Chaucer
...|Feminist Character in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale |
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|The Wife of Bath’s Tale features a character that seemed to resemble a feminist. But in Chaucer’s time, feminism was thought to be abnormal and the pilgrims’ |
|reacted negatively towards her for it, but The Wife of Bath had no qualms about displaying herself as she really was. She was not ashamed of the fact she had been |
|married five times, and was about to marry again. She hid nothing. |
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|The prologue of this tale showed that the pilgrim did not revere the Wife of Bath as an upstanding woman, nor did she desire to be seen as one. Almost as soon as |
|she began speaking in the prologue, she explained that she had gone through five husbands, and she was on the look out for a sixth. She also conceded that she |
|married for money: "…I’ll tell the truth. Those husbands I had, three of them were good and two of them bad. The three I call “good” were rich and old. They could |
|indeed with difficulty hold the articles that bound them all to me; (No doubt my smile)…" (Bath 263). She even went to the point of saying that she didn’t value her|
|husbands’ love. Then again, why should she? She...
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