Chaucer's Wife of Bath is the most fully and vividly realized of the characters in The Canterbury Tales and her lengthy Prologue and brief Tale have a force and vitality that derive from the perfect integration of character and message. The Wife's account of her own life and her tale are both, seemingly, directed toward establishing the principle that happiness in marriage results from the woman's "mastery" over her husband. Nearly everything she says runs counter to theological authority, ecclesiastical preaching, and conventional social notions regarding the relations between men and women. This has led everyone from Chaucer's fictional Clerk to many twentieth-century scholars to conclude that the Wife's opinions are heretical and shockingly unconventional. But her clash with the religious and social conventions of her own era was probably not so shocking as, superficially, it seems to be.
The Wife of Bath's autobiography and her tale are exaggerated in comic fashion and she warns, after all, that her "entente nys but for to pleye" (190). Although there is a very serious side to everything that she says, it hardly seems reasonable to assume that the Wife of Bath is actually advocating the complete overturn of all conventional notions of marriage in a fashion that would mean that men would simply become as miserable as women were under the old rules. But she is intent on contrasting the wisdom of experience (that is, a genuine knowledge of what actually happens in marriage) with the barrenness (and, frequently, malice) of the theological and social underpinnings of conventional views of marriage which not only promise misery for many women but have little practical relevance for marriage in the real world because, as the...
... middle of paper ...
...racter Chaucer presented the point of view of a woman who actually experienced marriage and, as such, this is a radical innovation in and of itself.
Works Cited
Aers, David. Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980.
Carruthers, Mary. "The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions." PMLA 94 (1979): 209-22.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. Daniel Cook. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1961.
Kittredge, George Lyman. "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage." PMLA 9 (1911-12). http://icg.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/ canttales/franklin/marriage.html
Lee, Brian S. "Exploitation and Excommunication in 'The Wife of Bath's Tale.'" Philological Quarterly 74 (1996): 17-35.
Shoaf, R. A. Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in late Medieval Poetry. Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1983.
The use of euphemism and crudeness in “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” is simultaneously unnerving and amusing, and begs the question of how a “wicked” woman like The Wife could ever actually progress in medieval society. Chaucer incorporates subtle allusions to female sexual organs and it is this bluntness (that would raise eyebrows even today) which establishes the Wife as such a powerfully outspoken character. Because courtship in Chaucer’s time was considered worthy of complete submission, the fact that the Wife places such emphasis on domination and even psychological power hints at her being an object of irony (and not a feminist figure “before her time”). It is for this reason that Chaucer’s delicate use of “queynte”- a term from which
Toswell, M.J. "Chaucer's Pardoner, Chaucer's World, Chaucer's Style: Three Approaches to Medieval Literature." College Literature 28.3 (2001): 155. Literature Resource Center. Web. 25 Feb. 2011.
Boardman, Phillip C. "Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400)." Enduring Legacies: Ancient and Medieval Cultures. 6th ed. Boston: Pearson Custom Pub., 2000. 430-54. Print.
Herman, John P. and John J. Burke, Jr., ed. Signs and Symbols in Chaucer's Poetry. University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1981.
Many critics throughout the years have given the Wife of Bath a title of that of a feminist. She is a strong-willed and dominant woman who gets what she wants when she wants it, by manipulating her husbands into feeling bad for things that they didn’t do, or by saying things that put them to utter shame. No man has ever been able to give an exact answer when she asks to know how many husbands a woman may have in her life...
"The Wife of Bath's Tale." The Canterbury Tales. New York: Viking, 2009. . Web. Jan. & Feb.
Leicester, Jr., H. Marshall. "Public and Private Feminism in the Wife of Bath's Tale." Women's Studies 11.1-2 (1985): 157-78.
In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, a reader is introduced to a rather bizarre and heterogeneous group of people leaving for a pilgrimage. The Wife of Bath is the most interesting and lively character of the group. Her "Prologue" and "Tale" provide readers with a moral lesson as well as comic relief. The Wife's "Prologue" serves as an overture to her "Tale", in which she states a very important point regarding the nature of women and their most sacred desires. According to this character, women desire sovereignty, or power, over their men most in the world. This wish seems to be most appropriate for women of the time period in which Chaucer lived. However, women today no longer wish to dominate their men - sovereignty of women over men is not relevant in the twenty-first century. The reason is that women are no longer deprived of power and freedom.
...equality in a marriage because that is the only way that marriage can last forever. Unlike her "Prologue," the Wife of Bath's "Tale" describes balance in a marriage. A hag is married to a knight and she asks him if he wants her to be old, ugly and faithful or young, beautiful, and unfaithful. He tells her to choose, which gives her the sovereignty. The hag then turns into a beautiful woman, and they live happily ever after. Although in her "Tale," it shows that both people should be considerate of each other in a marriage, in her "Prologue," the Wife of Bath seems dominant instead of concerns for her husbands.
One of the most interesting and widely interpreted characters in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is the Wife of Bath. She has had five different husbands and openly admits to marrying the majority of them for their money. The wife appears to be more outspoken and independent than most women of medieval times, and has therefore been thought to symbolize the cause of feminism; some even refer to her as the first actual feminist character in literature. Readers and scholars probably argue in favor of this idea because in The Canterbury Tales, she uniquely gives her own insight and opinions on how relations between men and women should be carried out. Also, the meaning of her tale is that virtually all women want to be granted control over themselves and their relationship with their husbands, which seems to convince people that the Wife of Bath should be viewed as some sort of revolutionary feminist of her time. This idea, however, is incorrect. The truth is that the Wife of Bath, or Alisoun, merely confirms negative stereotypes of women; she is deceitful, promiscuous, and clandestine. She does very little that is actually empowering or revolutionary for women, but instead tries to empower herself by using her body to gain control over her various husbands. The Wife of Bath is insecure, cynical towards men in general, and ultimately, a confirmation of misogynistic stereotypes of women.
Mandell, Jerome. Geoffrey Chaucer : building the fragments of the Canterbury tales. N.J. : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992.
In the Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Chaucer illustrates the different perspective between men and women on the concept of marriage and love. In The Wife of Bath’s tale, it is shown the woman appreciating marriage and wanting to be able to love a man unconditionally as where in The Miller’s Tale, love isn’t anything, but sex with the man in the story. In accordance with Chaucer, the complication with marriage is that men are consumed by sexual desire and are easily abused by women like The Wife of Bath. As noticed, The Miller’s Tale is all about adultery. “Just like men, the wives have secrets, as does God”, says the Miller. Both have information that the other do not know about that are sacred and better left unsaid.
Chaucer, in his female pilgrimage thought of women as having an evil-like quality that they always tempt and take from men. They were depicted as untrustworthy, selfish and vain and often like caricatures not like real people at all. Through the faults of both men and women, Chaucer showed what is right and wrong and how one should live. Under the surface, however, lies a jaded look of women in the form that in his writings he seems to crate them as caricatures and show how they cause the downfall of men by sometimes appealing to their desires and other times their fears. Chaucer obviously had very opinionated views of the manners and behaviours of women and expressed it strongly in The Canterbury Tales. In his collection of tales, he portrayed two extremes in his prospect of women. The Wife of Bath represented the extravagant and lusty woman where as the Prioress represented the admirable and devoted followers of church. Chaucer delineated the two characters contrastingly in their appearances, general manners, education and most evidently in their behaviour towards men. Yet, in the midst of disparities, both tales left its readers with an unsolved enigma.
Huppé, Bernard F. "Rape and Woman's Sovereignty in the Wife of Bath's Tale." Modern Language Notes 63.6 (1948): 378-81. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Rigby, Stephen Henry. (2000). The Wife of Bath, Christine de Pizan, and the Medieval Case for Women. Chaucer Review, (pgs 133-165)