The Wife of Bath has been described and depicted as an independent proto-feminist who long ago led the charge for sexual equality. Chaucer’s visionary protagonist was a refreshing and modern look at women’s rights in the fifteenth century. She spends much of her prologue breaking down stereotypical barriers that have confined women of her time to passive and subservient roles in her society. As a result, her prologue, if standing alone, can be noted as one of the great calls for female independence in historical literature. But upon viewing her works as a whole, her section of the General Prologue, her prologue and her tale, it is well noted that she strikingly contradicts her own call for equality with her story of the knight and the hag. She builds her case so strongly and defiantly in her prologue, yet subsequently demolishes her argument in her following tale. By allowing the hag to compromise her position, rewarding the knight for his chauvinist deeds and countering her own stance with several questionable details, the Wife of Bath contradicts her position for sexual equality and retards the momentum she had built in her prece

After the hag has put the knight in a position where she could take advantage and follow the Wife of Bath’s principles, she not only passes up on the chance to treach the knight a lesson, but actually entreats his disturbing persona. To procure their first encounter the hag (and this can be rightly assumed by her mysterious and later magical nature) attracts the knight the only way he could be lured. She supernaturally displays twenty-four dancing women to which, “he drew ful yerne. (999)” This quick advancement upon the women by the knight can be derived as the hag controlling him by taking advantage of his carnal desires, already displayed by his Neanderthalic raping of the maiden in the woods. This form of bait and switch still grasps to the Wife of Bath’s ideals and leads the reader to expect more of the same. He listens intently to her advice and with their pact the hag has him trapped, setting up the perfect opportunity to further display her foundation for female independence and ability to control their counterpart. Instead, though, of forcing him to learn to love her for who she is, her inner beauty so to speak, she rewards him in the end by changing into a beautiful woman after supposedly gaining sovereignty over him. Not only is the reader left with the surface impression that the hag may have no inner beauty to rely on, but digging deeper may decide that a woman’s only worthwhile qualities are her physical attributes. The argument has been made that the hag gained sovereignty over the knight be leaving the decision of her beauty entirely up to him, but the knight was already made aware that such power was exactly what women want and feigns giving the hag power, instead satisfying his superficial interests. It could even be determined that she wanted to be beautiful all along and only needed a partial reason to do so. She leaves the audience with the closing moral that all relationships should be condemned unless a woman has sovereignty over her husband. “Housbondes meeke, yonge, and fressh abedde,/ And grace t'overbide hem that we wedde;/ And eek I praye Jesu shorte hir lives / That wol nat be governed by hir wives;” (1259-62). This closing message reads as if the hag had conquered the knight into eternal submission and tha

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