Feminism In The Wife Of Bath Tale

Register to read the introduction… Jacqueline Murray, the professor of Department of History at University of Windsor, shows how women emerge in the thirteenth-century manuals as a ’marked’ category defined by their reproductive and sexual functions, viewed above all in terms of how their own sexual status (widow, wife, virgin, prostitute) contributes to the evaluation of males who commit sexual sin with them. ( 13) The Wife thinks that the virginity is not very important because our bodies were given us to use. She despises virginity but she does not tell anyone. The Wife speaks about sexuality in natural way which is very brave and unusual in her century. She represents and introduces the beginning of the moral failure and leads us into more cruel and darker side of the society. These thoughts strengthened and reached the peak throughout of the centuries which creates moral problems and stereotypes in the present society. S.H. Righby’s thought about feminism and feminist achievement in this work: Feminist approaches to literature are based on two fundamental assumptions. Firstly, that although there are unchanging biological differences between the sexes, these differences are always construed in socially and historically specific ways so that what seems 'natural' and 'obvious' about the sexes in one society will seem totally alien and mistaken in another. Through such social interpretation, biological differences between male and female become the …show more content…
Cecily Chaumpaigne introduced this theory. Many critics say that a woman has the desire to be raped because of her sexual dreams. Lousie O. Fradenburg writes about the rape in this way: the nameless knight commits the crime of rape and is sentenced to death. But instead of losing his life, he is rewarded with the “most loveable among women” – the ideal wife, who is both beautiful and faithful. At the end of the tale, his power and freedom are restored. But this transformation is accomplished through the knight’s submission. At the beginning of the tale, the knight is mortally ignorant of what women want. Rape not only shocks that interest, but represents a tyrannical assault on one of modern civilization's most cherished illusions, the so-called right to privacy. (Biedle) This is not the right and real representation of chivalric love and social rules in the Middle Ages. The sexual pleasure which the Wife feel seems to be a little masochistic. She is enjoys being beaten by her younger husband. At the end of the tale it figures out that the relationship based on equality and mutuality. In some sense, the Wife has a kind of privileges of maleness and she enjoys it.
One can argue that reading Chaucer’s ’The Wife of Bath’ in 21st century creates irony and sarcasm to the reader. The whole Canterbury Tales is a kind of human comedy. Her style of speaking does not merely personify or illustrate the traditional clerical view of