Femininity In The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales plays an important and admirable role in the literary world. Chaucer portrays the controversial relationship between the roles of men and women in the middle ages. Norm Klassen indicates “Inaugurated at the very start of the first tale, tyranny recurs as a theme throughout The Canterbury Tales, the project that occupied Geoffrey Chaucer for approximately the last fifteen years of his life before his death in 1400” (77). Hence, the patriarchal society in the fourteenth century is an era where men dominated most societies and women would rarely subvert male domination. The Canterbury Tales explores the images of constructed femininity throughout the three main female narrators. Thus, the male narrators constantly present women in the idealistic stereotypes such as mothers, nuns, wives, and mistresses. Chaucer dissents the idealistic feminine role presented by the male pilgrims through the voice of his three female narrators by
Anne McTaggart explains how “Chaucer’s Wife of Bath centers on a wonderfully fruitful paradox: she claims for women and for herself the right to “maistrie” and “sovereynetee” in marriage, but she does so by articulating the discourse imparted to her by the “auctoritee” of anti-feminism” (41). The Wife of Bath does not obey the dominating male figure like Griselda and Dorigen did but rather that men should be enslaved to women. The Wife of Bath’s had control over her five husbands and they obeyed and accepted the role that the female presented them. The Wife of Bath is unique and has a different portrayal of women in the fourteenth century compared to the other male dominated tales. In the Wife of Bath, she is able to challenge the masculine hierarchy and gain mutual recognition between the husband and wife. The Wife of Bath expresses the role of feminine desire throughout the