Gender Inequality In The Miller's Tale

Rape was significant in showing Chaucer’s admiration for exploring the impact of gender inequality through the masculine and feminine aspects within a relationship. Gender inequality was of normal relation in the 14th century. Some tales glorify rape while other tales seem to want the crime to be punishable. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, had stories that were a representation of his position or views on the male and female balance of power structure through rape. These particular tales told by Chaucer touched base with the treatment of rape in Canterbury Tales. First, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, displays a knight knowingly concedes his masculinity to a woman. The Reeve’s Tale incorporates a woman who, in effect, pays her rapist for violating her. The "Miller's Tale"
The Franklin’s Tale attacks rape from a woman’s point of view, which is a rarity within the time period these tales were set in time. The Miller’s tale played as a fabliaux, in the sense that as it deals with adultery and with bawdy wordplay leading up to the tale’s bittersweet conclusion. As well as the Miller’s Tale being exemplar because of the way equal control of marriage was related to both tales of rape, The Wife of Bath and The Reeves’s Tale. In the Miller’s Tale, Chaucer gives his reader a hypothetical replacement to the disapproving views on sexuality by the Church. In the likeness of a peasant, Chaucer presents a freer, more innocent, portrait of the character Allison of Oxenford. Through her characterization Chaucer portrays the image of sexual nature, and only in this tale the nature maintains by a character. Since her sexual nature defies sexual restrictions imposed by the Church while at the same time creating its own meaning to love, I feel like she placed her love over her religion. Chaucer simply wanted to express through the Miller that the “common man” could tell a tale that others within the audience at that time