The manner in which amorphous female identities overlap and echo each other in Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wife of Bath’s Tale and La Morte D’Arthur may appear to represent the ambiguity of distinguishable female personalities in romances...

The character of Alison, who tells the tale of The Wife of Bath in Canterbury Tales, is one of the most complex and outspoken narrators written by Geoffrey Chaucer. Her confident and sarcastic remarks are especially controversial given the social...

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late 14th Century, featuring several tales loosing linked together that revolve around typical medieval lifestyles, virtues and preoccupations with many modern day parallels. In the Merchant’s...

Satirizing the Upper Class Before even knowing what it is, any modern consumer of television, literature and other creative work is influenced by satire. Masked as innocent comedy, satire is the gateway for creatives to give their take on real,...

Although a contextual shift may result in changed values and attitudes, some traits are inherent in the human condition and transcend time. This is explored in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale (TPT) and Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan (ASP),...

To the heedless reader, Dante’s Inferno and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales are generally interpreted as mere works of fiction designed and created for the sole purpose of entertainment. To fully glean the authors’ intended message, though, one...

Musical symbolism pervades the works of renaissance and medieval literature―used as a tool by authors to emphasize persona, atmosphere, tone, or simply to drive the plot forward. Instruments, singing, and moreover music in general are abundant...

The Miller and the Reeve in The Canterbury Tales are two characters who hold similar views regarding marriage and love but are different in both mental and physical conditions. The relationship between the Miller and the Reeve, as well as the...

Medieval British women had few choices in regards to how they chose to spend their life: marriage to a man or marriage to God through joining a convent. The limitations set upon them by society, even in only this example, show a societal female...

Consciously and unconsciously, we are shaped by the world we live in. The events, people, ideology, and lifestyle of our era affect our thoughts, behavior, and how we express ourselves, be it verbal such as speech or nonverbal such as writing....

When reading Geoffrey Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women, readers will notice that none of these good women are granted satisfying lives or happy endings. Nearly all of them meet tragic, even gruesome, ends––these women are betrayed, abandoned,...

In both The Merchant’s Tale and A Doll’s House, sexual relationships are symbolic of power imbalances, the exploitation of others, and the strenuous relationship between men and women in societies continually determined by gender relations. Sexual...

Chaucer and Wilde, although writing 500 years apart, both present power as an intrinsic aspect of marital life in Medieval and Victorian patriarchal societies. January sexually dominates May in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, while in ‘An Ideal Husband’ it...

Humor makes life bearable. It brings joy to the vagrancies of humanity. Without humor, life would be hard to cope with. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a perfect example of how humor can make life a joy to live and remind us that in this life,...

In both ‘Tis Pity’ and ‘The Wife of Bath’ many character abandon reason, and tend to replace reason with their own desires, making them, in T.S Eliot’s words “Monsters of egotism”. Fundamentally, in ‘Tis Pity’, when characters do not listen to...

The Wife of Bath by Geoffrey Chaucer was written in the late Middle Ages, a time in which women possessed little agency and were perceived as inferior individuals. However, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath presents a female character that is vibrant and...

By bringing such a wide spectrum of people together, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales reveals a tremendous amount about basic human behavior. Characters ranging from the noble knight to the corrupt pardoner reveal tidbits of how life was in...

“Queer[ness] functions to undermine normativity.” (TISON PUGH)

Before introducing the critical debate surrounding Chaucer’s use of queerness and establishing the main argument of this essay, it is important to initially define the meaning of the...

In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Criseyde’s character is something of a paradox, for while the reader is able to see a great deal of her thoughts, her character itself remain somewhat ambiguous, capable of being interpreted in multiple...

Composed in a time of severe patriarchy and a society based on a strict social hierarchy, it is anticipated that medieval literature mirrors society’s judgement of a woman’s worth, in that representation of female authority is inextricably linked...

Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' opens to the ringing tones of Troilus's 'double sorwe'. From the first lines it is ascertained that he is the main character of the poem, no matter how attractive Pandarus and Criseyde appear. Troilus' heartbreak,...

To be female is to be frivolous and inconstant. This is the position that Geoffrey Chaucer takes in his love poem, "Troilus and Criseyde". The lovely Criseyde, with whom Troilus falls madly in love, is the epitome of frivolity and inconstancy, in...

Chaucer is known for his talent at pushing his readers to step outside their preconceived notions regarding genre, characters, and themes. In addition to this, Chaucer uses words with double meanings to create ambiguity and depth throughout his...

As a poem that presents tragedy within love as inevitable, in Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer also explores the forces that control this downfall: Fortune, the planets and free will. These can be separated in to two categories, those that exist in...