Contradictions in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale

The literary work : Geoffrey Chaucer’s tale The Wife of Bath’s Tale
The method : The symbolic code by Roland Barthes.

Symbolic code is linked to theme (of literary a work). It consists of pairings related to the most basic binary polarities-male and female, night and day, and so on. These are the structures of contrasted elements which structuralists see as fundamental to the human way of perceiving and organizing reality.

In this analysis, we try to look at the contrasts found in the text and relate them to the broader system.

The first contrast of the tale is between the king and the queen as the ‘controller’ and the knight as the ‘controlled’. In more modern concept, we call them the government and the civilians. The government have the authority to make rules. The rules must be obeyed by all the civilians. The knight accepted the sentence, willingly or not. He could not run anywhere. Although the knight was the part of governmental system, he is still a civilian. He had to obey the rule in the kingdom. At first, he was sentenced to lose his head by course of law, but the queen gave him a chance to live by giving him a ‘strange duty’. He was responsible, in the eyes of law, for what he had done. The queen was in position to give a punishment and she did her role.
Geoffrey Chaucer lived from 1340 to 1400. He did not know the concept of modern life. He did not know about governmental administration. But what he wrote shows the same pattern of people in community; there will be the ‘controller’ and the ‘controlled’.
Roles of ‘controller’

• make policies
• give the civilians (members) a more prosperous life
• keep order of the civilians

Roles of ‘controlled’

• As the doers in the circle of rules

One other example is the position of director and actress. A director is the one who determines the standard the actress’ acting- whether the acting is bad, good, or great. The director arranges precisely the actresses’ moves, styles, gesture, and mimicry. On the contrary, the actresses are in the circle of the rules made by the director. If their acting is bad, for example, the director will get angry. If they do good, they will get praise.
In the smaller form of these roles, for example, we find in a family. Parents are the policy determiners who determine how much money the children will get each day for school, determine the punishment given to children if they do wrong, e.g. embezzling their school fee, or determine the present given to children if they get good GPA. While the children role the reverse.
The same roles will be found in any parts of reality. You are the ‘controller’ when you are a manager, and the ‘controlled’ if you are a worker. You are the ‘controller’ if you are the principal, and the ‘controlled’ if you are a student. These roles, in conclusion, always exist as the result of interactions between individual and individual, individual and community, and community and community, especially when the interactions deal with space of authority.

The second contrast is found in the conversation between the knight and the old lady. One reason given by the knight for behaving badly to her is that the old lady was poor. As a knight, of course, he lived wealthier than the old lady who had no position in the system of the kingdom. Although at last the knight accepted the old lady as she was, but the first attitude of the knight toward poverty depicts the position of poor people amongst other people in society. How if the old lady is rich, will the knight accept her?
One other reason said by the knight is that she was old. The knight admired youth. Will the knight accept her if she was young?
The binary oppositions between poor and rich or old and young are inevitably facts. Then the ‘problem’ is in the appreciation towards them. Someone regarded as rich person will be respected, and someone regarded as poor person is not respected. In reality, those having characteristics that are appreciated by other people will place a ‘superior’ position while the reverse will be in ‘inferior’ position.
Usually one chases the things that are regarded as good according to the society, or according to what certain person says. If you feel that you are not beautiful, for example, you will try to be beautiful-since the society respects beauty or someone wants you to be beautiful. In this case, you are in the ‘inferior’ position. If you are regarded as beautiful, and the communities where you live value your beauty, then you are in the ‘superior’ position.
A student will try to get good score since teachers, parents, and friends value high score. Or if he or she is going to find a work, the score plays the role of the acceptance. Here, he/se is trying to reach ‘superiority’.

Some points of the ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ position;

• Those positions exist when one or a community values something highly.
• There will be a struggle to reach ‘superiority’
• Seldom is one wants to be in ‘inferiority’

The first contrast in the story is King and Queen. The time of the story is in the era of King Arthur. A knight who was about to be given supreme penalty by the law because of raping a woman, attracted the queen to take the law-meaning to give mercy or refuse. King Arthur agreed. Here, we can see that both king and queen have authority to control the law in a kingdom, like a judge in the court of a country. The decision was taken by the queen. She did not give supreme penalty at the time but exchanged it with another duty. The queen gave a chance to the knight to comprehend the meaning of life by asking him to find out what the thing that women most desire is. The most apparent thing can be seen as contrast, in short, is the way of giving punishment. The king argued to obey the rule but the queen saw human as ‘changing creature’. It shows that the queen was able to see a punishment as a process of humans to behave well.