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

Linking Griselda of The Clerks Tale and the scriptural Sacrifice of Abraham The Clerks Tale seems to strike most readersas a impish representation of corrupt sovereignty and emotional sadism few can go reveal any value in Walters incessant urge to test his wifes constancy, and the hotshot that woman is built for suffering is fairly revolting to most unexampled sensibilities. Nevill Coghill, for instance, described the tale as too cruel, too incredible a story, and he notes that nonetheless Chaucer could not stand it and had to write his marvelously versified humourous disclaimer (104-5). It seems, however, even more incredible that a great poet should bicker composing a tale for which he himself had little taste that is, on that point must be some point, however strange, to the ordeal of Griselda. One of the speech communication Chaucer frequently uses to describe her character is sadness. The word obviously had a re every last(predicate)y different meaning in fourteenth-century England from what it has today In Chaucer it does not touch a depressed moral or psychological state, but a way of reacting to events which takes them thoroughly seriously without letting them disturb ones internal composure. This miscellanea of sadness can best be understood in legal injury of the biblical models Griselda follows. She explicitly echoes the Stoic resolve of personal credit line when she declares, Naked out of my fadreshous, ...I cam, and naked moote I turn again (871-2) this quote needs a / to show 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 manikin (in Calvins phrase), puffed up in its own satisfaction at an unploughed system of moral debts and repayments, is negated by the knowl edge of an intractable sinfulness, and in which all human activity turns out to have been an anguished cry for forgiveness. whole works Cited Benson, Larry. Ed. The Riverside 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. fright and Trembling.Trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton PrincetonUniversity Press, 1941.