English 201: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Spring 2015

 

Final take-home essay.  Please respond to one of the prompts below with a well-organized essay of ±1200 words (±4 pages), referring to at least three tales. Essays—typed, double-spaced, etc.—are due electronically to fgrady@umsl.edu by 10PM on Monday, June 8.

 

 

1. Discuss how the issue of marriage is treated in at least three tales that are not traditionally thought of as being part of the "Marriage Group" (i.e., the Wife, the Clerk, the Merchant and the Franklin).

 

2. 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, 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—i.e., who’s in charge of which tale comes next--relate to instances of governance in the various tales?  Refer to at least three tales in your essay.

 

3. Discuss, referring to at least three tales, this remark by the critic Anne Middleton:

       In [. . .] the Canterbury Tales generally, Chaucer encourages us to examine, define, and redefine ethical abstractions that are treated as given in his originals or regarded as unexamined moral categories by their Canterbury narrators: concepts such as "gentilesse," "fredom," "innocence," "auctoritee." Instead of firmly defining these moral categories by exemplary action, and recommending them as imperatives to an audience, Chaucer places them within quotation marks, and chips away at their solidity by reminding us of the speaker's self-interest, inconsistency, or imaginative blindness: in the Canterbury Tales, ethical terms are not hypostatized and set in motion, as in some allegories; they become sets of emphases in somebody's scheme of things.