Geoffrey Chaucer's The Wife of Bath - review

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Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath

Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet, born in London between 1340 and 1345 died there, 25 October 1400. In the year after the succession of Henry IV and the death of Richard II, whose reign, starting in 1377, thus falls entirely in the poet's life (Moore). In " The Wife of Bath," Geoffrey Chaucer paints a very delicate and graceful picture on mortality and pleasure: the wife in this story does not even realize she is dissatisfied with her marriage until she finds her fifth husband. The Wife of Bath is a strong, smart and dominant woman who experience is the authority she hold against others with opposite views under the aspect of example, since she has been married five times, and she was able to be the “master” in each of her marriage. 

According to today’s culture, specifically through the use of such magazines as Elle and Cosmopolitan, the woman of the millennium can still be defined by her sexual uniqueness, although perhaps in different terms than were used when Chaucer first wrote the Canterbury Tales. "Today's woman" is one who is powerful and equal in all ways to her sexual partner, which is "today's man." She works outside the home, pursuing an emotionally and financially profitable career, and she is no longer a virgin by the time she gets marry, and usually she has several sexual experiences before ever meeting the man she will marry. Financial independence is something women often struggle to achieve, often choosing it to precede a family and husband. Sexuality is a thing that is no longer considered of greatest privacy, but rather is discussed in close detail with most women's close associates, if not all. The Wife of Bath is perhaps more suitably used as a character for this time period than it was for when it was written, and indeed, when this twentieth century perspective is removed, she becomes the outrageous woman she was first meant to be: every bit as aggressive as women today in the pursuit of their goals.

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Louise Fradenburg, psychoanalyst, explains the way that shape anxieties about mortality criticism of the Wife of Bath’s prologue and tale (Fradenburg 205). He also shows how concerns about the mortal body and its pleasures are at work in the prologue and tale (206). In discussing how awareness of mortality shapes the Wife of Bath prologue and tale, Fradenburg studies “…a long-standing association of the romance genre with fantasy. Fantasy inspires anxieties similar to those linked with the mortal body and its pleasures” (206). Furthermore, he gives examples about how fantasies linked with the mortal body and its pleasure. Fradenburg tells us ...

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