Comparing The Wife Of Bath's Prologue And Tale

The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale (DATE) tells the story of a lusty, boisterous, opinionated yet powerful woman who puts her marriages before anything else. Many of her views are presented to the modern day reader as a feminist statement of empowerment, contrasting heavily with the harsh anti-feminist views that were dominant at the time. Chaucer creates a character who uses these anti-feminist ideals to her advantage by succumbing to the views and using them to manipulate and control the men in her life. This manipulation of stereotypes makes the Wife of Bath one of the most famous characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. These contradicting elements of the Wife of Bath make her a very complex character, making it difficult to discern if Chaucer was a feminist or anti-feminist. By …show more content…
Although there is little known about Chaucer’s upbringing it is clear that he came from a relatively wealthy family, his father being “a prosperous wine merchant” (BBC, 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/chaucer_geoffrey.shtml). He also married into wealth with his wife inheriting many properties from her uncle. This upbringing may have had some effect on his views of women. At the time women who were of a higher status we treat slightly differently to a common woman in the middle ages. A middle class or higher class woman would have married young, not for love but money, whilst a women who was of lower status did not marry until later on in her life as she would have been needed to work for her family. This difference could explain why Chaucer chose to portray the Wife of Bath. He would have witnessed many women being married young, having little influence in the running of business and overseeing finances, mainly seeing women running the household and producing children. This may have possibly inspired Chaucer to create an independent female

Show More

Comparing The Wife Of Bath's Prologue And Tale

Related Documents: Comparing The Wife Of Bath's Prologue And Tale

Maturity In Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales