The Canterbury Tales — страница 2

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easy (Hallissy 77). It is not long before another man named Absolon also falls in love with beautiful Alison. He thinks of Alison as a lady to be courted. But like her husband John, he has deceived himself about Alison: she is a fast and easy girl who does not require much courting (Hallissy 80). Throughout the rest of the tale she continues to be a “faithless wife and clever liar” (Hallissy 79). She makes a fool of both her husband and Absalon who are both oblivious to what she is really like. The “Merchant’s Tale” also presents a cunning, deceitful woman. The whole story is handled with great dramatic effect by the Merchant, himself unhappily mated, to give point to his bitter condemnation of matrimony and to the women to whose evil devices it exposes men (Nardo 23).

In the opening, an old man named January “felt an urge/So violent to be a wedded man.” (357). He thinks having a wife is the most wonderful thing in the world. “For who is so obedient as a wife” (358). In fact, he believes he can buy as a wife a domestic beast that will serve his every wish and, somehow, fulfill his most erotic fantasies (Donaldson 48). Therefore, he chooses May, the most beautiful virgin he has ever seen, to be his wife. After their wedding night, May “didn’t think his games were worth a groat” (373). When January fails to satisfy her sexually, a young man named Damian tells her he is in love with her. In return, she: Wrote a letter in her own fair hand In which she granted him her very grace. There needed nothing but the time and the place To

grant the satisfaction he desired He was to have whatever he required. (377) She proceeds to carry on a passionate love affair with him thus exposing her wicked ways. Finally, January goes blind and insists on holding May’s hand all the time. This still doesn’t stop her from continuing her liaisons with Damian. The climax of their affair comes in what is known as the “Pear-Tree Episode” which serves the Merchant as an example of the wicked wiles of women (Nardo 23). May tells Damian to wait for her and January in a garden. When she and January get there, January asks her to always be faithful to him. She passionately says that she would rather die a horrible death than to “. . . do my family that shame/Or bring so much dishonour on my name/As to be false . .” (382).

This is a bold-faced lie because she knows that Damian is waiting for her in a pear tree to do exactly what she just said she would never do. She then tells her trusting husband that she wants a pear and needs him to give her a boost. Once in the tree, Damian “Pulled up her smock at once and in he thrust” (386). At that moment Pluto gave January his sight back and Proserpine helps May by putting “a ready answer on her toungue/And every woman’s after, for her sake” (384). When May realizes that she has been caught,she quickly tells him that she helped his eyes back to sight. She was told that “nothing could cure them better than for me “To struggle with a fellow in a tree” (387). Not only does she lie her way out of the situation, but she also tells him that he

should be thanking her! Throughout the tale she consistently lied and cheated on her kindly, trusting husband. The Wife of Bath is also a very good example of the cunning, deceitful woman. “She’d had five husbands” (Chaucer, “Prologue to The Canterbury Tales” 74). This was considered to be extremely immoral in her day (Hallissy 105). The Prologue also said “Her hose were of the finest scarlet red/and gartered tight” (74). Her array is flamboyant for a woman past forty much less a widow (Hallissy 103). In fact, she defies authority just by her appearance alone (Hallissy 105). The Wife of Bath is also not fully to be trusted (Parker 53). There are many contradictions between her theory and her practice. Throughout her prologue, the Wife recalls anecdotes from her own

life to make the point that the happiest marriages are those in which the wife is the boss (Nardo 22). However, there is a contradiction when she describes her fifth husband. When she married him, she says she “handed him the money, lands and all/That had ever been given me before” (275). She also says that her fifth husband “had beaten me in every bone” (272). She was in no way the boss in that marriage, and yet she said “I think I loved him best” (272). Her idea that women should have mastery over their husbands, and many of her other ideas take on a feminist point of view. However, the irony of her feminism as seen in her tale is that it not only subscribes to the antifeminist cliche that all women, in their heart of hearts, desire to be raped, but it reinforces it