Essay Comparing Wife Of Bath And Eve's Apology

In both Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale and Lanyer’s Eve’s Apology, there is an importance placed upon religion and the need to refute those religious-based claims that seek and have harnessed the biblical text to harm the image of women. Although Lanyer’s entire poem is hinging on this and Chaucer uses it more sparingly in just one specific section, the importance is not so far between them. Chaucer’s characterization of Alyson is multi-layered and one must remain careful as there are so many twists in her personality if you focus too much on one feature, the whole image can be lost. She is strong-willed almost to a fault, uses her body to control her marital relationship, not afraid of argument against her or of confrontation. …show more content…
There is no radical, over-glorifying of women nor is there particularly negative misogynistic ranting, instead The Wife of Bath and Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women find an interesting middle-ground. Though they are written by different sexes in different times, the voice of femininity within these particular works of Chaucer and Lanyer’s comes from a place of realism. The differences one would expect to see instead come from the characterization of the subjects of the poem and still those are not so far apart. Women are portrayed here as having both faults and positive qualities like all people do. This goes to show we must look much deeper at the complex issue of gender and women as it relates to literature in a historical context. Too many young modern academics expect to see clear-cut, black and white difference when looking back into works such as The Canterbury Tales. The assumption they are shallow and that there was no discussion of gender and gender equality is pure folly. That mindset is far off base and almost insulting to these great authors and to the people of the Medieval and Renaissance