The importance of the promise and love
I'm going to talk about "The importance of the promise and love" in the Chaucer Geoffrey's Terrateniente story in "The Canterbury Tales" because when I finished to read it, I felt it was an example of true love. The most important topics are promise and love. Between the two both, the importance of promise is the leading and then, love. This last one emphasizes at the end of the story and it makes the readers feel sensitive to it. Shortly, this story is about a gentleman and a lady. Please! Imagine this story in your mind to understand it perfectly. This gentleman loved a lot to this lady and she loved him as well, that's why they decided to marry. Everything was great! They drunk, ate and went to live in a castle. A day, the gentleman left the palace during a period of two years, he had to go to another place to solve problems and his wife used to cry over him every day during his absence. It was a custom, at least in old literature. A day, she found her squire called Aurelio in her garden, he loved her a lot as well. Therefore, he begged her to abandon her husband to be the squire's lover. The lady denied it and sarcastically promised she would marry him if he managed to make all the rocks she used to see from the hill disappear (she said this because she never thought it could be possible). Of course, a person thinks that is not possible even in our days and, besides, when someone bothers you to do something you don't want to do, one says crazy things to that person does not bother you anymore ¿right? But, this squire could do the rocks disappear. He resorted to a wizard that made a spell for what nobody could see the rocks for a short period of time. After this, when the lady realised that she couldn't see the rocks anymore, she told her husband everything. He had already come back to the castle and he hadn't found out anything about the promise her wife gave to the squire.
You will wonder yourself: what did her husband do? Well, he told her that he loved her very much, but he preferred that her honour as a lady still stood before breaking her promise. He accepted that his wife was unfaithful to him because he loved her, he did not want society to treat her badly because she was not faithful to her promise. The lady met her squire, who noticed that the lady was sad. When he learned that the husband's wife agreed that she was staying with him, and because of the lady's sadness, the squire left her return with her husband. But why? I mean, did the squire spend his time and money to get the lady so he finally left her? I think he did it out of love because he knew she was very sad and he also knew that she was not going to be happy with him. Does someone who loves another person try to make her or him feel good? Well, this is what the squire did and I think it is a good example of true love for someone else.
Now then, why is the promise important in this short story? And how does this topic become love important and make us feel sensitive for that? My arguments are the next:
Point number one, the promise is important because it was the spirit of the Middle Ages. If you had the opportunity of reading all "The Canterbury Tales", you will able to realise that spirit in all of those short stories. In this story, promise is important because it was the warranty of all the activities in that period and if the lady wasn't faithful with that, she would be humiliated and sentenced socially and also, her promise would not be worth and, therefore, people couldn't be trusted on the lady's words when she promises something to someone else. If I'm wrong with this supposition, the lady's husband didn't let her go with the squire, as it would be common to think about in our century.
Point number two, the topic of love emphasize itself at the end of the story because if we pay attention, the fact that she has to be separated from the man she loves because she must be faithful to her promise and she can't do anything to change her situation, becomes a nuance of tragic and make us feel something like a shame for that situation and that's why we feel sensitive. And not only that but also it unwittingly makes us believe there is true love between the lady and the gentleman. On the other hand, we also feel touched on the topic of love when the squire, who fought for the lady, waives for her happiness.
If we analyse this from a useful point of view, such as those people who want to give a sense to everything, it could say that this second part of the story makes us think about love because the squire already had the woman he loved. He could have chosen to marry her and that would have been the end of the story, but not, he prefered the lady's happiness before his own. Will there be any other purest sign of love? That is the reason why I think the short story is a good example of true love and the reader could feel sensitized for this story. In short, we could see how the importance of promise and love connect in this story and how it let us think about those topics in everyday life. I mean to think about the pure love, in the sense of thinking for the person's, who we love, well-being instead of the things we really wish to do, like these gentlemen did it and in the fact that we can carry the promise that we do. Finally, I invite you to read "The Canterbury Tales" and you will be able to draw your own opinion of each story.
This text was made in the framework of a paper presented to "Universidad Nacional del Nordeste."
Original version: Spanish.
Autor: John Kevin Andersson F.
