Summary and Analysis of The Merchants Tale Essays -- Canterbury Tales

Summary and Analysis of The Merchants Tale (The Canterbury Tales)Prologue to the Merchants TaleThe merchant claims that he knows nothing of long-suffering wives. Rather, if his wife were to marry the devil, she would overmatch even him. The Merchant claims that in that location is a great difference between Griseldes exceptional obedience and his wifes to a greater extent common cruelty. The Merchant has been married two months and has loathed every minute of it. The emcee asks the Merchant to tell a tale of his horrid wife. AnalysisThe prologues that affiliate the various Canterbury Tales shift effortlessly from ponderous drama to light comedy. The dark tale of Griselde gives way to the Hosts complaint virtually his shrewish wife. This prologue further illustrates how individually of the characters informs the tale he tells. The travelers largely tell tales that conform to their personal experiences or attitudes, such as the Merchant, whose awful marriage is the occasion for h is tale ab pop a difficult wife. In most cases the influence of the narrator on his tale is apparent, but the authorial touch lightly felt. The Merchants Tale, for example, gains little from the prologues reading that the Merchant is disenchanted with his own marriage. Only a few of these tales go largely as extensions of the characters who tell them the Wife of Baths Tale is the most bountiful of these stories. The Merchants TaleThe Merchant tells a tale of a prosperous horse from Lombardy who had not yet taken a wife. But when this knight, January, had turned sixty, whether out of devotion or dotage, he decided to finally be married. He searched for prospects, now convinced that the married life was a paradise on earth. Yet his brother, Placebo, cited... ...y. Januarys repeated insistence that their intercourse includes a rationalization that a man and wife are one person, and no man would prostitute himself with a knife, an unpleasant phallic image. January uses May only as a sexual object he hammers away upon her, bringing her only inconvenience oneself and boredom. The Merchants Tale also stretches the conventions of fabliau through the climax of the tale in which netherworld and Proserpina intrude upon the sexual intrigues among January, May and John. Proserpina and Pluto discuss the virtues of men and women in marriage, coming to the conclusion that few men are commendable, but dead no women are worthy. Their intervention in the situation gives divine authority to the condemnation of women, purposely giving January his sight so that he stub condemn his wife (although in a mordant twist, January can literally not believe his eyes).