. Instead, the tale revolves around the undeserved salvation of the knight, who, by the power of the almighty queen, is spared his life in order to find the answer to a riddle. The knight is forced to marry an old hag, a woman who has given him the answer to the question that has saved his life and has forced him to marry one he is not attracted to and does not love. According to some scholars, the hag reflects, " a sort of medieval perspective on rape, might be said to misread and deflect the rape of the peasant maid, as she addresses the knight-rapist on offenses against class, gentilesse, on poverty, not on gender violence, lack on consent, and the value of women's bodies." (Rose, 36) The knight, in a way, learns his lesson about ethics and class division instead of learning the moral consequences from the violence he has caused another. Contemporary female readers would view this as completely intolerable as they began to question the many reasons as to why Chaucer depicted a rape in order to solve a seemingly unimportant riddle about what women really want in life. Then, instead of punishing the rapist by means of blinding, castration, or even death, Chaucer has given the knight another chance to learn the way of his errors. This could possibly seen as unacceptable due to the fact that a knight should know the difference between right and wrong, but his action instead is "a tope for schooling the knight in the 'gentilesse' appropriate to his position...too, he may have learned that he can abuse a woman's body-rape her-legally in marriage, rather than needing to force his pleasure by the roadside." (Rose, 37)
             More answers can be found in Brain S. Lee's, in _Exploration and excommunication in 'The Wife of Bath's Tale' _. "If the tale is designed to show that women desire sovereignty, it succeeds rather in demonstrating that women serve for men's delight both by chance and by poli...