Patriarchy In Canterbury Tales Essay
The Precarious Attack on Patriarchy
Chaucer’s Satiric Agenda
In the journey of Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer paints a vivid image of the medieval world. He brings forth three prominent concepts in the General Prologue, Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, and The Wife of Bath’s Tale. All tales satirically drenched with persuasive ideas, most would agree that his iconoclastic stories are dangerous for introducing aloud a different view on the church, gender relations and economic divisions. Creating doubt against the morals and true intentions of the church, bringing to light the inequality between genders and proposing a division between economic classes.
Chaucer’s attack on the hypocrisy of the whole church is found repeatedly in the General Prologue as well as The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale. The fight against patriarchy clashes with the blindness of people and fraud in the church. He in his …show more content…
He does this by creating one of the first powerful feminists with The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Summarizing this tale there are three main things that the Wife of Bath points out. She makes her points very clear; women are smarter than men, better at manipulating thus having more power than men and simply only desire sovereignty. (Page 143, Line 184) “My liege and lady, in general--A woman wants the self-same sovereignty over her husband as over her lover and master him: he must not be above her.” I think those lines generally cover the difference of how men and women were/are not equal to men as they should be. Chaucer gets his point across and brings light to issues that are deep rooted by tradition and unopened minds. The ungratefulness of the knights new wife also proves where the minds of men have always been. Opening my eyes to see that the problems we have today are only as shallow as the people who go along with the issues, simply because they are not strong enough to try to make a
Chaucer’s Satiric Agenda
In the journey of Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer paints a vivid image of the medieval world. He brings forth three prominent concepts in the General Prologue, Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, and The Wife of Bath’s Tale. All tales satirically drenched with persuasive ideas, most would agree that his iconoclastic stories are dangerous for introducing aloud a different view on the church, gender relations and economic divisions. Creating doubt against the morals and true intentions of the church, bringing to light the inequality between genders and proposing a division between economic classes.
Chaucer’s attack on the hypocrisy of the whole church is found repeatedly in the General Prologue as well as The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale. The fight against patriarchy clashes with the blindness of people and fraud in the church. He in his …show more content…
He does this by creating one of the first powerful feminists with The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Summarizing this tale there are three main things that the Wife of Bath points out. She makes her points very clear; women are smarter than men, better at manipulating thus having more power than men and simply only desire sovereignty. (Page 143, Line 184) “My liege and lady, in general--A woman wants the self-same sovereignty over her husband as over her lover and master him: he must not be above her.” I think those lines generally cover the difference of how men and women were/are not equal to men as they should be. Chaucer gets his point across and brings light to issues that are deep rooted by tradition and unopened minds. The ungratefulness of the knights new wife also proves where the minds of men have always been. Opening my eyes to see that the problems we have today are only as shallow as the people who go along with the issues, simply because they are not strong enough to try to make a