The Merchant's Tale - critics

Jill Mann (Chaucer’s model)

Society itself, rather than a literary genre, would have been Chaucer's model

Jill Mann (estates list)

It can only have been with the aim of providing a full version of an estates list that Chaucer chose to introduce as many as thirty pilgrims in the Prologue

Jill Mann (hierarchy)

The strict order of estates literature is governed by the notion of hierarchy. It is precisely this notion that Chaucer discards

Jill Mann (prejudice)

Literature and popular prejudice supported each other

Jill Mann (profession)

The profession often determines what we regard as sinful in a character

George Norton

In Carnival "Diverse social groups are brought together in liminal spaces away from the rules of everyday life"

Bakhtin (art)

Carnival belongs to the borderline between life and art

Bakhtin (relativity)

Carnival “absolutises nothing”

Angela Carter

Carnival is "here today and gone tomorrow, a release of tension not a reconstitution of order”

Paul Strohm (marriage)

Within his poetry the liabilities of marriage are unsparingly explored, and its benefits universally derided

Paul Strohm (middle strata)

Chaucer's "great interest is in what may be called the 'middle strata' of his society"

John Thorne (authority)

Chaucer explores a human wish to trust in authority and a desire to renegotiate its meaning constantly

Edward Wagenknecht

January’s physical blindness is the outward sign of his long-standing moral blindness

R. A. Shoaf

January shops for a wife like a merchant appraises goods in a marketplace

Jay Schleusener

Imagination provides what the Merchant discreetly omits

John R. Elliott Jr

The two voices become less distinguishable and eventually they blur together

John McGalliard

Whether the eulogy should be printed as the narrator's or as January's, there can be no question that it represents the thoughts and attitudes of the latter

J.S.P. Tatlock

The voice is Chaucer's because the Merchant "has no character, only a situation"

Robert M. Jordan

The mock encomium is an independently worked out satire on women which has its own lineage in the academic antifeminist tradition

Charles E. Shain

Even without the tell-tale vestiges of a clerical narrator, the Merchant's Tale betrays a preaching background

Wentersdorf (women)

The Merchant’s Tale “transcends the traditional medieval criticism of women for their seductive power and inconstancy in love” by criticising male folly

Elaine Tattle Hansen (the tale)

Prescriptive anti-feminist propaganda

Fiona Dunlop (posing)

Characters adopt the poses of courtly behaviour, while being motivated by much baser instincts

Fiona Dunlop (garden)

The garden may resemble Eden, but the relationships bear all the hallmarks of the Fall

Wentersdorf (Pluto)

The Pluto episode indicates that the marriage entered into by January is reprehensible because...it takes on some of the aspects of rape

Marcia A. Dalbey

The courtly ritual which May performs with Damyan is just as false, empty, and spiritually corrupt as her marriage to Januarie

Janette Richardson

The very act of combining the holy with a situation so sordid, though comic, creates an incongruity which deepens into profound moral criticism

Richard Neuse (blindness)

Though he is never clearly identified with January, the Merchant has surely more than a touch of his blindness

Richard Neuse (church)

As January is to be seen as a faithful son of the Church, he exposes...the Church's flawed conception of marriage

Stephanie Tolliner

Medieval marriage functions as contract and commodity

Holly A. Crocker

The difference between passivity and agency is only a matter of display

Elaine Tattle Hansen (May)

May is devised out of Januarie's thoughts

Amanda Walling

 Debate is a "phantom trope"

Pamela M. King

The narrative boundary between the frame and tale is permeable

Richard Neuse (language)

Januarie misappropriates religious language "lay usage…unusable for everyday profane existence"

Maurice Hussey

 Pluto and Proserpina add to the "tone of the mock heroic"

Murray

Justinus represents Chaucer's "own subtle authorial comments throughout the tale"

John Thorne (Januarie’s cherry-picking)

Januarie turns ‘caritas’ (charity) to ‘cupiditas’ (desire)

P.G. Ruggiers (evil)

Emphasis rests upon a kind of successful evil, an insistence upon the attraction of youth to youth as a retaliation for the blind lust of a duped old man

P.G. Ruggiers (garden)

The garden produces only a semblance of a Fall, and out of the semblance arises a generous vindication of the rule of love

Davidson

Fabliau justice "subverted conventional morality in order to allow the disempowered to triumph over the powerful"