The Wife Of Bath Analysis

In The Canterbury Tales, created by fourteenth century author Geoffrey Chaucer, society is described through literary elements such as tone, metaphors, and imagery. The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories that are told through different pilgrims who are on their way to Canterbury to pay homage to St. Thomas a Beckett. At the beginning of Chaucer 's collection of stories, he describes each of the pilgrims. One of the pilgrims that Chaucer describes is the Wife of Bath, and through his description of her the reader is able to find out about her appearance, background, and personality. Through Chaucer’s description of the Wife of Bath’s appearance through the use of imagery, it is suggested that the woman is finely and even ostentatiously …show more content…

He uses a sarcastic tone to illustrate how the Wife of Bath is a hypocrite because she has poor moral values while she tries to appear respectable. Chaucer sarcastically states that the Wife of Bath has been “respectable throughout her life/ With five churched husbands”(line #s). This statement is sarcastic because although the woman has been married properly through the Church, she has not been the most devout wife because she has been married five times. Therefore, even though Chaucer refers to her as “respectable” (line #) it can be interpreted that he does not really believe that she is because she has had multiple husbands. Chaucer is also shown to not expect much morality from the Wife of Bath because, when he mentions the woman’s love life when she was a young women, he states that of the “ other company in youth/. . . [T]here’s no need to speak, in truth” (line #). This statement suggest that not only has the Wife of Bath had many marriages, but she is also known to have had inumerous other romantic relationships with men when she was younger. Therefore, the Wife of Bath is portrayed as being promiscuous in her romantic life, which Chaucer appears not to value as a redeeming …show more content…

Chaucer describes the Wife of Bath as a very skilled and hardworking seamstress. According to Chaucer’s narration, “At making cloth she had so great a bent/ She bettered those of Ypres and even of / Gent” (line #). This statement from the narrator suggests that the Wife of Bath’s seamstress prowess were unusually superb. However, the tone of the narrator’s statement suggests that she is arrogant in her cloth making abilities. This appears to be the case because the fact that the narrator compared the Wife of Bath’s ability to seamstresses elsewhere suggests that she herself brags about being more skilled than those other