Theme Of Marriage In The Wife Of Bath

Many of Chaucer’s pilgrims represent a kind of duality. The Pardoner gives a sermon while admitting he is one held captive by his sin. The Miller, of one of the lowest classes depicted of the pilgrims, tells a tale directly proceeding the Knight’s tale of noble valor. Many others, still, tell tales that do not necessarily contradict their prologues but rather round out their characters. The Wife of Bath is no different. While seemingly hardened by her life of “misery and woe,” that becomes the marriages described in her prologue, she is still able to tell a tale of dishonorable knights, powerful queens, and relenting kings with a type of grace unexpected from a character such as herself. (Chaucer, 258).

The Wife of Bath’s prologue is full of coarse language. She talks of “generative organs,” with ease. (Chaucer 261) She defends her callous view of sex saying the generative

The Wife of Bath clearly separates love and marriage when she is speaking of her own matrimonies. She values control over her husbands over an equal marriage for she “cannot love a husband who takes charge of where [she] goes,” (Chaucer 267). In fact, the only marriage she “took for love and not for wealth,” was her fifth and last who treated her poorly and was “disdainful in his love,” (Chaucer 272). However, in the tale the old hag, who seems to resemble the Wife of Bath in looks and age, states that she will not trade for all the gold in the world to be “less than [the knights] wife” nor have “less than [the knights] love,” (Chaucer 287). While still separating love and marriage, the old hag seems to combine them in a way that suggests a happy marriage worth all the gold in the world must contain love. Both views on marriage, in the prologue and in the tale, separate love and marriage and suggest that a best marriage does contain love. Only the diction surrounding marriage and sex seems to