The Wife of Bath’s Tale
Prologue
Contention:
The Pardoner
mocks the wife
“I was about to take a
wife…There’ll be no wife for
me this year”
This is in response to the
Wife’s mentioning her desire
for a sixth husband
Prologue continued
Shows
that not all members
of the group get along
Underscores Chaucer’s
admiration for the Wife by
the Pardoner’s opposition
The Tale
 Theme:
marriage
 Theme: “What women want”
 Character: Chivalry (the knight)
 Comments on the general
treatment women received from
other men, especially their
husbands
Background
 Religion
is set up to “fall”
 Friars have displaced spirits in
lines 31-56
 Women had been ravaged by
spirits, but the wife suggests
that friars are even worse
 Scathing commentary on the
“morality” of the friars
Background
 Chivalry is set up
 59: “There was a
to “fall”
knight who
was a lusty liver.”
 64: “By very force took her
maidenhead”
 These examples are directly
contrary to the values espoused
by chivalry
Irony
 The
knight was to be beheaded,
but Fate intervenes: the queen
 The knight is saved by the
queen and her court
 His next task is Herculean:
discover “what women most
desire” in a year
What Women want
 Honor
 Jollity and
 The
variety of
answers
suggests that
pleasure
there is no
 Gorgeous clothes
answer
 Fun in bed
 Suggests that
 To be oft widowed women are
and remarried
impossible to
 Pampered and
please
flattered
Midas’ Wife
 Line
119-120: “…vicious we may
be within/ We like to be thought
wise and void of sin.”
 Women have an image to keep
up
 Pertains to men only—women
know their true natures among
themselves
Midas’ Wife
 Vicious:
though Midas “loved her
best,” his wife’s vicious nature
superceded her own love
 Of Midas’ ears transforming:
“she thought she would have
died keeping this secret bottled
up inside”
 Wife must gossip
The Secret’s Out
 The
Midas story prefaces the
secret to what women want
 The knight finds fairies who
disappear, leaving an old hag
 Note that fairies are mentioned
favorably
Secret
 The
hag gets the knight’s promise
to give her whatever she asks in
exchange for the difference
 “And then she crooned her gospel in
his ear”
 Crooned suggests intimacy; gospel
means truth
Secret Revealed
A
woman wants the self-same
sovereignty/ Over her husband
as over her lover,/ And master
him: he must not be above her.”
 Women want equality in the
relationship
The Bargain Met
 The
old hag takes he knight to
be her husband
 This is the woman in
“sovereignty”
 This is ironic for the knight, who
ravaged a maiden at the
beginning of the tale
The Bargain Met
 Line
248: “He takes his ancient
wife to bed”
 At this point, the old woman
teaches the knight “chivalry”
The Arguments
Line 276-277:
 Old
 Ugly
 Poor
 Low-bred

 These
are the
Knight’s reasons
for not loving
his wife

They reinforce his
character as not
chivalrous
Rebuttal: Low-bred
 Lines
285-293
 The hag says that the idea of
noble birth guaranteeing
“gentility”
 The hag claims that deeds make
a nobleman (gentleman)
Rebuttal: Poverty
 355
 Hag
mentions that God approves
of poverty
 This appeals to Chaucer’s
audience, who would have been
familiar with this Christian
concept
Rebuttal: Poverty
 Claims
that poverty is not
shameful—indulgence and
avarice are
 The poor are not missing what
counts: being happy
Rebuttal: Old and Ugly
 The
hag claims that these two
attributes ensure that she is
chaste
 The old hag will still satisfy the
knight’s “worldly appetites”
Submission
 The
knight finally submits
 He has a “loyal, true, and
humble wife
 At the time of submission, he
finds his wife young and
beautiful
‘The Moral to the Story’
 “cut
short the lives of those who
won’t be governed by their
wives”
 Request by the Wife for all
husbands
 The wife displays her real world
intelligence