The Role Of The Wife Of Bath A
According to popular culture, specifically through the use of such magazines as Glamour and Cosmopolitan, the woman of the twentieth century can still be defined by her sexual identity, although perhaps in different terms than were used when Chaucer first wrote the Canterbury Tales. "Today's woman" (to coin the popular culture term) is one who is powerful, and equal in all ways to her sexual mate, "today's man." She works outside the home, pursuing an emotionally and financially profitable career, she is no longer a virgin by the time she takes a husband, and usually has several sexual partners before ever meeting the man she will marry.
Financial independence is something women often ...
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today in the pursuit of their goals and fulfillment.
Yes, the Wife of Bath is a woman that we of this age can relate to, she speaks freely and openly, and displays none of the characteristics that would have defined a woman of that time, she is not subtle and demure, nor does she shy away from describing her sexual needs and desires. In her very descriptions of her life she depicts herself as something other than the norm, from the opening page where she is rebuked for having had so many husbands to the end, where she gains complete dominance over her fifth. Obviously for the time this book was written, this woman was coarse and commanding, an outrageous woman if ever one could be defined; yet to examine her with a twentieth century notion in mind, she becomes all the more humorous, all the more common, and perhaps, easier for us to relate to as we watch women struggle more fiercely for sexual and financial equality if not dominance.
As the Wife of Bath's Prologue is spoken by ...
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"Therfore no womman of no clerk is preysed." However, while it is clear that the Wife is on the side of fellow females, in a logical sense the Wife's arguments are not particularly effective against the anti-feminists' view that women are as vain as cats, as sex-crazed as spaniels, and as destructive as "wilde fyr". She advances her argument by means of pouring scorn on her husbands and cursing them. While "old lecchour" and "with sorwe!" may defeat her husbands' supposed wrath, it cannot be said that the Wife herself logically defeats the attacks made by anti-feminists on women and married life.
Indeed, the Wife's speech and behaviour, as well as her account of her history, appear to ...
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"The Role Of The Wife Of Bath A." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 16 Aug. 2008. Web. 26 Apr. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Role-Of-The-Wife-Bath/88395>
"The Role Of The Wife Of Bath A." Essayworld.com. August 16, 2008. Accessed April 26, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Role-Of-The-Wife-Bath/88395.
"The Role Of The Wife Of Bath A." Essayworld.com. August 16, 2008. Accessed April 26, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Role-Of-The-Wife-Bath/88395.
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