Megan Williams
Dr. O’Hara
EN314
October 29, 2015

Annotated Bibliography: The Canterbury Tales
Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. "The Wife of Bath and the Mark of Adam." Women's Studies 15.4 (1988): 399-416. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 26 Oct. 2015. Hansen has two facets of her argument about The Wife of Bath from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The first explains how important the Wife is to the feminist critic, while the second paradoxically argues that she can be looked at as antifeminist based on the fact that she is a speaker that in reality is the voice of a man. Her views are manipulated and characterized by a man, therefore they do not allow a true woman's voice to be heard. In part one of her argument she is in favor of the idea of the Wife of Bath …show more content…
Through the Wife’s tale, she is able to assert her authority and become the ruler of the public scene of the travelling pilgrams. This is done in order to counter the male domination that she encounters in her life and use her tale as a “powerful instrument”. Through this power, the Wife alters the conventional chivalric tale by having the knight be a rapist, and the quest is comprised of finding out what women want. This is also a form of the Wife creating a framework where the women have power from the beginning of the tale. The enjoyment from the Wife is seen through her employing her power in dominating the knight, and imaging herself being young and beautiful like the transformed old hag …show more content…
Her retelling of this classic tale reveals her feminist message. It reveals the secret that the wife must keep about her husband, and how it can be looked at as a universal secret that all women must keep for their husbands. This exemplum also shows the Wife’s impatience with “masculine foolishness” even though, in reality, it shows women in an unflattering light. This represents a real frustration that is infused into, and has become an aspect part of marriages. The third section of Leicester’s argument discusses the quest that is given to the knight by the Queen after he commits the rape of the young maiden. He discusses that the quest itself is a fool's errand because women are much more complex than a simple question of “what do women want?”. The reality lies in the fact that women are individuals and have many different kinds of desires, and that these desires are subject to