This article analyzes the subconscious desires within the Wife of Bath and the Clerk in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales by comparing and contrasting the characters' apparent goals with the consequences of their tales' endings. At first glance, The motivations of these characters seems clear; the wife tells a tale that demonstrates woman's desire of mastery over the husband and the Clerk wants to refute her point by offering an example of a perfectly submissive wife. However, due to their awareness of their audience, they both end their tales with clarifications, as though they are nervous that their points were not explicit enough. This nervousness is attributable to difficult quandaries that both tales leave in the wake of their endings,
