Chaucer's Gender Role to BBC's Race

Every story can undergo a certain kind of adaptation. Sometimes a story can be translated from different languages and sometimes it can adapt into a whole other interpretation. An example of literature’s many adaptations is between Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Man of Law’s Tale” and BBC’s “Man of Law’s Tale”. Both the literature and media stories follow a young girl named Custance or Constance, who has a strong Christian faith and overcomes many hardships in her life. Although the literature and media keep a faithful tradition to many themes, the media adaptation opens up a perspective with the race and origin of the story.

In the literature, Custance leaves her Christian home in Rome and plans to wed a Muslim Sultan in Syria. From this point on, Custance faces the hardships of death, suffering, religion, lies, and even femininity. To follow the fashion of a hagiography, Custance never whines or complains about her suffering, she keeps her faith strong and believes that God is always with her. Custance in many ways is a saint because she inflicted her beliefs and faith on those who did not believe. Custance attempted to convert the Muslims in Syria and successfully converted the Northumberlands from paganism to Christianity. Lies played a very active theme with Custance in the sense she was the intended victim, but those lies are shown the light in the end. Finally, Custance’s femininity is exemplified through her passive nature, in all if a woman tries to command her own fate, she is unfeminine in the eyes of the world. Chaucer’s tale in literature provides not only a context on medieval times, it gives a context on how women were put into a gender role and the rules they were meant to follow, which was ultimately them getting married and doing what they were told.

In BBC’s adaptation of “Man of Law’s Tale”, the writer remains true to the traditions of the story, 

but in some cases represents it’s own text. Yes, the media shows the story of a young, beautiful girl 

who grasps her faith and accepts life’s hardships. However, BBC fits the story’s timeline to fit a more 

modernized issue, which puts a focus on race. Constance, a nigerian refugee, who escapes from her 

invaded home, and ends up in England where she suffers from trauma and blacks out from time to 

time. Constance is true to her faith and in times where she is victimized, the truth reveals itself.  

Although conversion does not play a larger role in BBC’s Constance, femininity and race take hold of the story. Women, in present day, curve their own paths and create a standard that blurs the line of femininity, like Constance kissing Alan which was considered out of line for a woman back in time or even in Nigeria, people would talk about Constance’s pregnancy being impure and shameful. But when it comes down to adaptation, BBC’s contemporary media changed Constance’s race to highlight the prejudice in society and the struggles that refugees endure. Constance, being a female refugee, emphasized how women are judged for the choices they make or the perceptions people bestow on women. In all, one of the greatest comparison’s between BBC and Chaucer, both stories end with an irreducible uncertainty, which stays true to the Chaucerian tradition.