User:PomuSupporter/The Wife of Bath's Tale

The Queen's Law
Within the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the medieval general roles are reversed between men and women, and moreover regarding legal power, it suggests a theme of feminist coalition-building. The Queen is appointed as the sovereign and judge. She holds the type of power that men are given in the world of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The Queen in the Wife of Bath’s Tale is given power as judge over the knight’s life. Author Emma Lipton writes that the Queen uses this power to move court from a liberal one to an educational one. In this sense the court is moving beyond the offense beyond punishment and now puts a meaning behind the offense with the idea of consequences. In the tale, the Queen is a figurehead of the greater feminist movement within the society, much like the misogynistic world in which the Canterbury Tales takes place in. Because of this idea and feminist movement that the Queen leads in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, women are empowered rather than objectified to demonstrate a theoretical change. The effect of feminist coalition building can be seen through the knight. As a consequence to the knight’s sexual assault against the maiden, when the old women ask the Queen to allow the knight to marry her the Queen grants it. This shows the support and the broader female community’s dedication to education female values. In response to this fate the knight begs the court and the Queen to undo his sentence by using all of his wealth and power, “Take all my goods and let my body go,” to which the Queen denies it. The lack of the knight’s agency in this scene demonstrates, according to Carissa Harris a juxtaposition or role reversal to the lack of agency of women in situations of rape.