Wife Of Bath's Tale By Geoffrey Chaucer

The definition of the word feminism is, the advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men. Back in the olden days, women were seen as inferior to men and had to let them do all of the “hard work”. In The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer, Alice is presented as a bold and audacious character, and therefore feels differently about the norm of letting men have all of the rights. She uses her willpower to overcome the social mentality that men have a higher status than women. When labeling herself with this authority, she is able to gain control over her many husbands and win what a man would normally inherit at birth. Regardless of the lack of power among women in this time period, Alice takes

In the General Prologue, Chaucer describes Alice as a love-obsessed mastermind of relationships. He writes, “Of remedies of love she knew parchaunce, / For she coude of that art the olde daunce.” (Chaucer, 205.) The author is describing how skilled Alice is at manipulating her relationships. He says that she knows exactly how this system works and that since she has had so many relationships, she knows precisely how to act in order to steal the power from her spouse. In this case, she trades sex for power. In the translation of the tale, the wife says that her “husband shall have it both evening and morning, whenever it pleases him to come forth and pay his debt. I will not stop. I will have a husband who will be both my debtor and servant, and have his tribulation upon his flesh, while I am his wife.” (Chaucer, 162.) This quote explains how the wife is willing to do anything for her husbands to make them happy. Once Alice’s husbands are pleased with her, they are willing to give up things such as their property and money which lead to her gaining power. Alice also says that she “will use the flowers of my life in the acts and fruits of marriage.” (Chaucer, 114.) By using the word “flowers”, she is referring to the best and youngest years of her life which are most appealing to her husbands. She wants to use these blooming years to win her husbands’ approval and therefore gain his

Alice says that, “‘I would firmly swear to my old husbands, that they said this in their drunkenness; and all was false, except I got Jankin and my niece to be my witnesses. O Lord! The pain and woe I did them, though they were innocent, by God’s sweet suffering!” (Chaucer, 394.) Although they were not true, Alice would convince the whole town that her husbands were responsible for these actions. This made her men take the fault and therefore give in to accommodate to their wife. Alice would, “accuse my old husband of visiting prostitutes, even when they were so sick that they could scarcely stand.” (Chaucer 394.) Whether these stories being told about her husbands were true or not, she would make them so believable that there was no way for the men to get out of these