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Attitudes Toward Marriage In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

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Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, demonstrate many different attitudes and perceptions towards marriage. Some of these ideas are very traditional. . "Marriage in Chaucer’s time meant a union between spirit and flesh and was thus part of the marriage between Christ and the Church". The Canterbury Tales show many abuses of this sacred bond. To have a good marriage you need a lot more than looks. You have to want to make it work, love each other, and be faithful. The Wife of Bath’s speak to the problems that happen when couples have a big difference in age. The knight is forced to marry a woman who is “foul and old and pore” by her own admission. Luckily for him, his wife chooses to magically transform into a maiden was “so fair and was so …show more content…

She thinks she knows everything about marriage and not one person can tell her different. She does not follow the bible's example of only marrying once, nor does she heed his reproach to the woman at the well with five husbands. Instead, the Wife of Bath interprets Scripture in her own way. She prefers to go forth and multiply, defending her position by pointing to King Solomon, who had many wives, among other Biblical figures who married often. Of her five husbands, the Wife of Bath says, three were good and two were bad. The first three were good because they were rich, old, and obedient to her every whim. She always told husband two that she dreamt of him in her sleep. Once they had given her their money and land, she no longer had any use for them. She would make her husbands bring her presents and put them through torments. The Wife of Bath does not have good marriages because she is very selfish. She will marry anyone as long as it will benefit her. The major gain of marriage, for the Wife of bath is the marriage debt, or sex, which is why she's so strongly in favor of marriage. She also is all about marriage because appears the ability to gain property, wealth, and a comfortable living situation through a husband. The Wife Of Bath is constantly lying to all five of the husbands she has

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In the second-to-last stanza, it appears that the woman had decided that the knight had fully learned his lesson, and they were able to have a happy relationship. The last stanza seems to be an ideal that the Wife of Bath holds. Instead of wives being, “meek and young and fresh in bed,” the Wife of Bath wishes for men to be held to that same standard. She also prays that any man who, “won’t be governed by their wives” to be killed, meaning that she wants men to hold the same amount of respect for their romantic partner as anyone else, otherwise they should be punished. These stanzas offer a satisfying conclusion, while also adding in the Wife of Bath’s ideas of gender equality and respect.

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Chaucer characterizes The Wife of Bath as controlling and powerful. The Wife of Bath was a complete contradiction of the typical female, during this time. The average woman was submissive and reserved. Whereas, The Wife of Bath possessed character traits that one would associate with men. Chaucer emphasizes this trait by describing her in such ways one would describe a man.

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She held herself up as a strong woman who could do what she wanted. The Wife of Bath was a cloth maker (high quality) of the middle class who had done very well at her job. She was known as being a business woman and very knowledgeable; wore colorful clothes and scarlet stocking shoes, and is a church goer. The woman has a specific figure that includes wide hips, skinny legs, and a gapped tooth also meaning she was “over-sexed”. The Wife of Bath travels plenty and has visited Jerusalem, Rome, Spain, Cologne, and Boulogne, and rides horses.

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In the Wife of Bath’s, she broke all the stereotypes Medieval society thought a wife is. She tells the people that being married intercourse is part of marriage and God has made privates parts to make generations, not to waste in doing nothing. Being categorized or stereotyped in Medieval society was hard for married women in the Medieval era because often they were portrayed as disloyal, uncontrolled sexual beasts because of the lack of marriage

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In addition to the fire scene, once the knight and she are married she gives a second appearance of an enchantress. The Wife of Bath makes an offer to the knight. She tells him she can be beautiful and unfaithful or stay ugly and remain faithful forever. The knight tells her to be whatever she pleases, which was the right thing to say! When he gave her authority over him, she transformed into a beautiful girl who will also be faithful.

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The Wife of Bath’s behaviors are questionable but are inherently aided by the social injustices that face women of this time period. The Wife of Bath discloses that for her first three marriages she sought out older wealthy men for sex and money. Her intentions included making her husbands fall in love with her and then making them have enormous amounts of sex until they die. In addition, the wife elaborates on her occasional tumultuous tirades of accusing her husbands of being unfaithful to her. Her uproars chided her husbands into persistently obliging into her every request.

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The Canterbury Tales is a book filled with different tales, 29 stories to be exact. These tales are all different and have their own storyline. The Wife of Bath being one of these. It all begins with a knight who sexually assaults a young lady and for this event is told to find what it is that women most desire. Desperate in finding the answer, he makes a deal with an old lady he encounters to get his answer in exchange of doing whatever the old lady may please.

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At the time, it was proper to be monogamous, and if not in a relationship, chaste. However, the Wife of Bath was anything but chaste. She was very promiscuous and had five husbands, all of which ended in divorce, which was also looked down upon. The Wife of Bath’s promiscuity and appearance exemplifies the defiance of the Medieval value of

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The Wife of Bath however, explained how she loved to have sex, whether it was for money or just to have it. She expressed how she would rather leave being a virgin to the perfect ones. This made the medieval churches view her as a “wicked women,” and she was proud of it. She believed that the “imperfect” should be able to use their gifts as best as they could, and her gift happened to be her sexual power. She used this power as an “instrument” to control her

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Jean-Paul Sartre and Soren Kierkegaard are two widely known existentialists who agree on many of the main principles of existentialism, but also disagree on several of the finer details. For example, they both agree that what matters most is action. What a person actually does is what defines the person, and the process of defining one’s self never ceases. By comparing and contrasting how they portray the emotion of anguish - specifically, in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Sartre’s The Humanism of Existentialism – we see another example of the two agreeing on some principles while disagreeing on others.

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Geoffrey Chaucer is one of the best writers of the earlier centuries and is right up there with Shakespeare, his Canterbury tales is one of his greatest works ever and the stories told in it are very innovative for his time. The one story I really enjoyed more was the wife of bath, the way she is a self-proclaimed authority of marriage since she has married more than once. She reminded me of the show “The real house wives of Orange County” and how the wife of bath has the same habits of marrying rich men but at the same time making claims about how marriage works. The real house wives are a modern counterpart to the wife of bath and I think if Chaucer was born in our own era he would have been very different and able to express some of his stories in a better or different way.

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The Wife of Bath is displayed as strong, independent, and unconcerned with any social standards she may or may not be held to. When explaining the Wife of Bath Chaucer details,“Bold was her face, and handsome; florid too. She had been respectable all her life, And five times married, that’s to say in church, Not counting other loves she’d had in youth”(Chaucer 14). Multiple clothing items add onto her attitude of self-determination and power, as she is described as wearing a hat that resembled a shield, and sharp spurs on her feet (Chaucer 15). With the Wife of Bath being described as a mistress with multiple husbands, one would expect her to be characterized as a scheming harlot that men should be wary of (as was common in medieval misogynist tales).

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1060 Words | 5 Pages

In the fourteen century, men were always the superior, head of the household, the breadwinner, but women were always inferior, they would stay at home, do the house work, cook, and never would have a job. Well, times have changed. Women are reaching an equal status to men in political, social and economic matters It’s part of the idea called Feminism. In many ways the Wife of Bath displays many characteristic of women in the 21st century. Instead of being directed by men, she views herself as an independent person.

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The Wife of Bath: An Analysis of Her Life and Her Tale The Wife of Bath’s Prologue stays consistent with the facts that experience is better than the societal norms, specifically those instilled by the church leadership. Chaucer uses the Wife of Bath to display the insanity of the church, but through switching and amplifying their view of men and chastity onto the opposite gender. The church doctrine at the time held celibacy in an idolized manner, forgetting the inability for humans to ever reach perfection, or live up to this standard. They also did not hold women in a high regard at all, again this is where Chaucer flips the role, as the Wife of Bath describes her five marriages in her prologue, essentially describing each as a conquest, where the result is her having all control.

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608 Words | 3 Pages

However, the Wife of Bath is described in the prologue as being independent because she travels on her own and “[knows] much of wandering by the way” (467). In her tale, the wife says, “women most desire… sovereignty/ [over] their husbands or the ones they love” (1038-1039). Based on her label as wife, readers

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