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The Wife Of Bath Synthesis Essay

614 Words3 Pages

Throughout history traditional gender roles have not changed in literature. It’s a repeated plot just with a different text. There’s a damsel in distress that only an honorable knight can save her from. The setting and the situations may have changed to mimic the time period it was written in but the main concept has not. In the Wife Of Bath the female characters take a drastically different road than those in previous novels, they take what it means to be a woman and a feminist and change it into their own meaning.
The Wife of Bath doesn’t let societal restrictions of the time to dictate how she should live. “But of no nombre mencioun made he, Of bigamye or of octogamye; Why sholde men speke of it vileinye?” () In her own mind it doesn’t make sense for a person particularly a woman to be labeled as unholy or impure just because of how many times they have been married. She uses the bible to back up her reasoning. This leads the way …show more content…

The wife of bath tells her tale of a girl married young who is at the mercy of her parents and her husbands, but unlike most women who would be in similar situations she doesn’t let herself be pushed around by her husbands. “FIND QUOTE WHERE IT SAYS SHE TORMENTED HER FIRST THREE HUSBANDS” (). Unlike most wives instead of being submissive to her husbands she flips the script on her own story. She mainly does this because she didn’t have much control over her life until then. She controlled how her husbands acted towards her and it was mostly a method of self preservation. She didn’t want to feel helpless so she set the tone for her first three marriages and twisted it into what she wanted or what she thought she wanted. Since they were older, she tore their self esteem down to make sure that they didn’t cheat. She made them think that no other woman maybe including herself wouldn’t

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