Critical Quotes Flashcards
Cathy O’Neill
‘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 misogynistic and 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’
Philip Allan
‘The Merchant’s 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 and expected to behave as instructed. This commercialisation of values is apparent in the transactional imagery which characterises January’s rhetoric’
Cathy O’Neill on marriage
‘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’
