Week 11 Essay: Characters of Canterbury

This week, I read the Canterbury Tales unit. The units on British literature were the ones I was most looking forward to because I had a great experience with their unique language and nuances in high school. I distinctly remember reading the prologue to the Canterbury Tales during my junior year and discussing in depth each character and his or her morals.

In the unit in the Un-Textbook, the tales of the Wife of Bath, the Friar, the Franklin, the Pardoner, the Prioress, the Nun's Priest, and the Canon's Yeoman were all included. To refresh my memory, I re-read the prologue and found the sections where each of these characters is introduced. It is interesting to then compare the narrator's description of each to the personalities that shine through as they tell their stories.

First, the narrator introduces the Wife of Bath as having relatively loose morals, simply due to the fact that she has married five times. Certainly, this is a lot of husbands to have in one lifetime, and it is definitely understandable that one would think her to be morally weak because of this, especially in those times. However, as she reveals in her tale about the knight and the old woman, her experiences with her spouses revolved around the one thing that women want--to have obedient, loyal husbands. It is assumed, then, that she separated from her ex-husbands because they did not provide her with this indulgence, and she is now happy with her fifth and current husband because he does obey her.

The tales of the Friar, the Pardoner, the Nun's Priest, and the Prioress all have distinct elements of Church influences. Certainly, the Church was a big part of life in those days, so this would make sense. Chaucer injects subtle satire into each of these tales, however, and this indicates to the reader that the Church isn't as cohesive at this time as it would have liked to portray itself. For example, the Friar's tale attacks the Summoner and displays his corruption (and the Summoner's tale, which is not included in this unit, attacks the Friar and tries to show how he is contributing to the deterioration of the Church as well). Clearly, not everyone gets along and follows all of the rules, and this leads to a chasm within the system.

The tale that I liked the most was that of the Franklin. This was a refreshing change of pace after reading about the feud between the Friar and the Summoner. The Franklin is one of the only truly good people in this caravan, as the narrator points out during the prologue. His story, the Promise of Dorigen, was a beautiful story of love, trust, and honesty, and showed the Franklin's heart and strong morals.

Through both his clever, thinly-veiled satire and his words of praise, Chaucer shows the reader of the Canterbury Tales the true character of each of these travelers.