Yeah: you're seeing that correctly. That's a man holding his own severed head while he rides a green horse. Medieval romances are just the best. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is so weird and so much fun to teach!

I like to assign the Norton Critical Edition of the poem, which uses Marie Borroff's translation and includes some canonical but accessible critical essays. I reference this edition in the following blog post, including some of the essays in the back.

For more advanced students, it's fine to split the poem up into three days: Fitts I-II, Fitt III, and Fitt IV. For younger or less advanced students, I would spend one day per Fitt.

There are at least three definitions that you will want to go over before diving into the poem. Either these terms refer to concepts that will be foreign to students, or they are middle English words that have "false friends" in modern English:

• Trouth (many alternate spellings): a word to describe the interrelated concepts of loyalty, fidelity, honesty, integrity, the keeping of promises and oaths, and justness and innocence. Related to our modern English words truth and troth, it goes far beyond simply "telling the whole story without any lies."
• Gentilesse: a word to describe both the kindness and goodness that everyday people can practice and also the state of being part of the landed nobility or the "gentils". Its meaning was contested during the time of the writing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (see the Wife of Bath's Tale in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales), but we cannot quite divorce gentleness from gentility in this time period. I have learned from my medievalist friend, Kristen Aldebol, that asking students to think about what it means to call someone a "gentleman" is a good way to get them thinking about how class is still attached to the concept in our modern use of the word "gentle."
  
• Translatio imperii: (Latin for "transfer of rule") originating in the Middle Ages, translatio imperii is a concept for describing history as a linear succession of transfers of an empire. In England, this is manifested in Galfridian historiography (i.e., English history that takes its cues from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae), which argues that Brutus of Troy (son of Aeneas) is the "founder" of Britain. The empire thus transfers from Troy to Britain.
  

I have found that the key into this poem is to focus intensely on imagery. Various symbols are weaved together through this poem, almost like an intricate tapestry, and getting students to read for imagery instead of for plot is a hugely important gain in terms of making the poem engaging and building towards strong student writing in response to the poem.

I ask students to sign up for a motif to trace. Obviously some of these motifs are more exciting and engaging than others, but students really like taking ownership of their own special motif:

Motifs:

I do something similar when I teach Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, but in that text the interwoven motifs work to obscure meaning (suggesting that there is no transcendent truth we can access beyond the text) and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, they arguably create meaning (perhaps suggesting that there is a truth hidden underneath the veil of the text). Whereas the overall effect in Gawain is to make a verbal tapestry, Lot 49  seems more like the textual equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting.  I would love to one day teach these two together, but it would be a tall order to organize that syllabus!

In the blog post below, I will share my reading questions for each Fitt or part of the poem.

What is the significance of the translatio in the opening lines of the poem?  Why might the poet choose to remind the audience of the connection between Arthur, Brutus, and the Trojan refugee Aeneas at the beginning of the narrative? 

Arthur is said to be the "most courteous of all" British Kings (ll. 26). What are the characteristics of his court? His knights? His Queen?

As you read, pay attention to descriptive and narrative details. Why are they included? What do they signify? For example, the narrator describes the knights and ladies at Arthur’s feast as “fair folk in their first age” (54). What does that mean?  Why does he characterize them in this way?  How does the Green Knight reinterpret the “first age” of the courtiers? 

Notice the descriptive details the narrator mentions regarding the Green Knight.  What kind of character is he?

Pay attention to the introduction of the knight Gawain. How does he distinguish himself in the opening scenes? How is he different from the other knights? Does he fulfill a chivalric duty that the other knights neglect? What is his relationship to the ideal of "courtesy"?

Does the Green Knight play by the rules of courtesy? Does he seem like a negative or a positive figure in this section of the poem?

Why do you think the poet spends so much time describing the changing seasons at the beginning of part II?  In a poem about steadfastness, why would the poet be interested in describing change?  How might the changing seasons give insight into Gawain’s mental life?

What is the significance of the Pentangle? Why is it described in such detail (ll. 619-665)? What does it symbolize when taken as a whole?   What is the significance of the series of five fives associated with the pentangle?  Taken collectively, what might they represent? Can the pentangle be seen as a symbol of the chivalric virtues? The pentangle as a whole is called a "token of truth" (see ll. 619-626), the very virtue that is put to the test by the Green Knight. Recall that the Middle English term "trouthe" means more than the modern English word "truth." What promises are made by Gawain in this section of the poem?

The following passage is from Gawain’s vision of the castle in the wilderness: “No sooner had Gawain signed himself thrice: “Than he was ware, in the wood, of a wondrous dwelling, / With a moat, on a mound, bright amid boughs / Of many a tree great of girth that grew by the water– / A castle as comely as a knight could own, / On grounds fair and green, in a goodly park” (763-768).  What is important about this vision of the Lord’s Castle, popping up out of thin air after Gawain prays to God and Mary that he won’t freeze to death?  What about the manifestation of the castle should make Gawain suspicious?  Why doesn’t he seem to notice anything symbolic about it? What do you think the poet intends the reader / audience to know about the Lord’s castle?  Remember that one of the symbolic elements of the pentangle is the 5 senses.  Are Gawain’s senses failing him?  Is this castle like a mirage or a dream?  What evidence do you have?

Gawain is stalwart and strong out in the wilderness, but once he gets inside the castle he has all his armor taken off of him, the wine goes to his head, and he spends an awful amount of time lying in bed.  Is he merely recovering from fatigue or does the poet suggest that he is losing strength because of the castle?  On the pentangle, one of the five points represents Gawain’s five fingers.  What do hands symbolize?  Is Gawain’s possible loss of physical strength related to the five fingers symbolized by the pentangle? How so?

Notice when Gawain prays to Jesus and Mary, calling on them for help, guidance, or aid.  In what part in the narrative does he seem connected to Jesus and Mary?  At what point in the narrative does he seem preoccupied with other things?  How does this develop the symbolism of the pentangle?

Characterize the Lord of the castle in lines ll. 842-849 and in ll. 1079-11-25.  What other character in the poem does he resemble in his physical stature and/or age and in his proclivity for seemingly harmless games?  Why might that be important?

This part of the poem is set up as a complex intertwining of sports/games.  The escalating seduction scenes mirror the hunts of each day and both work together to offer insight into the state of Gawain’s soul.  Each of the three days begins and ends with the violent, fast-paced action of the chase, and embedded at the center of each day is the courtly, bawdy bedroom scene. 

Day 1: What does the Host hunt?  How does he hunt it?  What does the Lady do to Gawain?  Is she the hunter or the hunted?  How is Gawain similar to the animal hunted in the larger context of the poem?

Day 2: What does the Host hunt?  How does he hunt it?  What does the Lady do to Gawain?  How does she escalate the seduction just as the hunt scene escalates the danger of the hunt? How is the animal killed and what happens to its body after the Host kills it? How is Gawain like the animal hunted in the larger context of the poem? 

Day 3: What does the Host hunt?  How does he hunt it?  What are symbolic characteristics of the animal that the Host hunts?  What does the Lady do to Gawain?  How is she behaving like the animal that the Host hunts? How does Gawain behave like the animal that the Host hunts?

One of the things I have done that's been really interesting and helpful in class is to survey the class to ask which hunt they thought was the most difficult and why. I admitted to them that the boar hunt, to my mind, seems more exciting than the fox hunt and that I found the final hunt to be rather anticlimactic (although what's happening with Sir Gawain is obviously more climactic).

We developed the above chart--tracing the intensity of various qualities of the hunts over time--to highlight what is being tested of Lord Bertilak in each hunt. On some level, Gawain is being tested in his own way on all of these levels: his social commitment, his physical strength, and his intelligence. The fact that he "falls" on the day that Lord Bertilak faces the fox seems to indicate that Gawain has failed because of an error of judgment, a corruption of his reason: it is the chink in his armor.  It was also kind of fun to do this because the hunts work as a Rorschach test: each reader can find something intimidating in the three hunts because the poem elicits a fear of failing across multiple modes. I think that this activity ended up helping students to identify with Gawain!

Read ll. 1851-1858, wherein Gawain accepts the Lady’s offer of the magical Green Girdle. This is the crucial moment of the poem that is sometimes compared to the temptation of Adam by Eve. On what levels does Gawain fail and/or “fall” here?  If we think about the poem as a Christian allegory, what does his action (accepting the green girdle) represent? What does it say about him as a human being and as a knight?  How harshly do you think we should or are meant to judge him?

Compare and contrast the knot of the pentangle with the knot of the girdle.

What is the poet’s attitude toward "courtly love”? Which characters represent that tradition? In traditional "courtly love," a knight performs feats of valor for a lady he loves who is generally not his wife. He aspires to win her love by proving his worthiness, chivalric merit, etc. through "love service"--doing her will and trying to help her and be worthy of her regardless of her treatment of him. Does Gawain serve a lady in the poem? If so, whom does he serve? Is there a more "traditional" depiction of the courtly lady? What is the poet's (and Gawain's) attitude toward Lady Bertilak? What does that imply about "courtly love"?

What is the significance of that the Green Chapel is a mound instead of a man-made building? What are things that we associate with mounds?

Gawain is accused for a second time in the poem of being an imposter (ll. 2269-2273).  Compare the Green Knight’s accusation that Gawain is an imposter to Lady Bertilak’s similar claim (ll. 1293-95).  What does it matter than Gawain (the real man) is continuously being compared to his reputation (a social idea of himself)?  Does this comparison have an impact on the poem… (the poet presents the ideal of a chivalrous knight, but then maybe undercuts it by making Gawain seem less like a romance hero—greater in degree to his fellow men—and more like a comic hero—equal in degree to both his fellow men and his environment.)  What is the effect? See the Davenport essay, pp. 141-142.

How is Gawain’s reaction to the Green Knight at the Green Chapel like a confession?  Is it a better confession than the one he gives to the priest in Part III?  Why or why not? Make sure you go over the sacrament of confession with the class.

Close read ll. 2374-2384.  What sins does Gawain confess?  On pp. 149-150 of our text, scholar Ralph Hanna III argues that the sins Gawain identifies don’t make sense in the context of the poem. (See the past paragraph on p. 149 and the first paragraph on p. 150).  In other words, the narrator takes pains to undermine Gawain’s analysis of his own sins.  Do you agree with Gawain that these are his chief sins?

Close read ll. 2374-2384.  What sins does Gawain confess?  Some of these sins are really the same (i.e., greed and coveting are basically the same thing).  Group the sins into categories.  With these categories in mind, go back to three temptation scenes with Lady Bertilak.  Does she only tempt Gawain with lust, or does she tempt to sin along the lines he mentions.  How much should we seriously consider his argument than women are behind all of men’s sins?

In an essay in the back of our critical edition—“Unlocking What’s Locked: Gawain’s Green Girdle”—literary scholar Ralph Hanna III argues that there are at least 4 contradictory ways that the characters within the text define the symbolic significance of the green girdle.  How does Lady Bertilak construct the meaning of the girdle (1851-1854)?  How does Gawain construct the meaning of the girdle (2439-2438)?  How does the Green Knight construct the meaning of the girdle (2395-2399)?  How does the Arthurian court construct the meaning of the girdle (2513-2518)?

Who are the women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? Most critics agree that there are four: Guenevere, Mary, Lady Bertilak, and Morgan le Fay.  To what extent do they play similar roles? How do they differ? What is the function of each? What can you conclude (if anything) about the depiction of women in the poem? Is it essentially positive, negative, neutral, mixed? Are they idealized, realistically portrayed, caricatures, ciphers?  Are they marginal or central to the main conflict of the poem?

At the end of the poem, the Green Knight declares that Gawain is the best of all Arthurian knights; this opinion is shared by the Arthurian court but not by Gawain. Why does he think so? Why does Gawain disagree? Does the court’s failure to understand the significance of Gawain’s experience change our opinion of the people at the court?  Is Gawain a savior figure for the Arthurian court?

Why might the poet choose to remind the audience of the connection between Arthur, Brutus, and the Trojan refugee Aeneas at the end of the narrative?  In the light of these translatio reference here and at the beginning of the poem, what do you make of the French motto “Honi Soit Qui Mal Pense” found at the end of the poem?  The some translates this line, “Shame be to the man who has evil in his heart”; an equally plausible rendering is “shame on whoever thinks ill [of him/it].”  How can this motto be connected to the themes of the poem as a whole or to the translatio references which frame the narrative itself?

I like to close our discussion of the book by reading students the following passage, a quote from Jack Slezer in his essay in the MLA’s volume Approaches to Teaching Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:

This is a really great passage to consider for the closing discussion. Students often have a lot of sympathy for Gawain, and they see his decision to take the magical girdle as smart instead of sinful.  Although they may disagree with the idea that magical self-preservation is selfish, this idea helps them to conceptualize why it is possible to understand Gawain's decision as a failure that requires forgiveness.

There is so much to talk about in relationship to the Wife of Bath, that it can seem overwhelming. I like to focus my teaching of this tale on one major topic: the attitude that Chaucer seems to have about his character.  Is this a proto-feminist, antifeminist, or neutral piece of writing?

In order to do this, it is necessary to define "feminism" for your students. It's useful to talk to them about the history of movement so that they can recognize the great gap of time between when Chaucer was writing and when the political feminist movement(s) took place, and so that they can tease out the ways that Chaucer either approaches or fails to approach the goals of the feminist movement in his prologue and tale.

First wave – suffrage.  Turn of the century in Europe and North America.  Elizabeth Caddy Stanton, etc.  The early feminists bravely fought for women’s right to vote in Western civilization.
Second wave – 1960s, especially in France and North America.  Women like Irigaray, Kristeva, and Cixous in France and Freidman and Steinem in America wrote about the way that a masculinist Western culture attempted to repress women’s ability to speak, write, work or even really exist in the public sphere. 
Third wave feminism – 1980s to the present day. The Second wave feminists were criticized as being too “black and white” in their thinking (“bra-burning man-haters”)… Third wave feminism is supposed to be both kinder and more nuanced philosophy. Some general characteristics of it are as follows:

• More nuanced thinking about the differences between women.  Does not assume that the problems faces suburban wives in USA are the same problems facing fifteen-year old girls in Uganda.
• More nuanced in the relationship between men and women to avoid the “man-hater” stereotype that became associated with second-wave feminism.  Although there were undoubtedly some man-haters in the second-wave feminists, I want to stress that the writing of the feminists is not angry at real-life men but at a “masculinist” culture: a culture that systematically prevents women from having equal opportunities to men.  Nonetheless the stereotype exists, and that is one of the reasons that “feminist” is sometimes thrown out there like a dirty word. If you have that misconception of feminism, discard it now.
  
• More interested in the idea of “having it all.”  Women who did not want to conceptualize the world in terms of a choice between a life in the public sphere that included fulfillment in terms of work and career and a life in the private sphere that included fulfillment in terms of family life.

In my time teaching, I have learned that it is very important to drive home the following point to your students: feminism is NOT saying that women are better than men.  It is NOT saying that women deserve more power than men, even in marriage.  It is not attempting to take the current power structure and simply invert it so that women are on top; rather, it is attempting to abolish a hierarchical structure, and replace it was an egalitarian one.

Then, I ask students to consider the following BIG questions, which we consider over the course of our entire unit:

• Does this text suggest that women should have the right to an opinion on marriage and that they should be free to express it?
• Does this text suggest that women’s thoughts about marriage are as valid as men’s thoughts about marriage?
• Does this text make women’s experience in marriage seem to be a valid counterpoint to the authority of the male writers who argue that virginity is holier than marriage?
• Does this text make the Wife seem monstrous… a grotesque expression of womanhood, something to be mocked and shunned?  If so, does this portrait completely undermine the Wife’s argument about female expression and authority through and/or in marriage?

I like to break the basic discussion into two to four parts depending on the grade level of the students.

Advanced students can read ll. 1-502 in a single day, but for younger or less advanced students, you will probably want to split that up so that they read ll. 1-192 on the first day (the opening discussion of experience and authority) and ll. 193-502 on the second day (the discussion of her first four husbands).

Also advanced students can probably handle ll. 503-1263 in a single day, but younger students would do well to slow down and read ll. 503-856 (the discussion of Jankyn) and ll. 857-1267 (the Tale) on two separate days.

Both the language and the concepts are hard, and benefit from slow, careful reading. In the post below, I will share my strategies for opening up the Prologue and the Tale to student discussion.

The opening words discuss experience and authority: what kind of experience does she offer?  What is “authority” in this context? 

 What can we glean that the authorities are saying? Against whom does she position herself?

• That people should not remarry because it is a sin: bigamy, adultery, etc.? (lines 9-34)
• That women especially should not remarry? (lines 35-46)
• That male-authored “learning” about marriage through the bible is somehow better than her own “learning” through actually participating in marriage? (47-50)
• That marriage is bad because only virginity is holy? (65-120)
• That “members of generation” were made primarily for purgation of urine and to tell males from females? (121-140)
• That sex itself is bad? (155-159)
• That men aught to have complete dominance over their wives? (160-168)

What is a clerk? The word "clerk" is derived from the Latin clericus meaning "cleric," i.e., clergyman.  In medieval courts, writing was mainly entrusted to clergy as most laymen couldn't read.  Nowadays, the word “clerk” can denote someone who works in an office and whose duties include record-keeping or correspondence.  In Chaucer’s time the word primarily meant "scholar" but it was still related to the word "cleric," a generic term used to describe the formal religious leadership within a given religion. 

If there is time, I like to discuss the ways that the Wife appropriates the methods of biblical exegesis that clerks practice.  I give students a handout on Ephesians 5 and 1 Corinthians 7, and then ask my students to think about what it means that she both quotes and misquotes the bible.

The Wife is masterful at taking biblical passages out of context.  To a student who is somewhat familiar with the bible, these passages will sound vaguely “right” but the Wife's excerpts are actually arguing something different from what the biblical passages say in their entirety.  The Wife does this to take a diametrically opposed stance to what most monks, priests, and clergy were saying about marriage and about women when they were using the exact same rhetorical strategy and quoting the exact same passages of the bible.  The effect at the time would have been startling… and perhaps it still is today.  In adopting this rhetorical strategy, the Wife draws attention to the power of preachers to shape someone’s larger, total understanding of the bible, particularly the types of relationships between men and women that the bible advocates. She's co-opting the clerks' text and their rhetorical tools.

What does this opening do for our understanding of the Wife’s character?  What kind of person does she seem like here?

The Wife provokes the anger of the Pardoner, who sarcastically calls her a “noble preachour” (171).  As a mock preacher, she is assuming a role normally reserved for men: “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet” (1 Timothy 2:11-12).  She, however, casts aside this criticism very gently by saying that her intent is only to play (198).

Where does the wife seem playful and where does she seem serious?  Are there places in her prologue where she seems angry, sad, flirtatious, funny, etc? 

There is then a long, long passage (her discussion of her "good" husbands and also the first of her "bad" husbands) wherein she seems to be an amalgamation of every bad quality that men fear in women: gold-digging, lying, cheating, manipulative, loud-mouthed, unruly, etc. She also falsely paints herself as the "victim" of their drunken, anti-feminist tirades in order to win pity from them that she doesn't deserve (although she uses language from real antifeminist books, so the language is convincing to them). What do you make of this portrait? Why does Chaucer do this? Does this section perhaps undermine the presentation of the wife that we saw as she was positioning women against clerks? Why or why not?

In the transition to discussing her fifth husband Jankyn, she gives some details that are easy to miss: ll. 509-520. Her ribs continually ache because of his “shrewish” behavior to her, and he "beat her every bone" or violently abused her (which apparently did not diminished their great sex life).  These details point to a pun in the word “dangerous” when she says, “I trowe I loved him best for that he / Was of his love daungerous to me” (519-520). 

The OED defines the word "dangerous" according to the following definitions:
Difficult or awkward to deal with; haughty, arrogant; rigorous, hard, severe (current at the time of Chaucer’s writing, c. 1386)

1. Reluctant to give, accede or comply (current c. 1386)
2. Fraught with danger or risk; causing or occasioning danger; perilous, hazardous, risky, unsafe (first record of this sense is 1490, this is the current sense of the word)

The second sense is the one that is the best fit for this passage because the Wife goes on to say that women always want sex when their husbands deny them; however, the first sense (a closer definition to our modern definition) could work as well.  When he was violent with her she was the most aroused by him. 

What does this troubling passage do for our understanding of the Wife’s character? 

• Does it mirror the earlier passages, wherein she appeared to be in total control of her husbands, but was only posing?  Does it soften the anti-feminist pastiche? 
• Does it instead make her seem like an abused housewife, and perhaps portray another side to a well-rounded anti-feminist portrait (i.e., that women "want" to be dominated and hurt)? 
• Does Chaucer seem to give voice to real sadness here that her husband’s anti-feminist literature produces real violence against women?

As she explains that Jankyn was a clerk at Oxford, she laments the misogynist book he reads and she says that it is impossible that any clerk will speak well of good wives.  They only praise the martyred female saints (overwhelmingly virgins).  She references a tale from Aesop that has to deal with the bias of the person recording an event, and argues that if women had written stories as prolifically as clerks then there would be just as many stories hold men accountable for their sins as there are stories about wicked women. 

This point perhaps goes to the ideas inherent in the second wave of feminism: in the long scope of history, women have not been permitted to enter the public sphere through their writing.  The Wife seems to make a similar argument, that her culture has silenced women's voices and only allows one side of the story to be told: that the male gender is superior in virtue and that a clerical life of virginity is better than a secular life of marriage. 

The section from 720-793 recounts the anti-feminist stories and proverbs that Jankyn reads to her from his book.  This section balances out all the reported speeches that her “good” husbands supposedly tell her in their drunkenness.  Whereas before she postured like a victim of verbal abuse to arouse shame and guilt in her husbands with the intention of using that guilt to control them, now the wife really is a victim of her husband’s verbal abuse.

• Why does Chaucer include this section?  How are the charges Jankyn lays against women perhaps more damning than the charges that the Wife pretends to have suffered at the hands of her "good" husbands?  It seems to me that in this section, Jankyn asserts that women are not capable of love, and that they have no worth.  The sections above don’t paint women as violent things to be shunned as much as it paints them as manipulative creatures to treat with suspicion... Do you agree? Or are they equally as bad?
  
• Why is her heart filled with woe and pain at this diatribe whereas she was filled with a type of glee at her husbands’ complete willingness to believe that they would have actually said all the anti-feminist things that she claims they said?

The tale of the fight they have over the book: ll.794-828; Now this entire prologue seems to be about texts, sources, books, and clerks.  It is about who gets to write, who literally puts words in other people’s mouths, and who is not allowed to write. It is perfectly fitting that the fight is over a book and not, for example, over clothing or land.  How might the escalation of violence over this book be a metaphor or a symbol?  How do the two get over the fight, anyway? Is this realistic? Is it a fantasy or a nightmare?

This tale is in the genre of an Arthurian romance.  Here are some of the key characteristics of medieval romances:

• The reason that they are call “romances” is because the first ones in the genre were written in the vernacular (French, Spanish, and other romance languages) instead of in Latin.  Even though Arthur is a figure out of British legend, stories about him were popular in continental Europe as well.
• They usually deal with quests, and often a knight goes on a quest with the intention of either winning or rescuing a lady.  Because romantic love was a common theme in these stories, we developed our word romance (in its modern sense) from these stories. 
• In any case, the quest is a type of journey he undergoes to learn about virtue and defeat vice.  There is a definite sense of good and evil in the world, a kind of black-and-white mentality. 
• The monsters the hero fights are oftentimes outward projections of inward struggles to remain virtuous (i.e., a hero lies because he fears that he will die when he is put to the trial, and then all of a sudden he encounters a sly fox in a hunting scene; the “sneakiness” associated with the fox is something the hero has to encounter in his own psyche).  The metaphorical and allegorical nature of romance allows the genre to explore the inner psychological or spiritual states of the heroes.
• The stories dealt with chivalry.  Arthur’s court had a reputation as the most-famous center of chivalry in pre-history Europe.
• Arthur supposedly existed during the brief period of time after the Romans left England but before the Anglo-Saxons took over.  He was supposedly a “Briton,” a member of the original people inhabiting the British Isles.  Stories about Arthur, told after the Norman invasion, look far back in time (~900 years).  The genre of romance is always a nostalgic form that looks back to golden days.
• In most cases, romance as a genre is akin to fairy tales: the protagonist is not a god or a demi-god, but rather a human being who has strength, determination, or virtue that is beyond the scope of most humans.  He encounters mystical forces or monsters.  This genre is not meant to be realistic.

Why do you think Chaucer gives the Wife a fairy-tale type story? 

• Perhaps to undermine the Wife’s thesis? The ending of her prologue reads a little bit like a fairy tale (and then we lived “happily ever after”).  Does the genre of her story re-enforce a reader’s skepticism that giving women “mastery” can somehow bring about happiness in marriage?
• Perhaps to nuance the Wife’s thesis? Does the Hag represent the Wife?  Does it seem like the Wife’s fears (male aggression, male rejection, etc.) are perhaps valid?  After all, the knight that rapes the maiden at the beginning clearly does need to be reformed in some way; even King Arthur sees the necessity of punishing the knight for his action.  The Old Hag gets the mastery only to surrender it again to her husband.  Perhaps her thesis is more about curbing aggressive male dominance than it is about advocating female supremacy? What do you think?

It is worthwhile to compare and contrast the tale to the prologue, especially comparing the Wife to the Loathly Lady in the story. Is this story wish fulfillment for her? How does this Tale contribute to our investigation about whether or not Chaucer feels sympathy or revulsion for his character? This is a good time to go back to those BIG questions from the beginning of the post.

I think this lesson plan is not only important for investigating Chaucer and his most canonical pilgrim, but also important given the events of the past month at UC Santa Barbara. Whether or not this prologue and tale are proto-feminist or anti-feminist, we can turn our pedagogy of the text into a method for teaching young students about feminism and about gender. There is obviously still an urgent need for such instruction.