The Second Sex and The Final Quit: Part III
The Voiceless Woman
Welcome to the final installment of my series!
If you need a refresher and are pressed for time, go ahead and reread the second installment–linked here–for within it, I preface that Substack with a decent recapitulation of the first installment.
But for my final post, I’d like for us to jump right in.
I left off the last part by finishing out my coverage of the way the Manciple quits the Wife of Bath on the topic of sexuality and the treatment of women’s carnality.
For this final portion of my exploration, I would like to discuss the gravity Chaucer assigns to a women’s rhetorical capacity.
We have seen the way in which the Wife of Bath masterfully wields her voice and language in order to not only break into male forums but disrupt traditional discourse.
I think the Manciple, within his tale, presents something that sits in stark contrast to the Wife of Bath, but in this way offers an example that has similar value to the discussion at hand through its profound contrast.
The wife of Phebus presents an interesting foil to not only the Wife of Bath, but all the women that have existed within Chaucer’s tales.
The reason? Her lack of voice.
As I have said before, a closer look at Chaucer’s tales provides invaluable insight into an early commentary on women’s rhetorical power.
The Manciple’s tale is one of many stories which include the involvement of a wife and her extra-marital affairs. One of the most remarkable of these is The Merchant’s Tale; at its climax, the wife–May–is caught in the middle of coitus by her blind husband whose sight is restored in that moment by the god Pluto.
Similarly to May and others across the fabliaux, “Phebus’s wife arranges an adulterous liaison” which eventually ends in discovery (Raybin 19). Despite the familiar structure of narrative we are given, Phebus’ wife meets a sudden and merciless death; and the reason for this sudden diversion of events seems to be rooted in the lack of a key element of character construction that Chaucer has purposefully removed. Raybin posits the root of the issue here:
. . .unlike those other woman, whose timely speech allows them to become active subjects in both the determination of their fate and the narrative progression of their stories, Phebus’s wife is not granted the textual opportunity to speak or in any way act on her own behalf; she dies immediately, the object of her husband’s anger, and her death is less a dramatic climax than it is a simple turning point in the plot (Raybin 19).
Though her death carries little flare or consequence within the tale’s singular events, its occurrence is rich in subtext and carries weighty implications for the discussion of women’s rhetorical power that has begun since the onset of The Canterbury Tales.
Do you recall, Reader, the lines I asked you to remember from the end of my first installment?
Within the passage I had selected then, I believed that the lines provided had shown best the Wife of Bath’s encouragement to women to exercise their rhetorical power; and it is also because of the specific lines 231 and 232 that I have been led to believe that the Manciple’s tale is constructed to quit the Wife of Bath.
Here, they are (translations included):
A wys wyf, if that she kan hir good,
A wise wife, if she knows what is good for her,
Shal beren hym on honde the cow is wood,
Shall deceive him by swearing the bird is crazy,(Harvard lines 231-232)
It seems as though the Manciple had been paying attention to the Wife of Bath’s prologue and, in his response, provided a second look at the theoretical situation she had posited but readapted it to prove a point that seems to support her own views.
Where the Wife of Bath encourages women to use their rhetorical abilities to not only protect themselves and further their positions in society, relationships, and life, the Manciple seems to warn women of the dangers of a voiceless woman, illustrating through his tale the worst outcome for a rhetorically inept woman.
Indeed, the events from the Merchant’s tale serve as perhaps the most successful example of the rhetorical power the Wife of Bath is suggesting. May is able to manipulate her husband, January, into deluding his own sight and forgiving her dalliances; in sharp contrast, we see how Phebus’ wife is unable to argue her case or protect herself from the quick effects of her husband’s anger, proving the “narrative stress on the relative efficacy of [a] character’s voice. . . [which] informs [us on] Chaucer’s treatment of female voices in The Canterbury Tales” (Raybin 20). It is through this final tale, and its singular point of deviation from the established pattern of the other falbiaux, that “Chaucer offers a powerful response to questions about power, freedom, and gender that he has raised throughout the collection” (Raybin 20).
I believe that from as early as Alisoun in the Miller’s tale, we have begun to see Chaucer lay the foundations for proving a point about the feminine necessity of rhetoric that women must realize; from the moment we indulge in the Wife of Bath’s prologue, Chaucer has as boldly as his character asserted directly a call for women to begin recognizing the range of power rhetoric affords. In this context, the Manciple’s tale serves not only as an end to the tales but a conclusion to the discussion of feminine rhetoric by attaching a heavy finality to the conversation with his implications about a woman stripped of speech.
Whew! Thank you for sticking with me, Reader.
This had been a long journey, and I am a little sad to conclude it here, but I hope you have enjoyed it as I have. I believe that Chaucer’s perspective on the second sex, femininity, and women’s rhetoric was ahead of its time and the ways in which he had grafted his insights into the poetics of his work were intricate, innumerable, and instructional in a manner that I believe is unique to creative narrative.
Again, thank you for reading.
Until the next <3
Harvard. "3.1 The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale." Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer
Website, chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/wife-baths-prologue-and-tale-0.
Lawton, David, editor. The Norton Chaucer. E-book, W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Leitch, Vincent B., et al. “Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex.” Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism. Third ed., Norton & Company Limited, W.W., 2018.
Raybin, David. “The Death of a Silent Woman: Voice and Power in Chaucer’s
Manciple’s Tale.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 95, no. 1, 1996, pp.
19–37. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27711257. Accessed 2 May 2025.