Chaucer uses the five books of Troilus and Criseyde to track just how and why this should be so, making the power imbalance between Troilus and Criseyde an illustrative and exploratory example of the power imbalance between all men and women. Once Troilus has fallen in love with Criseyde and begun to make his feelings known, Chaucer’s brilliant stroke is to have him realize, just as Criseyde does, that it is almost impossible for her to agree to love him in any way he can believe (or she can mean) since he holds her life in his hands. Chaucer is of course following his source in telling this story, but when Criseyde is finally passed to the Greeks in a prisoner exchange and she ‘betrays’ Troilus by yielding to the advances of Diomede, a new and powerful protector, Chaucer so carefully anatomizes the difficulties of Criseyde’s position that he can have each of the major characters in the story condemn her (as her uncle puts it quite simply ‘for certain I hate Criseyde’), while simultaneously ensuring that his readers will recoil from this view. If Criseyde is a ‘bad woman’ by the estimation of all those around her, it is also those people who have given her no other means to survive.

Chaucer’s next long poem, The Legend of Good Women (1386–7), builds upon this premiss—and, it would appear, this hardening conviction, in Chaucer’s sense of the world—for what makes women ‘good’ in this poem, in almost every case, is that they have been betrayed by men. The symmetrical relationship is there in the prologue to the collection where, in a vision in a dream, a figure much like Chaucer (for he has written everything Chaucer has up to that point) is condemned by Cupid to penance for having written poems such as Troilus and Criseyde which ‘defame’ women. It is probably important that this represents a misreading of Troilus and Criseyde (the Legend of Good Women also has some bones to pick with bad but powerful readers), but the Chaucer-figure responds dutifully, and begins to tell a series of stories, all taken from classical sources, which describe women who are abandoned, mistreated, or violently abused by men (Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomela). It is of course strange that, in every case, the virtue of these women is generated, inversely, by the harm done to them, but it is easy to see the importance of the strategy to Chaucer, who clearly believed that male power allowed women hardly any space in which to shape their own lives. These stories let him focus on the injuries that power inflicts, while still insisting, in every case, that this was women’s problem, not their fault.

There must also have been something deeply unsatisfying about the celebration of such pitiable victims, and, although the Legend of Good Women was meant to be a much longer poem, Chaucer never finished it, and the project of the Canterbury Tales quickly took its place. The return to issues of gender and power in these narratives could, in this sense, be seen as an equally reciprocal attempt to champion women by envisioning the opposite of a victim in the Wife of Bath. There is some evidence that the Wife of Bath was an early creation (parts of her Prologue seem to have been in circulation long before the rest of the Tales). Her personality is also based on a kind of reciprocity for, in another stroke of genius, Chaucer took the huge amount of poetry and prose that he had accumulated to warn men of the dangers of female sexuality and marriage (a surprisingly popular genre throughout the Middle Ages) and turned it on its head so that the Wife of Bath is created, point for point, as that genre’s perfect nightmare: she marries for money, manipulates her husbands, and makes their lives a misery unless they do what she says. In a culture where women were rarely allowed any independence, it is impossible not to admire her spirit, but the tale she tells—which describes a knight who rapes a woman and is sentenced to death unless he discovers ‘what women most desire’—makes clear that the stakes are reciprocal here too. Though the view is implicit rather than overtly expressed in her story, the Wife believes that there will be no happiness between men and women unless there is some sharing of power, for there is only a happy ending when the knight renounces any control he might have over his wife (he has learned that this is what women want most), and she in turn gives him exactly what he wants.

It is the strength of the Wife of Bath’s performance that makes the other tales of ‘marriage’ in the Canterbury Tales seem to orient themselves around her, not because they express a range of views (as Kittredge argued) but because they offer a variety of perspectives on the same assumptions about the entwining of gender and power. While the Clerk’s Tale may seem to be about a ‘bad’ marriage, the story of a meek wife, Griselda, dominated by her overpowering husband, Walter, Chaucer insists that this is a story about the ways in which it is Walter’s will not Griselda’s that finally bends. The Merchant’s Tale might seem, in a similar way, to criticize rather than praise women’s power, since the young woman, May, whom the elderly January marries, is scheming and cruel, and finally betrays her husband right before his eyes. But this tale is also carefully structured to show that May’s desire becomes dangerous only as a result of having her wishes entirely ignored. Rather than contradict the Wife of Bath’s claim that men must give women power if they want to be happy, this tale shows how men suffer most (that they, in effect, condemn themselves to betrayal) when they try to subjugate women’s will to their own. The Franklin’s Tale continues this point by insisting that both men and women benefit when women are also given the scope to choose and have what they want.

Many more tales explore the strong connection between gender and power, and the result is a championing of women throughout the Canterbury Tales, whether they are subjected to men or manage to make their own decisions. In addition to the tales of the ‘marriage group’, this is very much the case in the Tale of Melibee, where all of the wisdom that matters resides in Melibee’s wife Prudence. In the Miller’s Tale and the Shipman’s Tale wives who get what they want even though they cause harm to their husbands go completely unpunished. It is also no accident that the one saint’s life in the collection, the Second Nun’s Tale, is a story celebrating a woman’s wisdom. This last example also reveals the powerful religious traditions and meanings Chaucer harnessed to this topic. Griselda acquires power through victimization in the Clerk’s Tale in part because her circumstances and behaviour are continually portrayed as Christ-like: like Christ, she emerges from an ‘ox’s stall’, and like him she defeats strength by means of patient endurance rather than brute force. This is a set of meanings Chaucer also explores in the Man of Law’s Tale, where the trials endured by Constance always reveal the power given her by her faith. While valuing women’s suffering like this might seem to justify women’s oppression, Chaucer is simply bringing together two fundamental truths for a Christian society and emphasizing their inherent connection. If suffering is taken to be a positive good (if, like Christ, Christians are most virtuous when they can endure great hardship), then the medieval ideal of marriage (in which the wife must endure whatever demands her husband makes on her) makes women especially good in Christian terms. If there is a power imbalance in these religious tales, in other words, it is actually all in favour of women: to precisely the extent that the men in these tales cause women to suffer, they are actually helping them to be better Christians than those men could ever be.

Philosophies of Language

Rather than offering progressive arguments about a particular idea or generating some sort of thematic narrative by their forward motion, then, the disordered (the never-to-be-finally ordered) Canterbury Tales radiate outward from certain central convictions like spokes from the hub of a wheel. If the most important of these is the definition of female virtue in relation to male power, of nearly equal importance as a centre of meaning in the Tales is Chaucer’s insistence that language is, fundamentally, a social and political instrument. This may seem an obvious point to anyone willing to pick up a book that contains a six-hundred-year-old poem. Words matter to all of us who read a great deal, and Chaucer’s words matter very much to those of us who care about the history of English poetry.