Canterbury Tales - Linking Griselda of The Clerks Tale to the Biblical

Linking Griselda of The Clerks Tale and the Biblical feed of Abraham The Clerks Tale seems to strike most readersas a distasteful archetype of corrupt sovereignty and emotional sadism few can find whatever value in Walters incessant urge to test his wifes constancy, and the sense that adult female is built for suffering is fairly revolting to most modern sensibilities. Nevill Coghill, for instance, describe the tale as too cruel, too incredible a story, and he notes that even Chaucer could not stand it and had to write his marvelously versified ironic disclaimer (104-5). It seems, however, even more incredible that a great poet should bother composing a tale for which he himself had little taste that is, there mustiness be some point, however strange, to the ordeal of Griselda. One of the words Chaucer ofttimes uses to describe her character is sombreness. The word obviously had a very distinct meaning in fourteenth-century England from what it has today In Chaucer it does not denote a depressed moral or psychological state, but a focus of reacting to events which takes them thoroughly seriously without letting them disturb ones internal composure. This kind of sadness can best be understood in terms of the biblical models Griselda follows. She explicitly echoes the Stoic resolve of Job when she declares, Naked out of my fadreshous, ...I cam, and new moote I turn again (871-2) this quote needs a / to establish line breaks and should use spaced periods with square brackets for ellipses. But the allusions to Job may momentarily throw the reader off the trail of an even stronger biblical model the story of Abrahams sacrifice of Isaac The affinities b... ...ch the intoxicated security of the flesh (in Calvins phrase), whiff up in its own satisfaction at an unbroken clay of moral debts and repayments, is negated by the knowledge of an intractable sinfulness, and in which all gentleman activity turns out to have been an anguished cry for forgiveness. Works Cited Benson, Larry. Ed. The riverbank Chaucer. Boston Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Clerks Tale.The Riverside Chaucer.Ed. Larry Benson. Boston Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987. 137-53. Coghill, Nevill. The Poet Chaucer. London Oxford University Press, 1967. Kierkegaard, Sren. Fear and Trembling.Trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton PrincetonUniversity Press, 1941.