From The Canterbury Tales By Geoffrey Chaucer

For take my word for it, there is no libel On women that the clergy will not paint, Except when writing of a woman –saint But never good of other women, though.

 What do her prologue and tale argue, and how successfully?  Does she support or challenge medieval and modern stereotypes of women?  What views of sex and marriage does she hold, and how do the patterns of imagery help us understand them?

 Deaf, gap-toothed, mature, ruddy complexion, flamboyant taste in clothes  Portrait focuses on her personal life as a wife five times over, whilst the others are described in terms of their professional lives.

Unique in The Canterbury Tales, the introduction to the Wife of Bath’s Tale is longer than the tale itself. She describes her own marriages in great detail. She sees nothing wrong with having had five husbands. To defend her position, the Wife refers to King Solomon, who had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines.

2. The Wife of Bath’s first three husbands were old, rich and willing to do what she said. 3. Her fourth husband had a mistress. She had him believe she was sleeping with another man so he would be jealous. 4. When the husband died, she married the good-looking Jankyn, twenty years her junior, who treated her like dirt. 5. He used to read her from a book that how women could not be trusted. She got so furious that ripped the pages out, and he hit her so hard that she went partially deaf.

Misogyny was common and accepted in medieval times The idea of women as a source of evil and trouble to men originated with the introduction of Christianity Eve: wicked and stupid, and caused all humanity to be expelled from Paradise Women were considered to be full of vices and inferior to men St. Jerome (342 – 420) and Theophrastus were leading misogynistic writers.

The Wife of Bath uses her introduction and tale to support her points that: 1. Women should be allowed to marry as many times as they wish, and; 2. That once they are married everyone will be happier if the woman is in charge.

 A great deal of animal imagery is used (sheep, spaniel, goose, ox, ass, hound, cat, hawk, magpie, nightingale etc) and it almost entirely refers to women  Women were considered closer to animals than men were and were often compared to them, unflatteringly  Animals are considered to lack reason: men are only compared to them when out of control, e.g. drunken as a mouse