The Wife Of Bath's Tale By Geoffrey Chaucer

883 Words4 Pages
During the 1300’s, it was a time in history, when women had the least involvement and power in their society and households. It was an era of anti-feminists, who opposed women to prosper and excel in the community. The Middle Ages wasn’t a soothing period for women of both, higher and lower class due to the male dominated culture. Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales in the late fourteenth century, when women were restricted to express any opinions about certain religious topics. But, Geoffrey Chaucer elegantly goes against these ideologies in The Canterbury Tales through his characters such as The Wife of Bath & The Second Nun. Chaucer’s portrayal of women is presented to be powerful & Chaucer allows these women to use that power to have full control in their marriages…show more content…
“Medieval Women of the Middle Ages were viewed as the instrument of evil. This attitude towards women, initially encouraged by the church, led to their total subservience to men and the degradation of their lives” (Alchin). However, in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”, the Wife of Bath is completely distinctive from the conventional medieval woman. Chaucer portrays her as an “activist due to her strong radical ideas and beliefs” (Vu) for Christian women in the Middle Ages. Her ideas about virginity, equal ownership and male dominance disobey many Church principles, but she uses the Bible to support the validity of her various arguments. In the “Wife of Bath Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer explains the Wife of Bath’s views for her
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