An Analysis Of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales": The Wife Of Bath's Tale
..."Canterbury Tales," I found that of the
Wife of Bath, including her prologue, to be the most thought-provoking. The
pilgrim who narrates this tale, Alison, is a gap-toothed, partially deaf
seamstress and widow who has been married five times. She claims to have great
experience in the ways of the heart, having a remedy for whatever might ail it.
Throughout her story, I was shocked, yet pleased to encounter details which were
rather uncharacteristic of the women of Chaucer's time. It is these
peculiarities of Alison's tale which I will examine, looking not only at the
chivalric and religious influences of this medieval period, but also at how she
would have been viewed in the context of this society and by Chaucer himself.
During the period in which Chaucer wrote, there was a dual concept of
chivalry, one facet being based in reality and the other existing mainly in the
imagination only. On the one hand, there was the medieval notion we are most
familiar with today in which the knight was the consummate righteous man,
willing to sacrifice self for the worthy cause of the afflicted and weak; on the
other, we have the sad truth that the human knight rarely lived up to this
ideal(Patterson 170). In a work by Muriel Bowden, Associate Professor of
English at Hunter College, she explains that the knights of the Middle Ages were
"merely mounted soldiers, . . . notorious" for their utter cruelty(18). The
tale Bath's Wife weaves exposes that Chaucer was aware of both forms of the
medieval soldier. Where as his knowledge that knights were often far from
perfect is evidenced in the beginning of Alison's tale where the "lusty" soldier
rapes a young maiden; King Arthur, whom the ladies of the country beseech to
spare the life of the guilty horse soldier, offers us the typical conception of
knighthood.
In addition to acknowledging this dichotomy of ideas about chivalry,...
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