Canterbury Tales Essay - Wife of Bath as an Attack on...

Canterbury Tales - Wife of Bath is Not an Attack on Women and Married Life Feminists have proposed that the Prologue of the Wife of Bath is merely an attack on women and married life. The Prologue is spoken by a woman with strong opinions on how married life should be conducted, but is written by a man. It is important to examine the purpose with which Chaucer wrote it. This is especially so as many of the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales condemn themselves out of their own mouths, such as the Monk and the Friar. While the Wife spends most of the Prologue arguing in favour of the deceit and deviousness that wise wives will execute, the argument is often illogical and can approach ridiculousness in its vehemence. Are we to agree with†¦show more content†¦However, the vitality and forcefulness of the Wife forces us to avoid coming to so neat a conclusion. Dame Alison is frightening and dangerous, true. By the moral codes of society, she has sinned by committing adultery, and strictly speaking, should not have married so many times. However, the langu age that Chaucer has her speak is not that of right and wrong, it is that of total amorality and self-service. The Wife does not pretend to better behaviour, nor does she accuse anyone else of sinning, and so we cannot accuse her of hypocrisy. In contrast, the Monk and Friar [good] are clearly the targets of irony, as they do not seem to be aware of the contradictions in their arguments. The Wifes contradictions are so staggering and frequent: confusing bigamy with remarriage, using Gods commandment to go forth and multiply although she is childless, and especially, her frank admission that in previous showdowns with her old husbands, al was false that she accused them of. She is not a hypocrite; on the contrary, she glories in her irrationality and manipulation of her material. It is difficult, therefore, to see her as being attacked through irony, as the Monk and Friar are. The Wifes view of married life as a continual battle for maistrieShow MoreRelatedA Picatrix Miscellany52019 Words   |  209 Pagesdebate over precedence between the marshmallow and the mandrake, the self-commendation of the olive tree and how a sleeping king was apprised by a tree that his servant, disregarding the royal command in anticipation of the royal remorse, had spared the life of the queen. The other extracts are, in the main, explanations of the magic properties of certain plants and of the customs of the peoples mentioned in the Nabataean Agriculture (pp. 362-401). Not all can be traced to the manuscripts of the Agriculture