Character Analysis: The Clerk's Tale

The Clerk’s Tale is Chaucer’s exaggerated version of Petrarch’s or based his on the original by Boccaccio. It exaggerates that of an abusive relationship in marriage during the medieval times. There is a tyrant and a victim and Chaucer does everything he can to distinguish between the two and get the readers to ….

Chaucer’s Clerk made terrorising an explicit motive for Walter’s tests, he also makes the torment the explicit effect experienced by Griselda. Chaucer has Griselda describe Walter’s behaviour as ‘causing pain with tormenting’ which can be seen in line 1038. At the narrative’s level, obedience appears not to be the primary goal of the testing: it seems to be, rather, Griselda’s chiere in its response to Walter’s ruthless commands. Indeed, true to the nature of a torturer, Walter never inquires as to Griselda’s obedience; he is interested …show more content…
There were times where Walter would distinctly call their children ‘her’ children, so what right did he have to insult their lineage and become their judge and executioner so as their mother and sole parent, she should have done everything in her power to protect her children from her tyrant. Though she did not plan their deaths, she did not say a word against Walter’s plan, neither did she show any negative reaction, nor did she act when she watched Walter’s Sergeant take her children away to ‘murder’ them. In this day and age, Griselda could essentially be an accessory to murder. The fact that it was her own children just made that fact worse. In lines 650-651 Griselda claims that she would never get over their children’s murders. She loses her children, and her recovery of them ten years later cannot compensate for her grief and sorrow: “I have noght had no part of children tweyne/But first siknese, and after, wo and peyne” (650-651). Yet it can be argued that she did not have the right to mourn their deaths when she did nothing to prevent them from