What type of tale is the wife of bath

Like her Prologue , the Wife's Tale is written in iambic pentameters in rhyming couplets. Chaucer can use and vary this pattern to great effect to ensure that the listeners readily understand the movement of the tale and the choices and conflicts generated within it.

For example, read from l. But this time it is the Old woman who is granted choice. In this line, Chaucer alerts the reader to the drama of the moment, by changing the established metric pattern and beginning the line with a trochee. Investigating the strucutre if The Wife of Bath's Tale. The structure of The Wife of Bath's Prologue In spite of its many digressions, the structure of The Wife of Bath's Prologue is very straightforward because it is mainly chronological.

The Wife moves: From the discussion of the issue of the validity of her serial marriages To an account of her victories over the first three husbands treated as a group To her fourth marriage Then to her fifth marriage to Jankin the clerk. Pace Pace is an aspect of narrative. It concerns the space and time given in the text to the movement of the plot and to different aspects of the narrative: Description slows the pace, for example, and so does lengthy dialogue An episode may be covered briefly, e.

Investigating ways of charting the structure of The Wife of Bath's Prologue Think about how you could make a chart to reflect the way in which you see the structure of The Wife of Bath's Prologue. For example, you could draw: A long line with patches in different colours to indicate, for example The Wife's arguments with church teaching Her arguments with her husbands Moments of reflection Moments of reconciliation Awareness of her pilgrim audience The Pardoner 's interruption.

Your ideas? She has traveled all over the world on pilgrimages, so Canterbury is a jaunt compared to other perilous journeys she has endured. Not only has she seen many lands, she has lived with five husbands.

She is worldly in both senses of the word: she has seen the world and has experience in the ways of the world, that is, in love and sex. Scarlet was a particularly costly dye, since it was made from individual red beetles found only in some parts of the world. The fact that she hails from Bath, a major English cloth-making town in the Middle Ages, is reflected in both her talent as a seamstress and her stylish garments. Bath at this time was fighting for a place among the great European exporters of cloth, which were mostly in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Although she is argumentative and enjoys talking, the Wife is intelligent in a commonsense, rather than intellectual, way. The knight explains his quest, and the old woman promises him the right answer if he will do what she demands for saving his life.

The knight agrees. When the queen bids the knight to speak, he responds correctly that women most desire sovereignty over their husbands. Having supplied him with the right answer, the old crone demands that she be his wife and his love. The knight, in agony, agrees. On their wedding night, the knight pays no attention to the foul woman next to him.

When she questions him, he confesses that her age, ugliness, and low breeding are repulsive to him. The old hag reminds him that true gentility is not a matter of appearances but of virtue. She tells him that her looks can be viewed as an asset.

If she were beautiful, many men would be after her; in her present state, however, he can be assured that he has a virtuous wife. She offers him a choice: an old ugly hag such as she, but still a loyal, true, and virtuous wife, or a beautiful woman with whom he must take his chances. The knight says the choice is hers. And because she has "won the mastery," she tells him, "'Kiss me.

The Wife's prologue is unique in that it is longer than the tale itself. The Wife of Bath uses the prologue to explain the basis of her theories about experience versus authority and to introduce the point that she illustrates in her tale: The thing women most desire is complete control "sovereignty" over their husbands.

Because she has had five husbands, the Wife feels that she can speak with authority from this experience, and, in the prologue, she tells how she got the upper hand with each of them. In Chaucer's time, the antifeminism of the church was a strong controlling factor. Women were frequently characterized as almost monsters; they were sexually insatiable, lecherous, and shrewish, and they were patronized by the church authorities.

Women were not allowed to participate in church doctrine in any way. Likewise, in Chaucer's time, a second marriage was considered suspect, so the Wife of Bath carefully reviews the words of God as revealed in scripture.

And her knowledge of scripture although confused at times reveals that she is not simply an empty-minded woman. Nowhere, she confesses, can she find a stricture against more than one marriage, save the rebuke Jesus gave to the woman at the well about her five husbands. But this, she confesses, she cannot understand. Furthermore, in Chaucer's time, perpetual virginity received considerable praise; some of the saints were canonized because they preferred death to the loss of their virginity, or some struggled so fiercely to retain their virginity that they were considered martyrs and were canonized.

After the Wife of Bath departs from the holy scriptures, she appeals to common sense — if everyone remained a virgin, she offers, who would be left to give birth to more virgins?

Even more basic, she maintains that the sex organs are to be used for pleasure as well as for procreation: She admits that she is a boisterous woman who enjoys sex and is not ashamed of it — a violation of the medieval view that saw sex as justified only for procreation. She also denies the popular belief that women should be submissive, especially in matters of sex. The reader should remember that the Wife's arguments, in all cases, go against the authorities of the church and that she is a woman who prefers her own experiences to scholarly arguments.

The truly remarkable aspect of the Wife of Bath's prologue is not her argument with the mores of her time or with the strictures of the church, but the very wonderful portrait of a human being.