Critics Flashcards
Ruggiers
ugliness of January’s sensuality
Donaldson
The tale itself is intrinsically savage
Field
Exposes the hollowness behind knightly pride
Cooper
a fabliau dressed up as a romance
Holman (on marriage)
January is a perversion of marriage, whose motives are sensual and who converts what his era considered a venial sin into a deadly one
O’Neill (on Pluto)
Pluto, having obtained his own niece as wife by rape, can hardly be taken without question as a moral authority.
O’Neill (on Januarie)
January has a “mercantile view of humanity”.
Taylor
May has her fitting punishment by being married to January.
Davidson (on winter)
The personified force of winter attempts to repress the resurgent spring.
Pearsall
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
Davidson (on Januarie)
January is a joke who deserves our derision
Davidson (on May)
May is silent and passive… a contextualised reading would see this as reflecting her role in society at the time; she is the blushing subservient bride. A Marxist reading may highlight her inferior social status and see this as the Merchants own preoccupation with rank. A feminist reading may draw attention to the patriarchal values of the narrator, objectifying May and describing her only in terms of her appearance
Davidson (on youth)
The triumph of May can also be seen as a celebration of youthful energy and potency
Nuttall
We would not usually expect to meet gods and goddesses in a fabliaux. We are both entertained and disorientated by the seeming mismatch between what we expect of a fabliau and what we get in the story
Barthard-Smith (on courtly love)
The tale exploits the tradition of courtly love, another tradition steeped in dishonesty and trickery.
