Wives and Lovers

Bear with me, I'm processing through Maxalt lag, but I really want to write this.  It's been bugging me for two days...

Every year, I teach the Wife of Bath's tale.  Every year, the Knight rapes the maiden.  Every year, he gets his sentence, goes on his journey, seeks his answer, comes home, winds up married, and has his little temper tantrum (I can't call it anything else).  Every year, he is offered his choice, gives up the power to his wife and gets, to his surprise, everything he ever wanted.

Can I just tell you that this bothers me a little?

I love Chaucer for what he's trying to show.  I believe in what he's saying.  He believes in the power of repentance, the power of people to change and become something new if they will take the presented wisdom and opportunity to change.  If they will turn from the path of destruction (unlike the assorted idiots in the Pardoner's Tale), they don't have to die.  They can be forgiven, reclaimed, renewed and transformed.

He also perfectly shows the three types of power relationships that can be had between men and women: man with all the power and abusive (Knight rapes maiden) = destruction; Woman with all the power and dominance (Queen sentences Knight to death if he can't fulfill her requirements) = destruction; Mutual yielding (Knight gives up power of control, "Old Woman" gives up power of control of her form to make him happy) = happily ever after.  I totally and completely believe this.  If anybody in a relationship is trying to have the whip hand, then it's all going to fall down.  God bless Chaucer for getting that in 1400.  Wouldn't it be nice if more people in 2011 could?

What I guess I can't quite get over is the fact that this is a rapist getting a happily ever after.  And maybe that his "transformation" seems to come so fast, consist of so little.  I keep thinking about him with his now-nubile wife marching (or whatever the bedroom equivalent of that is since that's where we see them last) merrily off into a golden sunset....while that poor broken girl from the beginning of the story is somewhere in a cold grey convent cell with her head in her hands wondering what her life might have been like before he rode by that day.

You know, in a perfect world, she becomes like Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz, and a convent becomes her perfect freedom and refuge, not a consolation prize at all.  Her mind and her soul open, and she grows to think of the moment she first saw that Knight not as an ending but as a strange kind of rebirth.  She doesn't have nightmares.  She doesn't have scars.  She doesn't mourn.  There is peace.  She has her own happily ever after.

In a perfect world.

I wish Chaucer would have given her one, too.  Maybe someday, I will write one for her, give her wings.  It bothers me that this writer who is so much about redemption and second chances that he can reclaim a rapist and make him a hero would leave her cast aside like a footnote, like a broken-winged bird.