The Canterbury Tales: the Man of Law's Tale Women and Femininity Quotes

The people of Rome describe Custance as the most beautiful and good woman who has ever been born. This sets her up as the standard for female excellence in the Tale. By paying close attention to her traits, we can learn what the people consider a good (and, by extension, a bad) woman.

Here we have the traits that make up the paragon of female excellence in the tale: beauty, humility, virtue, courtesy, holiness, and "almesse," or generosity. Against this standard, all other women will be judged. Yeah—good luck, ladies.

The narrator ironically says "housbondes been alle goode." His point is that women's position in their society obligates them to accept almost any husband rather than stay single. He frames this as the common wisdom of wives, implying that many a wife is probably in an unhappy marriage whose necessity she couldn't avoid.

Custance strengthens her assessment of women's position in her society by using her own plight as an example. This is the "thraldom" and "governance" to which she refers. When she says "penance" she could be referring to the Christian theology that says women's subjection to men is penance for Eve's role in the Fall.

The narrator calls the Sultan's mother a "feyned woman" because she is demonstrating traits that conflict with those that, in Custance, he's established as feminine. What are these traits? Well for one thing, the Sultaness does not sit passively by waiting for whatever fate overtakes her. Nope, she attempts to take her destiny into her own hands. Also, the violence she unleashes, and the murder of her own son, are decidedly un-feminine from the narrator's point of view. Which is another way of saying no good.

Here the narrator links the Sultaness's moral failing to Eve's, saying that the Devil has a long tradition of ensnaring women. He's also saying that women have historically been more susceptible to being the devil's "instrument," perhaps because they are gullible (easily "bigiled"), or perhaps because they are not as smart as men.

This passage is a little ambiguous, but with his "Fy, mannysh, fy," the narrator may be implying that his initial instinct is to label Donegild, like the Sultaness, as unfeminine because of her aggressive behavior. Ultimately, of course, he rejects this label as too good for her because it implies that she is human, which is just too much of a compliment.

The Senator's sole support for Custance's virtuous living is that she would rather die than be wicked. The pun on "prikke," which here can mean either the injury of sin or the penis (oh, Chaucer, you sly dog) suggests that the main kind of vice the Senator has in mind is sexual. Custance, he is saying, would rather die than be raped, and this is the measure of a virtuous woman in his eyes.