The Canterbury Tales: The Clerk's Tale Virtue Quotes

Walter's sentiment here echoes the Wife of Bath's claim that gentility comes from God and not lineage. This is only one of many echoes of the "Wife of Bath's Tale" which serve, ironically, to link this tale about a totally submissive wife to that tale about women's desire for sovereignty.

By moving quickly from Grisilde's exterior beauty to her "vertuous beautee," or inward characteristics, the tale implies that while she's definitely easy on the eyes, the most important thing about Grisilde is that she's virtuous within.

Here the narrator connects Grisilde's virtue to a life lived in poverty. This connection between virtue and poverty goes hand in hand with Walter's later point that virtue comes from your character and not from your lineage. This passage implies that a life of poverty better fosters a character that is likely to be virtuous.

Grisilde's lack of "ydel ese" contrasts with Walter's life of "delyt" and his obsession with hunting and hawking—both fairly idle pursuits, since noblemen just did them for fun (and not for, say, food).

The connection between virginity and a strong character grew out of a religious rhetoric in praise of virginity, and particularly of the Virgin Mary. The idea was that a girl's virginity gave her special power and strength that a non-virgin could not possibly approach.

Grisilde's hardworking nature again takes center stage in the description of her virtue. The tale may highlight this in order to draw a sharp contrast between Grisilde's and Walter's lives and essential natures.

The fact that Grisilde is able to find and prepare herbs for food shows how resourceful she is. Her "ful harde" bed shows, again, how she has rejected "ydel ese." Even when she sleeps, Grisilde rejects the easy life. She lives kind of like a nun, really.

The entire portrait of Grisilde is meant to emphasize her great virtue. Here the respect and obedience she pays her father become part of that virtue, and the tale sets us up to praise the way she will obey Walter later on.

Walter's sober—and not lustful—consideration of Grisilde makes him appear virtuous, as does the fact that he notices her virtue as much as her womanliness. Both Walter and Grisilde have a seriousness about them that makes them well suited to a serious tale like this, in contrast to some of the zanier and bawdier of Chaucer's tales.

Here "peple" probably refers to the common man, the implication being that Walter, as a nobleman, is better at sussing out virtue than the common man would be. Although at some times the "Clerk's Tale" appears to want to democratize virtue, it also has a somewhat contradictory tendency to criticize the shallowness of the "peple," or common folk.

There's a subtle criticism here of the "peple," whose hearts Grisilde is able to win after she becomes Walter's wife. After all, she's always been virtuous, but it's only now, when she's all decked-out and surrounded by bling, that they love her the way they should.

As he did a few hundred lines earlier, Walter again gets to seem virtuous just because he's one of the few able to notice Grisilde's virtue. The idea is that only a virtuous or prudent person would be able to recognize this kind of virtue in someone else. Apparently, prudence is something rarely seen in these parts.