You should write a unified essay and not a series of loosely connected interpretations of different tales. Find a central argument and thesis that you can support in the case of each tale you choose. Focus on presenting an argument and avoid irrelevant plot summary and description. Cite the text in order to bolster your claims and focus the reader’s attention on specific aspects of language central to your thesis; do not waste your time in paraphrasing the text. Finally, if you use secondary sources, be sure to cite in your footnotes any work which you feel has influenced you as you prepared your essay.
1. Chaucer engages the notion of consent from a woman (in sexual relations) and consent from a governed people (in political contracts) in a number of tales. Treating the Canterbury Tales as an investigation of the grounds for consent, analyze two or three tales that approach this issue in overlapping or differing ways.
2. Marriage is a site of controversy in the CT, where characters think long and hard about whether or not to marry, and where many tales revolve around the expectations, hopes, and frustrations of marriage. The characters seem highly aware that marriage is a social contract as well as a religious institution, and that the descriptions of marriage from social and religious positions do not always match up. According to theology, marriage was a unioneven a total mergingof a man and a woman. In what ways, does the notion of total absorption at times appear exalted and spiritual? or impractical or even violently repressive to others?
3. A storyteller may create a fiction to identify, interpret, and perhaps to solve a personal problem. Taking the Pardoner’s Tale as the fictional creation of the Pardoner in the General Prologue, ask yourself these questions: what problems is the Pardoner confronting or evading? how does he situate or identify himself in the tale (and how do you know)? does the tale lead to a resolution of his problem? is it, in this context, a successful or a failed fiction?
4. Analyze the application of terms and images from commerce and finance to sexual and other social situations in two or three tales of your choice. Why does this vocabulary show up where it does? What important effects does economic vocabulary have on the tales you have chosen?
5. Concentrate on a figure from the Bible referred to frequently in the CT (e.g., Solomon or Paul) and analyze the various uses the tellers make of this figure. Solomon, e.g., was a wise and fair judge and a notorious lover of women, thought to have written the Song of Songs (a dialogue between a bride and bridegroom) and Ecclesiastes (a grim meditation on human foolishness), both reproduced in your reader.
6. Investigate the use of space (particularly as embodied in architecture, monuments, tavern, village and castle, gardens, countryside, woods, natural spaces, and even the human body) and movement in space (where the characters go and where the language of description gravitates (e.g., Alisoun & the farmyard) in one or two tales. If you take on consecutive or responsive tales, such as those of the Wife, Merchant, and Clerk, consider the way in which the latter tale’s spatial organization “quites” the preceding tale. Or does it?
7. Thresholds and other liminal spaces. A number of tales draw attention to thresholds as spaces that mark transition, transformation, or transgression. Consider the bedroom window in the Millers tale, the transition from the court to the bedroom in the Wife of Baths tale, the threshold between Janiculas home and Walters domain (especially the unclothing and reclothing of Griselda), and/or the cliffs edge in the Franklins tale. What uses does Chaucer make of these liminal spaces between one thing and another (e.g., unmarried and married, poverty and wealth, life and death)?
8. Psychology. In what ways do Chaucers tales suggest an early interest in psychological state of mind? You might consider the tales (and prologues) of the Wife of Bath, the Clerk, the Franklin, and the Pardoner.
