Power In The Wife Of Bath's Tale

The history of the past is often looked at as foreign to present day, but in truth it is very applicable to many parts of society today. The Wife of Bath’s Tale from the Canterbury Tales explores a time in the far past where a knight takes advantage of a young girl and is then brought to court for punishment. The queen forces him to find what women desire most in a year to avoid death, but unable to figure it out on his own he is forced to seek help from an old hag; in exchange he reluctantly agrees to marry her. Through the back and forth that goes on between the characters, and the revelation that women most desire “the same self-sovereignty over her husband as over her lover and master him”(Chaucer 132, l. 215); the moral of the story becomes clear. Power is desired by all, and how one uses it once it is achieved expresses their true character. The knight is the first character to reveal the abuse of power, with his actions against the young maiden. Though previously thought of as a gentleman, this knight

By saving the knight’s life she gains control over him through marriage, but rather than abusing her power she uses it to gain something even more desirable. When the knight complains about her many bad qualities, she argues that her poverty and birth does not mean she is not a gentlewoman since God determines those aspects, and that her age and ugliness means that she will be all the more faithful to him as a wife. With her clever use of power, she gains not only the mastery over her husband, but his love which she practically exchanges her power for. The old woman shows that she desires power not for power itself, but to gain the love of her husband, which is possibly the true root of what women most desire in the tale. Ultimately, the aged woman reveals her strong and kind character by using her power to attain love rather than hurting