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Chaucer's The Wife of Bath

Geoffrey Chaucer presents a broad portrait of life in his Canterbury Tales both in the depiction of the pilgrims themselves and in the characters in the stories the pilgrims tell one another to pass the time. 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. The Wife of Bath can be seen as a character exhibiting primordial behavior, or behavior that is both original and primitive for her time. The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale are connected in the way the themes of the story illuminate the character of the Wife of Bath, just as her character sheds light on the broader meaning of the story she tells.

The Wife of Bath is portrayed in a complex fashion in three parts in the structure of the work as it stands (though she might have been more fully developed had Chaucer finished his original conception, with all the tales and interim material originally planned). She is first portrayed in the "Prologue" for the Tales; she is then portrayed in her own prologue; and finally she is represented by her story (Brown 50). The treatment of the Wife of Bath can be seen from our perspective today as the result of a tension between feminism and anti-feminism, between the prevailing view of women in her age and her own desire to do away with those images to assert herself as an individual. She is both a frightening presence, a female constantly on the prowl for another husband, and an individual with strengths that make her the equal of the men in the group. Hope Phyllis Weissman sees Chaucer as the heir to a tradition of what she calls antifeminism in literary tradition. She states that a strict definition of antifeminism would mean those writings which revenge themselves upon woman's failure to conform to male specifications by presenting the woman as a nagging bully or an avaricious whore. Weissman finds...

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Chaucer's The Wife of Bath. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:31, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692507.html