Response To Wife Of Bath In The Canterbury Tales

Response Paper: Wife of Bath From only hearing about the “Canterbury Tales”, I initially thought the story would be uninteresting and just an average tale with a specific generic moral. To my surprise, Wife of Bath encompassed more than what I expected, it themed satire, church corruption, social issues, as well as women’s rights and biased power held by society. One of the more interesting parts of this tale is the tone of the story, although it has satirical elements, the overall tone to me seemed straightforward. There was really no need to “beating around the bush” with the way Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the tale. I also found it satirical that the language and settings had a romance-feel to it while the concept of the tale really wasn’t remotely lovey-dovey. I found the Wife to be almost like a role-model for

I could assume that she would appreciate this story greatly, since the gender-role of the decision making has flipped especially. It is very rare that a king would ever give his wife, the queen, the full authority of making a decision this major. I also enjoyed the irony on how the knight’s punishment was practically the opposite of the crime he committed. He raped a woman, giving no disregard to consent nor what maiden wanted or desired and his punishment how was to search for what women truly want most in the world. Being in a more patriarchal society, it shows that the majority of men didn’t really notice their status over their females since the idea of women wanting power was unthought of until he was told by the older lady. That same older lady didn’t just give the knight that information without any benefit to herself, within the whole scenario the knight still was underneath the control of women. Something that at the time was very unknown and many could claim that it’s the epitome of what women have struggled