English Literature / Unit 4 ENL 0319 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading a Chaucer Portrait
The idea
Portrait passages from the General Prologue are answered by reading the details against the narrator's words. First, identify the estate: knight, cleric, or worker, because each estate had an ideal the portrait implicitly measures. Second, collect the concrete details: clothing, possessions, habits and speech. Third, compare those details with the ideal of the calling: a nun should renounce worldly love, a pardoner should sell true pardons, a monk should keep his cloister. Fourth, note the narrator's own comment, usually praise, and set it against the details. Fifth, state the irony: the gap between the praise and the facts is the satire. The Wife of Bath's portrait gives five husbands at the church door, three pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and partial deafness; the details sketch a worldly, well-travelled woman, and her own prologue later explains the deafness.
In practice
Estate, details, ideal, the narrator's praise, the gap.
Where people slip
Do not adopt the narrator's admiration. Answers that call a pilgrim wholly admirable usually miss the irony the details build.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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