The Merchant's Tale Critics Flashcards
What does Schroeder say?
This old knight makes a world which….
…exactly mirrors his fantasies, and in the process is shown to be a fool, who blindly creates a hellish opposite to the paradise he desired.
Everything that has been metaphorical…
in the tale is made literal in the garden
Schroeder
The tale is dominated
by projected self images which create instead a peculiarly personal, reductive vision
Schroeder
What does Hardman say about Januarie’s tyranny?
Tyrants of Lombardy
“Rejects the traditional virtuous motives for marriage… in favor of plain lechery.”
“Vice to be habitual with Januarie”
Olson: J love May?
“Januarie does not love May as a person but as a thing.”
Niebrzydowski
“May is representative, an object”
“Voracious vagina”
Cetiner-Oktem
Change is only allowed outside the garden, and not in it,
the Garden of Eden, under the guise of being benign, becomes a perfect site of entrapment and a space of divine confinement
Cetiner-Oktem
Gardens function mainly as
mechanisms of control, primarily by men over women…. enclosed gardens represent the way in which women, as wives or as prospective wives, are treated as the property of men.
Howes
“the narrative progresses until her paradise becomes his hell”
the lover becomes a vehicle through
which the silent, oppressed wife learns to express her desire
Kaufman
Blamires
proactive voluptuary fantasy as male
Neuse ‘De Raptu Prosperinae’ (5th century AD)
“Marriage is viewed form the woman’s perspective as a kind of rape and a kind of death”
“Dungeon of wedlock”
Shrock
God is missing from Eden.
