Chaucer's Portrait of Life in Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer presents a broad portrait of life in his Canterbury Tales both in the depiction of the pilgrims themselves and in the characters in the stories the pilgrims tell one another to pass the time. One of his problems in shaping this lengthy project was a perceived need to achieve variety within a coherent and unified framework. He achieved unity first by means of his central premise--that these varied pilgrims were united on the road by their intention to reach Canterbury in the prescribed time and for a religious purpose. He achieved variety through his selection of the people to be on this trip, reflecting members of those segments of society which would be represented on such a journey, leavened at times with additional characters such as innkeepers and the like they would encounter on their trip. In addition, there is unity in the secondary premise that each of these pilgrims would help pass the time by recounting tales to the others, and these tales often come in groups which complement one another thematically or in some cases offer a form of balance between opposing points of view. Variety is further achieved through the characters told about in these stories, offering an even broader cross-section of the society that produced these people. The controlling image for the book is the pilgrimage itself, and it is around this event that everything else is shaped.

As noted, the pilgrims themselves constitute a variety of types,

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nce aroused they are also able to turn the tables on the miller and seduce his wife and daughter under his nose much as he has stolen from them. These clerks never question their own actions or the rightness of their vendetta against the miller. In the end, they beat him up after his wife has accidentally knocked him unconscious. There is an arrogance in these scholars, who hold themselves above the rest of society because they are learned while the mass of people are not. They see themselves as above the law, as it were, and consider the miller an outlaw who needs to be punished. The whole thing is a game to them at the same time, a lark in which they use the others as pawns in their game, seeking their own enjoyment and unconcerned about the consequences to others. This attitude contrasts sharply with what will be seen in The Franklin's Tale, a story in which the intellectual class may start out just as greedy and just as certain of its ability to do what it pleases, but that ends up with a strong moral sense that overcomes these feelings. Indeed, the Reeve sees his tale as a moral one in which the miller gets his just desserts, and thus he appears to condone the actions of the clerks as a form of justice: Thus is th

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