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.
The Wife of Bath’s Tale is a story to men about what women most desire. The man in the tale has to find out the answer to that question, or his life is at risk. After searching for twelve months and a day, he finally finds the answer: sovereignty. Women want the right to have power over her husband and lover. They want their freedom.
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 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.
The fight for dominance is the constant battle for The Wife of Bath throughout Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. The Wife of Bath believes that her power to speak about marriage has come from experience, and she speaks much of her desire and ability to obtain “maistrye” or mastery within all of her marriages. The Wife of Bath demands to have complete control over herself, all possessions and her husband and is not willing to rest until she does. She is eager to fight daily until she gains full mastery.
“The Wife of Bath,” written during the Late Middle Ages, is one of a variety of stories which can be found in The Canterbury Tales. It is a tale which is told within the context of a larger story. Bath’s wife is atypical given the period of time in which she lived. She advocates for the institution of marriage by employing an unusual technique to convey her viewpoint.
Power as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “the possession of control, authority, or influence over others.” It connotes having the upper hand over what happens to somebody or something. In the book, The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer, he talks about a kingdom that had a lusty knight who raped a lady, and was charged to find out what women loved the most. In the knight’s pursuit to answer this riddle, he discovers that women want sovereignty and power. Power is a very important theme in the book.
In the book of Wife of Bath’s Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer shows the role of a woman being weak creatures while men are economically powerful and educated. Women are seen as inheritor of eve and thus causes
Through the structure of her speech, Chaucer characterizes the Wife of Bath as loquacious. Because she goes on many tangents during her dialogue, it is apparent that the Wife of Bath is a character that loves to talk. For instance, when she is telling her tale and digresses to talk about Ovid, she says, “If you wish to hear the rest of the tale, [...] When this knight whom this tale specially concerns.” (Wife of Bath Tale 126-127).
What women long for but rarely have in their marriages is reflected quite exceptionally in her tale. In the beginning of the tale, the Wife of Bath clearly portrays how men behaved towards women in her day and age. Full of lust, the character of the King’s knight “by very force he took her maidenhead,” (line 64). This development of the tale might even expose something about the wife herself, possibly that one of her husbands was forceful or controlling concerning their marriage.
According to the story,the wife of bath’s. The narrator of the story is the character or voice that relates. The story events to the reader,Many narrators have distinct personalities that are revealed through the subject,matter,tone,and language of their stories. In this story the narrator is the wife of Baths. One of the most charsmatic character in the conterdeurry tales and arguedbly in all of as you notice what she reveals about herself and medieval.
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).
She loses her place in the story momentarily, then resumes with her fourth husband’s funeral. She made a big show of crying, although, she admits, she actually cried very little since she already had a new husband lined up. By Chaucer 's time, it obvious how there were many anti feminist individuals and how it was a tradition to write texts about the dangers and annoyances of women and wives. The Wife of Bath refers to many of these texts in her Prologue. Her fifth husband, she tells us, owned a book that was an entire collection of such texts, from which he used to read to her every evening.
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.
