A Feminist Potrait Painted By A Man
Samaria Cooper
Professor Leiza Brown
Humanities 201.019
November 19, 2007
Wife of Bath, the Prologue: A Feminist Portrait Painted by a Man
The Wife of Bath's Prologue is pedestal led on the medieval genre of figurative confession. In this tale a personified subordinate such as Greed or Desire confesses his or her sins to the reader. Due to the fact that the statements in the Wife of Bath attributes to her husbands were taken from the satires published in Chaucer's time, which portray women as traitorous, shallow, evil creatures, looking to undermine their husbands, feminist critics often tried to portray the Wife as one of the first feminist characters in literature. Although most portray the wife to be a feminist this cannot be true because her logic behind how she dominates her husbands derive from a man. In the Prologue, The Wife of Bath, the Wife is portrayed as a sexual deviant, and an ignorant hypocrite.
This elucidation is undermined by the verity that the Wife of Bath herself conforms to a number of misogynist and misogamist stereotypes. She describes herself as sexually insatiable but at the same time as someone who only has sex to get money which would make her a prostitute. She also illustrates how she subjugated her husband, playing on a fear that was common to men, as the Pardoner's nervous interjection reveals. Despite their contradictions, all of these ideas about women were used by men to support a hierarchy in which men dominated women.
As authoritative as the tale may seem, Chaucer's "Wife of Bath Tale" also explores the aspects of a woman's ambitious to find the precise love. The old hag might be intended to represent the Wife of Bath herself, at least as she would like others to see her. Though the hag has aged, she is capable of displaying all of the vigor and inner beauty of her youth if the right man comes along, just as the Wife did with her fifth and favorite husband, the youthful...
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