The Wife of Bath

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Recommended: Chivalry in the Canterbury tales

Orest Voloshchuk
The Wife of Bath
Geoffrey Chaucer is a writer from the late middle ages who is most famous for his poetic narrative, The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer, however, was not writing simply to entertain his fans, but also to speak through his characters. During the Middle Ages freedom of speech was not a conceivable concept, if someone did not agree with either the state or the church their time on Earth would be quite limited. These were unfortunate circumstances for Chaucer as his ideas were not particularly welcome with the people of power in his country. To express his opinions and stay away from the gallows Chaucer wrote stories in which he used the characters to express his philosophy. One such character in the Wife of Bath who Chaucer uses to express his egalitarian views and critique patriarchy.
The Wife is an older woman who has had five husbands over the course of her lifetime, four of which she married for money. She is a skilled weaver, possibly one of the best in England, she is one of the best traveled pilgrims having made three pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and she is one of the best educated having read and interpreted the Bible. She is also sexist, believing that women should be the dominant sex. She got most of her wealth and accomplishments by marring, manipulating, and possibly killing old, rich men. She talks about having children despite never having any herself, leading to the possibility of her being guilty of abortions. She is also cherry-picking different Bible verses that support her claims instead of looking at the Bible as whole.
The complexity of the Wife’s character lead to a great deal of controversy about whether the Wife is meant to be a symbol of Chaucer’s egalitarian ...

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The Wife is perhaps the most complex character in the entirety of the Canterbury Tales. She at first appears to be the feminist superhero of the day, but soon reveals to be a quite controversial character. It soon becomes obvious that Chaucer is trying to expose a dark side to her by making her a hypocrite and pocking holes in her arguments such as hinting at the fact that she did not have any children but was talking about how having children justifies lots of sex. However, she is not asking for equal rights, she is asking for superiority. If one was to look closely enough at the text he would see that she is and exact replica of the average patriarch, just reversed. And because Chaucer is mocking her it is reasonable to assume that he is arguing that sex-superiority of any kind is ridiculous.

Works Cited

The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer

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