A very detailed document containing quotes and analysis from the text (including line numbers) along with relevant context and critical quotes under nine major themes that may come up in an exam. Makes essay writing a breeze!
ESSAY PLAN: Does The Merchant’s Tale reinforce medieval assumptions about women?
The Merchant's Tale Essay Plans
The Merchant's Tale Context
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A/AS Level
WJEC
English Literature
AS Unit 2 - Poetry Post-1900
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The Merchant’s Tale Theme Quotes and Analysis:
Marriage and Relationships
Quotes and Analysis:
❏ ‘To take a wif it is a glorious thing’ (56)
❏ Iambic pentameter emphasis on ‘take’
❏ ‘Under that hooly boond with which that first God man and womman bond’ (49/50)
❏ Epistrophe, heroic couplet, emphasis on bondage
❏ ‘Under this yok of mariage ybounde’ (73)
❏ ‘Who can be so buxom as a wyf?’ (75)
❏ Obedience and paradoxical idea of large breasts insinuating the lure of sex
❏ ‘If thou lovest thyself, thou lovest thy wyf’ (172)
❏ Syntactical parallelism, diacope, potentially inferring that January will honour
his wife, redemption?
❏ That is in mariage hony-sweete; (184)
❏ Polysemic: temptress, new life and fertility, nectar of the gods, sticky and
entrapping.
AO3:
❖ Theophrastus (81): author of the ‘Golden Book of Marriage’, preaches that women
lead men to their doom.
❖ Intertextual; Wyf of Bath, made her husbands suffer in purgatory, potentially the
Merchant hijacking Januarie’s opinions
❖ As soon as a woman was able to bear children, she could marry.
❖ Women had as many rights as a domestic pet. The author of ‘The Goodman of
Paris’, a french medieval guidebook on wifehood, instructed his young wife to take
note of his lapdog when looking to improve upon her wifely traits.
❖ Chaucer’s granddaughter was first married in her teens to a man in his fifties. She
bore one child to her third husband.
❖ It was not uncommon to buy a bride. Conventional opinions of marriage at the time
were not dissimilar to Januarie’s.
AO5:
★ ‘The Merchant’s misogyny is a product of his marital disillusionment’- Tolliver
★ ‘To the courts of love, marriage was the institution of boredom’- Holman
★ ‘Mutual love between spouses was notably absent- Kelly
Gender Roles and Antifeminism
Quotes and Analysis:
❏ ‘She is a shrewe at al’ (9)
❏ Pejorative
❏ ‘Bodily delit on wommen, ther was his appetit’ (38)
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