7 - The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

Summary

This chapter seeks to justify and explain the Wife of Bath’s prominence among the Canterbury pilgrims as the representative of Chaucer’s powers of representation and as the anchor of the debate on marriage witnessed across a number of tales. As a source of dramatic intensity and thematic richness, the Wife offers an argumentative and autobiographical anti-clerical prologue and a redemptive romance that complicate received ideas of women’s value in marriage. She demonstrates the Wife’s stereotypically “feminine” foibles and her radically feminist thought, which turn our neat conceptions of masculine and feminine, active and passive, spiritual and worldly, on their head. The chapter argues for the Wife’s disruptive power in the Canterbury Tales.