Chaucer's women in The Canterbury Tales do not suffer, are not betrayed and usually prevail, even if at great cost. The Tales are the site of comedy, a collection where rough justice, as in the Miller's and Reeve's fabliaux and the Merchant's tale, prevails; where suffering and struggle are rewarded, if only in part, by a degree of happiness, as in the Man of Law's and Second Nun's tales; where tragedie is repudiated in favor of tales of ‘joye and greet solas’. These are comic tales in the tradition of medieval comedy, which Lee Patterson has argued focuses on character: ‘it seeks to represent men and women not in terms of their social existence but as individuals’. The women of the tales represent a wide variety of personalities, dilemmas and triumphs. Alisoun in ‘The Miller's Tale’ is the only character at the end of the tale to escape injury or insult. Maleyne in ‘The Reeve's Tale’ is described as so happy with the adventures of the previous dark night that as the dawn begins she gives her father's ‘treasure’ of a ‘cake of half a bushel’ of meal, stolen from the clerks, to Aleyn. Custance, besieged by mothers-in-law, false charges, rapists and single motherhood, finds her way home to her husband, her father and to Rome. In ‘The Shipman's Tale’ the merchant's wife not only finds the sexual satisfaction her husband seems to have been too busy to provide, but also gains the money that circulates between her husband and the monk.