Chaucer Refutes In The Wife Of Bath's Tale

Chaucer Refutes Chaucer presents women in a light different to the long tradition of anti-feminist literature. In The wife of Bath’s tale, he presents women as grace givers; When the queen chose to show mercy rather than showing the knight to his death.

Chaucer’s The wife of Bath’s tale refutes the long tradition of both misogynistic and anti-feminist literature that painted women as malicious people who poisoned their husbands out of spite, originator of bringing sorrow to mankind, the downfall of men, mentally unstable, heartless and lustful brutes who killed their husbands in their sleep in other to spend a night with “lechers” (279).

After reading The wife of Bath’s Prologue in contrast to her tale, I began to understand what the

The knight in the tale, was said to have a reputation of being a “lusty liver” (282), hence the heinous crime of forcefully having relations with the maiden. To deem just women as lustful creatures as the book (Theophrastus and valerius and others (276).) insinuates does not only gives a single story but also an inaccurate representation of what the truth clearly is. The truth is even if women where lustful, men should have been equally represented in the same book. It would be to wrong to assume that the only perpetrators of lust where women, and since biblical references where made numerous times during the prologue, it would also be safe to say the knowledge of king Solomon, his many wives, mistresses and concubines was also lustful.

The queen, wife of king Arthur disputes allegations of wanting vengeful deaths for wrong doers. Since women in anti-feminist literature where known for killing men who offended them and did not do things a certain way, the outcome of the knight rapping the maiden should have gone a different direction. The queen should have order his head, cut off. But this is not the case, since the knight lived despite his heinous