Who is wife of bath

The fact that she hails from Bath, a major English cloth-making town in the Middle Ages, is reflected in both her talent as a seamstress and her stylish garments. Bath at this time was fighting for a place among the great European exporters of cloth, which were mostly in the Netherlands and Belgium. Although she is argumentative and enjoys talking, the Wife is intelligent in a commonsense, rather than intellectual, way.

Through her experiences with her husbands, she has learned how to provide for herself in a world where women had little independence or power. The chief manner in which she has gained control over her husbands has been in her control over their use of her body.

The Wife uses her body as a bargaining tool, withholding sexual pleasure until her husbands give her what she demands. She admits to withholding sex from a husband "til he had maad his raunson unto me" , and berating another husband by asking him if he knows how much money her body could fetch on the open market. So, while the Wife may indeed be lusty, she's also strategic. We see this talent for strategy in two places: 1 in her account of past relationships, in which she always manages to get the upper hand, and 2 in her rhetorical technique, particularly in her defense of marriage in the first lines of her Prologue.

There, she makes her argument using texts, easily-verifiable life experience, and the mechanics of the human body itself. She makes the abstract anti-marriage texts seem irrelevant in the face of all the concrete evidence she marshals against them.

She wins her audience over with humor, encouraging them to imagine Solomon on his wedding night, for example. She's self-deprecating, readily admitting to being less than perfect spiritually, but she also sounds authoritative by quoting from well-recognized Biblical and scholarly texts.

The Wife of Bath continues to use these techniques throughout her Prologue, and they have the effect of making her really likable , even when she admits to her worst deceptions. And deceive she does: lying to her husbands about what they said while drunk, lying to Jankyn about a dream she never had, and probably lying to us as well. All of these deceptions are motivated by the Wife's desire for "maistrye" — to hold all the power in her relationships. The Wife claims that she always achieves her goal, governing her husbands "wel after my lawe" She maintains throughout her Prologue that she always manages to be the most powerful person in any relationship.

For this reason, the conclusion of the Wife's Prologue, and what it reveals about her character, is unexpected. She expresses her views with infinite zest and conviction, with such determined assurance in the correctness that no pilgrim can argue with her logic; they can be shocked by it, but they cannot refute it.

As she unfolds her life history in her prologue, she reveals that the head of the house should always be the woman, that a man is no match for a woman, and that as soon as they learn to yield to the sovereignty of women, men will find a happy marriage. In her prologue, the Wife admirably supports her position by reference to all sort of scholarly learning, and when some source of authority disagrees with her point of view, she dismisses it and relies instead on her own experience.

Because she has had the experience of having had five husbands — and is receptive to a sixth — there is no better proof of her views than her own experience, which is better than a scholarly diatribe.

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