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From:
Date: 10/28/2009
Time: 11:35:07 AM
Remote Name: 139.135.112.164
In the Knight’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale and the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, we do get different views of love, marriage and the relationships between genders. In the Knight’s Tale, we read the word love described between the love triangle of two men and one girl, Emilie. Emilie in the beginning does not love either man and is disgusted with the fact that she will marry, for she longs to keep her virginity. The two men in love with her one prays to Mars to win the battle between them to “win her” and the other prays to Venus for love, and Emilie prays for the well being of both. There seems to be little compassion and enthusiasm or description of the longing to be with one another and that it’s more of a prize than love. Two men again are fighting over the woman, and the woman doesn’t care to have anything to do with them for the most part. She is described as beautiful but not so much to the extreme as the other tale’s and that she’s not trying to seduce them or flirt, she’s more conservative. The wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale seems to share that the woman is on top and dominating gender. She will willingly give herself to Grescelda. She is tested in preparing new brides wedding to see whether or not she will unselfishly help or decide to leave. When the wedding comes along the beautiful young girl that had come back into town is her long lost daughter to whom they thought were dead. This showed loyalty in the relationship but again it seems a theme that comes along with arranged marriages is lacking of compassion and other traits of being in love with each other compared to forcing to love one another. In the Miller’s Tale we see a complete fabliaux almost a double plot with no morals in the relationship between the wife and husband. The husband just tends to trust that his wife is helping building a boat with the flood with no gut feeling that something fishy is going on, like her cheating on him. Much adultery takes place showing this as an element of human kind through out this story. Love seems to be taken advantage of here for she can go right back to her husband with not much seeming consequence for her actions.