Chaucer and Women
In The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer portrays women in various lights and through these depictions; Chaucer narrates and interprets the relationships between men and women in the 14th century. The teachings of the bible laid out how women were suppose to behave. “The Clerk’s Tale” tells of a woman’s total submission to her husband. Juxtaposed, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” exemplifies misogynist stereotypes and antiauthoritarianism. Chaucer challenges the values of medieval society when trying to depict the relationship between men and women, while doing so he paints himself as a misogynist.
Chaucer portrays the wife of Bath as a woman of experience and of lust while giving her feminist characteristics. In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”, Chaucer depicts a theme of sovereignty for women. The idea of sovereignty has multiple connotations, the first is that women want to have dominion over their husbands; the second is that women want to be independent from their husbands and seen as equals, this is the more of a feminist or misogynist value. Chaucer depicts sovereignty as independence in “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”: “‘Do as …show more content…
The wife in “The Clerk’s Tale”, Griselda, gets tested multiple times on how submissive she is and at the end of the tale Chaucer puts a warning: “Just one word, gentlemen before I go:/ It would be pretty hard to find, these days,/ In town three Griseldas, or two/ Because, should they be put to such assays/ their gold’s so poor now, made with such alloys/ that, though the coin looks good enough to you/ instead of bending, it will break in two” (Chaucer 242). This warning: do not treat women as Walter (the husband in the tale) treated Griselda, because women like her no longer exist, is an incredibly forward and misogynist way of thinking coming from
In The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer portrays women in various lights and through these depictions; Chaucer narrates and interprets the relationships between men and women in the 14th century. The teachings of the bible laid out how women were suppose to behave. “The Clerk’s Tale” tells of a woman’s total submission to her husband. Juxtaposed, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” exemplifies misogynist stereotypes and antiauthoritarianism. Chaucer challenges the values of medieval society when trying to depict the relationship between men and women, while doing so he paints himself as a misogynist.
Chaucer portrays the wife of Bath as a woman of experience and of lust while giving her feminist characteristics. In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”, Chaucer depicts a theme of sovereignty for women. The idea of sovereignty has multiple connotations, the first is that women want to have dominion over their husbands; the second is that women want to be independent from their husbands and seen as equals, this is the more of a feminist or misogynist value. Chaucer depicts sovereignty as independence in “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”: “‘Do as …show more content…
The wife in “The Clerk’s Tale”, Griselda, gets tested multiple times on how submissive she is and at the end of the tale Chaucer puts a warning: “Just one word, gentlemen before I go:/ It would be pretty hard to find, these days,/ In town three Griseldas, or two/ Because, should they be put to such assays/ their gold’s so poor now, made with such alloys/ that, though the coin looks good enough to you/ instead of bending, it will break in two” (Chaucer 242). This warning: do not treat women as Walter (the husband in the tale) treated Griselda, because women like her no longer exist, is an incredibly forward and misogynist way of thinking coming from