Deceptiveness and Duality in Chaucer�s "The Wife of Bath's Tale"
Deceptiveness and Duality in Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale"
The Wife of Bath is perhaps the most vividly drawn of all of Chaucer's characters, and her tale, together with its prologue, makes for satisfying drama as well as for exposition of a thought-provoking moral. Scholarly arguments have been advanced to show it as a pro-feminist treatise, and just as many to prove the opposite: that it is deeply misogynistic. Certainly, "maistrie" (mastery) is a central theme; however, I intend to prove that the moral of the tale is two-fold: first, that nothing is as it seems, appearances being deceptive; and secondly, that everything contains within itself its own opposite, and that this ...
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the Wife of Bath throughout the tale in an entirely favorable light. He is attractive enough for the hag to desire him in marriage, with no seeming repugnance for his act. Even after his cruel renunciation of the hag as poor, ugly and lowborn, she (the Wife or the hag) does not repudiate him. The hag offers him a choice of an ugly but faithful, or a beautiful but potentially faithless, wife, and oddly he decides to let her make the choice. At this point, she becomes young and beautiful, as well as devoted, and they live happily ever after.
There is an obvious parallel between the fairy-tale and the Wife of Bath's account of her marriage to Jankyn the clerk. The disparity in their ages, the man's attempt to establish his superiority over his wife, and his subsequent capitulation and their happy life thereafter, are directly comparable.
The figure of the hag who desires a young man and has the potential to change into a beautiful young woman is a fairly common literary ...
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are young, virile and attractive. A common device of the Middle Ages is the memento mori, the remembrance of the inevitability of death. The skeleton confronts the revelers: "As I was, so ye are; as I am, so ye shall be." The hag becomes young and desirable, a transformation which could have been a two-edged sword; she now could be desired by others, and only through trust in her integrity will the knight be able to rest assured that she is his alone. Adding to the irony, we can see in the prologue that the Wife of Bath, when she was young and comely, was cruel to her three old husbands, gaining control of them through mockery, and by flaunting her youth and appetite. Her fourth ...
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Deceptiveness and Duality in Chaucer�s "The Wife of Bath's Tale". (2015, August 19). Retrieved November 28, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Deceptiveness-Duality-Chaucers-Wife-Baths-Tale/104911
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"Deceptiveness and Duality in Chaucer�s "The Wife of Bath's Tale"." Essayworld.com. August 19, 2015. Accessed November 28, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Deceptiveness-Duality-Chaucers-Wife-Baths-Tale/104911.
"Deceptiveness and Duality in Chaucer�s "The Wife of Bath's Tale"." Essayworld.com. August 19, 2015. Accessed November 28, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Deceptiveness-Duality-Chaucers-Wife-Baths-Tale/104911.
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