Summary The Merchant's Tale- complete context notes
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The Merchant\'s Tale- Geoffrey Chaucer
Institution
OCR
Book
The Canterbury Tales
This document incorporates the entirety of the most useful Merchant's Tale context notes used in A-Level English literature which is key to the top band of marks in this assessment.
The Merchant's Tale KEY QUOTATIONS WITH TRANSLATIONS
Women in Medieval life and literature- REVISION POSTER
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The Merchant's Tale- Geoffrey Chaucer
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The Merchant’s Tale – Geoffrey Chaucer
Characterisation:
- Character fulfil the functions required of them by the plot
- The participants are the object of ridicule, they are animated to appear plausible but
not enough for the audience to sympathise with them
- The Merchant- he exists at a different layer in the narrative composition, but he is
given physical characteristics in the general prologue and in the introduction to his
tale – we, as readers, are listening to the Merchant’s voice
- Chaucer is on the pilgrimage himself, and he pretends that each story is a retelling of
a prodigious feat of memory
- In a modern novel, the inner thoughts of the character can provide the audience
with a lens, giving them the ability to explore the contexts of the time and the ways
in which each individual character lived
- The Merchant’s Tale offers a lens into a dysfunctional marriage
Chaucer the ventriloquist:
- Chaucer’s own characterisation in the play prevents the pilgrims from being read like
characters- he puts stories forward himself (Melibee and Sir Thomas) which are both
experiments of bad story-telling
- From this position, as a storyteller, he can tell an explicit story about illicit sex by
hiding behind the character of the Merchant- Chaucer implies he cannot control the
merchant yet of course, the Merchant is Chaucer’s own invention- thus Chaucer uses
the character of the Merchant to tell a story about sex- yet, equally, he neither
agrees nor disagrees, with the attitude he has constructed
- He intervenes in his own voice at the end of the Clerk’s Tale, urging women to not
behave in a passive manor towards their husbands who make unreasonable
demands on them
- This may suggest to the reader that the merchant’s presentation of bad marriages as
a result of bad wives is not a view Chaucer himself shares
- He sets the scene for various differential readings through his constructs of pilgrims
The Merchant:
- The characterisation of the Merchant has given rise to extensive critical debate, not
helped by the dubious Merchant’s prologue which does not exist in many of the
manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales
- The debate- whether or not the depiction in the general prologue is sympathetic, is
he vain or successful, hypocritical or just a man of this world- is the story a tale from
an embittered man or the outpouring of a newlywed whose wife, when in male
company has been stray away
- The Merchant, like all characters in the collection, manipulates an old story for his
own purpose- the tale about bad marriages is suggestively reflective of all bad
marriages, especially his own
- The Merchant attempts to allow the reader to see January as misguided- a marriage
that is based on the sacrament of materialism and sexual desire and that all women
are devious and lecherous
- Important to remember that it was not uncommon to ‘buy’ a bride, Merchants used
their assets to seek country estates, coats of arms and the status at the court
whereby
, - Attitudes towards women and marriage were very close to January’s own attitudes
and the marriage is presented as a mercantile transaction
- Wedding vows are a way to express care and fidelity, sanctifying the partnership in
the eyes of God and where those vows are kept, the marriage is said to be good
despite the inequality between partners
- The narrator of the Merchant’s Tale draws no distinction between good and bad
marriage, belittling the sacrament itself
Anti-feminism:
- St Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate Latin Bible, was the ultimate authority on
women in the Middle Ages- he was the first and most influential pronouncement on
the celibacy of the clergy- he stated that virginity was far superior than marriage-
marriage was at best, a necessary evil
- Jerome also quoted one pagan authority- Theophrastus, whose work didn’t survive
but was believed to have written a short vitriolic treatise containing the archetypal
portrait of a wicked wife
- The 12th century British writer, Walter Map, wrote a long commentary in the form of
a letter to a friend, citing mythical and biblical reasons why he should not marry-
within that, the literary tradition of misogyny was established
- The Merchant lies within this tradition and January is often comparing women with
food, as if they are to be demolished and dominated
- The Wife of Bath in her prologue states that this is devaluing the mature woman, she
says that once the ‘flour’ is gone she must sell the ‘grain’ the best she can.
- Chaucer’s work is unusual for its literary milieu as it allows room for the reader to
develop sympathy for the woman’s case
- Eustace Deschamps, Chaucer’s French contemporary is remembered for his ‘Mirror
of Marriage’ which includes a list of the ploys used by a woman when her husband
will not give her what she wants, how she will deceive him, and on how everything in
marriage turns to torment for the man, whether his wife be beautiful or ugly, rich or
poor- texts written like this became known as ‘badly married’ and evolves into this
conventional diatribes in which the speaker (a man) practically lists his wife’s
failures.
- One woman, another of Chaucer’s French contemporaries, Christine de Pisan, wrote
a rejoinder called ‘Letter to Cupid’, which points out the discrepancies between the
literary convention of courtly love in which men languish and threaten to die from
unrequited love for unattainable women and the wide-spread male assertion in the
anti-feminist tradition that women are inferior beings who are not worth having
Marriage:
- In Chaucer’s day- marriage was rarely undertaken for love- consolidation of land and
money was paramount
- Betrothals of infants were common- marriage between elderly men and younger
women was common- men in search of an heir
- Chaucer’s own granddaughter, Alice, was married in her early teens to a man in his
fifties- she outlived him and two other husbands- she bore one child to the third
husband- a son =
- Once married, women had the same legal status as domestic animals- the equation
in The Merchant’s Tale is not shocking
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