The Surrender Of Maistrye in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

I love it… “Miss Independent”. I too want to talk about the inscrutable Wife. I’ve been researching women in medieval culture over the last few weeks and have come across the Wife often. A particularly interesting analysis of the Prologue and Tale can be found in chapter three of Jill Mann’s book Geoffrey Chaucer. This book was published as part of a series, Feminist Readings.
In this chapter, Mann discusses the scene at the end of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, “the surrender of maistrye”. This is the chapter in the book I found the most interesting. Mann approaches the surrender of the rapist and his transformation into a meek and obedient husband as a kind of feminine fairy tale, and yet also a representation of male subjugation to female power (87-88). These two points: that a rapist mystically allows his old and undesirable wife to dictate the future, and that the surrender of man is worthy of female daydreams can be said to characterize the Wife herself. Indeed, Mann notes that the tale “repeats on a larger scale the pattern of surrender and reconciliation which is traced in miniature at the end of her Prologue” (87).
Side note: perhaps this partially explains why Pasolini may have found the Prologue itself extremely adequate representation of the Wife and therefore omitted her Tale.
We mentioned many aspects of her character in class. She’s spunky and quick to explain away her faults, and yet finds no sin in any of (and even her most tricksy) actions. And as see upon reading her tale, I believe she can be heralded as an early feminist. She believes that the most important thing for a woman is the right to choose what she’ll do and where she’ll go. The surrender of maistyre represents the fantastical dreaming of a woman who wants nothing more than to take this maistyre and turn and wield it herself.


Mann, Jill. Geoffrey Chaucer. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, Inc.,
1991.