How Far Does "The Wife of Bath" Conform to Medieval Female Stereotypes?

The Wife of Bath is, without a doubt, one of the most carefully studied characters in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and certainly one of the most seemingly contradictory. She has been described as both proto-feminist and a stereotype of Medieval misogynist ideas. This controversy has perhaps arisen due to a confusion over the definition of Medieval female stereotypes, namely how women are perceived to act, and how those stereotypes differ from Medieval ideals about how women should act in order to be deemed moral by society. Indeed, some commentators have seemed to see no distinction between the two, and therefore claim that the Wife of Bath, as a character, serves as a negation of St. Jerome and Theophrastus' antifeminist ideas of what constitutes medieval stereotypes of women. The Wife of Bath, it is clear, lives up to few, if any, of the ideals held by medieval society, in particular the Church, concerning how women should behave. This essay, however, will aim to show how she in fact does live up to many of the stereotypes concerning women and thus reinforces, rather than challenges them.

The Wife of Bath, in both her lengthy prologue and her tale, makes clear that she believes that the main aim and desire of women is to gain control and mastery over men:

wommen desiren to have sovereyntee As wel over hir housbond as hir love, And for to been in maistrie hym above.

(Pearsall 1999, 138, 1038)

In her prologue, in which she gives accounts of her five marriages, the Wife gives many examples of how she achieves this mastery over her husbands. She aims constantly to gain points over her spouses and one of the ways in which she does this is by frequently falsely accusing them of misdemeanours, or making...

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... ideals. She boasts about the fact that she has had many sexual partners and proudly tells her fellow pilgrims about her manipulative, competitive approach to marriage. In these ways she turns misogynist male determinations, such as that of Jerome regarding the image of a wife as a pinching shoe, into female statements of power. She has no problem with directly comparing men and women and makes no secret of the fact that her primary goal in life is to gain mastery over men. She seems a character who is proud to rebel against the ideals expected of her, and who is fighting against the notion that the stereotypes generally pinned on her sex are in some way morally wrong. It is precisely this battling which renders the Wife of Bath a feminist icon and has led many critics to view her as a groundbreaking character in terms of changing the way females were viewed.