Wife of Bath Research

Wife of Bath Research

  • Submitted By: nicky18
  • Date Submitted: 02/21/2009 10:33 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 775
  • Page: 4
  • Views: 555

Feminism is the belief that women must have equal rights to men. The wife in The Wife Of Bath controls men and has power over them. In Chaucer’s time, feminism was not accepted by the pilgrims because it was abnormal at the time so they reacted negatively towards the wife for it. The wife had no problem about showing herself as she was and she wasn’t ashamed that she had been married five times and was going to marry again. Even though the wife in Chaucer’s The Wife Of Bath is trying to spread feminism, she is just a woman who is greedy for power. The greed that the wife has makes her want and need more in The Wife Of Bath.
The wife was a controlling woman and had power over men. She showed this when she talked about her five husbands before. She used her first three husbands because they were rich and old. She would torment these men and accuse them of having an affair and other things so they would feel guilty and give her whatever she wanted. She would tell them what to do. When the knight in the story raped a woman, the wife told him as a punishment he had a year and a day to ask all the women in the land what did women want and he was forced to do so. As Leicester says, “Along the way she takes advantage of the power of her temporary position as a narrator or straw-stuffer to enjoy her work. She enjoys, no doubt about it, the satisfaction in fiction and fantasy of dominating the ill-bred knight and all his kind…” (Leicester 2). The wife is very independent as a woman and likes to keep it that way. The wife likes to be in control all the time and she shows it by the way she treated her husbands and the way and the way she treats men in general.
What’s more, the wife has greed over money and has more desires for that than men. She admits herself that she had sex for money, moreover, her husbands. You could say that she was materialistic. She cares a lot about staying young and beautiful and not growing old. That’s why she married a younger husband after...

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