Canterbury Tales Satire Analysis

Exaggerate Much?
(Chaucer’s Use of Satire) Anybody who has ever read any of Chaucer’s work, would all agree on the fact that he writes about some things in very ironic ways. In the Canterbury Tales, you could call his approach satiric; he used satire to reach his intended audience. Satire is the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity on views. There are two different types of satire. The first type of satire is called horatian; this is basically like a gentle type of satire that doesn’t offend the person that it is pointed towards. The other type is juvenalian satire which is the nasty and mean kind that actually ends up hurting people’s feelings. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer just so happens to use both of these different types of satire to reach his audience. Chaucer will use satire to critique three different institutions. …show more content…
This is basically men versus women, and how women were treated by men back in his day. It’s how men had more value than women because men sit above women on Aristotle’s pyramid. Back then they felt as though asking the pyramid to say something differently was outside of nature, and was crazy because they believed sitting women equal to men would be going against God’s will. In the Wife of Bath’s Prologue is where you will see Chaucer attacking patriarchy the most in the Canterbury Tales. “Some say the things we most desire are these: Freedom to do exactly as we please.” (Lines 81-82 of The Wife of Bath’s Tale). This is somewhat describing the patriarchy because it’s talking about how women would like the freedom to do whatever they want, just like the men are allowed to do. He was attacking this concept of how men are higher up than women, and people may have called him an iconoclastic because he was basically blowing the beliefs that they’ve always known away. It was very obvious that Chaucer attacked patriarchy in The Canterbury

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