Detailed Analysis Of Major Characters In Prologue
THE CANTERBURY TALES
Geoffrey Chaucer
Analysis Of Major Characters
The Knight
The Knight rides at the front of the
procession described in the General Prologue, and his story is the first in the
sequence. The Host clearly admires the Knight, as does the narrator. The
narrator seems to remember four main qualities of the Knight. The first is the
Knight’s love of ideals—“chivalrie” (prowess), “trouthe” (fidelity), “honour”
(reputation), “fredom” (generosity), and “curteisie” (refinement) (General
Prologue, 45–46). The second is the Knight’s impressive military career. The
Knight has fought in the Crusades, wars in which Europeans traveled by sea to
non-Christian lands and attempted to convert whole cultures by the force of
their swords. By Chaucer’s time, the spirit for conducting these wars was dying
out, and they were no longer undertaken as frequently. The Knight has battled
the Muslims in Egypt, Spain, and Turkey, and the Russian Orthodox in Lithuania
and Russia. He has also fought in formal duels. The third quality the narrator
remembers about the Knight is his meek, gentle, manner. And the fourth is his
“array,” or dress. The Knight wears a tunic made of coarse cloth, and his coat
of mail is rust-stained, because he has recently returned from an expedition.
The Knight’s
interaction with other characters tells us a few additional facts about him. In
the Prologue to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, he calls out to hear something more
lighthearted, saying that it deeply upsets him to hear stories about tragic
falls. He would rather hear about “joye and greet solas,” about men who start
off in poverty climbing in fortune and attaining wealth (Nun’s Priest’s
Prologue, 2774). The Host agrees with him, which is not surprising, since the
Host has mentioned that whoever tells the tale of “best sentence and moost
solaas” will win the storytelling contest (General Prologue, 798). And, at the
end of the Pardoner’s Tale, the Knight breaks in to stop the squabbling between
the Host and the Pardoner, ordering them to kiss and make up. Ironically,
though a soldier, the romantic, idealistic Knight clearly has an aversion to
conflict or unhappiness of any sort.
The Pardoner rides in the very back of the
party in the General Prologue and is fittingly the most marginalized character
in the company. His profession is somewhat dubious—pardoners offered
indulgences, or previously written pardons for particular sins, to people who
repented of the sin they had committed. Along with receiving the indulgence,
the penitent would make a donation to the Church by giving money to the
pardoner. Eventually, this “charitable” donation became a necessary part of
receiving an indulgence. Paid by the Church to offer these indulgences, the
Pardoner was not supposed to pocket the penitents’ charitable donations. That
said, the practice of offering indulgences came under critique by quite a few
churchmen, since once the charitable donation became a practice allied to
receiving an indulgence, it began to look like one could cleanse oneself of sin
by simply paying off the Church. Additionally, widespread suspicion held that
pardoners counterfeited the pope’s signature on illegitimate indulgences and
pocketed the “charitable donations” themselves.
Chaucer’s Pardoner is
a highly untrustworthy character. He sings a ballad—“Com hider, love, to me!”
(General Prologue, 672)—with the hypocritical Summoner, undermining the already
challenged virtue of his profession as one who works for the Church. He
presents himself as someone of ambiguous gender and sexual orientation, further
challenging social norms. The narrator is not sure whether the Pardoner is an
effeminate homosexual or a eunuch (castrated male). Like the other pilgrims,
the Pardoner carries with him to Canterbury the tools of his trade—in his case,
freshly signed papal indulgences and a sack of false relics, including a brass
cross filled with stones to make it seem as heavy as gold and a glass jar full
of pig’s bones, which he passes off as saints’ relics. Since visiting relics on
pilgrimage had become a tourist industry, the Pardoner wants to cash in on
religion in any way he can, and he does this by selling tangible, material
objects—whether slips of paper that promise forgiveness of sins or animal bones
that people can string around their necks as charms against the devil. After
telling the group how he gulls people into indulging his own avarice through a
sermon he preaches on greed, the Pardoner tells of a tale that exemplifies the
vice decried in his sermon. Furthermore, he attempts to sell pardons to the
group—in effect plying his trade in clear violation of the rules outlined by
the host.
One of two female storytellers (the other is
the Prioress), the Wife has a lot of experience under her belt. She has
traveled all over the world on pilgrimages, so Canterbury is a jaunt compared
to other perilous journeys she has endured. Not only has she seen many lands,
she has lived with five husbands. She is worldly in both senses of the word:
she has seen the world and has experience in the ways of the world, that is, in
love and sex.
Rich and tasteful, the Wife’s clothes veer a
bit toward extravagance: her face is wreathed in heavy cloth, her stockings are
a fine scarlet color, and the leather on her shoes is soft, fresh, and brand
new—all of which demonstrate how wealthy she has become. Scarlet was a
particularly costly dye, since it was made from individual red beetles found
only in some parts of the world. The fact that she hails from Bath, a major
English cloth-making town in the Middle Ages, is reflected in both her talent
as a seamstress and her stylish garments. Bath at this time was fighting for a
place among the great European exporters of cloth, which were mostly in the
Netherlands and Belgium. So the fact that the Wife’s sewing surpasses that of
the cloth makers of “Ipres and of Gaunt” (Ypres and Ghent) speaks well of
Bath’s (and England’s) attempt to outdo its overseas competitors.
Although she is argumentative and enjoys talking, the Wife is intelligent in a commonsense, rather than intellectual, way. Through her experiences with her husbands, she has learned how to provide for herself in a world where women had little independence or power. The chief manner in which she has gained control over her husbands has been in her control over their use of her body. The Wife uses her body as a bargaining tool, withholding sexual pleasure until her husbands give her what she demands.
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