Women In The Canterbury Tales

The Wife of Bath: Satire and the Place of a Woman Geoffrey Chaucer's short story "The Wife of Bath", within The Canterbury Tales, describes the unidealistic life and the role of women in the Late Middle Ages. With each containing similarities and differences of the other, the prologue and tale describe the lives of two women, an old hag and the Wife of Bath. Chaucer tells the story of these to women in order to relate them to the times and ideals of their Medieval society. Within these two short stories, Chaucer's use of satire allows for the trichotomic situation to arise between the role of the woman in marriage, the patriarchy, as well as the views of women during these times and how it was inherently antifeminist. Beginning with the
The tale begins with a knight of King Arthur sexually assaulting a woman, and subsequently being sentenced to death. However, he gets out of his sentence because the Queen petitioned to decide the knight's fate, and she gave him a quest to find what women most desire. This authority that the King gave the Queen shows that she had control of hum even though he is seen as the most powerful of all. Also by putting the fate of the knight in the Queen's hands she is able to control the will of this man. Chaucer mocks the nobility of knights by forcing one to be subjected to the will of women. The knight ultimately succeeds in his task of finding what women most desire, only because of the assistance of a ugly old hag. Without relying on the help of this woman he would have been sentenced to death. This goes against the respected view of men and their superiority towards women. The knight, having been forced to marry the hag, put her in a "position of control and demoting the Knight to a position of submissiveness" (Trudeau par. 7). Chaucer pokes fun at the lack of power of the knight and control of the hag. When it comes to the appearance of the hag, she claims that it is up to him, but it is actually in her control because the knight realizes the control the hag has over him: "once the husband in her story had granted his wife what women want most in all the world—sovereignty... [then the husband] yield the other the 'mastery'" (Brewer par. 1). The position of the knight directly mocks how men were supposed to be noble, powerful, and in control of all things in their lives. Chaucer uses the hag to satirize how she had the ability, not the man, to save the knight's life, further characterizing the new position if