The Variety of Ways in Which Chaucer Treats the Subject of Love

Write an essay on the variety of ways in which Chaucer treats the

subject of love.

Within ten stories in the Canterbury Tales, men and women on the way

to, or in marriage provide the ostensible subject, with six tales

expounding largely on love and its counterpart in marriage. In comic

tales, sexual activity is constantly relished, especially in the

Miller’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale, where love is defined and

motivated by animalistic physical desire and relationships clouded

with lies and deceit. In contrast, romances like the Knight’s Tale and

the Franklin’s Tale have a high ideal of relaxed and trusting harmony,

“Thus been they bothe in quiete and rest”, relying also on the poetics

of courtly love. Then we have the blend of characters who hold views

from all parts of the scale, like the amorous Wyf of Bath who affirms

the above view of harmony in marriage, but feels her sexual organ is

for use than moral control- commitment is intertwined with twisted

Biblical fact to be a hindrance in love rather than a necessity of it.

Chaucer not only introduces us to the various traditions and angles of

love (formal courtly love to cynical fabliaux), but also examines the

contrast in relationships, and the motivations of love within the

tales. By doing so, he makes us realize that love is not a single

compartment of perspectives, but like real life, is embedded with

different angles and beliefs that vary in their extremity, and this

enables us to have a deeper understanding of love at the end of the

tales.

What Kittredge fondly calls “The Marriage Group” demonstrates the

structural plan Chaucer had engineered to demonstrate the various

aspects and contrasts in the characters’ beliefs of love, with the Wyf

of B...

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...her had no actual emotional

value, “That I ne tolde no deyntee of hir love”. She demands mastery

in love, and even for her fifth husband which she admits she truly

loved, he used violence on her, “And with his fist he smoot me on the

heed”. And yet even as she brags about her shameless manipulation of

her husbands and the control women must have over their husbands who

will go astray, yet she admits to her romantic nature, and reveals a

deep fondness for the one man she could not control. Love in this

instance, is presented in a pessimistic light, with no actual

compromise or everlasting satisfaction, a power struggle which one

must maintain tirelessly to try to gain control over the household.

Despite this, the last contradiction reveals a certain softness and

belief in actual harmony in love, I was to hym as kynde

824: As any wyf from denmark unto ynde.