the middle-aged, the patriarchal. Illicit sex in the marital bed while while the husband sleeps in the rood in a makeshift lifeboat readied for a new World Flood; an incompetent rival made to kiss the heroine’s behind in the dark” (Blamires 622-23). The fact the the Miller’s Tale is followed right after the Knight’s tale, one full of chivalric heroism and noble acts, also disguises Chaucer’s objection of the nobility. The Knight’s Tale drives the Miller to tell a parallel plot, yet the opposing tone of the tale is used to rebuttal the Knight’s tale and a satire of the nobility. In the spur of the moment, one might think that the Miller’s Tale is told to antagonize the Knight’s Tale, but with further investigation, there are many similarities elucidate the heroism and chivalry with paradoxical
On the other hand The Miller's Tale differs from the Knight's Tale as it is set in the contemporary world and not the epic or heroic past. Also, the characters are lower class people and not aristocrats. Additionally this tale does not involve idealized love but instead there is heavy emphasis on cunningness, deception and stupidity and not virtue and morals.
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.
Boardman, Phillip C. "Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400)." Enduring Legacies: Ancient and Medieval Cultures. 6th ed. Boston: Pearson Custom Pub., 2000. 430-54. Print.
Alison in the Miller's Tale and May of the Merchant's Tale are similar in several ways. Both are young women who have married men much older than themselves. They both become involved with young, manipulative men. They also conspire to and do cuckold their husbands. This is not what marriage is about and it is demonstrated in both tales. What makes the Miller's Tale bawdy comedy and the Merchant's tale bitter satire is in the characterization. In the Miller's tale we are giving stereotyped characters. The principals are cardboard cut-outs sent into farcical motion. The Merchant's Tale gives us much more background and detail of the character's lives. The reader is more involved and can feel their situations. Here we will focus on the two women of each tale and how they demonstrate this difference.
What is Pornography? When asked some people might say, “I can not define it, but I know it when I see it.” The word “Pornography” comes from the Greek for writing about prostitutes. Many people concluded that the Miller’s tale was merely a pornographic story that surrounded four people. This also depended on one’s view of pornography. The Miller’s tale was told by the Miller who was not stable at the time. The Miller’s tale focused on two men, Nicholas and Absolon whose goal is to establish a relationship with Alisoun, the attractive adolescent wife of an older carpenter named John. Alisoun on one hand used old-fashioned romantic strategies such as dressing up in lavish clothes and singing. Nicholas on the other hand tricked John into believing that a Noah’s flood was coming, which forced him to spend the night in a tub on the roof while he gets his way with Alisoun. In the dark, Alisoun played a brutal trick on Absolon, who in return became enranged and burned Nicolas’ bottom. As a consequence, John crashed onto the floor and broke his arm. Many have argued the Miller’s tale is simply a pornographic story, but it is not the case. There were many themes that gave this story its meaning and purpose to the reader. These three themes include sex, love, and religion.
“The Canterbury Tales” was written in the 14th century by Geoffrey Chaucer. These tales constitutes a frame story which each pilgrim has to tell their own story to the Chaucer, the pilgrim; not the poet. As we know, the tale itself is a satire, but the stylistic structure in the tales creates a sense that can be a parody as well. To support this idea of parody, it is need to know the definition of parody and how Chaucer use this style to make his own ideas clear through the general prologue and the tales such as “The Miller’s Tale” and “The Knight’s Tale”.
“The Knight’s Tale”, for example, uses the concept of a knight not only to parody the concept of the hero, but also to question the well-established courtly love convention. This last concept refers to a set of ideas about love that was enormously influential on the literature and culture of the medieval times for it gave men the chance to feel freely. Also, it gave women the opportunity to be an important element in the story – not only decorative. However, when scrutinizing the tale, the readers can realise that all the aspects of a knight’s love are exaggerated and conveyed throu...
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.
Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales was originally a frame story including thirty people, later to become thirty-one. Does filthy reading make a great tale? A morally sound story is one that is clean, has an easily discovered moral and a moral that teaches a good lesson. The Miller’s Tale is quite a tale to tell, this tale does lack of being morally sound, it is entertaining and it fits The Host’s personality.
The Canterbury Tales is a literary masterpiece in which the brilliant author Geoffrey Chaucer sought out to accomplish various goals. Chaucer wrote his tales during the late 1300’s. This puts him right at the beginning of the decline of the Middle Ages. Historically, we know that a middle class was just starting to take shape at this time, due to the emerging commerce industry. Chaucer was able to see the importance and future success of the middle class, and wrote his work with them in mind. Knowing that the middle class was not interested in lofty philosophical literature, Chaucer wrote his work as an extremely comical and entertaining piece that would be more interesting to his audience. Also, Chaucer tried to reach the middle class by writing The Canterbury Tales in English, the language of the middle class rather than French, the language of the educated upper class. The most impressive aspect of Chaucer’s writing is how he incorporated into his piece some of his own controversial views of society, but yet kept it very entertaining and light on the surface level. One of the most prevalent of these ideas was his view that certain aspects of the church had become corrupt. This idea sharply contrasted previous Middle Age thought, which excepted the church’s absolute power and goodness unquestionably. He used corrupt church officials in his tales to illustrate to his audience that certain aspects of the church needed to be reformed. The most intriguing of these characters was the Pardoner. Chaucer’s satirical account of the Pardoner is written in a very matter-of-fact manner that made it even more unsettling with his audience. Chaucer uses his straightforwardness regarding the hypocrisy of the Pardoner, suggestive physiognomy of the character, and an interesting scene at the conclusion of the Pardoner’s Tale to inculcate his views of the church to his audience. The way that Chaucer used these literary devices to subtly make his views known to an audience while hooking them with entertainment, shows that Chaucer was truly a literary genius.
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.
Geoffrey Chaucer was a man with an interesting life to say the least. From imprisonment and royal service to being renowned as one of the greatest poets and writers of the 1300s. Chaucer's life had many mysteries to it as well such as what intrigued him to write The Canterbury Tales, one of his most famous works.
Mandell, Jerome. Geoffrey Chaucer : building the fragments of the Canterbury tales. N.J. : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992.
The Knight’s Tale and The Miller’s Tale are both told by pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. Although the two stories are set in the same time period and have a similar theme, they each have a distinctive tone. The Knight tells a romantic story that reflects his higher social class during the era in which he lives. The Miller tells a story in which lust, not love, is the guiding motive for the characters. The Miller is in fact drunk when he tells his story, so the Miller’s Tale contains lots of dirty jokes and complicated tricks. The Miller’s tale mirrors the Knight’s tale in a lot of ways. Both of the stories contain a love triangle.
Two of the greatest masters of British literature, Shakespeare and Chaucer, tended to look to the classics when searching for inspiration. A lesser-known example of this lies in an ancient tale from Greece about two star-crossed lovers. There are many variations on the names of these lovers, but for the purpose of solidarity, they shall henceforth be referred to as “Troilus and Criseyde” for Chaucer and “Troilus and Cressida” for Shakespeare. Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” offers up a classic tale of love that is doomed, whereas Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida” is not only tragic but also biting in its judgment and representation of characters. This difference may be due to the differences in time periods for the two authors, or their own personal dispositions, but there can be no denying the many deviations from Chaucer’s work that Shakespeare employs. Shakespeare’s work, by making the characters and situations more relatable, builds upon Chaucer’s original work, rather than improving it or shattering it.