No New Tale To Tell

Modern day literature can, for the most part, relate back to The Canterbury tales. This set of stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer, can relate to many things in modern literature and current day living. Two of the stories from The Canterbury Tales that we read so far are The Wife of Bath and The Pardoner.

In The Wife of Bath, it can be indicated that Chaucer felt that woman should have more voice in the community. This is shown especially when the queen decides on what the knights punishment should be. And it was none, because he was able to fake that he understood woman and what a woman should  and does want in life. It's obvious though that the knight really does not know what a woman would like and need in life because he already ruined one woman's life with his greed and lust. Chaucer could have easily killed off this horrid character by having King Arthur have the final ruling in the punishment. But like we discussed in class, that would have made for a much less interesting tale.

Women are constantly being oppressed in modern day literature and even in current day. Even in America, 'the free country.' To have Chaucer write about woman's oppression and put it in a not so glorious light is good. He shows it as something that should not be taken lightly and by the way he puts it he talks about that sexual harassment is punishable by death. But the queen was lenient and gave the knight a second chance by giving him a difficult task in which he would have thirty days to answer and if not, off goes his head. I feel like that wasn't good because the victim then lived in constant fear, much like today's victims because rape is taken almost too lightly it seems.

In the Pardoner's tale, three men are too greedy and that costs them their lives. It seems that everyone is just backstabbing jerks. I mean of course not everyone but the three FRIENDS in this story definitely are. They ask an old man where to find death and he points them to an old tree. The start of this story isn't going too well. First off, they ask a man cheating death where to find Death. This man wants death so don't you think he would also have been at the tree desperately awaiting Death to come and take him? Well, onto the next part. At this point, they are already at the tree. And there at the base, is a pot of gold. How lovely. Then one of them proceeds to go buy wine and rat poison and the other two decide to kill the one who left. What a shame it would be if they were all to die. Well, that happened. And yes they found Death. Well, Death found them. Dead.

This relates to so many things in modern day everything. Books are constantly expressing backstabbing, greed, and distrust. These never result in anything good. Even in our culture today we are constantly seeing distrust happening too often.