From Eva and Ave to Eglentyne and Alisoun: Chaucer's Insight into the Roles Women Play

The dominant high & late medieval image of woman was either as the emblem of all man's strivings for self-perfection & self-fulfillment, or as his temptress & downfall. Both views dehumanize women. Chaucer was amused by these feminine types, but he went beyond them to examine the roles women were allowed or compelled to play in his culture, & their responses to this treatment. In the Canterbury Tales he was interested in the more complex role playing that all humans engage in for self-aggrandizement. The Prioress effaces her own personality & replaces it with an etablished feminine role which, Chaucer makes clear, she has painstakingly learned. Caught between two roles, she is fated to look silly or ambivalent. Her sympathy for small, helpless creatures suggests that she sees herself as an imprisoned, helpless creature herself, vulnerable to men who would menace or tyrannize her. In her tale of the "litel clergeon," an innocent, pathetic child is protected by women - her mother, Mary - & victimized by a M world of strict teachers - the Jews, the wicked lord who keeps the Jews near him for usury, & ultimately, Satan. At the end of the tale, the dead child, miraculously inspired by Mary, tells the Abbot (another masculine authority figure) how prerational peity has saved him, & thus brings the Abbot to his knees - an image of the final triumph of the helpless (& feminine) over worldly (masculine) power, & a wish fulfillment particularly appropriate to the Prioress, who must spend her life trying to win the favor of men. By contrast, the Wife of Bath seems intent on dominating men by ruling her husbands in marriage, & on shocking them by glorifying contradictions about sex, marriage, & the M-dominated traditions of learned antifeminism. The Wife upends traditional feminine roles in the sphere of "experience" by getting the "maistrye" over her husbands & the sphere of "auctoritee" by appropriating clerical arguments & methods to challenge the hegemony of men in the intellectual sphere. In the process she both attacks men & assumes for herself masucline attributes; hence the contradiction inherent in her role playing & self-presentation. There is an element of self-hatred in the Wife's introduction into her Prologue of material injurious to her cause. Such self-hatred may represent Chaucer's awareness of the strains involved in assuming roles denied one by society - in the Wife's case, the M roles of ruler in marriage & authority on marriage & M-F relationships