The Clerk's Tale

As Chaucer’s clerk begins his tale, the implication that marriage will be the main theme of the story is quite apparent. However, as the reader continues, the matter of obedience and loyalty seem to take form. There is no doubt that The Clerk’s Tale is a direct response to the Wife of Bath whose tale portrayed that women desire complete control over their husbands. The Clerk tells a story from the opposite view and illustrates a totally submissive wife. In this paper, I will propose that in the Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer uses the characters of Walter and Griselda to invite us to ask questions about wifely obedience. The characters in the Clerk’s Tale seem to describe obedience as, not just being respectful to your lord’s orders, but it also involves a total…

The Tale reveals that the perfectly good woman is powerful, or at least potentially so, insofar as her suffering and submission are fundamentally insubordinate and deeply threatening to men and to the concepts of power and gender identify upon which patriarchal culture is premised (Hansen, 190.) However, the happy ending brings the heroine the dubious reward of permanent union with a man whom the Clerk, embellishing his sources, has characterized as a sadistic tyrant, worst of men and cruelest…

The Clerk's Tale: The Best of the Canterbury Tales Of the many stories of the Canterbury Tale, the Clerk's Tale is the most interesting of the tales for the hardships that Griselda goes through that teach the Biblical moral of long-suffering and submitting to the will of the Lord. Walter, the prince and husband of Griselda, sought after a virtuous, obedient wife, and found that in the maiden Griselda, daughter of the poorest man in the village. To test her patience and judge her character…

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…

“The Clerk’s Prologue and Tale” is story about a king named Walter who pushes his wife’s loyalty and tests her with a series of terrible wishes. It is through Walter’s actions that the reader is able to examine sovereignty within the marriage of the king and his wife, Griselda. Sovereignty is the state in of having supreme authority over something or someone. A power that Walter has over defenseless Griselda. Griselda “if one should speak… fostered in dire poverty was she, no lust luxurious in…

we have to think of the Canterbury Tales in a certain context, these stories are being told in the passage of a Pilgrimage to Canterbury. We see that these characters all live in the same world interacting with one another, but they all have different points of view in several topics. “The pilgrims are represented as affected by a variety of destructive and restorative kinds of love. Their characters and movement can be fully described only as mixtures of the loves that drive and goad and of the…

In the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer makes fun of many aspects of medieval society. He shows how corrupt society was through the characters. The Pardoner sells fake relics and scams the poor. The Monk disobeys his vow of poverty and his vow to stay and pray in a monastery. The reeve steals from his master. Chaucer uses all these flawed characters to show different medieval ideas. One of these ideas is the relationship between men and women. The Clerk is unhappy with The Wife of Bath’s tale…

strong feeling of affection and sexual attraction to someone”.1 Chaucer’s tales, whether original or translated, walk the reader through themes of religion, folly, greed, sexuality, and among others, love while on a pilgrimage to Canterbury.2 The incomplete collection of twenty-four tales has survived since the late 1400’s. And notably, though not exclusively, the author used those tales containing marriage to highlight the incompatibility of power and love in romantic relationships. Though…

The Franklin's tale portrays one main theme, and that theme is love. all throughout his tale, the Franklin has a story of love and never ever giving up on one another told all throughout the entire tale. It is likely that Chaucer wanted one of the tales to be a true love story, where through thick and thin one person loved another. Most of the themes introduced in the preceding tales are reintroduced in The Franklin's Tale and organized in support of the orthodox position of the Man of Law as…

dominion over their wives, which gave them the control over the land, money, house, and more importantly, their wife. Male dominance was acquired through money and the undoubted belief that they were superior to their wives. In fact, there were even laws that allowed husbands to beat their wives; although, it was preferred to do so in the isolation of their own homes. Laws like these showed men they didn’t have to be held accountable for their actions, so that if a women was found to be…