'A Merchant's Tale' - Critical Flashcards
(18 cards)
John Dryden
“The Merchants Prologue and Tale was devised purely for entertainment”
C David Benson - A
“The Merchants complaints are of a conventional piece of medieval antifeminism”
C David Benson - B
“January is one of Chaucher’s greatest achievements in moral characterisation, but the pilgrim Merchant is little more than a stock figure. The Merchants tale warns us to trust the tale and not the teller”
Derek Pearsall - A
“The image of sexual possession as eating, the fantasies of prolonged rape, the haste, the barrelfuls of aphrodisiacs give a partly comic effect but always with an undertone of disgust and repulsion”
Philip Allan
“The Merchants Tale has nothing to do with trade or any of the business that occupies the Merchant himself.”
Sam Brunner
“January chooses a wife as he, or the merchant, would buy a horse. She is simply another piece of livestock bought to fulfil a specific sexual and procreative purpose”
Derek Pearsall - B
“Damian is no more than a poodle to this lady dog-trainer”
G L Kittredge
“We should not forget that the satire is aimed at January rather than May. That egotistical old dotard is less excusable than his young wife, and meets less mercy at the Merchants hands.”
Tina Davidson - A
“By letting May off the hook, Chaucer shows the inevitability of youths victory over age”
Tina Davidson - b
“The personified force of winter attempts to repress the resurgent spring. Needless to say, winter always fails”
Tina Davidson - c
“Chaucer keeps coming back to January, working with the traditional motif of the senex to remind us of the foolish dotard”
Cathy O’Neill - A
“The tale can be read as a critique of the gender imbalance of the medieval marriage market in which women were traded as commodities”
Yakar
“May does not yield to subjection, which the dominant medieval patriarchal discourse of gender demands. Instead, with limited opportunities, she creates her own meanings and gets pleasure from her resistance to her husband by redefining her subject position as a young woman married to an old husband.”
Cathy O’Neill - B
“May’s cleverness and ingenuity mean that we root for her as she outwits the controlling January”
Graham D. Caie
“Chaucer has made May in the second half of the tale sufficiently unattractive to lose the sympathy she gained earlier”
Martin Stevens
“Dimly misogynisticand bitter… a story intending to show the deceitfulness of women”
Norman Harrington
“We are left to believe that a level of happiness is possible through folly and self-deception.”
