Literary Research
Amanda Nudo
Dr. Francis
Research Paper
7 December, 2010
Feminism within the Bounds of Patriarchy
The Wife of Bath is often considered to be one of the most controversial characters in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. While some scholars see her as an early feminist, many critics prefer to think of her as a slightly revamped example of the stereotypical, nagging wife of the middle Ages. However, The Wife of Bath is a character more like the former school of thought who, while not as hardcore as many modern feminists, looks to advance the power of women by using the materials provided to her by the patriarchic society in which she would have lived. Though she does not seek to overthrow the patriarchal power, she attempts to advance women’s rights within the limits of her society. In order to accomplish this task, the Wife of Bath often twists experiences, literature, and common ideas to give them the pro-feminism spin that she desires to find in them, the same tactic that she argues men before her used to hold the male-dominated society in place.
It is nearly impossible to argue that the Wife of Bath, a woman who has been married five times and has traveled on countless pilgrimages, lacks life experiences. As she puts it at the beginning of her prologue, “Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynough for me…” (Chaucer 1-2). By saying this, Alisoun, The Wife of Bath, devalues traditional patriarchic doctrine by claiming that her experiences make her a better teacher than the accepted texts. For example, Alisoun has plenty of advice to offer from her experiences with marriage. She learns quickly that the general belief that virtue alone would make a woman successful is
inaccurate and that wealth and power are important rewards to gain from one’s spouse. The Wife of Bath practiced this idea by refusing to make love to her spouses until they agreed to leave her their estates when they passed away. In Carruthers’ words, “This bald exchange may strike us as cynical, vulgar, and immoral, but we must remember that by the standards common to her class Alisoun’s behavior is simply shrewd business” (211). The wife of Bath learned this “business practice well; she wedded wealthy husbands who were well on their way to the grave three times in a row. Knowledge of economic gain isn’t enough for the Wife of Bath, however. “As Alisoun knows from experience, the true fruits of marriage…are set in the marriage bed. Its important spoils for her are neither children nor sensual gratification but independence” (Carruthers 214). By focusing on power and independence rather than obedience and procreation, Alisoun is able to free herself from the traditional female role and tackle life on a more equal footing with the men of her society.
Though she proves her wealth of knowledge gained by experiences throughout her prologue via the stories of her first four husbands, Alisoun’s personal struggles and the knowledge she gains from them climax in her fifth marriage to the young clerk, Jankyn. Alisoun was able to convince her first four husbands (all of which she married for their money) to allow her free reign whether through deception or nagging, but her relationship with Jankyn was different. Alisoun gave over her accumulated wealth to Jankyn and, with it, sacrificed her freedom for the sake of love. However, Jankyn had no intention of returning the favor. When Alisoun finds that she is losing, “…her integrity as her young husband tries to change her into an obedient wife with no life of her own, she starts to fight him” (Vaneckova 37). While Alisoun sacrifices wealth for love initially, she learns from this experience that what she values most, freedom and integrity, requires money to secure.
In order to reacquire her wealth, the Wife of Bath destroys Jankyn’s book, forcing him to feel helpless and frustrated. The book is worth as much to him as Alisoun’s freedom is to her, and, by ripping it, she brings her husband down to her physical level of dealing with a situation. When Jankyn loses his words, and joins Alisoun at the level of physical “communication”, he gains understanding of her experience. As Vaneckova explains it, “He lost his dearly beloved book, she lost her dearly beloved ideal of happy marriage. The success of their marriage begins with a loss, and also with realization of something more important. Jankyn realizes that he loves his wife more than he loves his book…Once she is secure not to be inferior, she does not struggle for superiority…” (38). It is only when Jankyn is made to experience the frustration of a woman struggling for freedom that he can began to understand his wife’s plight. Once again, Alisoun succeeds in teaching through an experience and learns her lesson. She recalls to the other pilgrims, “And to him yaf I al the lond and fee / That everewas me yeven therbifore / But afterward repented me ful sore; / He nolde suffer nothing of my list” (Chaucer 630-633). This passage shows Alisoun’s discovery about the dangers of handing over one’s tradable commodities for the sake of love; something the men in Alisoun’s society would never risk doing and something the Wife of Bath makes it clear that she would never be foolish enough to try again.
“The Wife of Bath’s Tale” carries over her prologue’s theme of men gaining understanding of women through experiencing their troubles. When the knight robs a woman of her maidenhead, he is sentenced to death but is saved by Queen Guinevere and placed at the mercy of the women in the story. The women decide to give this knight a quest to seek not a masculine battle success but rather an understanding of women. True to the value she places in experience, Alisoun doesn’t allow the knight to fully understand what women most desire until
he hands over his sovereignty to his loathly wife. Like Jankyn, the knight is forced to play the women’s role of marrying an older spouse against his wishes and submitting dutifully to his spouse’s whims before he understands what it is like to live as a woman and to truly be at peace with his wife (Vaneckova 41-42). It’s important to note that Alisoun and the loathly wife in her tale are both perfectly content to be obedient and true to their husbands once they have received the sovereignty that they are attempting to gain. This might seem like a step back for feminism but readers should remember that Alisoun was not trying to destroy patriarchy, but merely to improve women’s roles within her society. Thus, for men to actually understand and empathize with the challenges that their wives face would have been considered a great success by mild feminists like the Wife of Bath. In the case of her tale, Alisoun is taking her real life experiences and transforming them into a story format as a means of teaching the men of the company about the needs and desires of women and getting across that women don’t always fit into the mold of the patriarchic society that exists around them.
Experience might be Alisoun’s preferred weapon on her feminist campaign but she proves that she is just as capable of getting her viewpoints across by interpreting scripture and other works of literature to fit her desires. As Dinshaw explains, men of Chaucer’s time often created interpretations of a holy passage or well-known work. This practice was called glossing. Gloss often appeared in the margins of manuscripts and tends to take the place of the true text, or original wording, over time (121-122). Alisoun’s interpretations of the scripture may seem a bit off but she is glossing the text the same way many men do; she just understands exceedingly dissimilar interpretations. In fact, the Wife of Bath references her own glossing abilities when she alludes to the analogy of the painting that depicts a lion being slain by a human; a lion sees the portrayal and declares that it must have been man who created it. This suggests that, if the
lion had the ability to paint, the places of the figures in the picture would have been reversed. Alison also explains this analogy in another way, “By God, if wommen hadde writen stories, / As clerkes han withinne hir oratories, / They wolde han writen of men more wikkednesse / Than all the mark of Adam may redress” (Chaucer 693-696). Thus, if the glosses of women like Alison were given authority, many works would have been interpreted in a more pro-feminine perspective that would have agreed with the Wife of Bath’s aspirations for equal treatment between the two genders.
Along with these analogies and statements by Alisoun herself, secondary sources exist that validate Alisoun’s quotations of her main source, the Bible. Many scholars have combed through her references to the holy book and have found her translations to be accurate. According to Tinkle who examined several glosses of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, “…most of the biblical glosses endorse the Wife’s authority as an exegete, and that a scribal consensus emerges in the fifteenth century; in thirteen manuscripts [out of nineteen], scribes use the margins of the text to invent the Wife of Bath as a reliable biblical expert” (72-73). An example of her knowledge appears when Alison supports her sexual desires by pointing out, “The’ Apostel [Paul], whan he speketh of maydenhede, / He seyde that precept thereof hadde he noon. / Men may conseille a womman to been oon, / But Conseilling is no comandement…” (Chaucer 64-67). Tinkle found that every scribe who translated this Bible passage confirmed that it matched up accurately with Alisoun’s quotation, thus giving her more credit in her denial of a woman’s need for chastity (77). Similarly, when Alisoun quotes Saint Paul in saying that women have power over their husband’s bodies rather than the men themselves (Chaucer 157-160) she is again found to have quoted the original Latin translation of the Bible verbatim, giving Alisoun even more credit in her attempts to justify her sexual needs (Tinkle 80). Thus, the Wife of Bath
tears down the patriarchic view of the need for women to be submissive virgins by accurately using the Bible, the source men often gloss to impose second class requirements on women.
The Bible was not the only popular literary source that the Wife of Bath was forced to deal with. Authors like Theophrastus in his The Golden Book on Marriage would have been the well-read anti-feminists that forward-thinking women such as Alisoun would have contended with on a daily basis in order to fight the common stereotypes about females that they were apt to spew. For example, when offering reasons why men shouldn’t marry, Theophrastus complains that the upkeep of women is too expensive: “There are many things which women require—fine clothes, gold, jewels, money, maid-servants, all kinds of furniture, litters, and gilded coaches” (357). Alisoun, while she may be interested in material items, stands at a fortunate position in her last two marriages of being the provider, or the man in the relationship, while Peter and Jankyn (after he relinquishes the estate to her) are forced to rely on her good-graces to obtain what they need. Thus, Alisoun turns the tables on Theophrastus’ first complaint. Alisoun takes Theophrastus’ next generalization about women and uses it, in her personal experience, as an equality lesson. He grumbles, “…if a wife is unchaste, she can’t be guarded, and if she isn’t she doesn’t need guarding” (358). He continues his tirade on objectifying women as weak beings who can’t control there lust. Alisoun unknowingly refutes his complaints by fitting the stereotype of the unchaste women who sneaks out for fun every night. She chides her husband about his issue with her sneaking out, “Sire olde fool, what helpeth thee to spyen? / Though thou preye Argus, with his hundred yen, / To be my warde-cors, as he can best, / In feith, he shall not kepe me but me lest; / Yet coulde I make his berd, so moot I thee” (Chaucer 357-360). However, she does this with her fourth husband predominantly because he is also participating in unchaste activities himself. Alisoun feels that she should be allowed to be as unfaithful as her husband and
that chastity is for certain men and women but not for most people. Thus, the Wife of Bath turns Theophrastus’ example into a unisex one instead of simply a rebuke of women. The last point that Theophrastus seeks to make is one that Alisoun has continuously championed in both her prologue and her tale; he says, “…better than a wife, who only considers herself mistress of a house if she goes against her husband’s wishes; that is, she does what she pleases, not what she’s told” (359). The Wife of Bath would call this statement sovereignty. She continuously played this role, not to claim herself as mistress, but to gain the same freedoms that her husband’s had by natural right. Alisoun debates with her husbands until they allow her to leave the house as she pleases and she even destroys Jankyn’s book in order to regain her independence. Instead of her words, it is Alisoun’s actions that twist Theophrastus’ claims; making stereotypes that he applies to women seem to fit both genders and, by doing so, increasing gender based parity.
It is not only Theophrastus’ anti-feminist ideas that Alisoun embraces in order to surpass in some way. Chaucer offers us an example of this in Alisoun’s prologue when she says to her fourth husband, “What eyleth yow to grucche thus and groan? / Is it for ye to wolde have my queynte alone? / Why taak it al! lo, have it every-deel! / Peter! I shrewe yow but ye love it weel! / For if I wolde selle my bele chose, / I coude walke as fresh as a rose; / But I wol kepe it for your owene tooth.” (443-449). While the words themselves are anti-feminist in nature, the tone which she takes is that of a strong woman. However, she utters these lines as if they are rehearsed to please her husband and avoid his prying eye into her nighttime fun, thus using the anti-feminist words as a tool to accomplish a feminist end (Dinshaw 120). Another example for inspection is when the Wife nags her husband about her lack of freedom to go as she pleases; her shortage on fancy clothes; and his lackluster performance. While this often leaves Alisoun in the category of overdone shrew, we soon find out that her reason for complaining about this is to gain independence from the patriarch of the household, her husband. While her means of going about it are anti-feminist, it soon becomes clear that her goal is to be able to make decisions for herself, a decidedly feminist one. These two instances offer readers yet another illustration of how the Wife of Bath uses the functioning patriarchal society to her feminist advantage.
Alisoun has proven herself through her interpretations and experiences to be a feminist who is willing to barely push the bounds of her patriarchic world without seeking to destroy it. She shows through her experiences with her husbands that she can obtain things like freedom, wealth, and sovereignty without seeking to be viewed as a full equal by the men around her. Alisoun also reveals through her experiences with Jankyn that making men understand women is the best way to nudge toward gender equality. However, she is still content to remain obedient to her husband once her freedom has been established. Alisoun proves an expert at twisting her words to her advantage. She uses her own glosses in order to interpret the true texts into a more feminist light that yields to her a new set of sexual standards that accord with the Bible. The Wife of Bath is further successful in using stereotypes endorsed men like Theophrastus and stereotypes in general in order to twist those stereotypes to make them look less like a female issue and more like a universal problem. All in all, the wife is successful in making small strides for feminism despite the influence of a highly patriarchic society on her upbringing and beliefs. Vaneckova describes Alisoun best when she states, “Alisoun is a feminist of her own making. Although many say she still submits to the rule of the patriarchal world, they do not take into account the time of her creation” (34). This is to say that the Wife of Bath is a flawed feminist, but her flaws, which were mostly created by the limits of the time period, make her the colorful and convincing character and a notable predecessor to the feminists of today.
Dr. Francis
Research Paper
7 December, 2010
Feminism within the Bounds of Patriarchy
The Wife of Bath is often considered to be one of the most controversial characters in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. While some scholars see her as an early feminist, many critics prefer to think of her as a slightly revamped example of the stereotypical, nagging wife of the middle Ages. However, The Wife of Bath is a character more like the former school of thought who, while not as hardcore as many modern feminists, looks to advance the power of women by using the materials provided to her by the patriarchic society in which she would have lived. Though she does not seek to overthrow the patriarchal power, she attempts to advance women’s rights within the limits of her society. In order to accomplish this task, the Wife of Bath often twists experiences, literature, and common ideas to give them the pro-feminism spin that she desires to find in them, the same tactic that she argues men before her used to hold the male-dominated society in place.
It is nearly impossible to argue that the Wife of Bath, a woman who has been married five times and has traveled on countless pilgrimages, lacks life experiences. As she puts it at the beginning of her prologue, “Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynough for me…” (Chaucer 1-2). By saying this, Alisoun, The Wife of Bath, devalues traditional patriarchic doctrine by claiming that her experiences make her a better teacher than the accepted texts. For example, Alisoun has plenty of advice to offer from her experiences with marriage. She learns quickly that the general belief that virtue alone would make a woman successful is
inaccurate and that wealth and power are important rewards to gain from one’s spouse. The Wife of Bath practiced this idea by refusing to make love to her spouses until they agreed to leave her their estates when they passed away. In Carruthers’ words, “This bald exchange may strike us as cynical, vulgar, and immoral, but we must remember that by the standards common to her class Alisoun’s behavior is simply shrewd business” (211). The wife of Bath learned this “business practice well; she wedded wealthy husbands who were well on their way to the grave three times in a row. Knowledge of economic gain isn’t enough for the Wife of Bath, however. “As Alisoun knows from experience, the true fruits of marriage…are set in the marriage bed. Its important spoils for her are neither children nor sensual gratification but independence” (Carruthers 214). By focusing on power and independence rather than obedience and procreation, Alisoun is able to free herself from the traditional female role and tackle life on a more equal footing with the men of her society.
Though she proves her wealth of knowledge gained by experiences throughout her prologue via the stories of her first four husbands, Alisoun’s personal struggles and the knowledge she gains from them climax in her fifth marriage to the young clerk, Jankyn. Alisoun was able to convince her first four husbands (all of which she married for their money) to allow her free reign whether through deception or nagging, but her relationship with Jankyn was different. Alisoun gave over her accumulated wealth to Jankyn and, with it, sacrificed her freedom for the sake of love. However, Jankyn had no intention of returning the favor. When Alisoun finds that she is losing, “…her integrity as her young husband tries to change her into an obedient wife with no life of her own, she starts to fight him” (Vaneckova 37). While Alisoun sacrifices wealth for love initially, she learns from this experience that what she values most, freedom and integrity, requires money to secure.
In order to reacquire her wealth, the Wife of Bath destroys Jankyn’s book, forcing him to feel helpless and frustrated. The book is worth as much to him as Alisoun’s freedom is to her, and, by ripping it, she brings her husband down to her physical level of dealing with a situation. When Jankyn loses his words, and joins Alisoun at the level of physical “communication”, he gains understanding of her experience. As Vaneckova explains it, “He lost his dearly beloved book, she lost her dearly beloved ideal of happy marriage. The success of their marriage begins with a loss, and also with realization of something more important. Jankyn realizes that he loves his wife more than he loves his book…Once she is secure not to be inferior, she does not struggle for superiority…” (38). It is only when Jankyn is made to experience the frustration of a woman struggling for freedom that he can began to understand his wife’s plight. Once again, Alisoun succeeds in teaching through an experience and learns her lesson. She recalls to the other pilgrims, “And to him yaf I al the lond and fee / That everewas me yeven therbifore / But afterward repented me ful sore; / He nolde suffer nothing of my list” (Chaucer 630-633). This passage shows Alisoun’s discovery about the dangers of handing over one’s tradable commodities for the sake of love; something the men in Alisoun’s society would never risk doing and something the Wife of Bath makes it clear that she would never be foolish enough to try again.
“The Wife of Bath’s Tale” carries over her prologue’s theme of men gaining understanding of women through experiencing their troubles. When the knight robs a woman of her maidenhead, he is sentenced to death but is saved by Queen Guinevere and placed at the mercy of the women in the story. The women decide to give this knight a quest to seek not a masculine battle success but rather an understanding of women. True to the value she places in experience, Alisoun doesn’t allow the knight to fully understand what women most desire until
he hands over his sovereignty to his loathly wife. Like Jankyn, the knight is forced to play the women’s role of marrying an older spouse against his wishes and submitting dutifully to his spouse’s whims before he understands what it is like to live as a woman and to truly be at peace with his wife (Vaneckova 41-42). It’s important to note that Alisoun and the loathly wife in her tale are both perfectly content to be obedient and true to their husbands once they have received the sovereignty that they are attempting to gain. This might seem like a step back for feminism but readers should remember that Alisoun was not trying to destroy patriarchy, but merely to improve women’s roles within her society. Thus, for men to actually understand and empathize with the challenges that their wives face would have been considered a great success by mild feminists like the Wife of Bath. In the case of her tale, Alisoun is taking her real life experiences and transforming them into a story format as a means of teaching the men of the company about the needs and desires of women and getting across that women don’t always fit into the mold of the patriarchic society that exists around them.
Experience might be Alisoun’s preferred weapon on her feminist campaign but she proves that she is just as capable of getting her viewpoints across by interpreting scripture and other works of literature to fit her desires. As Dinshaw explains, men of Chaucer’s time often created interpretations of a holy passage or well-known work. This practice was called glossing. Gloss often appeared in the margins of manuscripts and tends to take the place of the true text, or original wording, over time (121-122). Alisoun’s interpretations of the scripture may seem a bit off but she is glossing the text the same way many men do; she just understands exceedingly dissimilar interpretations. In fact, the Wife of Bath references her own glossing abilities when she alludes to the analogy of the painting that depicts a lion being slain by a human; a lion sees the portrayal and declares that it must have been man who created it. This suggests that, if the
lion had the ability to paint, the places of the figures in the picture would have been reversed. Alison also explains this analogy in another way, “By God, if wommen hadde writen stories, / As clerkes han withinne hir oratories, / They wolde han writen of men more wikkednesse / Than all the mark of Adam may redress” (Chaucer 693-696). Thus, if the glosses of women like Alison were given authority, many works would have been interpreted in a more pro-feminine perspective that would have agreed with the Wife of Bath’s aspirations for equal treatment between the two genders.
Along with these analogies and statements by Alisoun herself, secondary sources exist that validate Alisoun’s quotations of her main source, the Bible. Many scholars have combed through her references to the holy book and have found her translations to be accurate. According to Tinkle who examined several glosses of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, “…most of the biblical glosses endorse the Wife’s authority as an exegete, and that a scribal consensus emerges in the fifteenth century; in thirteen manuscripts [out of nineteen], scribes use the margins of the text to invent the Wife of Bath as a reliable biblical expert” (72-73). An example of her knowledge appears when Alison supports her sexual desires by pointing out, “The’ Apostel [Paul], whan he speketh of maydenhede, / He seyde that precept thereof hadde he noon. / Men may conseille a womman to been oon, / But Conseilling is no comandement…” (Chaucer 64-67). Tinkle found that every scribe who translated this Bible passage confirmed that it matched up accurately with Alisoun’s quotation, thus giving her more credit in her denial of a woman’s need for chastity (77). Similarly, when Alisoun quotes Saint Paul in saying that women have power over their husband’s bodies rather than the men themselves (Chaucer 157-160) she is again found to have quoted the original Latin translation of the Bible verbatim, giving Alisoun even more credit in her attempts to justify her sexual needs (Tinkle 80). Thus, the Wife of Bath
tears down the patriarchic view of the need for women to be submissive virgins by accurately using the Bible, the source men often gloss to impose second class requirements on women.
The Bible was not the only popular literary source that the Wife of Bath was forced to deal with. Authors like Theophrastus in his The Golden Book on Marriage would have been the well-read anti-feminists that forward-thinking women such as Alisoun would have contended with on a daily basis in order to fight the common stereotypes about females that they were apt to spew. For example, when offering reasons why men shouldn’t marry, Theophrastus complains that the upkeep of women is too expensive: “There are many things which women require—fine clothes, gold, jewels, money, maid-servants, all kinds of furniture, litters, and gilded coaches” (357). Alisoun, while she may be interested in material items, stands at a fortunate position in her last two marriages of being the provider, or the man in the relationship, while Peter and Jankyn (after he relinquishes the estate to her) are forced to rely on her good-graces to obtain what they need. Thus, Alisoun turns the tables on Theophrastus’ first complaint. Alisoun takes Theophrastus’ next generalization about women and uses it, in her personal experience, as an equality lesson. He grumbles, “…if a wife is unchaste, she can’t be guarded, and if she isn’t she doesn’t need guarding” (358). He continues his tirade on objectifying women as weak beings who can’t control there lust. Alisoun unknowingly refutes his complaints by fitting the stereotype of the unchaste women who sneaks out for fun every night. She chides her husband about his issue with her sneaking out, “Sire olde fool, what helpeth thee to spyen? / Though thou preye Argus, with his hundred yen, / To be my warde-cors, as he can best, / In feith, he shall not kepe me but me lest; / Yet coulde I make his berd, so moot I thee” (Chaucer 357-360). However, she does this with her fourth husband predominantly because he is also participating in unchaste activities himself. Alisoun feels that she should be allowed to be as unfaithful as her husband and
that chastity is for certain men and women but not for most people. Thus, the Wife of Bath turns Theophrastus’ example into a unisex one instead of simply a rebuke of women. The last point that Theophrastus seeks to make is one that Alisoun has continuously championed in both her prologue and her tale; he says, “…better than a wife, who only considers herself mistress of a house if she goes against her husband’s wishes; that is, she does what she pleases, not what she’s told” (359). The Wife of Bath would call this statement sovereignty. She continuously played this role, not to claim herself as mistress, but to gain the same freedoms that her husband’s had by natural right. Alisoun debates with her husbands until they allow her to leave the house as she pleases and she even destroys Jankyn’s book in order to regain her independence. Instead of her words, it is Alisoun’s actions that twist Theophrastus’ claims; making stereotypes that he applies to women seem to fit both genders and, by doing so, increasing gender based parity.
It is not only Theophrastus’ anti-feminist ideas that Alisoun embraces in order to surpass in some way. Chaucer offers us an example of this in Alisoun’s prologue when she says to her fourth husband, “What eyleth yow to grucche thus and groan? / Is it for ye to wolde have my queynte alone? / Why taak it al! lo, have it every-deel! / Peter! I shrewe yow but ye love it weel! / For if I wolde selle my bele chose, / I coude walke as fresh as a rose; / But I wol kepe it for your owene tooth.” (443-449). While the words themselves are anti-feminist in nature, the tone which she takes is that of a strong woman. However, she utters these lines as if they are rehearsed to please her husband and avoid his prying eye into her nighttime fun, thus using the anti-feminist words as a tool to accomplish a feminist end (Dinshaw 120). Another example for inspection is when the Wife nags her husband about her lack of freedom to go as she pleases; her shortage on fancy clothes; and his lackluster performance. While this often leaves Alisoun in the category of overdone shrew, we soon find out that her reason for complaining about this is to gain independence from the patriarch of the household, her husband. While her means of going about it are anti-feminist, it soon becomes clear that her goal is to be able to make decisions for herself, a decidedly feminist one. These two instances offer readers yet another illustration of how the Wife of Bath uses the functioning patriarchal society to her feminist advantage.
Alisoun has proven herself through her interpretations and experiences to be a feminist who is willing to barely push the bounds of her patriarchic world without seeking to destroy it. She shows through her experiences with her husbands that she can obtain things like freedom, wealth, and sovereignty without seeking to be viewed as a full equal by the men around her. Alisoun also reveals through her experiences with Jankyn that making men understand women is the best way to nudge toward gender equality. However, she is still content to remain obedient to her husband once her freedom has been established. Alisoun proves an expert at twisting her words to her advantage. She uses her own glosses in order to interpret the true texts into a more feminist light that yields to her a new set of sexual standards that accord with the Bible. The Wife of Bath is further successful in using stereotypes endorsed men like Theophrastus and stereotypes in general in order to twist those stereotypes to make them look less like a female issue and more like a universal problem. All in all, the wife is successful in making small strides for feminism despite the influence of a highly patriarchic society on her upbringing and beliefs. Vaneckova describes Alisoun best when she states, “Alisoun is a feminist of her own making. Although many say she still submits to the rule of the patriarchal world, they do not take into account the time of her creation” (34). This is to say that the Wife of Bath is a flawed feminist, but her flaws, which were mostly created by the limits of the time period, make her the colorful and convincing character and a notable predecessor to the feminists of today.