Wife Of Bath Misogynist Essay

Women through a misogynistic man’s eyes: Does the “Wife of Bath Prologue” reinforce misogynistic prejudices? Throughout the collection of frame stories, “The Canterbury Tales” by Geoffrey Chaucer, women are viewed through misogynistic man's eyes. Specifically, in the prologue of “The Wife of Bath” female figures are negatively stereotyped as deceitful and manipulative. The Wife of Bath lives a lustful life; she victimizes herself against men and uses her sexual power to obtain wealth. Furthermore, she is basically described as a whore who seeks for pleasure and take advantage of men to benefit herself, with the only difference of an actual whore that the Wife of Bath did possess a legal marriage contract. She considers a good man, one “who

During medieval years women were stereotyped as less than men and as a disadvantage for them. Similarly, in the story, women are seen as deceitful and seekers of beneficial sustain. Even her last husband Jankyn thought that women were misleading. Therefore, he read a book of “wicked wives”, which contained stories of manipulative and very bad wives. Annoyed by this, the Wife of Bath decided to tear the pages from the book and throw it away. Jankyn got extremely mad and hit her really hard on the head leaving her partially deaf. In particular, this part of the text shows the reader the lack of respect women receives and how little men value them. Many people argue that “The Wife of Bath” is a pro-feminist story because women’s desire is to obtain power and sovereignty, which in effect they actually achieve. However, I disagree because even though they did achieve it, a misogynistic prejudice of women is reinforced. In essence, women are stereotyped as manipulative and deceitful leaving the reader with the wrong impression of women’s thinking and goals in