ENGLISH 4620 THIRD ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

GRADY WINTER 2010

Essays on one of the topics below should be typed and double-spaced (one-inch margins/12-point type) and four to six pages long. Be sure to refer as helpfully and specifically as possible to the texts upon which you're basing your argument--and be sure to have an argument or thesis. Your essay should have an original title, and it should not be marred by a single sentence fragment. Essays are due on MONDAY, APRIL 19; electronic submissions are acceptable.

1. Design your own topic, of suitable specificity and sophistication, about something that interests you in the Canterbury Tales we've read. A brief consultation with the instructor is required for this option; talking with one another is recommended, too, and I’d like to receive a paragraph or email describing your topic by Wednesday, April 14.

2. "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 potentially self-satirizing stories--with reference to either the Knight's Tale or the Wife of Bath's Prologue or the Summoner’s Tale.

3. 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 so far? [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.]

4. Here's an alternate way of looking at gender issues in the Canterbury Tales: is it possible to describe what Chaucer thinks of men?

5. Reread John Gower's "Tale of Florent" from his Confessio Amantis. Then write an essay comparing the ways that Chaucer and his friend and fellow poet Gower treat the "loathly lady" tale. (NB: Compare-and-contrast topics need a thesis too!)

6. Reread John Gower's "Tale of Constance" from his Confessio Amantis (available on-line via the course syllabus)--one of the major sources for Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale. Then write an essay comparing the ways that Chaucer and his friend and fellow poet Gower deal with the genre of the hagiographical romance. (NB: Compare-and-contrast topics need a thesis too!)

7. The Canterbury Tales may be fragmentary and incomplete, but the fragments themselves often have a certain thematic unity. Write an essay about the common themes, characters, plot elements, images, or other devices that help to unify Fragment III (Wife of Bath, Friar, Summoner).

8. The Wife of Bath pays lot of attention to bodies, both women's and men's, in her Prologue and Tale. Why is that? Discuss the importance of the body--its various functions, the natural and unnatural changes it can undergo--as a theme in her performance.

9. Discuss the Wife of Bath’s by comparing at least two (if you’re a graduate student, at least three) of the critical essays on the Wife posted on MyGateway (they’re in the March 23 Course Documents folder).

10. "For patriarchy's scandalous secret...is that it had to be obsessively vindicated--often in grotesque or brutal ways, as in witch-hunting or wife beating...Patriarchy had to deal in cautionary tales and mete out surplus repression, because it was riddled with inner anxieties. And all this...stemmed from the fact that it was far from obviously 'natural'..." Comment on these sentiments (borrowed, I should admit, from a TLS review of a book about 18th-century life) with reference to The Canterbury Tales.

11. Discuss the fictions of advice and scenes of advising we’ve seen in the Tales, in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, and elsewhere (Knight? Summoner? Merchant?). Does Chaucer seem to have a particular “take” on the giving (and receiving) of counsel?

10. Kittredge agues in "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage" 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.