Comparing Women in the Merchant's Tale and the Manciple's Tale

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Recommended: Essays on the evolution of women in literature

Women in the Merchant's Tale and the Manciple's Tale

The Wife of Bath's extraordinary prologue gives the reader a dose of what is sometimes missing in early male-written literature: glimpses of female subjectivity. Women in medieval literature are often silent and passive, to the extent that cuckolding is often seen as something one man (the adulterer) does to another (the husband). Eve Sedgwick argues in Between Men that in many literary representations, women are playing pieces or playing fields in struggles between male players. By default it seems, male writers cannot help but create shallow constructions of women; heroism occurs in male spheres of activity, while the wives and daughters make the background, and the female love interest becomes a trophy. Unfortunately, when women are not silent they are often monsters‹and quite often, the silent ones conceal hidden dangers. Why should women present such a threat? Why do so many pre-modern (and, unfortunately, modern) male writers approach female subjects with such trepidation, with strategies of demonization or avoidance? Analysis of the Merchant's Tale and the Manciple's Tale proves fruitful in exploring these questions. In the sphere of the written word, women have often been silent in the West; the small number of great female medieval writers combined with a value system that praises passivity and quiet in their sex has effectively muffled female subjectivity, and yet somehow in silencing women men have doomed themselves to uneasiness and fear. To silence someone is to cut off access to her subjectivity, and in an intimate world like marriage such a formidable barrier quickly becomes a source of apprehension; woman becomes the terrifying, ...

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...rsity of Iowa Press, 1990.

Pearsall, Derek. The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography. Blackwell, 1992.

Internet Sources

Dominion and Domination of the Gentler Sex: The Lives of Medieval Women. 1997. 20 August 2003 <http://library.thinkquest.org/12834/>.

Irvine, Martin. Medieval Women. 1998. 20 August 2003 <http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/subjects/women/women.html>.

Lalonde, Michael. Sybils! Homepage. May 2002. 20 August 2003 <http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~mmedia/mw2.htm>.

Lopez, Alan. The Appropriation of Masculine Discourse and the Disruption of Gender Identity in Chaucer's The Merchant's Tale. 2000. 20 August 2003 <http://www.iusb.edu/~journal/2000/lopez.html>.

Sample A paper: Undergraduate. Fall 1998. 20 August 2003

<http://www.jsu.edu/dpart/english/treed/robinson.htm>.

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