Pardoners Tale Oppositions and partial linking to Wuthering Heights

Our focus of the lesson was directed at discussing the view that, “the Pardoners tale combines the macabre with a sermon on avarice” (The question is also the homework).

The literal meaning of “Macabre” is gruesome, and the “sermon on avarice” is the sin of greed (money, in this case). I personally feel these two motifs in the tale are the gothic elements within the pardoners tale. If you refer to your check sheet of gothic elements, you will see that the abuse of power and the graphicity of death (gruesomeness) are conventional elements of the gothic.

We later furthered our understanding of the prescence of macabre in the Pardoners Tale with a few quotes; “a privee theef man clepeth deeth” and “with his spere he smoot his hetre atwo”. The intensity of the image establishes a sense of Gothicism.

However we later went of to discuss if this facet of the Gothic alone can label the story itself as a Gothic text – or if the tale just has essences of the Gothic.

Comparing other texts to the PT

We later attempted to analyse oppostions in the Pardoners tale, mine were as following; “life and death”, “Heaven and Hell”, “Civilised and Uncivilised”, “Justice and Corruption” and “Nature of the Pardoner, and the conflicting expected morales of a clergyman” and “The old man vs rioters”. These oppositions, like in Wuthering Heights, blur what readers ussualy accept as distint notion, and produce highly ambivalent texts.

We refered to some A03 to further our perception on the opposition of “life and death” from the reputable Gothic critic David Punter; discovering that Death is both a blessing and a curse in the Pardoners Tale. This is due to the rioters seeking Death as a curse, and the old man wanting Death to come and put himout of his misery.

Further development of idea’s

Chaucer has centered the tale around the notion of corruption within the church, (however this concept of the church for contemporary readers, is the “politics” of the middleages; The Pardoners Tale is a universal text to many different era’s, as “corruption”is still present and therefore applicable to the modern era.

Chaucer’s linguistic has elements of the Gothic at present, but neither evokes terror or horror from the reader. Essentially Chaucer does not create a Gothic text, but one which is parodixial of the politics in the middleages.