Reality of Human Nature Hidden Behind the Canterbury Tales
A common word on the street says that everyone is different, therefore behave differently. Everyone has their own lifestyles and have diverse habits or reactions among circumstances. It is true. People do have different appearances, styles, ethnicities, and interests because of how they were raised within a family or just the way they are born. However, physical appearances may have an effect on how people are unlike, but emotionally and mentally, people are much alike than they think. This links into Geoffery Chaucer’s work, “The Canterbury Tales”. Chaucer tells his readers that his main purpose of the book is to reveal his belief on what causes people to misbehave. The argument is that the reason why people tend to act up is because of human nature. Chaucer hints this idea throughout the tales. Some of them that help prove Chaucer’s fact to be true are: “The Wife of Bath Tale” and her version of living day-by-day with different husbands, “The Pardoner’s Tale” that shows that greed leads to hatred amongst others, “The Knight’s Tale” who demonstrates that lust can cause one to sacrifice loved ones for the better, and et cetera. Using these tales, Chaucer uncovers his attitude towards why people behave better or worse depending on the situations. Chaucer focus’s on the natural behaviors of humans that lead them into corruption by setting each tale in different perspectives to show that there are many misbehaviors taken place throughout the tales because of human nature.
To start, depravity because of human nature is caused by natural habits that people have of testing something and making sure they are working properly as expected. An example of the tale from this coul...
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...ck to be caused by greed, lust, natural habit of testing something out, and all other human nature shown in the tales. Chaucer used the tales to symbolize the natural behaviors that people have that is similar within all people. Some tales were used to symbolize love over relationships and some were even to hide Chaucer’s true thoughts as if it were the ‘character’s’ ideas. Using the different perspectives of each character, Chaucer was able to show the readers all the kinds of corruptions that can occur with the natural habits. He wanted to regenerate the ideas of using Middle English within writing and show his new style of using allegory to express the nature of humans. Again, using different character’s to lead a tale was another way for Chaucer to reveal his beliefs. He wrote about similar traits that people have that can lead to bad behaviors and corruptions.
In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer demonstrates many themes such as lust, greed, and poverty. During the Canterbury tales the travelers the author himself is in the tale and he describes every character in detail. Most importantly in The Wife of Bath there is numerous examples of poverty. Thought out the tale Chaucer introduces to us a man who couldn’t control himself because of lust. As a result, he gets punished by the queen.
While reading, one has no choice but to come to the simple realization that nothing has really changed from Chaucer's time to ours. In "The Canterbury Tales" Chaucer depicted people from all walks of life. Society then had three basic classes of virtue that most people fell under: the Revered, the Commonfolk, and the Despicable. In the days of Chaucer, these people could be found in any village or town, just as they can be found today in our towns. Times were different then, but the people haven't changed a bit.
Chaucer 's characters appear heavily invested in the belief that the gods and the stars, not their own earthbound decisions and abilities, control their fates. Their steadfast faith in the power and prudence of the gods contrasts sharply with their often visible lack of confidence in themselves. Is this lack of confidence born out of the characters ' deference to the gods? Or conversely, is this obsession with the supernatural perhaps an attempt to rationalize, excuse, and possibly overcome their previous and potential shortcomings of which the characters are so often aware? In a collection of tales in which pride, honor, superlative excellence, and supernatural influence are so prominent, the rampant confusion, self-doubt, and "negative boasts"
The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, has gone through many adaptations. Some authors decided to translate the story into verse, while others chose to write the as a narrative in prose. Although all adaptations are based off the same story, they are vastly different and can be the result of opposing interpretations of the original work. After reading a text translated by Nevill Coghill (referred to as Version I) and a text translated into a narrative by a different author (referred to as Version II), it is obvious that for each similarity they share, there are many more differences in language, syntax, and imagery as well.
In The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer, the stereotypes and roles in society are reexamined and made new through the characters in the book. Chaucer discusses different stereotypes and separates his characters from the social norm by giving them highly ironic and/or unusual characteristics. Specifically, in the stories of The Wife of Bath and The Miller’s Tale, Chaucer examines stereotypes of women and men and attempts to define their basic wants and needs.
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 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, (written c. 1387), is a richly varied compilation of fictional stories as told by a group of twenty-nine persons involved in a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury, England during the fourteenth century. This journey is to take those travelers who desire religious catharsis to the shrine of the holy martyr St. Thomas a Becket of Canterbury. The device of a springtime pilgrimage provided Chaucer with a diverse range of characters and experiences, with him being both a narrator and an observer. Written in Middle English, each tale depicts parables from each traveler.
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.
Chaucer first begins his sly jab at the Church’s motives through the description of the Pardoner’s physical appearance and attitude in his “Canterbury Tales.” Chaucer uses the Pardoner as a representation of the Church as a whole, and by describing the Pardoner and his defects, is able to show what he thinks of the Roman Catholic Church. All people present in the “Canterbury Tales” must tell a tale as a part of story-telling contest, and the pilgrim Chaucer, the character in the story Chaucer uses to portray himself, writes down the tales as they are told, as well as the story teller. The description of the Pardoner hints at the relationship and similarity between the Pardoner and the Church as a whole, as well as marks the beginning of the irony to be observed throughout the “Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.” The narrator describes the Pardoner as an extremely over confident, arrogant, and unattractive man, noting that his hair is “as yellow as wex,” lying thin and fl...
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is a collection of stories by a group of pilgrims who are heading to Canterbury Cathedral. In this book, the pardoner and the reeve show antipodal characters in many ways. The pardoner is beautiful blonde hair man who is being loved by everyone. However he is very corrupted and smart and sells fake religious stuff to people saying very good compliment. On the other hand, the reeve is very serious and honest business man. He is very smart enough to know what criminals think and do. The pardoner story-tells a great example (or tale?) of seven deadly sins and reeve’s story is mocking of the miller. These very different characteristic men tell story telling that human beings are always punished for being greedy. The crooked pardoner and the honest reeve have different purposes for telling their tales, but their stories have the same major theme; sins deserve punishment.
Social class was the foundation of everyday life during the Middle Ages. Social class played a significant role in the lives of medieval people. The aristocracy class and the immoral lower class were often viewed by society as practically different races. In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer shows the wide variance among the classes in every aspect of their daily lives. The zeitgeist of the Middle Ages can be seen through his illustration of differences between classes in moral behavior, economic power, the autonomy and education of women during the Middle Ages.
An interesting aspect of the famous literary work, "The Canterbury Tales," is the contrast of realistic and exaggerated qualities that Chaucer entitles to each of his characters. When viewed more closely, one can determine whether each of the characters is convincing or questionable based on their personalities. This essay will analyze the characteristics and personalities of the Knight, Squire, Monk, Plowman, Miller, and Parson of Chaucer's tale.
The Canterbury Tales is a great contemplation of stories, that display humorous and ironic examples of medieval life, which imitate moral and ethical problems in history and even those presented today. Chaucer owed a great deal to the authors who produced these works before his time. Chaucer tweaked their materials, gave them new meanings and revealed unscathed truths, thus providing fresh ideas to his readers. Chaucer's main goal for these tales was to create settings in which people can relate, to portray lessons and the irony of human existence.
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.
Geoffrey Chaucer was a on a mission when he wrote The Canterbury Tales. That mission was to create a satire that attacked three major institutions. Raphel displays, “Medieval society was divided into three estates: the Church (those who prayed), the Nobility (those who fought), and the Patriarchy. The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is an estates satire.” Chaucer wanted to shed light on the institutions that were taking advantage of the everyday man. Chaucer does this by making up tales about certain people that she light to the undercover world of the institutions. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer uses satire to attack the Church, the Patriarchy, and the Nobility.