Chaucer Critics

Front 1

E.Talbot Donaldson

-show the tale as bitter in itself
bitter tone/merry jest?

"ugly muck" being spilled

Back 1

compared to Bronson

"another high card in the unending game between the sexes"

-chaucer didn't realise that the prologue would infect the piece constructed for mirth with a "mordant venom"

Front 2

Donaldson:

May/January

Back 2

"juxtaposition of the seemingly, or potentially, beautiful with the unmistakeably ugly."

-but the relationship is "dynamic", as the juxtaposition shows that both are in fact ugly

Front 3

Donaldson:

Merchant's tone

-things that one wants to believe good are "either made to seem fatally flawed or are tainted by the Merchant's poison"

Back 3

"the narrator's bitterness is such that it goes beyond the inevitable Anti-Platonism of the selfish, disillusioned romanticist almost to the complete denial of any human value."

Front 4

Donaldson:

Chaucer's technique of placing a vulgarity in an innocent phrase

Back 4

"aesthetic shock" e.g bene straw and greet firafe-suitable for old colt January

"like to the skin of houndfish"

Front 5

Donaldson:

May: "initially she seems a sort of Galatea created in reponse to the fantasies of January..the statue when it comes to life has not internal qualities to match its outward loveliness."

Back 5

-this revelation is delayed: we see her rejection of January and Damyn as she "in the privee softely (gentle womanhood/deceit) it caste." (and the privy)

"may is alone within the poem for being allowed to remain for any length of time unsullied."

Front 6

Donaldson:

"cynical kind of realism"

Back 6

panegyric:

1) sneering "thus saide this olde knight that was so wis"
-exposition of the ideals of marriage is "absurd" as it is based on the assumption of woman's servility- in one they obey-the other they don't (antifeminism/feminism)

Front 7

Donaldson:

Adam/Eve

"cynical pity" for Adam "bely-naked"-vulgar word

Back 7

"Eve, another poor worm, is as like Adam as May turns out to be like January. It is a depressing thought."

Front 8

Donaldson:

the wedding

Back 8

1) January disobeys Cato and Nature- not wedding his similitude

2) "(the priest) bad hire be lik Sarra and Rebekke...and croucheth hem, and bad God should hem blesse, and made al siker ynough with holinesse."

-bad God is "abruptly jussive"-sounds like he is giving God an order?
-"crouchen"- the Miller's tale (old john) "I crouche thee from elves and fro wightes!"/associations with primitive magic: reduces Christianity

Front 9

Donaldson:

"emotional energy" given by derogation of ordinary things (like the wedding and christianity) means that the reader is stirred up by the Merchant's tale as it isn't for others

Back 9

"the reader is made, willy-nilly, to suffer some measure of pity and terror."

the end is "such high and horrible fantasy that disconnects us from our sense of reality."

-so the end comes too late, and we don't care

Front 10

Donaldson: the wedding night

-climax of sympathy for May and disgust for January

Back 10

Bronson- Chaucer's generation didn't worry about youth/age?

NO exchange of moral roles, but merely emotion

"state of nervousness" by sloshing the emotion back and forth

praises May for caring about her honour (to Damyan) and then praises her dishonesty

"Lo, pitee renneth soone in gentil herte"

Front 11

Donaldson:

January's speech to May

"ris up my wif" "swiche olde lewed words used he" -"devastating anticlimax" - pardoy of the song of solom/ideal of marriage

Back 11

"January sullies the symbol in his own way, but the Merchant with his gratuitous sneer wholly destroys its value as an ideal ever to be obtained by human beings"

Front 12

Donaldson's conclusion

Back 12

the tale represents what will happen if an approach to marriage is "wholly mercantile and selfish"- his wife a domestic beast -blindness (J)/ hatred (M)

Front 13

Hussey Intro:

the merchant's list has "the same disillusion" as Jankyn's list to his wife in the WOB's tale "although the emotion is hidden"

Back 13

images are presented in a concealed way-are dangerous rather than admirable