Love and kisses,
KABO
Chaucer and Married Life
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories that serves as a frozen moment in time, an observation of the characters and practices that Chaucer saw about him when he was writing. The brilliance of the work is the ambiguity that allows for people from all walks of life to be revealed to the audience without putting Chaucer himself at risk of offending any particular group. From Chaucer’s early poems all the way to his Canterbury Tales, there is one topic that always seems to be on his mind- love. A more interesting facet though is that love is not always present in his marriage stories, in fact, many times it seems absent and the root cause of the problems between characters in stories. Love and marriage being separate spheres for life in Chaucer’s tales changes the idea of marriage from a fairy tale to an economic and political contract, one that does not always make people happy.
The crux of the matter for marriage and love seems to come from the Wife of Bath’s story. In the prologue the Wife of Bath tells her audience about her love life before she gets to that of her tale. For Alisoun, she started marrying men at the age of 12 and was never happy with her husbands. She tells that they weren’t necessarily bad men, but rather that they just didn’t spark in her a love and passion which lead her to a life of sorrow as their wife. Finally, at the age of forty she meets a man half her age and decides to marry for love, already having enough money from her dead husbands to support herself. The start of the marriage turns out to be sad, as her husband constantly tells her that wives and women are evil and she gets fed up with his verbal and physical abuse. Her story with him ends in love once he realized that striking her was wrong and that he needed to love her back in order to have a happy marriage.
The actual story that the Wife of Bath tells is about women wanting power and control over their husbands, making power a commodity that both parties strive for. The idea of power being equal, mimicking the last marriage of the Wife of Bath, is repeated by the Franklin’s tale,
“The Franklyn takes as donnees the notions of Christian marriage and courtly love: the husband is to take no "maistrye" against the wife's will, and is to have "soverayntee" only in name; the wife on her part will be his "humble trewe wyf." In moments of duress both partners agree to exercise patience. Thus the husband is to be servant in love and lord in marriage, and the result is to be "joy, ease, and prosperity" (V, 804). The compromise preserves nominal "maistrye" for the husband, satisfies the Wife of Bath's demand that sovereignty go to the woman” (Howard 226).
Chaucer, with most of his tales not involving love in marriage, seems to say that power is the commodity that all strive for in marriage. When love is present though, as it was for Alisoun and Jenkin, power no longer becomes an issues and the couple can be happy.
In Chaucer’s tales one of the main thing he points out that men want is a young wife. For the men, young wives seem to bring back the youth they lost in making names for themselves and ensures the chances that they will have multiple heirs, as well as providing that someone is capable of the energy running a household full of children calls for. The first time a young wife is introduced to the audience is in the Miller’s Tale, with young Alison. Having been married off to someone she didn’t love, the eighteen year old decides to play around with multiple men’s hearts and tricks her husband into looking like a fool while she had an affair on him with a young student. The carpenter though that he had power over the young Alison, but in his ignorance she was able to steal that power from him and get what she wanted. The tale is hilarious, but when looked at from an economic point of view it is very sad how their marriage is nothing but a game of seizing control from one another rather than doing as the Wife of Bath did with Jenkin and working things out to respect and love one another.
The next tale in which a young woman is married to a man for her looks rather than for love is the case of January and May. January at sixty years old decides that he should get married because he’s tired of being a bachelor and is finally ready to settle down with someone so that he can have an heir to his estate. He thinks long and hard about whom he wants, even telling his friends that his potential wife had better be no older than twenty, as an old wife would be nothing but trouble for him. One day he decides that the young girl May is the most beautiful maiden around and picks her to be his wife. He constantly tells her that he loves her, but any reader can see there is no real connection between the two of them and they live a life of a contractual relationship rather than one of the heart. Like Alison, May eventually deceives her husband in order to have an affair with his employee Damian. The God Pluto returns sight to January so that he can see his wife’s deception, but Pluto’s wife Proserpina allows May to have an answer to what January saw and is able to get out of his ill will. The interesting thing about this scene from the Merchant’s tale is that in one swell move Chaucer showed the economics of two relationships swaying back and forth. On one hand, January, who was so jealous and protective of May is still deceived and she is able to find love with another right in front of his eyes, then convinces him he didn’t see what he thought he saw. On the other, the goddess Proserpina is able to regain some of the power she lost when, as mythology tells, Pluto tricked her into eating the pomegranates and therefore forced her into becoming his wife and spending half the year with him. Chaucer seems to say with these tales that no matter what your station in life, from workman to knight to god, if there is not a pure love between a husband and a wife then the marriage will never be anything more than trying to one-over the other in a search for control. Or, “Control is theft, as he sees it, whether in the state, the market place, or the bedroom. An authoritarian relationship begets distortions in both parties to it” (Murtaugh 477).
Finally, in the Clerk’s Tale, the character Griselda is constantly toyed with by her husband to make sure that she was loyal to him. He gets her pregnant and takes away both of her children, then waits for her to say a bad word about him to prove that she is a horrible wife. After many years he even tells her that he is going to remarry and brings her long-lost daughter home as his “bride-to-be.” When Griselda stays completely faithful to him even up unto that point he finally decides to believe that she is true to him and gives up trying to trick her so that they could live happily ever after. This tale is especially scary for people to read, as it is about a man who psychologically tortures his wife in order to assert his power over her, and in no way can it be viewed as a story about true love. Chaucer seems to be trying to relate ideas about marriage that were common in his time,
“The Middle Ages delighted (as children still delight) in stories that exemplify a
single human quality, like valor, or tyranny, or fortitude. In such cases, the settled rule (for which neither Chaucer nor the Clerk was responsible) was to show to what lengths this quality may conceivably go. Hence, in tales of this kind, there can be no question of conflict of duties, no problem as to the point at which excess of goodness becomes evil. It is, then, absurd to censure a fourteenth-century Clerk for telling (or Chaucer for making him tell) a story which exemplifies in this hyperbolical way the virtue of fortitude under affliction. Whether Griselda could have put an end to her woes, or ought to have put an end to them, by refusing to obey her husband's commands is parum ad rem. We are to look at her trials as inevitable, and to pity her accordingly, and wonder at her endurance” (Kittredge 2-3).
It seems that Chaucer was trying to say that women were really powerless to their husband’s will and many times had to deal with injustices quietly for fear of their lives. In this instance, the power game is a game of life or death, it is a woman having to give up everything that makes her her in order to please a man who sees her as nothing more than a possession. In the end she may get her children back and her husband’s respect, but it is hard to say that it is just because of everything she went through.
In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales he approaches the idea of marriage in place of his earlier poems of love. It seems that all the women in his stories long for the freedom that the Tercel Eagle from the Parliament of the Fowls had in taking a step back and asking to be given a choice of whom to marry based on love rather than station or money or beauty or any other such trivial matters. His early poems were all dream visions, searching for what every person longs for- their soul mate and a life of happiness. The Canterbury Tales on the other hand is a compilation of stories by everyday people, it is about the reality of the world, the sad truth that love does not always conquer and many people end up in unhappy relationships because marriage was really about economics rather than feelings.
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