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 storey, Alison, is a gap-toothed, part deaf seamstress and leave behind who has been married five times. She claims to have huge experience in the ways of the heart, having a remedy for whatever efficiency trouble oneself it. Throughout her story, I was shocked, yet pleased to encounter exposit which were rather untypical of the women of Chaucers time. It is these peculiarities of Alisons bilgewater which I will examine, looking at not only at the chivalric and religious influences of this chivalrous period, but also at how she would have been viewed in the scene of this society and by Chaucer him egotism.         During the period in which Chaucer wrote, thither was a dual concept of chivalry, one facet being ground in reality and the other existing mainly in the ima gination only. On the one hand, there was the medieval design we are most known with today in which the sawhorse was the consummate righteous man, willing to sacrifice self for the good cause of the afflicted and weak; on the other, we have the nauseous truth that the human knight rarely lived up to this ideal(Patterson 170).

In a work by Muriel Bowden, Associate Professor of English at Hunter College, she explains that the knights of the Middle Ages were merely mounted soldiers, . . . notorious for their utter cruelty(18). The tale Baths Wife weaves exposes that Chaucer was aware of both(prenominal) forms of the medieval soldier. Where as his know! ledge that knights were frequently far from absolute is evidenced in the beginning of Alisons tale where the lusty soldier rapes a young maiden; King Arthur, whom the ladies of the country beseech to... If you want to grasp a full essay, swan it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

If you want to get a full essay, visit our page: write my paper