The Horror and the Shame

This is a timed writing from Thursday, October 18, 2001 on the topic of whether the Wife of Bath, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a woman who is trapped in a world not worthy of her 20th Century ideas, or is someone who uses twisted logic to justify her own set of warped values.  In my piece, I have chosen to refer to the Wife of Bath as "the Lady" so as to cut down on having to refer to that long name every time.  In other words, I am too lazy to write out her complete name all the time.

A woman of nobility and power, caught in a time when women are prized for being meek and submissive.  One might feel pity for such a caged eagle, yet this bird is more like a vulture, preying upon poor men to satisfy her lust and hunger for wealth.  After satisfying herself, she then tries to hide behind words of the Holy Book to try and justify her unscrupulous actions.   Such a twisted character could only be Chaucer's Wife of Bath, forever immortalized in his piece, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue." In the selection, she tells of her five husbands, whom she choose for their "purse and their chest," and dares anyone to try and scold her for her actions.

Canterbury Castle

One can only feel disgust towards such a person.  If the Lady feels she must justify her actions with scripture and be ever ready with an explanation of her actions, then somewhere deep-down , she too must feel that what she is doing is immoral.  If one feels no shame over something, one just does the action and then forgets about it, never worrying over the consequences.  Yet if any little part of that action causes grief in any way, the brain will be fixed upon dreaming up all sorts of reactions and outcomes.  Since the Lady has already rehearsed such a lengthy and complex explanantion of her actions, then she must be aware of the fact that what she is doing is considered a scandal of her time.  If she truly thought that what she was doing is condoned by God, then she would carry on and ignore all the other people's complaints and naggings.      The fact that the very society that accuses her of immorality is the same society that taught her to twist values into knots, makes the situation all the more deplorable.  The society of that time was of the mind set that as long as you presented a perfect "public" face, you could do whatever you wanted behind closed doors.  Such a philosophy practically begs for all kinds of sin and dabochery!  Therefore, the Lady can not be held soley resonspible for acting with such a disregard for values.  For example, right after the Lady's fourth husband dies, the Lady searches out a clerk that she had once said,      "How that he       were I a widow, might well marry me" The clerk quickly agreed to marry the new widow, and so when they attended the fourth husband's funeral, the two of them pretended to weep while all the while secretly planning their wedding for the next day.  How could such a man think to marry such a woman?  From her obvious disregard for a proper time of mourning, she doesn't caare a whit about loyalty.  Then consider the fact that she courted this new husband while still married to the fourth, showing her infidelity as wel.  The fact that he does marry the Lady must mean that he is without morals, making the two fiends a perfect match.      Some people might consider the Wife of Bath a strong liberating femal, standing atop a pillar for all those women of Chaucer's time.  In reality, the Lady represents all those actions and values that daies should avoid like the plague.  Her lack of loyalty and obsession with filling only her own needs of wealth and passion, combined with her own twisted sense of justification, make her a character of depravity and truly unworthy of any time spent focussed on her.

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