An Analysis of Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale"

        In reading Geoffrey Chaucers Canterbury Tales, I found that of the Wife of Bath, including her prologue, to be the most thought-provoking. The pilgrim who narrates this rehearsal, Alison, is a gap-toothed, part deaf seamstress and widow who has been married five times. She claims to have huge experience in the ways of the heart, having a remedy for whatever efficiency put out it. Throughout her story, I was shocked, yet pleased to encounter detail which were rather untypical of the women of Chaucers time. It is these peculiarities of Alisons description which I will examine, expression not only at the chivalric and religious influences of this medieval period, but also at how she would have been viewed in the linguistic context of this society and by Chaucer him egotism.         During the period in which Chaucer wrote, thither was a dual concept of chivalry, one facet being base in reality and the other existing mainly in the imaginat ion only. On the one hand, there was the medieval vox populi we are most known with today in which the sawhorse was the consummate righteous man, willing to sacrifice self for the beseeming cause of the afflicted and weak; on the other, we have the sorry truth that the human knight rarely lived up to this ideal(Patterson 170). In a work by Muriel Bowden, Associate Professor of face at Hunter College, she explains that the knights of the Middle Ages were merely mounted soldiers, . . . notorious for their utter cruelty(18). The tale Baths Wife weaves exposes that Chaucer was aware of both(prenominal) forms of the medieval soldier. Where as his knowledge that knights were practically far from absolute is evidenced in the beginning of Alisons tale where the lusty soldier rapes a young maiden; King Arthur, whom the ladies of the nation beseech to... If you want to grasp a full essay, hunting lodge it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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