The wife of Bath from Canterbury Tales - Essay Example

The Wife discusses how she has been frequently criticized in all these years. The Wife makes references to the history of religion in order to satisfy the concerns of people because she knows that nobody would object to the religious reference. She considers the fifth marriage justifiable for the reason that figures of the great Old Testament such as Solomon, Abraham and Jacob each had several wives simultaneously. She confesses that virginity has conventionally been defined as a very important and sacred thing, though she says that even by marrying, she is doing her bit to promote this ideology about virginity in her own way since virginity only has significance as long as there are procreators.

The Wife of Bath believes that virginity is too sacred a thing to be endorsed by ordinary people like her. Her sexual power plays the role of an instrument with which The Wife of Bath controls her husbands. The Wife of Bath tells that three of her five husbands have proven “good” while the rest have been “bad” husbands. What primarily made the first three husbands good were their submissiveness, wealth and seniority. She giggles while recalling the agony she caused to them and a typical conversation with them.

She used to accuse her good husbands of having multiple affairs and get favors from them when they drank. The Wife of Bath says to the pilgrims that she had been lying to her good husbands and that she blamed them to put them into grief. She went to the extent that she would not satisfy her husbands in the bed until they paid her for that. She is proud that she has been able to make full use of her oratory and sexual power to make her husbands submissive. The Prologue is different from The Wife of Bath’s Tale in that in the former, she justified her own fifth marriage while in the latter, she discusses the story of a knight who was supposed to bring the answer of what women want the most in the whole world to the