Wealth & Money Quote by Geoffrey Chaucer

Chaucer slips a social hand grenade into a joke and then watches it roll under the table. On its face, the line reads like a smug inventory of female “demands,” a medieval cousin of the modern listicle about what women “really want.” But the comedy is doing cover work for something sharper: an exposure of marriage as negotiation, not romance, and of male anxiety about who actually holds power inside it.

The first four wishes - brave, wise, rich, generous - sound like the public virtues of an ideal man, the kind that flatter a patriarchal order. Then Chaucer yanks the register into the private sphere: “obedient to wife” is the pivot, the moment the fantasy of male authority collapses into the feared reality of domestic submission. It’s funny because it’s taboo, and because it reveals the contradiction baked into courtly masculinity: men are asked to be commanding in the world and compliant at home, a psychic contortion that invites ridicule.

The final clause, “lively in bed,” lands with deliberate bluntness. Chaucer’s England didn’t lack for sexual candor, but putting performance alongside bravery and wisdom punctures the high-minded language men use to describe themselves. The subtext isn’t just that women have appetites; it’s that male status is fragile, judged in arenas men can’t fully control.

Context matters: Chaucer’s bawdier voices (especially in The Canterbury Tales) often belong to characters who weaponize “common sense” about gender to win arguments. The line works because it’s less a claim about women than a mirror held up to men’s fantasies, fears, and bargaining chips.