"Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee

  As wel over hir housbond as hir love,

  And for to been in maistrie hym above.

  This is youre mooste desir, thogh ye me kille.

   Dooth as yow list; I am heer at youre wille."

   In al the court ne was ther wyf, ne mayde,

   Ne wydwe that contraried that he sayde, (lines 1044-1050)

I noticed that instead of alliteration Chaucer chose to use end-rhyme. It doesn’t work in modern English, but I see how he rearranges words to create a certain sound. For example, he says “hym above” instead of above hym to rhyme with “as hir love.” Like alliteration, rhyme, rather it be at the beginning, middle, or end keeps the reader from getting lost in the midst of long passages. Also, it just sounds better when read aloud. I chose this quote because a man saying through a woman speaker that women basically want to have dominion over their husbands means nothing. However, I believe that he was making a point by putting the wife of Bath in a man’s place. The medieval ages were certainly a man’s world. Teen girls were being married to twenty-year-old and older men and had little if any say in who they married. In the name of dowries, women were basically sold to their husbands who could treat them any kind of way. Not to mention, women were treated as second-hand citizens, so their basic rights were lacking. On the other hand, men could basically do what they wanted with little consequence when it came to marriage. Some men cheated and some beat their wives and usually the woman had nowhere to go because she had no money or land. Maybe the writer was trying to show men how irrational it is for an adult to control another simply because they have different sexual organs. Also, as a whole, The Tale of the Wife of Bath demonstrates the hypocrisy of men marrying who they want, but a woman being criticized if she chooses to marry again even though her previous husbands have died. If men were the audience of Chaucer’s poem, then I don’t believe that they would have been convinced that women wanted control of them. Since women were seen as submissive and as people who needed to be controlled. Men probably laughed at the prospect of being controlled by the opposite sex