Women Seek to Posses Control i
A great misconception of society is that men are in control of the household, and women are content in their submissive roles. The simple fact is that women desire a mastery over their husbands in marriage and posses several methods of attaining it, and will do so at all costs. This is clearly demonstrated numerous times in "The Wife of Bath," a tale from the novel The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer. One way that women seek to gain mastery over their husbands is through the manipulation of emotions. As despicable as this may seem in and of itself, the tale also illustrates the use of women's sexual appeal to impose their will upon their partners thus once again granting them the control. However, perhaps the most grotesque method by which they seek control is through their wicked mind games and cunning bouts of deception. All of these devices are still nothing but a means to an end; that end being dominance over their partners. One particularly intrinsic behavior of a woman in her pursuit of control over her husband is the indiscriminant manipulation of emotions in an attempt to make the man feel sorry for the woman or feel that he is in the wrong. A monumental example of this is when the wife of Bath tells of qu
The man then becomes so "tickled" with joy he forgets any suspicion and the wife thereby gains the control. A prolific example is presented to the reader when the wife of Bath described one of the games she played; she always made sure that she was the one complaining, excluding her from any suspicion of being guilty herself: "Oh lord, the pain and woe I gave them, though they were guiltless, by God's sweet suffering! For I could bite and whinny like a horse; I could complain though I was the guilty one; else many a time I would have been ruined. Thus through the manipulation of his feelings of remorse she achieved the mastery over him which she had sought. The mechanism of twisting emotions is only one, and quite possibly the tamest of the devices that women use to attain control. ' But at last, after much care and woe, we fell into accord between ourselves. The wife utterly admits her guilt in this quote, destroying any belief that she was the one being taken advantage of. She had hit him well nigh knowing that he would respond with anger, and in so doing, he fell into her trap. Now it is obvious that sexuality is merely another instrument of war in the married woman's conquest of marital dominance. Women's use of sexual appeal by no means stops there. Here the wife uses her flirtatious manner with other men to make her husband jealous. She makes the excuse that all of her goings out at night are to spy on him since she loved him so. By making her husband jealous she may not gain control over his actions, but it is plainly visible that if she can make him jealous, she has control over his feelings.
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