Be a Member of this BLOG

Search This Blog

Mar 5, 2011

Character in Prologue to to the Canterbury Tales

The individuality and the typicality of the Pilgrim’s Inn in The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales has been recognized by all critics. Chaucer’s pilgrims have another quality about the,. They embody universal traits of human nature, which are basic and permanent to human beings, thus, Chaucer’s characters are type, individual and universal, all at the same time.

William Blake made an observant comment he said “the character of Chaucer’s Pilgrims are the characters which compose all ages and nations; as one is false, another is rises; different to mortal sight, but to immortal only the same for we see the same character repeated again and again, in animals, vegetables, minerals and in men; nothing new occurs in identical existence; accident ever varies, substance can never suffer change nor decay.” While it would not be true to say that the portraits are holy universal, for they has individual trades as well, it would not be wrong to agree that there are some elements which are to be found in all the ages and all hands.


The name and titles of Chaucer’s characters may change the ages, but the characters themselves remain unaltered. Name after, says Blake, but thing never do. The essential human characteristic and nature find expression in different human beings through the ages. Chaucer has varied the heads and forms of personages into all Natures verities, so that they are physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life, beyond which nature never steps.

The knights, Squire and the Yeoman came at the top of the portrait procession. The Knight is a true hero—a good, great and Wiseman. He is that species of character which in every age stands as the guardian of man against the oppressor. The Squire combines in himself the art and the warlike qualities. The Yeoman is perfect in his profession, and persons which are worthy attendants on noble heroes are to be found in all ages and lands.

The Prioress follows with her Chaplin. She is of the first social rank, rich and honoured. Her sentimental kindness and tenderness as well as her carefulness about the appearances trends which we find in most women, who forever try to intimate the higher class. The Monk is a man of social rank, rich, and expensively attired. The Friar is worldly like the monk. He sells absolution, and is not above seducing young women for pleasure.

The characters of The Canterbury Tales then have in themselves universal trends, which are to be met in all ages and all nations. It is true they are not nearly representative of universal traits. If they were, they would have become symbols of personification in the fashion of medieval allegory

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

All Posts

" Indian "Tomb of Sand A Fine Balance A House for Mr. Biswas Absurd Drama Achebe Across the Black Waters Addison Adiga African Ages Albee Alberuni Ambedkar American Amrita Pritam Anand Anatomy of Criticism Anglo Norman Anglo Saxon Aristotle Ariyar Arnold Ars Poetica Auden Augustan Aurobindo Ghosh Backett Bacon Badiou Bardsley Barthes Baudelaire Beckeley Bejnamin Belinda Webb Bellow Beowulf Bhabha Bharatmuni Bhatnagar Bijay Kant Dubey Blake Bloomsbury Book Bookchin Booker Prize bowen Braine British Brooks Browne Browning Buck Burke CA Duffy Camus Canada Chaos Characters Charlotte Bronte Chaucer Chaucer Age China Chomsky Coetzee Coleridge Conard Contact Cornelia Sorabji Critical Essays Critics and Books Cultural Materialism Culture Dalit Lliterature Daruwalla Darwin Dattani Death of the Author Deconstruction Deridda Derrida Desai Desani Dickens Dilip Chitre Doctorow Donne Dostoevsky Dryden Durkheim EB Browning Ecology Edmund Wilson Eliot Elizabethan Ellison Emerson Emile Emily Bronte English Epitaph essats Essays Esslin Ethics Eugene Ionesco Existentialism Ezekiel Faiz Fanon Farrel Faulkner Feminism Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness Ferber Fitzgerald Foregrounding Formalist Approach Forster Foucault Frankfurt School French Freud Frost Frye Fyre Gandhi Geetanjali Shree Gender German Germany Ghosh Gilbert Adair Golding Gordimer Greek Gulliver’s Travels Gunjar Halliday Hard Times Hardy Harindranath Chattopadhyaya Hawthorne Hazara Hemingway Heyse Hindi Literature Historical Materialism History Homer Horace Hulme Hunt Huxley Ibsen In Memoriam India Indian. Gadar Indra Sinha Interview Ireland Irish Jack London Jane Eyre Japan JM Synge Johnson Joyce Joyce on Criticism Judith Wright Jumpa Lahiri Jussawalla Kafka Kalam Kalidasa Kamla Das Karnard Keats Keki N. Daruwala Kipling Langston Hughes Language Language of Paradox Larkin Le Clezio Lenin Lessing Levine Life of PI literary Criticism Luckas Lucretius Lyrical Ballads Macaulay Magazines Mahapatra Mahima Nanda Malory Mamang Dai Mandeville Manto Manusmrti Mao Marlowe Martel Martin Amis Marx Marxism Mary Shelley Maugham McCarry Medi Media Miller Milton Moby Dick Modern Mona Loy Morrison Movies Mulk Raj Anand Mytth of Sisyphus Nabokov Nahal Naidu Naipaul Narayan Natyashastra Neo-Liberalism NET New Criticism new historicism News Nietzsche Nikita Lalwani Nissim Ezekiel Niyati Pathak Niyati Pathank Nobel Prize O Henry Of Studies Okara Ondaatje Orientalism Orwell Pakistan Pamela Paradise Lost Pater Pinter Poems Poetics Poets Pope Post Feminism Post Modern Post Structuralism post-Colonialism Poststructuralism Preface to Shakespeare Present Prize Psycho Analysis Psychology and Form Publish Pulitzer Prize Puritan PWA Radio Ramanujan Ramayana Rape of the Lock Renaissance Restoration Revival Richardson Rime of Ancient Mariner RL Stevenson Rohinton Mistry Romantic Roth Rousseau Rushdie Russia Russian Formalism Sartre Sashi Despandey Satan Sati Savitri Seamus Heaney’ Shakespeare Shaw Shelley Shiv K.Kumar Showalter Sibte Hasan Slavery Slow Man Socialism Spender Spenser Sri Lanka Stage of Development Steinbeck Stories Subaltern Sufis Surrealism Swift Syed Amanuddin Tagore Tamil Literature Ted Hughes Tennyson Tennyson. Victorian Terms Tess of the D’Urbervilles The March The Metamorphsis The Order of Discourse The Outsider The Playboy of the Western World The Politics The Satanic Verses The Scarlet Letter The Transitional Poets The Waste Land The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction The Wuthering Heights Theatre of Absurd Theory Theory of Criticism Theory of Evolution Theory of Literature Thomas McEvilley Thoreau To the Lighthouse Tolstoy Touchstone Method Tughlaq Tulsi Badrinath Twain Two Uses of Language UGC-NET Ukraine Ulysses Untouchable Urdu Victorian Vijay Tendulkar Vikram Seth Vivekananda Voltaire Voyage To Modernity Walter Tevis War Webster Wellek West Indies Wharton Williams WJ Long Woolfe Wordsworth World Wars Writers WW-I WW-II Wycliff Xingjian Yeats Zadie Smith Zaheer Zizek Zoe Haller