Wife of Bath's Tale & the Medieval Woman

It has been said that art or fiction is the reflection of reality and is a mirror to be held up so that a society may view itself. Sometimes this mirror is a distortion of what is true, and sometimes it accurately depicts the complexities of the society that produced the piece of fiction. This paper will use excerpts from The Book of Margery Kempe to argue whether Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale is an accurate reflection of a woman's power and choices during the Middle Ages.

According to Elaine Power, people in medieval society did not have the lifestyle choices available to them that they do now. Depending on one's class, much of life was taken up with either the struggle to obtain very basic needs, acquiring more goods in an effort to stay ahead, or acquiring more power in order to remain in power. A woman had even fewer choices and was usually consigned to marriage at an early age and bearing children for her husband while running the household until either she died, was widowed, or was past childbearing age. Depending on her circumstances, however, she could, with the blessing of her husband or family, start a business or be in charge of her own projects in the community and have power in making her own choices up to a point (Power 15). Exceptions to this seem to be when a woman was either a maiden or a widow in the middle to upper classes. Then she could also own land and represent herself legally. Loss of power occurred when a woman married and she gav

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more choices than giving into her sexuality. Her life as an adult female began normally. According to Power, despite the Wife of Bath's tale of being married at the age of twelve (Prologue 1), the custom in Northern Europe and England was for young women to marry in their late teens and early twenties, rather than at the onset of menstruation, as their counterparts in Southern Europe did (50). Margery Kempe's biography shows that this was true in at least her life as she also did not marry until her early twenties (Staley). Margery Kempe not only had married a reputable husband, but also came from a highly reputable family, so that her position in the middle class was thoroughly grounded (Staley). Add to this the fact that she bore her husband fourteen children, and also ran a regular household that included a short career brewing beer, and there is the picture of a very conventional, middle class woman of the late Middle Ages (Staley). After the birth of her first child, however, the reader first begins to see signs that Margery Kempe is not the conventional woman she appeared to be. Because of the harsh labor that she had to go through during the birth of her first son, Margery Kempe feared she was close to death and se

Category: Literature - W