Women of the Canterbury Tales
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Geoffrey Chaucer presents a broad portrait of life in his Canterbury Tales both in the pilgrims themselves and in the characters in their stories. The women in these tales are neither better nor worse than they should be, and they are much more realistically portrayed than the idealized women of many other writers of the era. They can be hypocritical and they can be saintly. They are sensual women pursued by and often pursuing men, and they can also be both as base as or nobler than the men. Membership in the church is not an assurance of nobility for either sex. The church women, like the church men, are very human. The Prioress is a woman of the church, while the Wife of Bath is a worldly woman, and they are very much alike in many ways. The Wife of Bath can be seen as a character exhibiting primordial behavior, or behavior that is both original and primitive for her time. Modern critics find much to discuss in Chaucer regarding the role of women, and feminist critics find evidence both of male domination and female assertiveness in the pages of this lengthy poem. The way Chaucer treats women in his work and the views expressed in the poem regarding women and marriage will be analyzed with a close reading of the Prologue to "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and "The Wife of Bath's Tale" and the "Nun's Priest's Tale," with reference to some of the women in other of the tales as they relate to the ideas expressed in these chapters to the larger saga.
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female in revolt against a male-ordered and male-centered civilization (Whittock 119).
The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale follow the "Man of Law's Tale," the story of Custance, the holy, chaste wife who thus contrasts with the five-times-married expert in the art of marriage. Some argument has been generated regarding the order of the tales, and often the order can be determined, as in this case, by the ironies that are created by the shape given the work by its author (Cooper 123-124).
Most of those who have examined the depictions of the wife of Bath find her to be what we would today call a feminist, a woman who is asserting her rights in a male world and who is making her way in that world successfully. The characterization of the Wife takEs place in three parts--her "General Prologue" portrait, the self-portrait in her own Prologue, and the hag-princess of her fairy tale. Weissman detects a particular kind of progression in this portrait. She says that the sequence moves from a comparatively straightforward confirmation of the Old Woman image in its most negative valuation, through a massive display of propaganda strategically manipulating the negative image while arguing a newly positive evaluation of it, ending in
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Approximate Word count = 7355
Approximate Pages = 29 (250 words per page)
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