How Does Chaucer Use Irony In The Pardoner's Tale

While both the Pardoner’s and the Wife of Bath’s prologues contain elements of hypocrisy, Chaucer's effective use of these contradictions sets the two characters apart. Using irony in the Pardoner's tale, Chaucer emphasizes the church’s deceitfulness, but oppositely, he uses irony in the Wife of Bath’s tale to celebrate her complexity and depth, showing how women are more complicated than typically portrayed.
The Pardonner, a master in creating elaborate sermons that can convince people to buy his pardons, is only able to make his living by being a hypocrite. Very self aware, the Pardonner freely admits to the sneaky ways he earns money and lives well, confessing his "hundred lying mockeries" and how he "preach[s] for nothing but for greed …show more content…
The Pardonner admits before beginning his tale that his "exclusive purpose is to win/And not at all to castigate sin." Those who are misled into thinking that the Pardonner's objectives were truly to relieve people of their burdens could not be more mistaken. Not everything about the church is holy and pure, there are people who cheat, sin, and whose heart are not as bonded to Christ as they proclaim. Chaucer is using the Pardonner to comment on the deceiving problems underlying religion in Medieval England. In Chaucer's point of view, the Pardonner serves as a general preview into the workers of the church, showing how many are sneaky and hypocritical. Using this irony, Chaucer condemns the church and the sin that is sat underneath their watch; he shames them because many people spitting the word of Christ are not truly committed. The Pardonner serves to show how corrupt the Church has become and how the church has lost it's integrity and honesty. Instead of helping people, the Pardonner is "stealing" from them, making a mockery out of his position of power. The Pardonner's tale serves as a critique and a reprimand from Chaucer himself, warning people that not everyone in the Church can be …show more content…
Chaucer uses irony in the Pardonner's tale to create a social critique, but in the Wife of Bath's tale, Chaucer uses this irony to create a deeply complex character that stands for all women in general. In medieval England, the gender roles that women played were very two dimensional; there were no layers, they were either typecast as the princess or the witch. Here, the Wife of Bath is able to receive her own monologue and proves herself to be very complex during it. She shows how women are expected to be chaste, but not too chaste as to anger their husbands. Women can then try to be more open, but then are immediately in "a danger to her chastity" and labeled as too promiscuous. There is "a rubric" in which women are expected to comply with; they must not "let her vices show." Unlike the Pardonner, there is no straightforward way in which the wife of bath can be typecast; she is undefinable, as Chaucer explains many women are. Unlike how many women are portrayed in medieval England, there is no one archetype in which women can be fit into, the expectations they are forced to fulfill are too contradictory to be realistic. The difficulties women face in order to live up to these standards are often overlooked and taken for