Wife of Bath Vs The Prioress

Canterbury Tales is a story about a group of thirty people, including the Host, that are traveling to the shrine of the martyr St. Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. The diverse group is a concoction of contradicting personalities that are intricately described by Chaucer. Among these twenty-nine excursionists are two women. One of them is the coquettish Prioress while the other one is the partially deaf Wife at Bath. Although both women possess discernable similarities, both possess divergent personalities and experiences. The Prioress, known as Madam Eglantyne, has an elegant nose, a Lilliputian, soft, and red mouth, a big-forehead, and a glass gray mouth. She wears a cloak, a set of beads, and a broche that reads, “Love conquers all.” She is a sensitive, vain, and artificial person that pretends to be rich. It is also stated that she possesses a coquettish tinge to her personality. The Wife at Bath, like the Prioress, is a lady above all else. Her clothes veer towards extravagance and affirm her great wealth. Like the Prioress, the Wife at bath is affable, loquacious and an eloquent orator. Like most of the people on the pilgrimage, the Prioress and the Wife at Bath encompass a contradicting role in society. Both are fragments of the corruption that hovered the Middle Ages. The Prioress was supposed to be nun. However, the way that she dressed and behaved is evidence to the fact that she was lady before a holy nun. She also owned a dog, which she carried around everywhere. The Wife at is a lustful person who has had five husbands, but yet ironically, is always first in the offerings at mass; she gets mad if someone goes ahead of her. Inclusively, before telling her story, she talks against some details of the Bibl...

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...f the Canterbury Tales. The author provides some insight on the tale of the Wife at Bath. She describes her tale as her own life story. She calls it a story within a story because the Wife at Bath can be metaphorically considered as the old hag in her story. She goes on to describe the Knight’s Tale.

Stearns, David P. "What Do Women Want? Go Ask Chaucer." Philadelphia Inquirer,

The (PA) 31 Mar. 2009. Newspaper Source EBSCO. Web. 12 Nov. 2011.

This article is about an opera inspired by Chaucer in New York. It talks about the difficulties of each of the actors, in particular the cast of the Wife at Bath tale. They talk about the scene where the knight is challenged by the Queen to answer the question, what do women want, in order to spare his life. This source did not help me because it focused on the feelings of the cast rather the actual characters in the tale.