The debate of which individual should have the authority in a marriage, the man or the woman, is a topic that has remained unanswered for centuries. While he does not solve this debate, Geoffrey Chaucer attempts to unpack the different elements that factor into it. In Canterbury Tales, primarily in the prologue of the Wife of Bath and both tales of the Wife of Bath and the Clerk, Chaucer displays different types of marriages. These marriages analyze how a man or woman can gain authority over the other. These marriages vary in terms of their dynamics due to the unique individuals and their environments. Through an analysis of the marriages depicted by Chaucer in the prologue and tales of the Clerk and the Wife of Bath, one can see the different …show more content…
Using words is a subtler way of gaining authority than using acts of violence. A woman can persuade her husband to listen to her through speech, without even making him aware that he is being swayed. The husband still believes he is in control because he is using free will to listen to his wife. After Jenkin strikes the Wife of Bath, she understands that physical exertion will not work towards gaining control. The Wife of Bath then states, “before I’m dead, yet will I still kiss thee” (Chaucer WBP 802). With this statement, the Wife of Bath allows Jenkin to believe that she will always be loyal to him despite the physical violence. After understanding that his wife will always be loyal to him, Jenkin now views his own actions as appalling. He then voluntarily forfeits his power in the marriage, giving the Wife of Bath “all the bridle in [her] hand to have governing of house and land, and of his tongue, and of his hands” (Chaucer WBP 813-815). With the power of speech, the Wife of Bath has now gained authority in her …show more content…
Choose yourself whichever one will please you.” (Chaucer WBT 1220-1226). The knight bases his decision off of information he learns in the beginning of the tale; that “women desire to have sovereignty as well over their husbands as their loves, and to be in mastery above” (Chaucer WBT 1038-1040). With this information, the knight voluntarily decides to give the hag control over his decision, given that a woman’s greatest desire is to have control. The hag rewards the knight’s decision by becoming “both fair and good, as will be plain” (Chaucer WBT 1240). This reward allows the knight to understand that it is beneficial for the hag to have authority in their marriage, as events will end favorably for him if he continues to give her the
Women are prizes to be won over in this tale. Competition for women is portrayed throughout the entire story. This competition leads to lies and deceit which overall creates an unstable conflict. But, because of the way of life, the people who don’t lie and deceit still lose out in the end. Therefore, Chaucer teaches us that life isn’t fair and that people don’t always get what they deserve.
Some say women can get the worst out of a man, but in The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1485, proves it. The tales were originally written as a collection of twenty four tales, but has been narrowed down to three short tales for high school readers. The three tales consist of “The Miller”, “The Knight”, and “The Wife of Bath” along with their respective prologues. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer shows the weak but strong role of women throughout the “The Knight’s Tale” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” to contrast different human characteristics and stereotypes on the spectrum of people.
This essay compares the conception honor in Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" and "The Franklin's Tale" from The Canterbury Tales. The problem of honor seems to be timeless in its difficulties. There are many ideas and opinions concerning this delicate subject, which always is popular, along with its ability to frustrate and perplex the human. During the time of Chaucer, females such as the Wife of Bath were asserting their rights against the forces of male chauvinism. Apparently, the battle of the sexes for supremacy is everlasting in its intensity and has always been fought. Consequently, we have both male and female chauvinists, and they appear in Chaucer's works. They make for interesting reading.
In Geoffrey Chaucer's The Cantebury Tales, many stories are told leading to a wide range of topics. One particular and significant topic Chaucer touches on many times is the role of women. In stories such as The Millers Tale, The Knight's Tale, and the Wife of Bath's Tale the women of each story are portrayed extremely different. Alisoun, Emelye, and the wife of Bath, each exemplify three dissimilar ways in which women love. The way Chaucer describes each of these characters is dependent on the out come of each particular story. Chaucer is careful with his word choice and figurative language with each woman, enabling the reader to get a very visual and sometimes humorous picture.
The Virtue of Men and Women in The Canterbury Tales People never change. In every town you will always be able to find the "rich guy," the "smart guy," the "thief," and the "chief." It has been that way since the first man was swindled out of his lunch. Throughout his life, Geoffrey Chaucer encountered every kind of person and brought them to life for us in "The Canterbury Tales," a collection of short stories written in the 1300's. There are tales of saints, tales of promiscuity, tales of fraud, and tales of love.
Chaucer’s character, the Wife of Bath, grabs the reader’s attention immediately as she sets the stage for giving an account of her beliefs on love and life: “Housbondes at chirche dore I have had five.” Because of her blunt honesty at the very beginning of her Prologue, the reader senses that the Wife of Bath feels no shame and carries no regrets about her many marriages. This is confirmed when the Wife proclaims, “Of whiche I have piked out the beste.” She displays two attitudes throughout the piece: living life to the fullest and loving to gossip about her past.
Now that we have that to think about, I would now like to suggest another thing that I think Chaucer is doing: pointing out some misogynistic characteristics of men in his society. In the prologue, Chaucer portrays the Wife of Bath as having controlling characteristics. We see that when she tells her audience about her husbands and how her various marriages went. The Wife tells us that during her first few marriages, she was the young, beautiful wife and she got what she wanted from her wealthy, older husbands. She tells her male audience that she controlled her husbands by mentioning that “[She] governed hem so wel after [her] lawe/ That ech of hem was ful blisful and fawe”, and that they always sought out ways to please her (219-220). With
Judgment is necessary for the self-preservation of humans solely when applied with original intent; however, overused and abused, judgment can mutate into prejudice. Frequently, openly addressing the issues of prejudice is more effective than suppressing it, facilitating optimum understanding while enabling capacity for change. Successfully employed, satire may enlighten hearts and minds to the ridiculousness of prejudice, while opportunely comical. Humorously, Alison exhibits loquaciousness, manipulation, sexual incontinence, indecisiveness, deceitfulness, and countless additional stereotypes in the prologue and tale, while she clarifies that sovereignty over husbands is the exclusive womanly desire. Auspiciously, Geoffrey Chaucer’s theme illustrates the absurdity of female stereotypes by utilizing satirical expression, ironically upholding the irrational presence of misogynistic
In most cases today rape gets you sentenced to prison and sometimes death. Back in Chaucer’s day, in the text The Wife of Bath’s Tale, Chaucer wrote about a knight in the text The Wife of Bath’s Tale. This knight was arrested for his deed of raping a woman. His punishment is not as suffice as it would be in the modern world. The life of the knight was spared because of his beauty that the Queen had seen. Instead, the Queen insisted that the knight go on a trip; a trip that would last a year and a day. When the knight’s time was up, he would return to the Queen and explain what she had asked him before he left on his journey. The question that was asked was, “’yet you shall live if you can answer me: what is the thing that women most desire?’” says the queen ([Prentice Hall Literature] page 140 lines 50-51).As for the knight, what final choice does the old woman offer the knight? In what way does his response show that he has finally learned his lesson about the nature of women? And finally, Has the knight experienced sufficient punishment and redemption for his crime.
Dissecting love and marriage ideals is an impossible task because human actions in emotional situations often defy all logic. This has been proven again and again and is also corroborated by Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, that makes fun of the conventional beliefs about these relationships in the context of social classes and individual values such as bravery, morality, infidelity, and street smartness. Through the substance of the plots, styles of the narrators and the gap between the cherished and real values in The Knight’s Tale, and the Miller’s Tale, Chaucer highlights that human behavior in romantic relationships can be crazy, unpredictable and influenced by one’s social class setting, and therefore
After reading explications of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a student is likely to come away with the impression that the Franklin is the critics favorite punching bag. To the average reader in the modern English-speaking world, the Franklin comes across as surprisingly fair-minded and level-headed, noteworthy as the man kind and inventive enough to resolve the marriage cycle with a tale of decency and openness. The critics, however, often depict the Franklin as a man primarily concerned with upward mobility, finding in his tale a number of remarks intended to win over the nobility and subtly assert his own claim to a kind of nobility. The contrast between the fawning Franklin of certain critical approaches and the open-minded Franklin of the more pedestrian reader can probably be summed up in the word "bourgeois." Some critics find in the Franklin a good example of the less flattering qualities of the word, while modern American readers -- products of a society in which the bourgeois lifestyle is considered the norm -- tend to find in the Franklin an intelligence, style and tolerance often associated with the upwardly mobile or the middle class. His "everybody wins" approach to the problems of the romance might even be an example of what Marxists and anarchists used to decry as bourgeois liberalism.
The Wife of Bath Prologue and Tale. Geoffery Chaucer. The Middle Ages, Volume 1A. Eds. Christopher Baswell and Anne Howland Schotter. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Fourth ed. Gen.eds David Damrosch, and Kevin J. H. Dettmar. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2010. 375-408. Print.
Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, demonstrate many different attitudes and perceptions towards marriage. Some of these ideas are very traditional, such as that illustrated in the Franklin’s Tale. On the other hand, other tales present a liberal view, such as the marriages portrayed in the Miller’s and The Wife of Bath’s tales. While several of these tales are rather comical, they do indeed depict the attitudes towards marriage at that time in history. D.W. Robertson, Jr. calls marriage "the solution to the problem of love, the force which directs the will which is in turn the source of moral action" (Robertson, 88). "Marriage in Chaucer’s time meant a union between spirit and flesh and was thus part of the marriage between Christ and the Church" (Bennett, 113). The Canterbury Tales show many abuses of this sacred bond, as will be discussed below.
One of the most prominent themes in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales is the attitudes of the pilgrims towards women. There are two distinct sides in the dispute: that women are simply objects of lust that must never be trusted, and that women are highly respectable and loving.
When reading the wife of Baths prologue and then her tale one can not help but to see the parallels present. The major parallel that exists is the subject of sovereignty. Who has it, which wants it, which deserves it and what will you do to get it? First we see that the Wife claims to have sovereignty over each of her husbands even though some were harder to gain dominance over than others. Then there is the tale where we find the answer to the question, “What do women want?”, sovereignty over their husbands. Finally we see the Wife’s idealized version of marriage in her tale. The hag gains control over the knight by forcing him to marry her, then giving him control to decide her loyalty, he cant chose so he gives up all control to her just like that and it’s over, the end, they live happily ever after.