Violence Against Women In The Canterbury Tales Essay

In her article, " 'Quiting ' Eve: Violence against Women in the Canterbury Tales,"

Angela Jane Weisl notes that "The Canterbury Tales are framed by a story-telling

competition that becomes increasingly heated as tellers (particularly the male tellers)

attempt to 'quite ' one another 's stories" (117). In their efforts to quite each other, each of

the first three story tellers, the knight, the miller, and the reeve, objectify and use the

women in increasingly more personal and physical ways.

Nussbaum and Langton have identified features that are involved in the viewing

and/or treating of a person, usually a woman, as an object. In "The Reeve 's Tale," the

most violent of the first three stories in the Canterbury Tales, all

The first of Nussbaum 's features is instrumentality: "The objectifier treats the

object as a tool of his or her purposes" (Nussbaum 257).John and Aleyn are not only

angry at being duped and cheated out of their grain by the thieving miller, they also fear

that when they get back to their college "men wil us fooles calle" (Chaucer 4111). But the

miller is a dangerous man who owns many sharp and pointy weapons, so, to get even, the

scholars will not physically attack the miller but will use the miller 's daughter to exact

Mulvey 2

revenge: "If that I may, yon wenche wil I swyve," vows Aleyn (Chaucer 4178). To

figuratively screw the miller, Aleyn will literally screw the miller 's daughter

In other words, he

wanted as a wife a woman of a higher social class, a woman who would help him in his

business and improve his social standing in the community. He sees a superior wife as a

tool to help him rise in the world. This idea of the wife being merely a tool of the miller

is found in the description of an article of her clothing - "a gyte of reed" - a red gown, an

article that highlights her wealth, value, and social status. It 's also a symbol of the miller 's

jealousy, a red stop sign to any and all who might covet her.

However, nowhere are we given the wife 's name or do we learn anything else

about her. We do learn that she is haughty, but this might be evidence of the bias on the

part of the teller of this tale – the miller is a thieving bastard and his wife is a haughty

bitch and both are deserving of what happens to them in the end.

Mulvey 4

Two additional features of objectification identified by Langton - defining

someone primarily in terms of their looks and identifying them with their body or body

parts - can also be found in The Reeve 's Tale.The Reeve describes the Miller 's