The wife of Bath, a pilgrim in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, has strong opinions on many subjects, such as sex, marriage , men and the Bible. . She speaks her mind clearly and at length, but she is also a manipulative, subtle and untrustworthy narrator, who strives to control her audience just as she controlled her husbands. She is both an agent and a target of satire; as she takes on men's unfair portrayals of women, she herself becomes such a maligned woman, an act of her own making. But although Chaucer uses her both as a satirical lens and as an object of entertainment, she remains indifferent; even though she uses satire, her goal is not to be a satirist but to control her husbands. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The grievances and attacks of the Wife of Bath are many; she spends more time complaining about her husband than telling his story. She had five husbands; his first three were “good, rich, old” men (187) with problems in bed. She controls them by telling them all the things they say about her, that "You say we women will hide our vices/until we are safely married, and then we will show them;/ it is certainly an appropriate proverb for a reprimand. grump!'" (195). She admits that "it was all wrong" (199), but her method works. Her other technique is to negotiate using sex, "giving them no pleasure...until 'he paid me his ransom' (201) Both methods show the weakness of older men willing to submit to a woman and confess to affronts they did not commit, in order to have sex. and peace of mind Alice's more subtle methods of dealing with these men satirize not only them, but also the cultural roles in marriage. Her husbands feel flattered when Alice walks around at night, supposedly to. "spying on the girls they sleep with" (201), but in fact she is profiting from her own affairs at this time. Her first husbands are stupid and impotent men, easily deceived and ruled by their wives' manipulation of their roles. She plays the role of the clever wife who insults her husband, and she portrays her husbands as thugs they are too old to be, "accusing them of being girls/when they were so sick they could." barely standing” (201). Shrews, like Xanthippe, mentioned by one husband, don't make pleasant wives, but they don't cheat either. She defends her reprimands by saying, 'since a man is more reasonable/than a woman, you must be patient'” (203), using female weakness as a tool. Even marriage itself is satirized by its pragmatism. “'If I sold my chosen beauty,/I could walk as fresh as a rose/but I'll keep her to your liking'” (203), Alice says to her husband; Marriage, for her, is only useful to the extent that monogamy helps her make older men feel guilty enough to give her all their money. The only husband she marries “for love and not money” (207) is the one who beats her. Alice's technique of embracing and using her role as a wife confuses all of her husbands. Her fourth is guilty of many of the crimes she has accused others of, but Alice's response to her lustful husband is the opposite of the one she used with her low-energy husbands. She doesn't have any things of her own, but she pretends to. She has no reason to cheat for herself, as she did duringher previous marriages, but she behaves like a bad wife to make her husband suffer. Jankin, her fifth, she surprises him by telling him about a dream that she didn't really have. She gives him control of all her assets, but he beats her and lectures her with stories of unworthy former wives and pecked husbands. Alice finally tames him by melodramatically proclaiming “now I'm going to die” (219) after he hits her. She accuses him as she did the first three, asking him: “Did you murder me like this for my land?” » (219), the land he already controls, when she knows that he hit her in anger because she tore off a leaf. his book. With pragmatism, intelligence and reprimand, the Wife of Bath dominates her five husbands, demonstrating the faults of men and marriage. But she herself is not quite perfect. There is little difference to her husbands between a woman who thinks they are having sex and a woman who only pretends to, between a woman who is having affairs and one who simply gives the impression of having them, between the one who feels wronged and the one who exaggerates her feeling of betrayal. Alice is a woman that very few men would want to live with, but she justifies her behavior as an attack and parody of the interpretations and writings of male authors. Preachers and theologians are the main targets of Alice's satire. "'I was clearly told... that since Christ only went once/to a wedding... by this example he taught me/that I should not marry again 'once'" (183), she says, citing an absurd example. of exegesis. She puts forward her own argument, both strong and weak in different respects. She cites Solomon, Abraham and Jacob as having had more than one wife, the commandment to "be fruitful and multiplied", the perfection of the genitals and the absence of any commandment regarding virginity. His argument is in part a refutation of St. Jerome, who wrote that women should not marry, and which works in this regard; but as an excuse for remarrying after widowhood, it is not very convincing. The only woman she mentions who married more than once is the Samaritan woman, and Jesus hardly approved of her multiple marriages. The Wife of Bath knows it; she innocently notices Jesus' words: "'Thus he spoke, certainly;/what he meant by that I cannot say'" (183) and continues her argument. When they support her, Alice cites the authorities, but when they oppose her, she dismisses them with a "'I will not conform to this text/and this rubric which is worth a gnat!'" (199 ). Alice manipulates and ignores texts in the same way. the way she treats her husbands; she even combines these techniques by accusing her husbands of saying that "there are three things / which trouble all this earth... that a hateful woman is counted among these misfortunes" and "just as worms destroy a tree / so a woman destroys her husband” (199) When she uses him as an example, she names Solomon’s many wives, but in discrediting him, she puts his words in the mouths of her husbands. She uses a similar tactic to explain. the misogyny of Jankin's favorite authors, saying, "the clerk, when old and incapable of doing Venus's work...writes...that women cannot keep their marriage vows" (215! ) It attacks the credibility of these authors or attributes their comments to a less credible source; for her favorite sentiments, she even creates sources, asserting that "in the Almagest [Ptolemy] pronounces this proverb:/'The wisest of all men is he/who never cares who has the world in his hands hands’” (197). But Chaucer does a similar thing to the Wife of Bath and her satire. Increating a manipulative and biased character, he casts doubt on his opinions. The perceived virtue of one of her greatest characteristics, her sexual desire, depends on her current husband's perspective, but his inclinations can be worrisome. At her fourth husband's funeral, she says she "acted sadly,/as wives must do, for it is the custom...but since I was provided with a companion/ I cried only a little” (209). Her deception satirizes marriage by emphasizing how Alice's emotions differ from a woman's expected grief, but it also shows a woman completely indifferent to her husband's death as long as it is provided for. The man she next marries is Jankin, of whom she says in her tirades: "'I wouldn't want him even if [my husband] died tomorrow'" (197). Even though she lies throughout her speech, the magnitude and unexpectedness of Alice's contradiction mocks her, if only slightly. She falls in love with Jankin when she “[sees] him walking behind the beer” (209) of her last husband. Jankin beats her, but she doesn't care, because he's good in bed; "in our bed he was so tireless and wanton... that even if he had beaten me every bone, he could soon win back my love" (205), she says. Lady Alice's tendency to love men who mistreat her and hate her "good" husbands (187). based solely on gender creates a perplexing character. Despite being satirized as a shrew and a sex-obsessed woman, Alice capitalizes on these roles in order to control not only her husbands, but all men, presenting herself as an authority over women. “We women have, to tell the truth,/a strange fantasy... Forbid us one thing, and we will desire it;/we urge it, and then we will flee” (205) she says. In context, as Alice describes the husband she "loved the most because he was so cool in his love" (205), this seems to mean that women like to be neglected, but it also has a more subtle meaning; forcing women to do anything, or forbidding them to do anything. "'Even if you ask Argus...to be my bodyguard...he can't guard me unless I want him to'" (199), she tells her husbands. that “no man can perjure himself and lie so boldly as a woman” (193) and “God has given women by nature deception, crying/and shadowing” (201). Although these words primarily describe Alice herself, she uses them to intimidate men as a whole, with her stated goal to Pardon: that he "distrust [marriage]" (191). Its goal is not to represent women in a positive way, but to indicate their power. "'Many saints... have always lived in perfect chastity... may they be white bread... and may we be our wives called barley bread'" (189) she says; his satirical portrait would not bother her; holiness is not its goal. She herself is a far from perfect lioness painted by a man, but she tries to create her own image of the woman in her tale. The story of The Wife of Bath is a retelling of a legend of King Arthur; Alice's version of the story contains many details supporting her claims. In this version, the knight sent to find out what the women want is not King Arthur but a rapist whose life was spared by the queen and whose response is weighed not by an evil baron but by the women, including widows “since widows are so wise” (229). The witch this knight is forced to marry gains power by being able, as she puts it, to "'rect all this,/if I wanted...if you behaved well to me'" (233 ) instead of being the victim. of a curse. In this story, women.