Essays on Wife of Bath

In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer sets up a rich and unexpected portrayal of The Wife of Bath, which is already well established by the beginning of her prologue to her tale. Her honest and shamelessly blunt diction and admissions, along with the inclusion of personal...

In both the Book of Margery Kempe and the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” in the Canterbury Tales, the female protagonists manipulate clerical discourse to challenge the male dominated institutional church and create new spaces for women in the late Middle Ages. Both texts take place...

Literature in the fourteenth-century brought about numerous characters, both major and minor, that presented allegorical issues pertinent to society. Characters that audiences have come to love (and hate) were featured in (fourteenth-century) works such as The Divine Comedy, Katherine, and Sir Gawain and the Green...

Chaucer, at least on the surface, recreates the commonly perceived stereotype of a vile woman in Alisoun; and as D.W. Robertson in Chaucer’s Exegetes states, “She is but an elaborate iconographic figure designed to show the manifold implications of an attitude.” Alisoun is portrayed as...

Question – The Wife of Bath tells anecdotes of her personal life. Does her tale also concern universal truths? Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a highly celebrated piece of British poetry of 14th century. A collection of 24 tales, it presents vivid and diverse...

The Canterbury Tales presents the Wife of Bath as an honest woman in conflict with her society. “Honest” here takes on two meanings. It either implies that the Wife of Bath is a moral and Christian member of society or, more literally, that she in...

The Wife of Bath’s tale begins by introducing a knight who commits a disgraceful sin when he decides to rape a woman. After the incident, a huge riot overwhelms King Arthur and it is concluded that the knight’s choices were unforgivable, however, a queen intrudes...

Long before enlightened women of the 1960’s enthusiastically shed their bras, in an age when anti-feminist and misogynistic attitudes prevailed, lived Geoffrey Chaucer. Whether Chaucer was indeed a feminist living long before his time, or whether he simply conveyed an alternate and unpopular point of...

In Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, the Franklin’s Tale and the Wife of Bath’s Tale represent marriage in different ways. The most striking contrast is the role of power in relationships in the two stories, and for the two tellers. The Franklin believes in mutuality, and...

“ Chaucer opens the “Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales” describing twenty-nine people going on a pilgrimage. It can be recognized from the way people behave today, that they had a distinct personality. In comparison with the other people, Chaucer made The Wife of Bath stand out from...

Throughout ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, Chaucer uses imagery to enhance our understanding of the Wife’s character and principles. Chaucer makes use of simple yet powerful metaphors such as fire and nature to augment our understanding of the Wife’s personality. However, some of the more...

The Wife of Bath, with the energy of her vernacular and the voraciousness of her sexual appetite, is one of the most vividly developed characters of ‘The Canterbury Tales’. At 856 lines her prologue, or ‘preambulacioun’ as the Summoner calls it, is the longest of...

In both Chaucer’s ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’ and Sheridan’s ‘The Rivals’, the question of morality is not a straightforward one, as there is tension surrounding the purpose of marriage and traditional social expectations. However, Chaucer’s exploration of passion and whether lust and...

In the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer presents two characters’ conflicting views on marriage and whether or not marital happiness can be achieved. Both Franklin and the Wife of Bath emphasize the importance of power in a relationship, but disagree on how that power should be...

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” deconstructs misogynist rhetoric proposed in texts such as Valerie, Theofraste, and Against Jovinian (Chaucer 673-83). Respectively, Valerie and Theofraste instruct husbands on how to curtail their wives’ duplicity, and Against Jovinian addresses the issue...

Values are defined as things that you believe are important in the way you live and work. However, values of those in the middle ages differ from values today. Values such as religion, loyalty, forgiveness, and humility were present during this time period. Literature such...

The Pardoner’s Tale’s Lesson The moral of this tale is that “greed is the root of all evil” as shown with the three rioters. They demand to know where they can find Death, a mysterious figure who killed one of their friends. An old man...

While there are places where the opinions of the medieval listener and the contemporary listener coincide, generally the vastly different contexts in which we assess the Wife of Bath divide our responses. Set in a strict world of Catholicism, aspects of religious blasphemy such as...

Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem ‘The Wife of Bath’ and John Ford’s play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ portray sin and punishment both in contrasting and corresponding ways. Annabella of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ is guilty of lust, one of the seven deadly sins, and even...