Semantron 20 Summer 2020

Rebellious female characters in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales

to him. This is, of course, by nomeans an approach deserving of praise and this is why to term the Tales’ women as successful in their rebellion is difficult.WhileAlisoun does exhibit sexuality, having her own ‘desyr’ for Nicholas, and uses her understanding of her own status as an object in the minds of all three men to get what she wants from the situation (that is, sexual gratification and some degree of escape from a world that attempts to domesticate her and remove her sexuality altogether), she still remains trapped within it. It is at this point where Chaucer’s stance becomes problematic: he critiques this oppressive system through humour, yet, as Mary Carruthers insists, Jill Mann’s argument ‘that the Christian values of pacience , s uffrance and pite are feminized by Chaucer into the figures of Constance and Griselda’suggests that he is still operating within this system, despite having identified its issues. 2 What we cannot avoid is a conflict between this simultaneous criticism and praise of a value system that Chaucer ridicules here but uses to praise Constance and Griselda elsewhere. It appears that although Chaucer’s characters are aware of their oppression, he remains trapped within a patriarchal view of relationships, the traces of which we see in how Alisoun is forced to both manipulate and bear a systemwhere she remains an object in any one of her three possible suitors’ (and, crucially, Chaucer’s) minds. Furthermore, a figure with similar issues is the Wife of Bath: as an irreverent female narrator, defying oppression with a bold sexuality that her choice clothing of ‘hosen of fin scarlet reed’ and its associations with lust and desire suggests, emphasized by the use of tautology in ‘scarlet reed’, perhaps implying a degree of saturation to this sexuality. She offers a crucial counterpoint tomany of her fellow women in the Tales: as Alisoun does in the Miller’s Tale, she stands out as a challenge the medieval value system, forging an alternative identity for herself by her subsuming the traditionally male role of a clothmaker, in which the Narrator describes her to have ‘hadde swich an haunt’ during her section of the General Prologue. She has become neither the wife nor the nun, refusing to fall into the only two identities left to other women in the Tales. She also questions why, if God allows five men to ask for her hand in marriage, ‘men thane speke of it vilenye’: she is glaringly aware of the hypocritical Christian value system that would seek to repress the sexuality and independence that she champions. Given this, why, then, does Elaine Tuttle Hansen’s argument, as summarized by Peter G. Beidler that, in this character, Chaucer ultimately accepts ‘the medieval antifeminist rejection of women’ that she believes he ‘seems to want to challenge’ fit so well? 3 While the Wife’s prologue does indeed cast her as a woman displaying autonomy and sexuality to be lauded by any feminist critic, it is her tale that proves problematic: it is a lacklustre, noncommittal inversion of power dynamics that can only negatively impact our evaluation of her character and Chaucer’s perception of women. The tale centres around sexual violence: a knight of King Arthur finds a maiden by a river and rapes her ‘By verray force’ and ‘maugree hir hed’. This depiction, focusing on the ‘force’ of such a violation, and portraying the maiden as an object of his lust and nothing more, is key to the story, functioning as a condemnation of male sexual predation. Indeed, when compounded by theWife telling us that people reacted to this rape with ‘swich clamour/And swich pursute unto the king Arthour’, which likely mirrors the reader’s own reaction to such an event, it is clear that the story aims to antagonize the reader against this act of sexual possession and cause them to condemn it; however, the tale’s final pronouncement that women desire ‘sovereynetee/As wel over hir housbond as hir love’ thus becomes problematic. ‘Sovereynetee’ denotes a strong sense of authority and po wer, which is laudable in terms of ‘love’, which perhaps implies a

2 Carruthers 1993: 536. 3 Beidler 1995: 109.

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