The Wife of Bath

The hag is by all accounts the idealized version of the wife of Bath. The Wife wants control over her husbands, and most likely does not get what she wants from every husband, and the hag gets what she wants from the beginning. Even though the Wife claims to have had sovereignty over her husbands she slips when telling her tale and informs us that she wishes an early death to those men whom do not let their wives gain suprem... ... middle of paper ... ... the tale truly mirrors the Wife’s own life the knight better watch his back of he to will be dead soon. The parallels that have been presented show that there are not just similarities in the tale and the Wife’s life, the prologue and the tale are the real and the ideal way that the Wife sees her world. She, like many women of her time and ours, wants control over her husbands and will do what it takes to gain it.

She explains more than anything, the thing women desire the most is the position to have complete dominance over their husbands. In the prologue, she talks about how she talks about how she succeeded in all her marriages. During Chaucer’s time, women were classified as closely the character of a monster. They were not allowed to participate in church and were characterized as unsuitable. Being that the wife of bath was married more than once, people have begun to sense suspect; because back in Chaucer’s time, if a woman was to be married for the second time was deemed untrustworthy.

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath presents a woman’s view on the institution of marriage. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue presents her experience of marriage as an economic exchange of sex for wealth. Alison explains her sex lifestyle within her marriages and how she retains control over her many husbands, thus enabling her to carry out her tale’s message that in marriage, women should have dominion. Her reproach starts when the husband has absolute authority and her greatest unhappiness lies in the moments where her power is threatened. In The Wife of Bath the character shows the qualities of power, lust and unfaithfulness in her marriages.

Desdemona and Emilia can be perceived as a foil to each other because of their different beliefs for women’s roles in marriage. Her obedience toward her husband causes her to steal the handkerchief and give it to Iago, so he can falsely set Cassio up with it. Without Emilia, Shakespeare could not have exposed his view on women’s roles and marriage, and the storyline for his tragic play Othello could not have been achieved. Works Cited Shakespeare, William. Othello.

The Wife of Bath is a clear emblem of believing that both genders are in battle with each other when it comes to marriage. She rejects religious teachings that women should submit to men, but rather, ‘that men shall yielde to his wyf his dette’ and this ‘dette’ is that she will use sex to dominate her husbands as he must pay the marriage ‘dette’ in bed. This is clear evidence of the Wife being a figure of revolutionary ideas by rejecting the idea of submission, however, an alternative interpretation is that the character of the wife of actually succumbs to

They loved singing and dancing with each other and had loads of fun with each other. Unfortunately, just as she almost gains complete control over her fourth husband, he dies. Her fifth and last husband was Jankyn. She loved him even ... ... middle of paper ... ...ife’s basis of her theories about experience versus authority and to initiate the main point she portrays in her tale: The thing women most desire is complete “sovereignty” over their husbands. Since the Wife has had five husbands, she feels that she can verbalize with authority from this experience.

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.

The Wife of Bath challenges patriarchal power by demonstrating the relativity of authority and persuading others to regard the validity of experience. According to Cixous, “nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason … it has been one with the phallocentric tradition” (879). In other w... ... middle of paper ... ...ptions of women and their roles as wives. Rather than opposing binary oppositions, she engages with them, using skilful language and exploiting her sex in order to disprove patriarchal thought. In particular, the Wife argues for experience over authority, demonstrating the biases that coincide with authoritative scripture and doctrine.

I feel Chaucer is showing how important the Wife of Bath needs a man in her life not only to control but also for her own personal fulfillment. Chaucer uses the female characters to show the type of lady that was trying to change her status but inside felt the same womanly feelings and emotions as any other. Although she wants to be in control over her husbands she realizes the importance of them in her life but is reluctant to emit this. Chaucer uses her clothes to show her strong-minded character. He takes the female gender and combines real character traits of most women a long with some more uncommon traits and places them in the female characters of this tale.

The Wife of Bath recognizes that the key to survival for a fourteenth century woman is marriage, as shown in her having had five husbands and being married at the age of twelve. The Wife of Bath is also not what a wife should be. She torments her husbands by denying them sex until she gets what she wants, which is land and money. When she does sleep with them, it always means "nothing," but for the older husbands it means their lives (Chaucer 224). The Wife of Bath, in her mind, has the right to deny sex because it is she who hold the "'power of his body' not he" (Chaucer 223).