Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Merchant's Tale Key Themes and Quotes 1
- Marriage and women
- Trapped in marriage
- "housbonde"
- 'Bound' together,
'housebound' - physical
restriction
- "secure"
- "wedlock"
- Merchant thinks he can 'purchase' a wife
- "As if one took a mirror, polished bright,
and set it in a common market-place"
- Has desired characteristics of a wife
- "obediant"
- Paradise -> heaven, god-given gift, there
for him and not herself, fulfills sexual
pleasures, earthly purgatory
- "His earthly paradise, and his source of consolation"
- "keeper of thy household"
- "old fish and
young flesh"
- Recurring animal imagery - as if he is hunting prey
- "one can guide a young thing, just as one can mold warm wax with hands"
- Wax motif - wants a wife that is impressionable and can be manipulated
- "gentil" = noble
- "fresh may" - innocent
- Merchant thinks marriage
solves all problem
- "They are so knit together no
harm can there befall"
- Cares strongly about about bloodline
- link to DOM (cardinal's comments)
- "I would rather hounds
had eaten me than that
my heritage should fall"
- Passiveness of May - doesn't speak until
halfway through text
- Religion
- References to Adam and Eve
- "woman are created for man's help...'let us
now make a helper for this man like to
himself'; and then he made Eve"
- Comparison of women to fruit, in reference to the
Garden of Eden - poisonous and forbidden
- "fruyt of his tresor"
- Biblical quote reference - 'body is a temple'
- "I ought to consider to whom I give my body for always"
- "Perhaps she may be your Purgatory!
- Ladder to heaven or hell? Women
are good or bad for men?
- Love/sexuality
- Ironic view as he desires a
young woman /
foreshadows blindness
- "love is blind always"
- Courtly romance (or the corruption of)
- Exchange of letters between May and Damien
- "she tore it all to pieces and in the privy softly threw it"
- Sexual control and confinement
- "he will no one allow to bear the key"
- Garden as a metaphor for May's
body - key to her body - ironic
- Destruction of May's innocence
- "I must do injury"
- May = prime and bloom / healing
- Comparison to meaning of January = 'Janus',
God of beginnings, gates, transitions, time,
duality, doorways, passages, and ending.
- Deception/betrayal
- January becomes physically blind but
was already metaphorically blind
- "now thou hast deprived him of both of his eyes"
- Lack of trust between January and May
- "He would suffer her to ride and walk,
unless he had a hand always on her"
- May physically and metaphorically uses January to get to Damien - 'stab in the back'
- "If I my foot set upon your back"