The Rich Diversity of Meanings of the Pardoners Tale Essay -- Pardone

The Rich Diversity of Meanings of the Pardoners Tale Chaucers innovation in the Pardoners performance tests our concept of dramatic irony by suggesting information regarding the Pardoners sexuality, gender identity, and spirituality, study categories in the politics of identity, without confirming that information. Our presumed understanding of the Pardoner as a character lacks substantiation. As we learn about the Pardoner through the narrators eyeball and ears, we look to fit the noble ecclesiaste (l. 708) into the figure shaped by our profess prejudices and perceptions, as any active reader must do. But the Pardoner, invariably aware of his audience, does not offer clear clues to his personality. This break between what the otherwise characters say about the Pardoner and what the Pardoner says about himself has been a major source of tension for all readers of the Tales and especially critics who search for substantiation of their views beyond the Chaucers own language. The general tone of the Canterbury Tales is comic. After all, the pilgrims are locomotion to the shrine St. doubting Thomas Beckett in a public act of divine reverence, but the Tales take a darker turn when the Pardoner is brought to the foreground. The whole Canterbury Tales is a collected set of performances, stories told about telling stories. As Joseph Ganim has written, theatricality, by which he means a governing sense of performance, an interplay among the authors voice, his fictitious characters, and his immediate audience, is a paradigm for the Chaucerian poetic (5). This paper shall endeavor to visualize that the major effect of the Pardoners presence in the Tales is to center on the readers attention to questions of performance and performativity, literary perception, ... ...University of California Press, 1988. Lochrie, Karma McCracken, Peggy Schultz, pack A. Editors. Constructing Medieval Sexuality. Minneapolis, MN University of Minnesota Press, 1997. McAlpine, Monica E. The Pardoners Homosexuality and How It Matters. Geoffrey Chaucers The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Ed. by Harold Bloom. New York Chelsea House Publishers, 1988. pp. 103-124. Nevo, Ruth. Chaucer Motive and Mask in the General Prologue. Geoffrey Chaucers The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Ed. by Harold Bloom. New York Chelsea House Publishers, 1988. pp. 9-20. Ross, Thomas W. Chaucers Bawdy. New York E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972. Sedgewick, G. G. The Progress of Chaucers Pardoner, 1880-1940. Chaucer Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. by Edward Wagnknecht. New York Oxford University Press, 1959. pp. 126-158.