Can i have some pointers please?

Question

I have just been given an essay question i dont get.
im not asking for a whole written essay as that is cheating but i need to know what sort of thing to write

Q:
is the merchant's tale (chaucer) more than a bawdy comedy?
if so, in what ways? HELP PLEASE :(

Answer 1

Ok, I'm not going to give you the answer to this, but to answer the question, you need to think about the other themes in the tale - put simply, what do you think Chaucer is trying to say about life by writing this tale. To give you some pointers, have a think about the following questions:

Do you think Chaucer is trying to make a point in the tale about the roles of men and women?

Who do you think Chaucer is trying to say about marriage, and the reasons that people marry? Do you think he approves of the people in his tale? Why not?

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

What makes the Miller's Tale bawdy comedy and the Merchant's tale bitter satire is in the characterization. In the Miller's tale we are giving stereotyped characters. The principals are cardboard cut-outs sent into farcical motion. The Merchant's Tale gives us much more background and detail of the character's lives. The reader is more involved and can feel their situations.

Answer 3

Your teacher is asking whether there is a underlying message to the story or if it was simply written to humor and entertain. Since it's been ages since I read that one, I really can't give you tips. But I can tell you that Chaucer usually has a message (often politics) to his stories.

What message do you think Chaucer was trying to convey when he wrote the story?
Find examples in the story to back this up (characters can be representative of certain people or types of people in history)

Hope that helps a little.

Answer 4

The Merchant's Prologue and Tale is one of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. In it Chaucer subtly mocks antifeminist literature like that of Theophrastus ('Theofraste'). The tale also shows the influence of Boccaccio (Decameron: 7th day, 9th tale), Deschamps' Le Miroir de Mariage, Roman de la Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (allegedly translated into English by Chaucer), Andreas Capellanus, Statius and Cato. Though several of the tales are sexually explicit by modern standards, this one is especially so. Larry D. Benson remarks:

The central episode of the Merchant's Tale is like a fabliau, though of a very unusual sort: It is cast in the high style, and some of the scenes (the marriage feast, for example) are among Chaucer's most elaborate displays of rhetorical art.
The main character, Januarie (a senex amans), is a 60-year-old knight from the town of Pavie, in the region of Lombardy. Pavie was a place known for having many banks and brothels (thus revealing certain characteristics about both the merchant and January). January marries May, a teenage girl, largely out of lust and under the guise of religious acceptablilty, while she marries him for the inheritance after his death and because it would be socially unacceptable to refuse him.

Sexually unsatisfied by Januarie, May secretly sets up an affair with Damyan, Januarie's squire. One June 8, Januarie and May have sex in Januarie's garden (a locus amœnus), while Damyan is hiding secretly above them in a tree.

May requests a pear from the tree and as Januarie is blind and cannot get the pear, he lifts May into the tree. In the process, May climbs on January's back, subverting the expected male dominance over women. In the tree, May is promptly greeted by her young lover Damyan, and the two of them then have sex in the tree: 'And sodeynly anon this Damyan / Gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng.'

The gods Pluto and 'Proserpina' (or 'Proserpyne'), watching the affair, have a short argument in which Pluto condemns women's morality. He decides to grant Januarie his sight back, but Proserpina in turn grants all women the ability to talk their way out of anything, saying, "I swere / That I shal yeven hire suffisant answere / And all wommen after, for hir sake; / That, though they shulle hemself excuse, / And bere hem doun that wolden hem excuse, / For lak of answere noon of hem shall dien."

Januarie regains his sight just in time to see his wife and Damyan engaged in intercourse, but May successfully convinces him that his eyesight is deceiving him because it has only just been restored and that she is only 'struggling with a man' because she was told this would get Januarie's sight back.

Answer 5

Yes, it tells of chivalry, romance ,self heroism, and tells of conflicts in marriages. among other things. If you google merchant's tales, it is written in one of those catagories.

Answer 6

I think without further ado that Barrowman has summed it up!