3/7/13

     I believe she changes the story in order to make men not look as good and honorable as they did in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell. In the original, the king is the one that must find the answer in order to be spared by another knight, who wants to kill him because one of his knights has ruined his life. In The Wife of Bath's Tale, a knight is on trial for raping a woman in the kingdom, and he must find the answer for the queen instead of the king. I believe she puts the queen in charge as a sign of women's sovereignty. She makes the knight's crime rape, which shows more sensitivity to women.

Chaucer
http://www.biography.com/imported/images/Biography
/Images/Profiles/C/Geoffrey-Chaucer-9245691-1-402.jpg

     In The Wife of Bath's Tale, the woman has "pillow talk" with the knight in which she wants to know why he is so gloom. He tells her that her ugliness and lack of nobility is upsetting to him, since in this time it was more of a "who your daddy was" that defined you. She comes out and tells him that true gentility isn't about that, but really about how you live. It is who you are, not who your dad is. I believe this matters to the Wife of Bath because to her many may look down on her since she has been married so much. I also believe it is because she wants people to remember her for her, not for who are dad or husbands were.
     First off, I wanna say that I really didn't understand the retraction. I searched the web, but couldn't find an answer that I saw fit, but I went back and read it again and this is what I came up with. I believe he is saying that things we read or see in life may not always be things we like, but we really cannot control them. Chaucer was just telling us that he didn't mean to offend anyone with his writings. I do not think he is taking anything back. I believe he is just saying sorry if it offended someone, because he didn't mean to offend them.
     I believe that Chaucer didn't really like the Roman Catholic Church. His characters like the friar, nun, and other religious figures are all in some form corrupt like the Cardinal from The Duchess of Malfi (John Webster). He may have been pressured by the church to write the retraction, in which case he apologized for the stories about the corrupt church leaders. However, he really never took anything back, he just told people that there are things that are good and some that are not. Either way he still proved his point.