Foreshadowing In The Wife Of Bath's Tale

In lines 445-76 of the General Prologue in The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer uses characterization, contrast and euphemisms in order to create foreshadowing for the Wife of Bath's tale later on.

The narrator begins this passage with the characterization of the Wife of Bath, meaning the character is introduced and the audience is provided with a description of them that gives a sense of the character's traits either directly through the author or indirectly through the character's actions or thoughts. Chaucer describes the Wife of Bath as "somdel deef" meaning that she is heard of hearing and "of clooth-making she hadde swich an haunt" meaning that she has worked as a cloth maker (446-447). This establishes that she is most likely an older woman as well as a member of the peasant class given that she has had a career in which she has worked at long enough to gain a high degree of skill and since religious leaders and knights would not have had to earn their living by doing manual labour. Already, Chaucer is implying as to the nature of the wife's tale through his account of her given that comedic stories often centred around peasants due to the fact that they were permitted to be less dignified than the nobles. He also goes on to inform the readers of the wife's past before joining the pilgrimage, imparting that "housbondes at

Here a potentially romantic element is introduced to the wife's tale though perhaps not in the typical sense. A widowed woman who remarried at all,