Similarities Between The Reeve's Tale And The Canterbury Tales

In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the Reeve's Tale and the Miller's Tale are mainly seen as stories for the express purpose of entertaining the reader. While the overall themes of the stories are presented in a much more lewd and irreverent light than many others, the two tales do display a common lesson for its readers to internalize. Throughout the entirety of both stories, the characters that end up most victorious cannot be called honorable, but they can certainly be called clever and quick-witted, easily running mental circles around their duller counterparts. By extension, their more ignorant foils receive very little sympathy once the tale reaches its conclusion, and what is more damning is how the miller and the carpenter are seen as equally deserving of …show more content…
The miller in the Reeve's Tale may have been a criminal, but the audience cannot say the same of the carpenter in the Miller's Tale, whose intentions came out of a simple and straight-forward devotion to his wife and earnest trust in his fellow man. In Chaucer's tales, their fatal flaw is the same, and deserves the same amount of scorn: it was not active maliciousness that was deemed their downfall, but willful ignorance and foolishness. In these tales, rather than instruct the readers in a way that may lead them to a nobler life, Chaucer instructs the readers to exercise common sense and to sharpen their wits. In the Miller's Tale, the narrative is distinctly scornful of the carpenter's low intelligence, immediately calling into question his decision to marry a young, beautiful woman despite their large age gap. He is accused of going against the advice of the the philosopher Cato “who advised that men should wed his equal” (Chaucer 3228) and that “men should wed according to their status in life, / For youth and old age are often in conflict” (Chaucer 3229-3230). Common sense and rationality dictates that