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 presenc

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per 156). Cooper cites the same sources for the tale noted above, and all are in English: The basic story, of the hag who promises to tell what women most desire in return for marriage and who ends up by becoming beautiful, is common to Chaucer and all the analogues (Cooper 157). The rape that begins the tale, however, has no analogue in these sources, though similar adventures have been ascribed to Sir Gawain in some of the French romances. Cooper feels the most likely analogues for this aspect of the story would be French pastourelles and similar poems in which passing knights rape or attempt to rape girls found by the wayside: The girls are most often peasants or shepherdesses, but not necessarily: crossing a forest seems especially to have invited disaster for women of all kinds. The classlessness of the Wife's "mayde," like the anonymity of her hero, keeps the story as a battle not between social ranks but between the sexes (Cooper 159). THE PROLOGUE Whittock notes the power of the satire in the prologue, satire directed at the sex-obsessed and guilt-ridden attitudes of the medieval Church. At all times the male attitude toward women involves a certain amount of distrust because the male suspects her of undermining a

Category: Literature - C