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Gender and roles of women in literature
Gender and roles of women in literature
Gender and roles of women in literature
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In “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath challenges the oppressive standards women are expected to uphold and asserts her agency by reassessing women’s public and interpersonal roles. However, rather than naively disregarding the influence of gender constructs, the wife manipulates the “limitations” that binary oppositions create for her gender in order to dominate the skill of persuasion. Through the careful use of language, the Wife of Bath exploits societal standards placed upon females in order to reconstruct women’s role within her culture and the institution of marriage. In particular, the Wife argues that her opinions should be regarded because her amount of marriage experience …show more content…
However, although she deems experience to be dominant over authority, she situates herself within the realm of authority by insisting on a reinterpretation of scripture, doctrines, and law. According to Helene Cixous, “nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason … it has been one with the phallocentric tradition” (879) In other words, because language is not for women and is inherently used to oppress them, women must re-work their understanding of language. Since “words fall almost always upon the deaf male ear, which hears in language only that which speaks in the masculine” (Cixous, 880-881), the Wife manipulates the meanings behind specifically chosen sources do away with others judgments about her seemingly exploitive techniques in gaining mastery within her marriages. For instance, the Wife does not see her many marriages as a sin, “I woot wel Abraham was an hooly man / and Jacob eek, as ferforth as I kan / And ech of hem hadde wyves mo than two” (Chaucer, ll. 55-58). The Wife is trying to illustrate the absurdity of people judging her multiple marriages by noting that many holy men were known to have more than one wife. By loosely referring to these religious icons, the Wife is engaging in the masculine sphere of activity that is reason over emotion. She practices authority by manipulating the scared texts in the same way that she believes men manipulate them to oppress women. However, she does not cite her statements, but jests that her “entente nys but for to pleye” (Chaucer, l. 192). The Wife makes it known to the pilgrims that although she has no claim to authority other than her personal viewpoints, she is simply playing with authority rather than asserting her right to it. By cleverly choosing the wording of “to pleye” (to play), the Wife is utilizing gender binaries
In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, a reader is introduced to a rather bizarre and heterogeneous group of people leaving for a pilgrimage. The Wife of Bath is the most interesting and lively character of the group. Her "Prologue" and "Tale" provide readers with a moral lesson as well as comic relief. The Wife's "Prologue" serves as an overture to her "Tale", in which she states a very important point regarding the nature of women and their most sacred desires. According to this character, women desire sovereignty, or power, over their men most in the world. This wish seems to be most appropriate for women of the time period in which Chaucer lived. However, women today no longer wish to dominate their men - sovereignty of women over men is not relevant in the twenty-first century. The reason is that women are no longer deprived of power and freedom.
Leicester, Jr., H. Marshall. "Public and Private Feminism in the Wife of Bath's Tale." Women's Studies 11.1-2 (1985): 157-78.
The image of the woman in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue is depicted by Chaucer to be “barley wheat” in a town and civilization lusting for whole white wheat or virginity (Chaucer 1711). The woman has married many men and in doing so forgotten the true value of the Christian faith and now believes worldly influence can overpower the scriptures of the Bible, “can you show in plain words that Almighty God forbade us marriage? Or where did he command virginity?” (Chaucer 1709). Jackie Shead analyzes the prologue and states, “it begins by manipulating authoritative texts--a pre-emptive strike to justify the Wife's marital history and her single-minded pursuit of self-gratification” (Shead). The possibility of the Wife of B...
Chaucer chooses to make a comedy of the Wife, putting into question the seriousness of her character. What opinion is the reader to make of a woman who rants about marriage and female domination when she is described as a clown prepared for battle in the General Prologue ? Her bright red stockings, bold scarlet face, shield-like hat and sharp spurs draw the picture of a silly, if not crazy, woman whose manner is larger than life. The Wife's comical 'larger than life' characteristics apply to her feminist beliefs as well. Equal coexistence is not enough; she says men "shall be bothe my dettour and my thral "-something likely unheard of when this piece was written. Much of what makes her comical is the plethora of sexual innuendoes dispersed throughout her dialogue. For instance, when she irrelevantly mentions in her tale the eager friars that have
When Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales, the social structure of his world was changing rapidly. Chaucer himself was a prime example of new social mobility being granted to members of the emerging middle class. He had opportunities to come into contact not only with earthy characters from varied ports of call, but with the wealthy nobility. He was also married to a knight's daughter, someone of higher birth than himself, a clear demonstration of a more lenient class structure (pp. 76 - 77*). As a member of this changing society, Chaucer had a keen perception of the attitudes and philosophies which were emerging and shaping the roles specific to people's lives. Among these were ideas and customs which had dictated extremely subservient lives for women. One of his characters, the Wife of Bath, contradicts many of these oppressive customs and asserts her own overbearing assessment of the roles of women in society and in relationships. However, while apparently attempting to assert female dominance over men, the effect the Wife desires is to bring men and women to a more balanced level of power.
Historically, men have always been seen as superior to women. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Ophelia is the perfect example of a female character that is weak, passive and overly reliant on men. However, The Wife of Bath, from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, does not adhere to the misogynistic mindset of her time. Despite the numerous female characters in literature similar to Ophelia, Chaucer’s creation of the Wife of Bath proves that not all authors depicted women as inferior.
In the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” and Margery Kempe women are empowered to make decisions regarding their own sexuality. This deviates from the gender constructs of the time period by allowing these women to dictate the course of their own lives: the Wife of Bath chooses to use her sexuality to acquire money and possessions, while Margery Kempe dedicates her sexuality to her spiritual beliefs. By working strategically to gain sexual independence both women move beyond the generally accepted position of a women at the time.
The Wife of Bath's Tale is the story of a knight who is saved from the disciplinary justice portrayed by the king just to confront the queens rehabilitative justice. This story has issues that we are still debating about today. The knight commits a violent crime and therefore has to have disciplinary actions. There are a tremendous amount of themes in The Wife of Bath’s Tale. The themes that I chose to discuss are old age, appearance, and feminism.
To expose the unjust doings of the patriarchy, Chaucer invents the character of the Wife of Bath’s. Disharmonious to most women in her era, The Wife of Bath’s won’t settle for any less than equality in her marriages. Through her, Chaucer is able to safely maneuver in the idea that women should be equal to their men. On line 183 of The Wife of Bath’s Tale, the knight says what every women wants is, “My liegle and lady, in general, A women wants the self-same sovereignty over her husband as over her lover, and master him; he must not be above her.” The knight informs the king and queen that the thing every women wants, is to be able to tell her partner what to
As a man fascinated with the role of women during the 14th Century, or most commonly known as the Middle Ages, Chaucer makes conclusive evaluations and remarks concerning how women were viewed during this time period. Determined to show that women were not weak and humble because of the male dominance surrounding them, Chaucer sets out to prove that women were a powerful and strong-willed gender. In order to defend this argument, the following characters and their tales will be examined: Griselda from the Clerk's Tale, and the Wife of Bath, narrator to the Wife of Bath's Tale. Using the role of gender within the genres of the Canterbury Tales, exploring each woman's participation in the outcomes of their tales, and comparing and contrasting these two heroines, we will find out how Chaucer broke the mold on medievalist attitudes toward women.
One of the most interesting and widely interpreted characters in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer is the Wife of Bath. She has had five different husbands and openly admits to marrying the majority of them for their money. The wife appears to be more outspoken and independent than most women of medieval times, and has therefore been thought to symbolize the cause of feminism; some even refer to her as the first actual feminist character in literature. Readers and scholars probably argue in favor of this idea because in The Canterbury Tales, she uniquely gives her own insight and opinions on how relations between men and women should be carried out. Also, the meaning of her tale is that virtually all women want to be granted control over themselves and their relationship with their husbands, which seems to convince people that the Wife of Bath should be viewed as some sort of revolutionary feminist of her time. This idea, however, is incorrect. The truth is that the Wife of Bath, or Alisoun, merely confirms negative stereotypes of women; she is deceitful, promiscuous, and clandestine. She does very little that is actually empowering or revolutionary for women, but instead tries to empower herself by using her body to gain control over her various husbands. The Wife of Bath is insecure, cynical towards men in general, and ultimately, a confirmation of misogynistic stereotypes of women.
Brewer, W, Gwen.. "What women want: The wife of bath and the modern woman." Human Quest. 01 Jul. 2001: 3. eLibrary. Web. 25 Nov. 2013.
When talking of the Medieval literature, one of the most outstanding works might be The Canterbury Tales written by Geoffrey Chaucer, which recorded stories told by 29 pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. Among them, the sixth story, The Wife of Bath's Tale, left the strongest impression on me. After some further study on it these days, it came to me that there are three points in this character that impressed me most: Her fashionable dressing, her sinuous marital experience and her overseas adventures.
Many critics throughout the years have given the Wife of Bath a title of that of a feminist. She is a strong-willed and dominant woman who gets what she wants when she wants it, by manipulating her husbands into feeling bad for things that they didn’t do, or by saying things that put them to utter shame. No man has ever been able to give an exact answer when she asks to know how many husbands a woman may have in her life...
Her extravagance and experience make her stand out among the other pilgrims, and medieval women, linking her to an idea of feminism. However, it is her knowledge and her use of it that mostly associates her with proto-feminism. The Wife of Bath shows an uncommon knowledge for a medieval woman, and the use she makes of it is even more unusual. Gottfried argues that ‘her intellectual powers also exceed the limits of the everyday’ (Gottfried 205), as her knowledge touches classical authorities. She is familiar with many classical authorial texts and their values, ‘That gentil text kan I wel understonde’ (29) and more important she knows how to reinterpret them in order to fit her arguments. Her knowledge can be linked back to her experience in