Who Painted the Leon?

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Who Painted the Leon?

In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, a reader is introduced to a rather bizarre and heterogeneous group of people leaving for a pilgrimage. The Wife of Bath is the most interesting and lively character of the group. Her "Prologue" and "Tale" provide readers with a moral lesson as well as comic relief. The Wife's "Prologue" serves as an overture to her "Tale", in which she states a very important point regarding the nature of women and their most sacred desires. According to this character, women desire sovereignty, or power, over their men most in the world. This wish seems to be most appropriate for women of the time period in which Chaucer lived. However, women today no longer wish to dominate their men - sovereignty of women over men is not relevant in the twenty-first century. The reason is that women are no longer deprived of power and freedom.

According to the Wife of Bath, sovereignty, or power, over their husbands is what women desire most in their lives:

Wommen desire to have sovereinetee

As wel over hir housbonde as hir love

And for to been in maistrye him above (1044-1046).

However, which powers exactly is the Wife of Bath talking about? It seems that materialistic power is what Alisoun means - women wish to control their husbands' estates and other economic holdings. In her "Prologue" the Wife of Bath describes her last, fifth, marriage to Janekin. After a huge fight with him, caused by Alisoun's ripping pages out of his book of wicked wives, Janekin grants her the control over the house and the land, what makes her very happy, and she treats her husband with kindness from then on:

He yaf me al the bridel in myn hand,

To han the governance of hous and land...

After that day we hadde nevere debat.

God help me so, I was to him as kinde

As any wif from Denmark unto Inde...(819-820, 828-830).

Therefore, according to the "Wife of Bath's Prologue," economic power over their husbands is what women wished to have.

However, later, in her "Tale" the Wife of Bath presents another opinion - women wish to have emotional power over their husbands as well. The fact that the hag is able to decide for herself whether to turn into a beautiful wife or to remain in her present state, manifests her power over the husband. It is up to her whether to make the knight the happiest men on earth or to make him miserable for as long as she lives:

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