The Wife of Bath’s Tale is a King Arthur romance based on the theme of the frog prince, but, with an unlikely twist. A knight commits a wrongful deed and when he is caught, the king turns his punishment over to the queen. The queen decides that given the crime, the knight will have the challenge of answering the question “what is it that women desire?”. He has exactly one year and a day to find the answer to this question, which proves to be harder than he thought. Alas, when the day arrives, he is tested by marrying an old woman who gave him the answer to the queens question.
This mockery shows stereotypes in a humorous way in order to attempt to change the way human nature is towards women. The first sentence of the Wife of Bath shows the reader that she relays on experience rather than listening and learning.
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.
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
As he approaches they disappear, leaving just one elderly woman who teaches him what women truly want. The knight returns to answer the Queen, saying “‘My lige lady, generally,’ quod he,/‘Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee/ As wel over hir housbond as hir love, And for to been in maistrie hym above” (ll.1037-1040). This plays into the moral of the story; the Wife of Bath conveys to the listener that a woman’s happiness stems from her superiority over her husband in every respect. Later on in the tale, after the knight is miserably trapped in marriage with the elderly woman from the forest, she asks why he is so downcast, he replies, “Thou art so loothly, and so oold also,/ And therto comen of so lough a kynde” (ll.1100-11001).
Her actions do not fit the model visions a husband would have of a wife in the medieval times. In addition to the emotional and sexual abuse, the Wife of Bath sought
The Wife of Bath and her tale are the most similar out of all the tales because they both share a domineering outlook over others. In the general prologue she is told to have had five husbands and is described as a looker, “Her face was bold and handsome and ruddy,” (Chaucer 39). In her prologue she goes more in depth of her time spent with her five husbands. Wife of Bath talks most about how she gains control over her husbands. For instance, her fifth husband was the controlling force in their marriage until he made the mistake of hitting her and telling her he would do anything to keep her with him and said, “My own true wife, do as you wish for the rest of your life…” (335).
The character the wife of bath, is used as a tool for satire. Chaucer uses the irony of how she freely speaks of sex, the description of her character to be gap-toothed, and her personality being honest, witty, and funny, to challenge the church’s corruption. Before The Wife of Bath tells her story, she goes through stating her prologue. Within her prologue she describes each of her husbands, how she viewed them, and how they treated her.
From the words of the internet, the Wife of Bath’s tale is a chivalric or medieval romance, as some of the stories in the book “Canterbury Tales” were about the Arthurian romance. Some elements of the said romance manifest themselves in the tale, despite the fact that some parts of the story are opposite of what the aspects of medieval romance. Like for example, one of the elements say that the story contains an idealized hero-knight. When we think of a knight, the words “loyal”, “justice”, “manners” and “bravery” follow immediately. In the story though, the knight is introduced when he rapes a young woman, thus breaking the honor code of a hero knight.
Drinking age is the right age when one is expected to start drinking. This age is put in place by the law that governs every citizen in the nation. The drinking age for military is 21 years old just like it is throughout the United States. The legal drinking age for the military should be dropped to 18 years of age. The law has various issues concerning when and where alcohol can be consumed.
Within this complete works we read many tales involving many different characters. A few of the characters I would like to talk about are the Knight and the Wife of Bath. The Wife of Bath was quite the character, she was very manipulative with her seven husbands but she was content in her life. Others thought she was not a virtuous person because of the way she had married seven men and her love of sex.
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).
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.
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.
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
