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 Douglas claimed, “evir (God wait) all womanis frend”?  Do women's roles, and Chaucer's depiction of them, tend to vary from genre to genre, or can you construct a consistent picture of his attitude about gender issues?  What exactly are the "gender issues" in the Tales? [note: these questions are designed to stimulate your thinking, not to take the place of the thesis you might develop, and not to serve as the structuring principle of an essay.]

            (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.