The Canterbury Tales: the Man of Law's Tale Suffering Quotes

Well that's a weird beginning. We're expecting an adventure, and instead we get a bunch of whining about how bad poverty is? As far as we can tell, the only real link between this introduction and the actual plot of "The Man of Law's Tale" is that in both, much physical suffering ensues. This link is a bit of a stretch though. No matter how you slice it, this is an odd way to begin.

The narrator is sensitive to the suffering involved in what, for many medieval noble women, was a fact of life: forced marriage. It was pretty common for a woman to be forced to ditch her friends and family and marry a stranger. Adding to the difficulty of Custance's plight is that she "knoweth nat" the "condicoun," or culture, of the man to whom she is pledged, meaning that the world of her future husband is totally alien to her. This is gonna be interesting.

Custance takes strength from another person who suffered—Christ. When she speaks of the plight of all women, "born to thraldom and penance, / and to been under mannes governance," it's clear that she has an understanding of women's place in her society whether she agrees with it or not. Custance isn't one to go against the grain. She'd rather suffer the grain nobly.

This is not the first nor will it be the last of the narrator's extremely hyperbolic, or exaggerated, descriptions of the characters' suffering. He seems to get particularly excited whenever a character is going through hard times. Schaudenfreude, much?

Our narrator is definitely a glass-half-empty kind of person. Instead of appreciating the good times, he wants you to always keep in mind the pain and suffering that is bound to come after it. Since he obviously believes that we're powerless to prevent this suffering, it's really not clear what good obsessing about its likely occurrence will do.

Here Custance prays to the cross when she's cast out of Syria in a rudderless boat. She prays not to just any cross, but to the cross as the place where Christ suffered, describing his piercing with the spear of the Roman soldiers. So, once again, Custance draws strength from the thought of someone else who suffered. Christ's suffering gives meaning to her own.

Yep, our Custance is pretty powerless at the hands of fate. It's her "aventure" (fate) to simply sit and wait for death, at the mercy of the "wilde wawes." Custance has absolutely no control over whether she lives or dies. But hey, she does have prayer.

In the face of a false accusation, the narrator compares Custance with a lamb brought to slaughter. Here again he links her suffering with that of Christ, who is also often referred to as a lamb. Um, sensing a pattern here?

The Constable cries passionately to God, asking why He allows innocents to suffer while the wicked live like kings. We'd never hear this kind of thing from Custance. Part of her virtue lies in her willingness to accept whatever God ordains for her—even if the rest of us would want to rage against the machine. These sentiments may be what the narrator and audience are thinking, however, and so the Constable becomes their mouthpiece.

Here Custance prays to Mary, saying that the suffering of mankind cannot possibly compare to what Mary endured watching her own child suffer on the cross. Custance, who in the past has prayed to the suffering Christ, now prays to the suffering Mary. The change is appropriate since Custance has recently become a mother and, like Mary, must now watch her own child suffer.

Get ready to get fancy. In these lines, our dear narrator is using a super cool literary device called preterition. What's that? Well, it's when a narrator suggests the significance or greatness of something by passing over it, often by suggesting that the thing in question is so great it lies beyond anyone's narrative abilities to do it justice ("ther is no tonge that it telle may"). Also significant here is the fact that finally, someone else besides Custance is suffering. Alla's pain at the loss of his wife and child is juxtaposed with hers on the open sea.

Wait a second. This is supposed to be a happy meeting, right? But it's a wee bit awkward, given that Custance thinks her husband tried to have her set adrift at sea. So here the narrator encourages us to suffer with the characters by telling us how the situation was "routhe," or piteous, "for to see," which places us in the position of sympathizing spectators. Sure, this is a nice family reunion, but there's some definite sorrow going on, too.

The narrator's focus on how the joys of this world are quickly followed by suffering jives pretty well with his belief in the powerlessness of mankind before fate. In the narrator's view, part being human is not having any control of your own life. And with that lack of control comes suffering. Makes sense.