Women and Love In Chaucer
Chaucer's opinion of women and his views on love are very prominently featured in his poetry. Focusing on women, one must first examine the popular views concerning women during Chaucer's time. Arlyn Diamond writes of Chaucer that, ". . . he accepts uneasily the medieval view of women as either better or worse than men, but never quite the same." (Green 3) This is evident in Chaucer's portrayal of women in such poems as "The Wife of Bath" and "The Clerk's Tale" which assault the reader with antithetical views of women. The Wife of Bath is one of the most memorable characters Chaucer ever created. She is considered, in view of Diamond's statement, to be better than the men in her life. Patient Griselda in "The Clerk's Tale" is a peasant woman, married to a nobleman, who tests her loyalty through a series of ordeals in which she is lead to believe her children to be murdered. In this tale Chaucer is exposing his reader to a woman who is beneath her husband, and is treated horribly by him. Chaucer frequently treats the women he writes about as objects, some prize to be won by the heroic man. This is evident in "The Knight's Tale," in which the two protagonists, Palamon and Arcite, war over the hand of Emily, who they have never met, but only gazed upon from a distance. Their devotion to her branches not from love, but the want of men to contain and control the women surrounding them. Now on to the subject of love. Chaucer writes in "The Knight's Tale" of a love based on physical beauty, where the two protagonists fall in love at first sight. This is a common device used in medieval literature to create conflict between characters. "The Book of the Duchess" focuses on the real love between the Black Knight, and the White Woman. This allows Chaucer to explore the nature of love in context.
Chaucer's Wife of Bath is a domineering woman who demands the men in her life to be subservient. The reader gains from her prologue that she is concerned with sovereignty, which she views as the control or mastery in the relationship. She does not appear to truly love any of her husbands. The first three are older men whom she seems to marry for their money. They pass on quickly leaving her with wealth, standing, and the chance to find herself a more suitable man. Her fourth husband was a profligate, a man of loose morals, who keeps ...
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...t sight. The pointless death of Arcite only emphasizes the hollow nature of this love. Love in "The Book of the Duchess" is treated differently. When Arcite dies there is no real pain felt for his loss. This is not the case with the death of the Black Knight's lady. Chaucer spends about eight hundred lines allowing the knight to lament his lost love. In his poetry Chaucer tries to be sympathetic to the plight of women. He endeavors to discuss love honestly, accepting the contradictory types of love and giving them all equal opportunity to prove themselves. The problem, however, lies in the subjects, for no matter how long or intently you look at them, they will always be as complex and incomprehensible as they always were.
Works Cited
Green, Richard Firth. "Chaucer's Victimized Women." Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Ed. Thomas J. Heffernan. Vol. 10. 1988. 3-21.
Wynne-Davis, Marion., ed. The Tales of the Clerk and the Wife of Bath. By Geoffrey Chaucer. Routledge: New York, 1992.
Edwards, Robert R. Stephen Spector. Ed. The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1991 154-176.
The moral compass of mankind has always piqued the interest of authors. The Middle Ages was a time of immoral behavior, corrupt religious officials, and disregard of marital vows. Geoffrey Chaucer used The Canterbury Tales to explore his personal views of this dark time. In particular, he crafted “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” “The Prioress’s Tale,” and “The Shipman’s Tale” to portray the tainted society, using women in all of them to bring forth his views. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer depicts women as immodest and conniving beings to suggest the moral corruption of the Middle Ages.
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.
Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P. 1992. Print. (Kennedy Library PR1928.W64 H36 1992)
In the words of the Broadview Anthology’s introduction to the Wife of Bath, she is “a sexually experienced cynic who teaches young people the tricks of love…. The Wife’s history and the literary shape of her prologue conform to many of the traditional misogynistic stereotypes found in her husband’s book” (Broadview 298). Why would Chaucer write such a clever portrayal of personal pleasure through the eyes of a woman, and yet design her to possess every quality so despised and abhorred within her so-called lifetime? Because the audience of this poem would probably include wives, and because everything the Wife describes is almost laughably vulgar, it can be understood that this poem would not be interpreted literally and women would instead be forced to listen to an account about female power, desire, and pleasure written, unfortunately, as cruel satire of their
*Blakelock, Jane. Online. Internet. 03/16/99. "Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, The Wife of Bath". Available http://www.media.wright.edu/studorgs/english20403/chaucer.html.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed Mack, Maynard et al. W. W. Norton and Co. New York, NY. 1992.
Hansen, Elaine. Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. 188-207.
Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. Los Angelos, CA: University of California Press, 1992. Print.
Bott, Robin. "The Wife of Bath and the Revelour: Power Struggles and Failure in a Marriage of Peers." Medieval Perspectives 6 (1991): 154-161.
The investigation into whether or not Geoffrey Chaucer was ahead of his time in terms of his views on feminism has been up for debate for hundreds of years. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is just one solitary
... allows the present day reader to gain insight into commonly held beliefs regarding women during the 14th century. By allowing Alison to have a sense of humor and joke about aspects of her marriage, Chaucer was able to make numerous points regarding women that would not have been acknowledged had a female author created them. By making Alison a laughable character, Chaucer was able to make points about women such as the unfairness of double standards, the acknowledgement of female desire, and the reality of women marrying well to improve their economic situations. Chaucer also provides us with detailed examples of commonly held stereotypes regarding women that are still relevant approximately seven centuries later.
In the Middle Ages, the roles of women became less restricted and confined and women became more opinionated and vocal. Sir Gawain and The Green Knight presents Lady Bertilak, the wife of Sir Bertilak, as a woman who seems to possess some supernatural powers who seduces Sir Gawain, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath Prologue and Tale, present women who are determined to have power and gain sovereignty over the men in their lives. The female characters are very openly sensual and honest about their wants and desires. It is true that it is Morgan the Fay who is pulling the strings in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; nevertheless the Gawain poet still gives her a role that empowers her. Alison in The Wife if Bath Prologue represents the voice of feminism and paves the way for a discourse in the relationships between husbands and wives and the role of the woman in society.
Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” is an important part of his most famed work, The Canterbury Tales. One of the most respected highly analyzed of all of the tales, this particular one is important both for its character development and its prevailing themes. It seamlessly integrates ideas on society at that time with strong literary development. This work stands the test of time both because of its literary qualities and because of what it can teach us about the role of women in late Medieval society.
Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. (1992). Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. University of California Press, Ltd: England. (pgs 188-208).
Chaucer, in his female pilgrimage thought of women as having an evil-like quality that they always tempt and take from men. They were depicted as untrustworthy, selfish and vain and often like caricatures not like real people at all. Through the faults of both men and women, Chaucer showed what is right and wrong and how one should live. Under the surface, however, lies a jaded look of women in the form that in his writings he seems to crate them as caricatures and show how they cause the downfall of men by sometimes appealing to their desires and other times their fears. Chaucer obviously had very opinionated views of the manners and behaviours of women and expressed it strongly in The Canterbury Tales. In his collection of tales, he portrayed two extremes in his prospect of women. The Wife of Bath represented the extravagant and lusty woman where as the Prioress represented the admirable and devoted followers of church. Chaucer delineated the two characters contrastingly in their appearances, general manners, education and most evidently in their behaviour towards men. Yet, in the midst of disparities, both tales left its readers with an unsolved enigma.