Wife Of Bath Marriage Analysis

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath presents a woman’s view on the institution of marriage. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue presents her experience of marriage as an economic exchange of sex for wealth. Alison explains her sex lifestyle within her marriages and how she retains control over her many husbands, thus enabling her to carry out her tale’s message that in marriage, women should have dominion. Her reproach starts when the husband has absolute authority and her greatest unhappiness lies in the moments where her power is threatened. In The Wife of Bath the character shows the qualities of power, lust and unfaithfulness in her marriages.

The Wife of Bath shows the interest of how she desire to complete control

The Wife of Bath explains that wife is no victim; rather, she is a perpetrator of the kind of marriages she has had. She is an active agent in her decisions to marry and use sex to propagate wealth. Her passion of sex makes us understand she endured sex with her first three husbands because they were old. Moments in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue suggest that while the Wife does not marry for love, she is unhappy in her marriages. The lack of love, however, does not mean that she is unsatisfied with her choices to be with those men. She gives no signal that she was depressed during her first three marriages, and the fact that she gets all their wealth when they die means that she was successful at what she set out to do by marrying them in the first place. Alison is suggesting a mechanism that women should have. She is a determined and principal woman who herself gets what she wants when she wants it with her sex lifestyle. She cannot accept defeat no matter what the cost. She feels this how things should be and men should obey women. Women should not be controlled or told what to do by others, especially by

The Wife of Bath describes how she fell in love with Jankyn, despite her expediency, she reveals her softer side. She recognizes that he used the same tactics against her as she used against other men in her marriages, but she cannot stop herself from desiring him. Alison gets married to five husbands meaning she committed adultery and considered mortal sin. The Church ideal marriage was marriage entered in front of the God with witnesses who could testify that the partners were not relatives. Sexual intercourse was to be performed only to conceive a child since it was believed that the devotion to the sexual enjoyment would distract people from their obligations towards the Church. Marriage was to last forever, until the death departed the partners. But she did not follow the commandment and was unfaithful to her