Marriage in The Canterbury Tales - Essay Example

Marriage in The Canterbury Tales Given the number of stories found in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, it is not surprising to find a large number of themes throughout the work. One strategy employed by Chaucer was to have different characters explore the same idea to show different aspects of it. One such theme that was explore was of marriage: “The story of the pilgrimage is greatly enlivened by the theory…that as the company rides towards the shrine of Thomas a Becket they engage in a discussion of marriage” (Lyons 252). The pictures of marriage that are presented in the Tales of the Wife of Bath, the Franklin, and the Merchant are contradictory complex, and they are used to explore ideas such as nobility, personal happiness, and autonomy. Chaucer’s own opinion is hidden deep within the murky depths of the discussion he begins, and perhaps it is less important than the mere fact that Chaucer is putting many different viewpoints up for discussion and exploring matters of interest to him. These three stories that have been selected for analysis can be viewed as the marriage stories, though there are other stories that deal with marriage in the Tales. First to consider among these stories is the Franklin’s tale. The story features a knight and the maiden he marries deciding to be a equal status: “Of his free will he wore to her, as knight,/ That never in his life, by day or night,/ Would he assume a right of mastery/ Against her will, nor show her jealousy” (264). The most interesting aspect of this was how completely against the accepted opinion of the times was this arrangement. Here Chaucer was asking his audience to consider an arrangement that worked completely against the perceived natural order of things in the society. Realizing this, Chaucer made sure that the arrangement was supposed to e kept between the two: “Save that the name and show of sovereignty,/ Those he would have, lest he shame his degree” (264). Because of the arrangement made between the two, there come to be complications in regards to their marriage. When Arveragus, the knight, leaves to gain glory and fame, his wife is left alone missing in a state of dejection. She obsesses over his safe return, and she worries herself sick over the rocks in the ocean that might cause his ship to wreck. At this point a discussion of the agreement between Dorigen, the knight’s bride, and Aurelius, a squire who declares his love for her, should take place. Dorigen agrees to give herself to Aurelius if he is able to counter-act the danger presented by the rocks to Arveragus’ safe return. In the first place, Dorigen would not have been able to even make such an agreement on her own if the marriage between herself and the knight hadn’t been equal. She would have considered herself the knight’s property more or less, and she simply would not have been in a position to make this agreement. When Aurelius holds up his side of the arrangement, the knight declares that Dorigen must honor her part of the arrangement, and because Aurelius sees that the two are truly in love and noble, he releases Dorigen from the agreement. This tale shows the Franklin to be a man who stresses the values of the time while discussing an irregular arrangement: “The Franklin emphasizes Christian and medieval virtues, and includes and even emphasizes marriage as a form of friendship” (Hinkeley 303). Overall, through the device of the egalitarian marriage arrangement, the question that Chaucer is ultimately exploring is that of nobility: “Masters, this question would I ask you now:/ Which was most generous, do you think, and how?” (286). Is Averagus more noble because he decides to his bride must keep her bargain, even if it means he will lose his love? Is Aurelius more noble because even though he has won Dorigen, he decides to release her because he knows that are in love? All three of these characters can be seen as noble, and Chaucer leaves it up to his audience to decide who is most so. While the Franklin’s Tale told of an equal marriage, the Wife of Bath’s tale is about a woman who claims to have had the upper had in all of her marriages. The Wife of Bath is one of the best known characters in the entire Tales: “The character of the Wife of Bath was well known to the Canterbury company and to Chaucer’s readers before she told her tale” (Brown 1053). Perhaps it is because there are many interesting questions explored during her prologue and tale about the nature of marriage. While in her prologue she defends herself for having had five marriages and being in control of them, the tale that she tells is a bit more complex than merely being about who has control in a marriage; it is about how to find personal happiness. After a knight rapes a woman, he is sent on a quest to determine what it is that women truly want as a way of teaching him a lesson. In making an arrangement with an old peasant woman who wants him to grant any request in return for telling him the answer: “Women desire to have the sovereignty/ As well upon their husband as their love,/ and to have mastery their man above” (189). While this is the answer that is given, it does not seem to be the point of the story. When the old peasant woman declares that she gave the knight the answer and requests to be married to him, he is unable to refuse despite his protests. She then gives him two choices, for her to be ugly but faithful to him, or her to be beautiful and unfaithful to him. This is not the point of the story, though, in regards to whether men want a faithful or beautiful wife. The point is that neither of the answers are the correct answer. By answering that he wants her to do what makes her most happy, the knight has shown that he has learned the error of his ways from the beginning. Instead of forcing his will on another person, he learns that allowing another person to decide what will make them most happy will also lead to his own personal happiness. The old woman transforms into a beautiful woman and pledges that she will be faithful to him because he allowed her to make the decision. Though the Wife of Bath declared that she was proud of being in control of her husbands, her story does not exude the positive aspects of one person being in charge of another in a marriage. In this way it is similar to the Franklin’s Tale, as the characters in that story were ultimately rewarded because they held each other to be in equal esteem within the marriage. Though the story is about a marriage, it would not seem to be appropriate to say that this tale is less about personal happiness than it is about marriage itself: “It would be an exaggeration to call her garrulous and frequently naïve discourse a marriage advertisement” (Hinkeley 295). Marriage is simply a way to state that one’s own personal happiness is dependent upon not forcing one’s will upon another person. Though the knight, at the old peasant woman’s bidding, stated that woman wanted to be in charge and control of their husbands, the final choice offered to the knight would make it seem less about control than happiness. The third tale in this analysis is the Merchant’s Tale, which can be viewed as contradictory to the previous two tales discussed. After lamenting that he has been ill-treated in his marriage, the Merchant goes on to tell a tale of a terrible man and his deceitful wife: “The Merchant’s Tale is…another attack on the Wife of Bath” (Lyons 260). In this tale, Januarie, a curmudgeon of an old man, weds a young maiden, and becomes blind the character becomes blind: “Alas! This noble January free,/ In all his pleasure and prosperity,/ Is fallen blind, and that all suddenly” (253). Considering that Januarie becomes a much more sympathetic character after his blindness, it would seem as though the blindness was in part a punishment for his previous ways. Marriage is not shown in a positive light in this story as Januarie’s young wife uses her husband’s blindness to her advantage and is unfaithful to him in a tree that he is sitting under. The gods Pluto and Prosperina decide to intervene in the situation, Pluto restoring Januarie’s sight so that he might catch his wife in the act and Prosperina giving May the power to explain her way out of any situation. Not only does this imply that the speaker of the poem considers women to be deceitful, but that women are deceitful by nature and they have a supernatural gift to be able to do so. When May is caught in her act of unfaithfulness, she explains her situation by saying “my medicine is false;/ For certainly, if you could really see,/ You would not say these cruel words to me;/ You catch but glimpses and no perfect sight” (261). This tale of a young woman taking advantage of her husband’s disability to commit infidelity stands in stark contrast to the previous two stories of the analysis. In this story May has the control over the relationship when her husband turns blind, and it would seem to be saying that all women have the control over marriages because they have been given a supernatural gift to be deceitful. This tale, however, doesn’t necessarily need to be taken as part of Chaucer’s actual attitude towards women and marriage: “Modern criticism may…sometimes fall into the error of reading into Chaucer’s work satirical intentions which it does not posses” (Lawrence 251). He might simply have been giving a voice to an opposing side in hopes that readers would come to their own decisions about the worth of what the Franklin, the Merchant, and the Wife of Bath had to say. May might be an immoral person, but considering that Januarie was perhaps struck blind for unacceptable behavior of his own, there might be the possibility that she would be punished later on in her life for her transgressions. None of the characters really seem to learn any lessons or receive appropriate reparations for their, however, as Januarie continues to be punished beyond his blindness and May is given the ability to deceive her way out of any situation. All of this would imply that this tale is less of a tale to take any sort of moral from or as the author’s opinion. Various characters learn different lessons throughout most of the tales, but instead of attempting to discern exactly what Chaucer felt about his characters motives, it might be more appropriate to consider these stories a dialogue about marriage: “The evidence is strong in support of the view that the tales of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, the Merchant and the Franklin were chosen by Chaucer to present and exemplify conflicting ideas about conjugal sovereignty” (Lyons 254). Chaucer might have simply been starting the dialogue, and then he intended for readers to continue it. Works Cited Brown, Carleton, “ The Evolution of the Canterbury Marriage Group. PMLA, vol. 48, no. 4, 1933. Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales. Ann Arbor, Michigan, Borders Classics, 2007. Hinkeley, Henry Barrett, “The Debate on Marriage in the Canterbury Tales.” PMLA, vol. 32, no. 2, 1917. Lawence, William Witherle, “The Marriage Group in the Canterbury Tales.” Modern Philology, vol. 11, no. 2, 1913. Lyons, Clifford P., “The Marriage Debate in the Canterbury Tales.” ELH, vol. 2, no. 3, 1935. Read More