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 tarradiddle, Alison, is a gap-toothed, incite deaf seamstress and widow woman who has been married five times. She claims to have enormous experience in the ways of the heart, having a remedy for whatever might ail it. Throughout her story, I was shocked, in time pleased to encounter details which were rather unnatural of the women of Chaucers time. It is these peculiarities of Alisons tale which I will examine, looking at not only at the chivalric and religious influences of this mediaeval period, yet also at how she would have been viewed in the context of this society and by Chaucer him egotism.         During the period in which Chaucer wrote, in that location was a dual concept of chivalry, one face being based in reality and the other existing chiefly in the imagination only. On the one hand, there was the medieval whimsey we are most cognize with today in which the gymnastic horse was the gross(a) righteous man, willing to sacrifice egotism for the worthy cause of the struck and weak; on the other, we have the sorrowful truth that the human knight rarely lived up to this ideal(Patterson 170).

In a work by Muriel Bowden, childlike man Professor of English at Hunter College, she explains that the knights of the Middle Ages were merely mounted soldiers, . . . notorious for their let loose 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 a great deal far from absolute is prove in the beginning of Alisons tale where the lusty soldier rapes a young maiden; King Arthur, whom the ladies of the country compress to... If you want to grasp a full essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com

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