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ENJOY THE ARTS The Armada Portrait
GEOFFREY CHAUCER THE CANTERBURY TALES
General Prologue 3
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T4
p.42
We have never seen spring before reading this, have we? This is life, not just of rain and wind, flowers and plants, birds and people, but of the spirit of man, who sets out on the journey of life to find himself, as the pilgrims found Becket, at his shrine, and others like them on the way to Canterbury. That’s the law of pilgrimages: you walk on and on and on, but there’s a goal: to find new life, for you, again.
The rebirth of man and nature in spring
Pilgrimages: the rebirth of the spiritual soul
A realistic picture of the different social classes The General Prologue opens with the image of spring, the season of rebirth for all creatures. Chaucer contrasts March, a cold wet month with its “drought” (l. 2) with April with its “sweet showers”, the blossoming of flowers and the singing of birds. The first lines convey an image of peace, calm and harmony between man and nature. The sun has gone through the second half of the zodiac, Aries, the “Ram”. Around this time of year, inspired by the rebirth of nature, people begin to feel the desire to go on pilgrimages to seek spiritual regeneration. Pilgrimages, therefore, bring new life to the soul in the same way as April brings new life to the soil; pilgrimages represent a symbolic journey towards spiritual salvation but at the same time they also preserve their peculiar function of holiday-making and an opportunity for amusement. Many devout English pilgrims set off to visit shrines in distant holy lands, but most people choose to travel to Canterbury to visit the relics of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral, where they thank the martyr for helping them when they were in need. From the narrator (Chaucer himself), we learn that London was the usual departure point for pilgrims.
Chaucer meets his twenty-nine fellow travellers at the Tabard Inn in Southwark – a London suburb just across London Bridge – on the night before their journey to Canterbury.
We can imagine that numerous company to be quite picturesque and colorful, since the pilgrims belonged to different social classes. Besides giving us some interesting information about the pilgrimage, the last lines of the text also provide a particular link between the work and its author. In fact, by allowing Chaucer to “take the way to Canterbury” with them, the
“company” turns the poet into a true eyewitness and makes his narrative more realistic.
YOUR PERSONAL RESPONSE
• You are at Tabard Inn when Chaucer and his fellow travellers arrive. It is sunset. The air is mild, full of the perfumes and sounds of spring. Inside the inn you can smell hot soup, roasted meat, baked potatoes… Around you people of all sorts, standing or sitting at the tables. Some are talking, others are listening, a few young people are singing in a corner. Plunge into this atmosphere and imagine… Who are you? Who are you with? What are you doing? What has brought you here? What is your reaction to the group of people who have just arrived?
GEOFFREY CHAUCER THE CANTERBURY TALES
The Wife of Bath 4
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T5
p. 44
She is the stubborn independent woman who made money and a career; she is proud of her wealth and position, she is rich and vain, and so delightfully funny. Big hat, big hips, big list of dead husbands, big ego, everything’s big with her. The first feminist portrait in English literature by the first great realist of English literature, Chaucer. Not so bad for medieval times, right?
The Wife of Bath: a symbol of social emancipation and gender equality
Her personality
Her physical appearance The Wife of Bath is a core character in the Canterbury Tales. She represents the rising middle class, since she is a merchant and cloth maker from Bath, an important centre of the weaving trade at the time. The overall image Chaucer gives of the Wife of Bath is that of a wealthy, independent, skilled, sociable and adventurous character, who is class-conscious and proud of her wealth and status. She is described as an emancipated and skilful business-woman, and for this reason
In presenting her, Chaucer reveals several aspects of her personality, job, life and social condition and comments with mild irony on her appearance and behaviour.
The first thing we learn about her is her skill at weaving, a profession in which she is much better than her colleagues in Belgium in Ypres and Ghent. She is also a very religious woman.
Every Sunday she goes to mass but gets angry when other believers precede her to the altar for the offering. This fact reveals that mass is a social rather than a religious event for her. She pays extreme attention to her clothes, which reflects her vanity. She wears fine quality heavy
“headkerchiefs” and expensive shoes with scarlet red stockings. Scarlet red is the colour of passion and anger and Chaucer associates the colour with her temper: she gets angry easily but she also has a deep sensuality. Evidence of this is the fact that she has been married five times and is experienced in love affairs (she knows “the remedies of love”).
The Wife is lively and likes chatting to people, too. She has travelled widely, on pilgrimages through Europe (to Rome, Boulogne, Cologne and to Santiago in Spain) and to Jerusalem. As for her physical appearance, Chaucer tells us that she is “gap-toothed” and also a bit deaf which, as he says, “was a pity”. She is an expert horse rider and on the pilgrimage to Canterbury she wears a large mantle, a wimple and over it a hat that is broader than a shield. With this simile,
Chaucer adds one more detail to the description of the character. Her skill, her temper, her many husbands and lovers, the clothes and the colours she wears and the places she has been to give us a detailed portrait of this woman, who is not a stereotype but a full human being with
her qualities and defects. The rhyme scheme is that of a couplet: the two lines rhyming together (following the pattern AABB) give the narrative a particular rhythm that, at times, resembles the sound of the galloping of the Wife’s ride towards Canterbury.
YOUR PERSONAL RESPONSE
• Chaucer’s description of the Wife of Bath is not oldfashioned, rather it seems tailor-made for today’s readers.
Chaucer chooses a woman to best represent the newlyborn middle class in a society that was on the brink of great transformation, which would bring about the end of the Middle Ages and the feudal system. Our world too is undergoing enormous changes. What aspects of today’s society are portrayed in this character?
