Wife of Bath

The tale of the Wife of Bath was really interesting and amusing to me. She starts out as this outspoken women who is going to teach everyone through her story of experience. As she gets further into the story I feel like she gets wrapped up in it to and lets her emotions about her past experiences play into the story. She kind of starts to jump around and the story loses its focus. At first I didn’t know what to think because she took pride in her ability to manipulate and control men. Then when she continues her story and talks about Jankyn, you can tell that the reason she loved him (the only of the 5 husbands she actually loves) is because he was the only one she couldn’t control. I think it is a perfect portrayal of how fickle women can be. She acts like she is hot stuff and knows everything about love, but she doesn’t. She knows how to control men but it was only when she let someone else be in control that she actually learned how to love.

I think that her story is completely embellished, and possibly untrue. She tries to vindicate herself and her actions by linking her story to pieces of scripture and other texts, but she can’t. The comparisons she tries to make don’t even make sense and you can just tell she is trying to play off as smarter than she really is. I think she just wants to sound as knowledgeable as those from higher classes to make herself feel better. That was amusing to me because I was reading some research on the Canterbury Tales and someone had noted that even those of higher/highest social classes could not even correlate their story to scripture or other texts correctly.

Okay, time to log off to go to class! More fun-n-games later!