4. PRIDE
Like the Pardoner himself, his characters exhibit pride, the kind that comes before a fall. To seek and try to kill Death is an attempt to go beyond the bounds of man, and therefore is punishable by death. What the Pardoner doesn’t realize is that the moral of his tale is especially applicable to himself. He is as blind to that as his three revelers are.
^^^^^^^^^^CANTERBURY TALES: FORM AND STRUCTURE
The introduction to the Pardoner’s Tale is in the form of a sermon that he delivers complete with fancy flourishes to the people he tries to rook into buying pardons. His tale continues the format and launches into a series of “exempla,” examples with a moral point that are richly illustrated and set down one after another. The story of the three rioters is an extended version of a moral example story, used often by preachers.
^^^^^^^^^^CANTERBURY TALES: PLOT
In the introduction to the tale, the Knight interrupts the Monk and tells him to stop telling his tragic tales–they’re annoying. The monk refuses to tell a different one, so the Host turns to the Nun’s Priest, Sir John, and asks him to tell a merry tale. The priest obliges.
The story begins with a poor widow who supports herself and her two daughters as best she can by raising a few animals. She’s contented because her desires are moderate; she wants no more than what she has.
The scene shifts to the yard, where Chanticleer the rooster, the best crower you’ve ever heard, rules over his seven hens. His favorite is Pertelote, who sings with him (this story takes place in the days when animals could speak and sing, we’re told) and sits next to him on his perch at night.
Pertelote wakes before dawn to hear Chanticleer moaning in his sleep because of a nightmare. She asks what’s wrong. He’s afraid of the dream, in which a doglike animal wants to kill him. Pertelote taunts him for being afraid of a stupid dream, which doesn’t mean anything. Bad dreams come from eating too much, she says, and offers to make him a laxative that will cure his nightmares.
Chanticleer launches into a long defense of dreams that foretell what will happen. But he ends by saying that with his fair lady by his side he is so filled with joy that he’s not afraid of nightmares or dreams.
It’s now daylight, so he ignores his fears and flies into the yard, mounting Pertelote twenty times by midmorning. But’s it’s unfortunate that he took his wife’s advice to dismiss his dream, for the fox is waiting for him in the bushes to carry him off.
The rooster is terrified, but the fox tells Chanticleer he doesn’t mean to harm him. He has heard that he’s a marvelous crower, as good as his father was. Chanticleer’s father and mother, the fox says slyly, were once guests at his house. Could Chanticleer imitate his father’s crowing?
Big headed from the flattery, Chanticleer closes his eyes to crow. As he stretches his neck, the fox grabs him, throws him across his back, and dashes off. The hens, cackling madly, begin the world’s sorriest lament, which brings out the widow and her daughters. A chase scene ensues.
As they’re running, Chanticleer tells the fox that if he were the fox, he’d turn and tell the crowd that it’s too late, the bird is his. Good idea, says the fox, and of course as soon as he opens his mouth, Chanticleer escapes up into a tree. The fox tries to lure him down, but Chanticleer vows not to make the same mistake twice. The tale ends with the narrator warning that even though this is just a story about animals, there’s a moral in it for people too.
In the epilogue the Host praises Sir John, not only for his tale, but for his manhood, making cracks about the hens he would need if he were a layman instead of a priest. The priest remains silent.
We see the WIDOW only briefly, at the beginning and near the end, but she represents an important aspect of the story. Her life is simple and contented because she feels none of the temptations we associate with rich living. We understand her life and moral values in just a few lines.
CHANTICLEER presents an immediate contrast to the widow’s simplicity. He is described like the noble prince in courtly love romances, which is a ludicrous description of a rooster. But this portrait gives us insight into the lovable and not-so-lovable characteristics of us humans, who are just as proud and vain as he is.
As a rooster, he carries large responsibilities: he crows better than any other rooster, he thinks he’s responsible for the very sunrise, he makes use of all the hens sexually, and he struts around his farmyard turf like a lion. He’s proud to the point of being arrogant (remember that, especially in medieval literature, pride comes before a fall), he’s aware of his attractiveness, he’s intelligent and sly, he is full of joy and life.
Is it ridiculous to have all these noble and ignoble characteristics combined in a rooster? Does his chicken shape keep us from taking him seriously? You’ll have to decide how much of his portrait is just for amusement and how much we should apply to ourselves.
PERTELOTE is a marvelous parody of a wife who henpecks her husband, in this case literally. Impressively, she can quote from Cato, a respected medieval authority, on dreams, which surely not many medieval wives could do, let alone chickens. But her interest lies mostly in the daily concerns of keeping her husband healthy and happy, chalking up his bad dream to indigestion, and offering a complicated mixture of herbs for a laxative.
She is more than this, though. She is presented as the beloved lady of medieval romances, the queenly figure for whom the knight would gladly die, in accordance with the ideal of courtly love. Yet Chanticleer teases her while serving her in a knightly fashion, implying that she doesn’t know things that he knows and therefore shouldn’t stick her beak in. But then he does listen to her, and ignores the warning of his dream and his own explanations.
You might examine whether she represents human folly, seeing only the base things in life and ignoring the spiritual realm, or if she stands for the practicality that Chanticleer lacks.
^^^^^^^^^^CANTERBURY TALES: STORY LINE
We get a taste of the characters’ symbolic importance to the tale. The widow’s way of life, which takes the place of any physical description, is humbly Christian: she doesn’t want what she can’t have and she practices temperance in all things. This sets up the moral tone of the poem. But among her few possessions she does have a sheep named Moll. It’s interesting that she and her daughters don’t have names, but her sheep does. This prepares us for the introduction of animals that seem more human than the people in the tale.
Chanticleer appears more highly bred and privileged than the poor woman who owns him. He sees himself as the center of his small universe.
NOTE: Chaucer shifts the point of view here from the objective sight of the widow to the viewpoints of the barnyard. He gives a closeup description of Chanticleer and compares his comb to a “castle wall” (line 40), making him appear large, as if we’re seeing him on a hen’s-eye level.
His portrait and that of the hens–his “paramours” (line 47)–are from a courtly romance, especially the standard romance description of Pertelote, “courteous, discreet, debonair,” who captured the heart of this noble rooster when she was only seven days old. But the whole romantic ideal is undercut by a reminder that these are animals: we are in the long-ago days when animals and birds could speak and sing (line 61). This shift back and forth from romance (and later, philosophy) to the barnyard occurs throughout the tale, usually with hilarious effect.
Chanticleer’s dream is suggestive of a medieval riddle: what is like something and yet is not that thing? (You can probably think of similar riddles from childhood.) His nightmare is about an animal “like a dog,” but he doesn’t know what. We immediately recognize a fox, which obviously Chanticleer his never seen; this puts us in a position of knowing more than the rooster does and keeps us from taking him too seriously.
Pertelote then becomes anything but “courteous” and “debonair.” It’s ridiculous that he should be afraid of dreams, she says. Aren’t you a man? she asks in all seriousness (though to us it’s very funny). Dreams come from overeating, gas, and an imbalance of bodily humors, in her opinion, as does her husband’s red “choler” (bile: one of the four temperaments believed to rule the body). In quoting Cato (lines 120-121), she is presenting one prominent medieval view of dreams, the “natural” theory that says they are worthless. Her courtly tone of voice mixes with the pragmatic until she concludes he should take a laxative.