The Pardoner In Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

The Pardoner Essay Draft 2

During the medieval period Pardoners were members of the church who sold religious pardons, and for the most part appear greedy and despicable in retrospect. In The Canterbury Tales, medieval author Geoffrey Chaucer assures us through his text that our present day view of Pardoners is no exception. By various means — grotesque imagery, demeaning comments, self incriminating characters, and the story he tells, Chaucer lends us a less then flattering view of these enterprising church sellers. The sight of anyone resembling Chaucer’s description of the Pardoner would be memorable, to say the least. Characteristics such as hair “as yellow as wax”(695) just don’t leave room for a forgiving first impression. Within

Chaucer, as the narrator writes almost casually that he, “judge[d] [the pardoner] was a gelding or a mare”(711). Considering that a gelding is a castrated animal, the narrator simultaneously implies that the Pardoner is androgynous and sub-human; his voice being described as the same as a goat (708) only furthers this idea. The cumulative effect of this non-human and foremostly disgusting physical description is to dampen any empathy the reader might have for a fellow human being and to give a terrible first impression which skews all future thoughts of the Pardoner in a negative

As he goes on to share some of his exploits the reader’s measure of the Pardoner’s hypocrisy increases as his greed and exploits become more and more apparent — this is exemplified if the reader knows that the Pardoners story completely supports his hypocritical maxim. Yet in the end the Pardoner pleas: “These other folks I’m still able to win… But … I only preach to satisfy my greed”(430). It is not a justification, merely an admittance of moral fault, an admission of not following his maxim. In fact it gives the impression that his hypocrisy is just an effect of him saving others from greed — his maxim against greed still makes logical sense as hypocrisy only weakens an argument. Chaucer might intend for the Pardoner to be a personification of the corruptness of the church at the time, as the church too was teaching morals and lessons of God that it itself could not follow, and if the metaphor holds then Chaucer may be implying that the corrupt church was still beneficial in teaching people moral