Sunday, June 7, 2009
The Prologue
While reading, I tried to interpret what the purpose of the Prologue could be. My intuition that the Prologue focussed mainly on setting up stereotypes of various class occupations was confirmed by Mann's elucidation on how Chaucer's use of professional jargon "contributes little to our sense of the individual psychology of the pilgrims, but a great deal to our sense of their working lives"(12). I wonder what Chaucer intends to achieve through this setup: Does he intend to construct these stereotypes (such as the knight's nobility, the shipman's ruthlessness, etc) in order to destroy them later? Or does he intend to prepare us for his perspective on why people of different occupations conform to different moulds of personality? I believe that further study of the Tales illuminate his motives more clearly for us.
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I was also drawn to Mann’s argument about the limited contribution to the characters’ individual psychology. I disagree, however, with her notion that the Canterbury pilgrims nevertheless “give us an extraordinarily vivid impression of their existence as individuals” (16). This impression, she writes, emerges from the fact that “we cannot apply to [the characters] the absolute responses appropriate to the abstractions of moralistic satire” (189). But while I find her argument about the reader’s contradictory responses appealing, I do not feel that the contradictions she mentions makes the characters more life-like. Despite the contradictory depictions, they fail to come alive for me as real characters.
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