Canterbury Tales - Wife of Bath is Not an Attack on Women and Married Life
Feminists have proposed that the Prologue of the Wife of Bath is merely an attack on women and married life. The Prologue is spoken by a woman with strong opinions on how married life should be conducted, but is written by a man. It is important to examine the purpose with which Chaucer wrote it. This is especially so as many of the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales condemn themselves out of their own mouths, such as the Monk and the Friar. While the Wife spends most of the Prologue arguing in favour of the deceit and deviousness that wise wives will execute, the argument is often illogical and can approach ridiculousness in its vehemence. Are we to agree with the views that the Wife of Bath puts forward so strongly, or does Chaucer present her as a caricature of every negative quality women are traditionally guilty of?
A great deal of the Wife's Prologue is spent in her narration of the tirades that she subjected her first three husbands to, largely a list of accusations made by anti-feminists of women, and the Wife's spirited responses. The Wife's replies defend women's behaviour -- if a husband has enough sex from his wife, she says, he should not care "How mirily that othere folks fare". She attacks scholars who accuse women of all manner of vileness by asking "Who peynted the leon, tel me who?" and that because scholars (Mercurie) and women (Venus) are diametrically opposed, "Therfore no womman of no clerk is preysed." However, while it is clear that the Wife is on the side of fellow females, in a logical sense the Wife's arguments are not particularly effective against the anti-feminists' view that women are as vain as cats, as sex...
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...ties of lechery and unscrupulousness; that is why Chaucer writes about her. By allowing both her and Jankyn bliss when he finally surrenders power to his wife, Chaucer does not appear to disapprove of this state of affairs on principle. The Wife of Bath is, however, a psychological study of a powerful, sexual woman and a speculation on what such a woman's life might be like. It is clearly one that intrigued Chaucer, as can be seen from the length of the prologue, which dwarfs all the others by comparison. Chaucer's aim in writing this prologue appears to have been the presentation of a character so strong, she approached a force of nature, rather than an attack on women and their conduct in married life.
Work Cited
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed Mack, Maynard et al. W. W. Norton and Co. New York, NY. 1992.
Looking back through many historical time periods, people are able to observe the fact that women were generally discriminated against and oppressed in almost any society. However, these periods also came with women that defied the stereotype of their sex. They spoke out against this discrimination with a great amount of intelligence and strength with almost no fear of the harsh consequences that could be laid out by the men of their time. During the Medieval era, religion played a major role in the shaping of this pessimistic viewpoint about women. The common belief of the patriarchal-based society was that women were direct descendants of Eve from The Bible; therefore, they were responsible for the fall of mankind. All of Eve’s characteristics from the biblical story were believed to be the same traits of medieval women. Of course, this did not come without argument. Two medieval women worked to defy the female stereotype, the first being the fictional character called The Wife of Bath from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The second woman, named Margery Kempe, was a real human being with the first English autobiography written about her called The Book of Margery Kempe. In these two texts, The Wife of Bath and Margery Kempe choose to act uniquely compared to other Christians in the medieval time period because of the way religion is interpreted by them. As a result, the women view themselves as having power and qualities that normal women of their society did not.
Schuster, C. S., and Ashburn, S. S., (1980). The Process of Human Development: A Holistic Approach. Boston: Little, Brown and Company Inc.
Woods, Al. “College Athletes Should Be Paid.” Sports and Athletes: An Anthology. Ed. Christine Watkins. Greenhaven Press, 2009. 87-94. Print.
Hume argues that perception can be divided into two types: impressions and ideas. He states that impressions are our first-hand perception, using all of our senses and emotions to experience them (Hume 2012, 8). For example, an impression of a sensation would be experiencing pain and an impression of reflection would be experiencing anger. Hume states that an idea is thinking about an impression. You cannot use your senses to experience the sensation or emotion, you are just simply reflecting on your experience (Hume 2007, 13). For example, thinking about the pain you felt when you stubbed your toe or thinking about how angry you felt when your football team lost. Hume argues that our thought is limited. He argues that when we imagine things such as an orange sea, we are simply joining two consistent ideas together. Hume argues that ‘all our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones’ (Hume 2007, 13). This is called the Copy Principle.
Hartnett, Tyson. "Why College Athletes Should be Paid." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 21 Oct. 2013. Web. 15 May 2014. .
Eitzen, D. Stanley. "College Athletes Should Be Paid." Sports and Athletes. Ed. James D. Torr.
Today there are over 450,000 college athletes and the National College Athletics Association (NCAA) faces a difficult decision on whether or not college athletes should be paid. Many people believe that they should and many believe they should not. There are several benefits that college’s athletes receive for being a student athlete. Why should they receive even more benefits than their scholarship and numerous perks?
Mitchell, Horace, and Marc Edelman. "Should College Student-Athletes Be Paid?." U.S. News Digital Weekly 5.52 (2013): 17.Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 Apr. 2014.
Bynas, Todd. "Putting a price on their back: Should college athletes be paid?." The News Tribune. N.p., 27 Sept. 2013. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. .
Graduating from high school is a proud moment in every student’s life. They must prepare what comes next for them whether it’s to get a job, start a career, or pursue continuing education. The cost for a college education can be overwhelming. There are many factors that play into the cost of going to secondary education. College tuition, fees, books, supplies, transportation, personal expenses, room and board. These expenses can vary for public community colleges and four year universities, public or private universities, and state residents or out of state residents. Community college tuition can range from $1,000-$12,000 for state residents and $4,000-$30,000 for non-residents. Four year college tuition can range from $4,000-$16,000 for state residents and $10,000-$35,000 for non-residents. Private four year institutions can cost as much as $25,...
Shakespeare, William, Barbara A. Mowat, and Paul Werstine. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Washington Square Press new Folger ed. New York: Washington Square, 2002. Print.
... many precious lives away and has injured many more. Making cell phones the new car keys would dramatically take away any chance of a person being able to text and drive. This would cause those devastating texting and driving car accident statistics to hopefully disappear. Enforcing this won’t just help the problem, but it will force the roads to be safer for all drivers. Ironically, allowing the phone to be the key, is the key to ending the problem of texting and driving.
It is imperative for us, especially all poets and writers of prose that use language to express figurative meaning, to critique this theory because it only decreases creativity and denies that artist say anything beyond the literal with their words and metaphors. Davidson's ideas violently affront to the purpose of our craft. If we become completely dependent upon objective, literal meaning and learn to reject subjective, figurative meaning in words, we will consequently become less human and more detached from the world, from our natural surroundings, from our fellow human beings, and from the spontaneous, creative voices deep in our guts that often speak of truths literal expression cannot capture.
Pela, Robrt. "Should you listen to music while studying?."Student Life. University of Phoenix, Inc., 29 08 2013. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.
What exactly is truth? What is true? These questions are two completely different questions. In order to answer what is true, you must first determine what truth actually is. If we look in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, we see the definition that says “The things that are true”. This is not what we are looking for in a definition of this word, but really there is no defining line between what is true, and what is not.