The Wife Of Bath In Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales centers itself around an eclectic selection of pilgrims who swap stories with one another on their collective journey to visit the relics of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. The Wife of Bath is one such storyteller. An older, experienced, well-traveled woman, she begins her story with a prologue stuffed with sexually explicit personal anecdotes before starting her tale about a knight of King Author’s court raping a young maiden. Some scholars make the claim that the Wife of Bath conveys a negative portrayal of women as an anti-feminist figure through her prologue and tale. Others make the claim that the wife is ironically supporting women against the chauvinistic prejudice levied against them
The Wife is a hearty, headstrong, opportunity seeking character who knows what she wants and strives for nothing less. She desires sex, money, and a partner that will do as she wills. To put it simply, what makes the Wife so frightening to the predominantly male pilgrims she is surrounded by is the fact that she embodies specific qualities that one would usually associate with men. Through the Wife of Bath, Chaucer quite literally conveys his own beliefs about women. However, in the same moment, he seems to reveal more about men than about women: what men in medieval England feared most is that they would be treated the way in which they treated the women of their time. Through this realization, it is clear that medieval England was permeated with stark gender roles which kept women and men apart, and that men of the period held that line close to their chests and feared its demise. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, then, serves as a marker of anti-feminism, feminism, and the power of challenging gender roles, all at the same time, with layers and subplots that give the tale a tremendous amount of breadth, depth, and cultural