One of the most recognized characters of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” the Wife of Bath, is known for her novel ideas on marriage and love. Chaucer created a character that inspired future writers of Western literature.
An Independent Mindset
In “The Canterbury Tales,” characters from all walks of life travel together on a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury. To pass the time, the pilgrims tell each other tales, in a varied collection of literary genres. By using this clever framing device, Chaucer encapsulated English Medieval life and the social classes it harbored.Like the other pilgrims, the Wife of Bath represents a certain class of Chaucer’s society, in this case, a well-off, well-traveled, and well-married woman belonging to the emerging middle class. She is one of two female storytellers, the other being the Prioress.
In the Prologue, the Wife of Bath, also known as Alison, is described as having gap teeth and large hips, both markers of beauty in Medieval times, and dressed in rich and tasteful clothes. She wears hose “of the finest scarlet red,” and “soft and new shoes,” which demonstrate her wealth, as scarlet was a costly dye.
She worked in the clothes-making business herself, making her a self-made woman at a time when women mostly relied on their husband’s wealth. It is further said that her sewing surpasses that of the clothes makers of Ypres and Ghent, two European cloth exporters at the time. Back then, Bath, the English town Alison came from, was also trying to establish itself as one of these major European exporters.
An Unapologetic Attitude
Alison married many times. In the General Prologue, the narrator states she married five times “in addition to ‘other’ company in her youth.” In the same way he described other pilgrims, the narrator satirized the Wife of Bath by bringing out her qualities of “pride, wrath, envy, and lust.”At a time when marrying more than once in a lifetime was frowned upon by the Church, the Wife of Bath presents a free thinking view of marriage and love. Although she married five times, she believes she did nothing wrong, and is open to the idea of another marriage.
The Prologue sets up this unapologetic mindset preceding her tale, an unusually lengthy text. The other pilgrims learn she had three husbands who treated her as an equal in the relationship, and two husbands who held the power in the marriage. Her first husbands were rich, old, and easily controlled. Her fourth husband died, and her fifth husband allowed her to do what she wanted.
Her marriages taught the Wife of Bath to provide for herself. The readers learn how each marriage formed her character. She gained financial stability with her cloth-making business; she found her happiest marriages had mutual love and respect. She did not accept male dominance, but equal roles and a partnership, a novel approach at the time.
A Provocative Tale
While the physical appearance and the past of the Wife of Bath shocked early critics of the character, the tale she tells the pilgrims is even more provocative. Her story is a Breton lai, a short Romance based on an earlier French model, set in the kingdom of King Arthur.
A young knight is sentenced to death after he is accused of rape. The wife of King Arthur tells him he can live if he finds out what women really want. The knight has one year and one day to find the answer, and he travels from place to place to find the right answer.
Some tell him women want wealth, others tell him they want pleasure, and others freedom. As the year passes, he prepares to go home and runs into an old woman. She tells him she will give him the solution if he promises to do what she asks in return. He accepts, and they ride to the court. There, the knight tells the queen that a woman wants sovereignty over her husband.
A Modern Story
The Wife of Bath never experienced this particular willing submission from a husband, but proves through her actions that any woman can create the life she wants for herself and can thrive in a male-dominated society.Although the Wife of Bath may strike modern readers as a radical character, there was already a rise of anti-marriage literature in the late Middle Ages. Authors such as Mathieu of Boulogne (Matheolus) expressed similar views about marriage in this growing genre. In his “Lamentations” (circa 1295), Matheolus criticized marriage for making men miserable.
The Wife of Bath’s Tale is surprisingly modern because of the character’s vision of marriage. This was of special interest to Chaucer scholars, who regarded the character as an example of a woman’s life during the Middle Ages.
