Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - The Incredible Wife of Bath's Tale

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - The Incredible Wife of Bath's Tale

In reading Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," I found that of

the Wife of Bath, including her prologue, to be the most thought-provoking.

The pilgrim who narrates this tale, Alison, is a gap-toothed, partially

deaf seamstress and widow who has been married five times. She claims to

have great experience in the ways of the heart, having a remedy for

whatever might ail it. Throughout her story, I was shocked, yet pleased to

encounter details which were rather uncharacteristic of the women of

Chaucer's time. It is these peculiarities of Alison's tale which I will

examine, looking not only at the chivalric and religious influences of this

medieval period, but also at how she would have been viewed in the context

of this society and by Chaucer himself.

During the period in which Chaucer wrote, there was a dual concept

of chivalry, one facet being based in reality and the other existing mainly

in the imagination only. On the one hand, there was the medieval notion we

are most familiar with today in which the knight was the consummate

righteous man, willing to sacrifice self for the worthy cause of the

afflicted and weak; on the other, we have the sad truth that the human

knight rarely lived up to this ideal(Patterson 170). In a work by Muriel

Bowden, Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, she explains that

the knights of the Middle Ages were "merely mounted soldiers, . . .

notorious" for their utter cruelty(18). The tale Bath's Wife weaves

exposes that Chaucer was aware of both forms of the medieval soldier.

Where as his knowledge that knights were often far from perfect is

evidenced in the beginning of Alison's tale where the "lusty" soldier rapes

a young maiden; King Arthur, whom the ladies of the country beseech to

spare the life of the guilty horse soldier, offers us the typical

conception of knighthood.

In addition to acknowledging this dichotomy of ideas about chivalry,

Chaucer also brings into question the religious views of his time through

this tale. The loquacious Alison spends a good deal of the prologue

espousing her views regarding marriage and virginity, using her knowledge

of the scriptures to add strength to her arguments. For instance, she