Chapter I. Geoffrey chaucer’s life and works

Feminism and anti-feminism

Chaucer was extremely interested in the role of women in society, and how they reacted to it. In the Wife of Bath's Tale, for example, Chaucer foregrounds the issue of female "maistrie", and in the series of Tales often called "the Marriage group" by critics, Chaucer actively explores the potential dynamics of a male-female marriage. In the Middle Ages, feminism had obviously not been invented; but one sees very clearly in the mouth of the Wife of Bath that ideas of female equality were by no means unusual.

Words and language

"What nedeth wordes mo?" ("What more needs to be said?") is a question that is constantly voiced, from the Knight's Tale all the way through the silencing theme of the final tale, the Manciple's. The nature of language, the value of words, whether words can ever have a true "meaning", or whether you can ever really "own" words are all themes which Chaucer scrutinizes at various points during the Tales.

Tellers as dramatic voices

The key structural complication of the Tales is the way that Chaucer situates himself within the fictional pilgrimage, claiming that he is simply recording what other people have said. Thus we are never sure whether any statement is the opinion of the teller (say, the Wife of Bath), of the fictional Chaucer ("Geffrey", as he is referred to in criticism) or of Chaucer himself. It is extremely difficult, due to the dramatic, "ventriloquised" nature of the tale-telling project, to actually ascertain who we are listening to at any one stage.

Quitting, vengeance and paying debts

There are several instances both within tales and across the structure of the work itself where one character resolves to "quit" another. The Miller, for example, quits the Knight's Tale, only to have his tale quit by the Reeve - and later, the Summoner furiously quits the Friar's Tale with his own venemous anti-Friar narrative. Quitting often provides smaller internal structures within the larger structure of the Tales as a whole, and invites the comparison of one thing to another.