Geoffrey Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales

The Wife of Bath is introduced in the General Prologue along with the rest of the pilgrims. The wife of Bath is a woman of independent mind and body. She is also a successful small manufacturer and can be seen as a strong challenge to the male status quo. Of all the women in Chaucer, she is perhaps the most contemporary-seeming, and she represents potent and innovative social ideas as well as business concepts. She stands for the primacy of experience over authority, meaning the validity of the ideas of ordinary people against those in authority. The Wife of Bath expresses a feminist argument in the opening sequence as she turns clerical authority on its head to argue the feminist cause by way of a knowledge of the traditional materials of anti-feminist diatribe (Knight 98).

In what she has to say on the subjects of marriage and relations between the sexes, the Wife of Bath is reacting to the m

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, and in the fragmentary ballad The Marriage of Sir Gawain (Maclaine 101-102). The Wife of Bath's Prologue was probably written late, after the Shipman's Tale, which seems to have once been Chaucer's choice for the Wife of Bath's tale. The Prologue deals at greater length with some of the issues raised in the narrative of that tale (Cooper 139). The prologue has materials that have been derived from antifeminist tracts, but it cannot be classified as a tract itself. Since the Wife freely admits her past misliving, to that extent the Prologue can be called "confessional," but it does not include what a true confession would--it has no submission to the will of God, or even to a husband, and the Wife of Bath states that she has no intention at all of changing her way of life. Other unique elements can also be noted: Several of Chaucer's discursive sources had allowed the woman's voice to be heard to reinforce their misogynist messages: Chaucer allows it to take over completely. Authority is reprocessed as experience; text is glossed from on meaning to its opposite with an ease rarely equalled until Freud (Cooper 140-141). Cooper notes that the prologue calls on a wide range of sources, some explicit and cited by the Wife
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Approximate Word count = 2331
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)