ENGLISH
4260: CHAUCER GRADY
FALL
2003 SECOND
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT
Please submit a 5-6 page essay on one of the
topics below by MONDAY, NOVEMBER 10. Remember to support your assertions with
frequent, accurate, and direct reference to the text, and be sure to cite
correctly any other sources you use. NOTE: Essays on topics 6(a) and 7 are not
due until Monday, November 17.
1. Design your own topic, of suitable
specificity and sophistication, about something that interests you in the Canterbury
Tales we've read recently (i.e., fragments II-IV. A brief consultation with the instructor and a short written
description of the project are required (by Wednesday 11/5); talking with one
another is highly recommended, too.
2. Read John Gower's "Tale of Florent"
from his Confessio Amantis--one of
the major sources for Chaucer's Wife of
Bath's Tale. Then write an essay comparing
the ways that Chaucer and his friend and fellow poet Gower treat the
"loathly lady" tale.
("Florent" runs about 450 lines; ask me for a copy or find it
on-line at
http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/authors/gower/gow-flor.html)
3. A lot of attention seems to be paid to bodies, both
women's and men's,in Fragment III (Wife of Bath, Friar, Summoner). Why is that? Discuss the importance of the body--its various functions, the
natural and unnatural changes it can undergo--as a theme in this fragment.
4. How does Chaucer deal with the topic of lordship in the Canterbury
Tales? Some questions to consider:
what makes a good lord, or a proper exercise of lordly authority? How should one approach one’s lord—what’s
the best way to deal with him? What’s
the relationship between lordship and gentilesse, or between noble birth
and noble deeds—and does that relationship always work out the way it characters
say it ought to? When Chaucer satirizes
obsequiousness, as in SumT or MerT, what’s his goal (or, alternately, what is
the goal of the pilgrims who narrate such moments)? How does the issue of governance in the frame narrative of the pilgrimage
relate to instances of governance in the various tales? Refer to at least three tales in your essay.
5. "By drawing narrators from the genres that
define them, Chaucer makes his reassessments of those genres a dramatic
process. Like the Wife of Bath berating
antifeminist authors and the Squire forecasting the adventures of noble youths,
the Franklin speaks a literature by which he has been configured" (Susan
Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales [1994],
p.107). Discuss this dramatic
process--that is, the effect Chaucer achieves by producing these
self-satirizing stories--with reference to at least three tales (n.b. the
knight, the friar and the summoner also fit this pattern).
6. [Held over
from the midterm!] Write an essay about
the women we've encountered so far in the Tales
(remembering that one of them, the Wife of Bath, is a pilgrim rather than a
character in a tale). Was Chaucer really,
as the 15th-century Scottish Chaucerian Gavin
(a)
Here's an alternate way of looking at gender issues in the Canterbury Tales: what does Chaucer think of men?
7. Long ago George Lyman Kittredge, in an essay
entitled "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage" (on reserve at the
library; see me for details) argued that the Franklin's Tale provides a
suitable conclusion and reconciliation of the issues of marriage that Chaucer
writes about in the Wife of Bath's, Clerk's, Merchant's and Franklin's Tales
(which Kittredge called the "marriage group"). Several topics revolving around this issue suggest
themselves:
(a) Is Kittredge right
to group these tales together? Is there
a "marriage group" in the Tales--and what tales should it
include?
(b) Do you agree with Kittredge that
the Franklin's Tale resolves the problems that arise in the other tales
of marriage?
(c) If we accept the Ellesmere/Riverside
order of the Canterbury Tales as "Chaucerian", how would you describe
the importance of the Wife of Bath's performance in the sequence of the tales
we've read so far?
(d) Write an essay on any other
aspect of the marriage theme in the Tales we've read so far.