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 that no woman should settle for less, but like building a hut on the seashore, without a foundation her whole argument is washed away.
When the time comes to repay the hag's kindness and fulfill their promise, the knight's unwilling and callous attitude is eventually rewarded. In the most shocking display of his ignorance and heartlessness, the knight calmly rejects the hag with stinging words after her first request for marriage.
