CHANGING SOCIAL ORDER IN THE CANTERBURY TALES: A STUDY OF THE GENERAL PROLOGUE

Abstract

General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 13871400) is one of the most complex literary efforts in late medieval English literature to chart the discontinuities and metamorphoses of the fourteenth-century English society. Composed in the context of the Black Death, the Peasants Revolt of 1381, the Lollard religious reform movement, the rise of a mercantile class, the text inscribed in the gallery of portraits a methodical questioning of the three-estate model, those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. This essay discusses how Chaucer uses narrative voice, irony, characterisation by satire, and the pilgrimage frame to express, challenge and finally disrupt, the social hierarchy of late medieval England. Based on New Historicist, materialist, and Bakhtinian theories, the paper examines the characters of the Knight, the Prioress, the Merchant, the Plowman, the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner as characters whose depiction reveals the collapse of the ideology of the estates, the emergence of proto-capitalist individualism, and the mutability of gender and religious power. The thesis of the paper is that Chaucer is not only a mirror of social change but he is also a co-creator of this change in the discursive process of the Prologue via the polyphonic construction. The results prove that the General Prologue is a heteroglossic cultural document, whose formal strategies are the very social mobility and transgression, which are described in the contents. Conclusions on the interpretation of literature as social change in late medieval England are drawn.