Sovereignty In The Canterbury Tales Essay

Words: 620
Pages: 3

There are many tales in the Canterbury Tales that tell us a story about during the time in the Middle Ages. In the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer there are many themes and characterisation that were shown in each tale. In the tale of The Wife of Bath, one of the theme that was shown the most is sovereignty. The theme sovereignty was created by the Wife of Bath efforts to follow every women desire: to gain control over men. To begin with, Chaucer use of conflict lead to the development of the theme “Sovereignty.” During the Middle Ages there was a new thing call “Social Ranks.” Social Ranks if the ranking from the highest statues to the lower. In this cause, the lower rank are the commoner and the highest rank is the King. Women were not granted any rank at all so they were not pleased with this. However, the Wife of Bath challenge this and was able to change women's …show more content…
The name Wife of Bath might made you think about a women that is rich and is constantly in her bathtub. However, that is wrong. Chaucer uses of her is a women with experience, who doesn’t follow rules, and someone who fought for women’s right. Wife of Bath married 5 men, with the last husband being so much younger than him. She was a old hag and she forced a young knight to married. She do this and gave him a choice of choosing a old ugly hag that is loyal and etc. Or he could choose not to marry her and go and take his chances with some young women. This demonstrate that in her eyes, age doesn’t matter. Another thing that stand out was her complete control of her husband. Normally it’s impossible for women to have complete control of their man, but somehow she was able to subjected him. One last example is her so call “church door.” I believe that in the bible it’s was considered a crime to wed more than 2 people for you are consider a demon/hoe. The Wife of Bath married more than 5 men. So why did the church didn’t say