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Geoff rey Chaucer
her, as she represents the knight in a process of change that mirrors
the crone’s metamorphosis. Th e knight’s transformation succeeds at
“tricking” the Wife’s (and, by extension, Chaucer’s) audience as long
as they perceive this as a likely conclusion representative of a “coming
into his true self,” a process Marina Warner identifi es in her analysis
of Apulius’s Golden Ass as “the ultimate goal of such a concept of
metamorphosis” (Warner 89). To this extent, the crone’s message,
fi rst whispered in the knight’s ear and then fi ltered through layers of
listeners, tricks all who hear it and, perhaps momentarily, moves them
to affi rm that it is the right answer to the queen’s question as well as a
suitable penalty for the knight’s initial transgression.
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