Bharat the wife of bath seminar PDF

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Bharat Mohan Bhagwani Hemnani P1

Seminar 3: THE WIFE OF BATH’S PROLOGUE” & “THE WIFE OF BATH’S TALE Questions 1. Whose story do we hear, and whose voice? First of all, The Wife of Bath has a reputation as the most memorable pilgrim in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and there's no doubt that her Prologue is a big part of the huge reason and meaning behind this. Henceforth, I truly think it can be clearly observed thoroughly throughout this text that in this specific and quite long and very extensive prologue, Alice, who is The Wife of Bath, does quote her autobiography, declaring or addressing in her very first words that “experience” will be her guide or help. She does begin the prologue by announcing that she has always followed the rule of experience rather than authority and that she has enough experience to make her an expert due to the fact that she has married different men five times and she sees nothing wrong with having had five husbands. In other words, the Wife of Bath begins the prologue to her tale by establishing herself as an authority on marriage, due to her extensive personal experience with the institution. Since her first marriage at the tender age of twelve, she has had five husbands. She says that many people have criticized her for her numerous marriages, most of them on the basis that Christ went only once to a wedding and therefore The Wife of Bath has her own views of Scripture and God’s plan. 2. She presents her own experience against authority. What do you think it means? Do we still keep this duality? That statement is due to the fact that she has married different men a total amount of five times and she sees nothing wrong with having had five husbands. Besides her claim where she says that experience is her one and only authority, it seems that Alice feels the need to establish her authority in a more cultured way. Personally speaking, I think that it could be both experience and authority she’s looking for. Yet, despite her claim that experience is her sole authority, the Wife of Bath apparently feels the need to establish her authority in a more scholarly way. She does imitate the ways of churchmen and scholars by backing up her claims with quotations from Scripture and works of antiquity. The Wife carelessly flings around references as textual evidence to buttress her argument, most of which don’t really correspond to her real points. Moreover, in keeping with her claim to speak from experience, the Wife chooses to illustrate the “wo that is in marriage” by telling how she ruled over her last five husbands. She launches into an extended flashback where she accuses her husbands of unfaithfulness, misogyny, and ill treatment of her, she also says that she managed to get everything she wanted from them. Thus, the Wife herself believes that she is explaining the suffering that wives such as her undergo in the patriarchal institution of marriage, ironically Chaucer reveals the opposite. It is the Wife's behaviour that generates most of the “wo” in her five marriages. Geoffrey Chaucer has already cleverly allowed her to be unwittingly ironic in where she claims to have been an expert all her life in the tribulation of marriage. However, she reveals the unhappiness of any marriage where the partners are unequal, and the woman has to always struggle to gain recognition for her needs in the “partnership”. It is this which leads to desperate measures of deception, violence, and using sex as a bargaining tool in order to gain some selfdetermination. Nowadays, the same rights, resources, opportunities and protections are supposedly given to both men and women, but it does not require that girls and boys, or women and men, are the same, or that they are treated exactly alike and this is a very sad thing that we can’t seem to eradicate or erase from people’s minds.

Bharat Mohan Bhagwani Hemnani P1

3. Is Alice of Bath telling us her whole life or a specific aspect of it? I’m in fact quite sure and think that Alice of Bath is telling us a specific aspect of her life. She uses almost the entire prologue to explain the basis of her theories about experience versus authority and also to introduce the point that she illustrates in her tale, which is the thing women most desire to achieve and this is to completely control ("sovereignty") over their husbands. Moreover, because she has had five husbands, Alice feels that she can speak with authority from this experience. 4. Why is marriage so important to her? In Chaucer's time, the antifeminism aspect of the church was a strong controlling factor. Thus, women were frequently characterised and treated almost as monsters or creatures and they were sexually insatiable, lecherous, and sharp-tongued, added to the fact that they were patronised by the church authorities. Women were not allowed to participate in church doctrine in any way. At that time, a second marriage was considered suspect, so Alice carefully reviews the words of God as revealed in scripture. And her knowledge of scripture reveals that she is not simply an empty-minded woman. Furthermore, in that period or Chaucer's time, perpetual virginity received a considerable praise; some of the saints were canonised because they preferred death to the loss of their virginity, or some struggled so fiercely to retain their virginity that they were considered martyrs and were canonised. Nevertheless, modern audiences would recognise that the Alice has a valid case to make and talk about the restrictions on life as a married woman. She reveals the unhappiness of any marriage where the partners are not equal at all and the woman has to struggle to gain any sort of recognition or freedom. 5. What is the main difference among her husbands? Would you expect a middle-class woman debating as she does? Of her five husbands, three have been “good” and two have been “bad.” The first three were good, she admitted, mostly because they were rich, old, and submissive. She laughs when she remembers the torments that she put these men through. No, I wouldn’t because during this period women used to be the submissive or ordered people. She would accuse her husband of having an affair, launching into a diatribe in which she would charge him with a confusing display of accusations. If one of her husband’s got drunk, she would claim he said that every wife is out to destroy her husband, he would then feel guilty and give her what she wanted. Moreover, she would tease her husbands in bed, refusing to give them full satisfaction until they promised her money and also, she admitted proudly to use her verbal and sexual power to bring her husbands to total submission. 6. What sort of authorities does she refer to? Once again, the thing women most desire is complete control ( “sovereignty”) over their husbands. Because she has already had five husbands, Alice feels that she can speak with authority from this experience. The image of the whip underlines her dominant role as the partnership; she tells everyone that she is the one in charge in her household, especially in the bedroom, where she appears to have an insatiable thirst for sex; the result is a satirical, lascivious depiction of a woman, but also of feudal power arrangements. I do think that it is made evident at the end of both the Prologue and the Tale that it is not dominance that she wishes to gain, in her relationship with her husband, but a kind of equality.

Bharat Mohan Bhagwani Hemnani P1 7. Does she represent the courtly wife of romances? Her tale upsets the conventions of the romance genre by rejecting the idea that love exists primarily outside of marriage, she declares the agency of wives in a literary genre that often makes marriage a prize of male success rather a matter of mutual choice. In these ways, Alice transforms both religious and aristocratic conventions to defend marriage as a virtuous practice, a position that promotes her own interests as a bourgeois lay woman. In other words, in the late fourteenth century, the ethic of courtly love was not taken too seriously, and she does not represent it to its fullest or entirety. 8. Do you think she is addressing mainly ladies? Absolutely not, I think it is addressed to all, both men and women. The struggle in The Wife of Bath's Prologue is “gendered”. It is not so much a struggle between two different people as a struggle between a man and a woman. The gender distinctions in the prologue seem distinctly marked. Men seem to be the ones with economical power and education, women seem to have to get what they need by appealing to or tricking men. In this respect, the Wife exposes the weaker side of the men she marries, who can easily be manipulated through their desire for sex and status. This is one of the models of ideals taught to her by the culture and the church of that time. She even names books which depict women as manipulative and depict the idea of marriage as especially dangerous for men who want to be scholars. Furthermore, Chaucer, being a clear man himself, uses irony and satire to challenge the church's oppression of women by allowing the Wife of Bath to speak freely about sex, marriage and women's desires. He develops her character as a gap-toothed, earthy old hag person who is honest, witty and quite funny. The challenges that the Wife of Bath confronted in the 14th century are the same challenges that women are still facing today. Although our society has become more lenient and accepting, women still struggle to gain the same sexual freedom and social power that men have always held. It is a text used to empower and extend equality for both men and women in their inner circle and also reflect about their actual status. 9. According to the description she gives of her married life, how would you describe the protagonist? Would you say she is a good narrator? First of all, the knight is the protagonist or main character alongside the Wife of Bath because all of the action in the story or text surrounds him and his mistakes. Moreover, he is also the protagonist due to the convention of the romance genre, in which the main character is most often a man, usually a knight, who undergoes personal growth in the course of the story. The story ends up being not only about his adventures, but also and mainly about their effect on him. On the other hand, the Wife of Bath is also a main character and she is portrayed as a woman of passion, who desires most of all to be more powerful than her man, her spouse, or her lover. When we look at the prologue, we are able to see who she is and get a real sense of how she actually views herself. She is confident about her knowledge of love, virginity and marriage because she has been married five times and declares that her experience is more important than knowledge derived from scholars and books. She is very original for a traditional type of woman because she does not feel shameful of her experiences in life, instead, she feels that living by experience is the smartest way to live. As the poem goes on, Geoffrey Chaucer paints a very controversial portrait of the Wife of Bath. On one hand she is crude, sexually explicit, and hypocritical, but on the other hand, she is witty, courageous, and radical and proud of her life. On the contrary, she truly believes in her philosophy and her virtues and supports them with citations from the Bible. That is ironic because she is opposing women's oppression with the piece of literature that has been used by men as a justification for women's oppression. I do think

Bharat Mohan Bhagwani Hemnani P1 that the narrator in The Wife of Bath’s Tale delivers an incredibly powerful voice in the Prologue of the tale. Chaucer develops a character that the reader is to interpret as a figure distinctly contrary with the stereotypical Christian ideals and his period’s constructs of what is appropriate of female behaviour. 10. What does the fifth husband, Jankin, represent? What sort of stories does his book contain and how does Alice respond to them? Do you think through this character Chaucer is attacking or supporting misogyny? He represents true love. Jankyn, her fifth husband and notably a clerk, possesses a “book of wikked wyves”, which contains stories of the villain of these basic stereotypes, which the Wife dismisses on the basis that they were not created by women, but they were created by rather misogynistic men. I think it is curious to ask whether Chaucer supported or attacked misogyny. On the one hand, men could be seen as targets of social criticism, since in the Prologue they are imputed to be controlling and misogynistic. In The Tale the crime is committed by a man. In the Prologue, women are represented as gossipy and manipulative or, depending on your interpretation, as resourceful and outspoken, in tackling the inequality of their situation in marriage. Chaucer's representation of the Wife can be labelled as being both “feminist” and “anti-feminist”. Depending on your point of view, either of these descriptions might provide a form of social criticism, either of the Wife or of the social world she inhabits. Chaucer cleverly uses a first-person narrator so that we are drawn to make our own judgements of the Wife, but these judgements are belied by ironies and contradictions. I personally thin that Chaucer was against misogyny and wanted to support feminism, but this was a rather funny and eye-catching method or technique he used to provide curiosity and common sense amongst society. 11. What are Alice’s opinions about friars? Friars have replaced rapist and sexual predators because friars go and are at same time in every place and everywhere, blessing every building and church they can find. Moreover, friars will seduce women and take their virginity. Furthermore, they are dangerous and also secretive sexual predators lurking everywhere, waiting to steal a woman's virtue, but now it is the friars instead of crazy rapists who are all over the place, ready to seduce women. She thinks they are a danger to women, literally saying they will “do no more than take your virtue.”

12. Is there a courtly code in this knight’s behaviour? Do we perceive here courts as sites of justice? What role do women play in them? In order to discover the knight’s real behaviour, we first should take into account or really know what happened before. For instance, one day a young, lusty knight comes across a beautiful young maiden. Thus, overcome by lust and his sense of his own power, he rapes her. So, the court is scandalised by the crime and decrees that the knight should be put to death by decapitation. After the knight commits a rape, the king hands him over to Arthur’s queen, who sends him on an educational quest. The queen presents the knight with the following challenge: if, within one year, he can discover what women want most in the world and report his findings back to the court, he will keep his life. If he cannot find the answer to the queen’s question, or if his answer is wrong, he will lose his head. On the whole, there are some specific aspects that show courtly love throughout the text, but the knight's behaviour is not actually courtly as the traditional. The Queen's request saves his life and sends him on a mission, as we named earlier. In this epoch, doing things

Bharat Mohan Bhagwani Hemnani P1

for a Lady is a common characteristic of courtly love; but still, he is saved by a woman and has to learn about women because of his disrespect. This aspect may be seen as different than what we normally see portrayed as courtly love. Hence, the answer is negative, and it is a clear no because the court of the tale seems more a place of funny and ironic manipulation and punishment in the means of vendetta or vengeance by the women instead of justice for a crime. Women actually play a very important role because his education comes through women, and the queen’s challenge puts him in an interesting situation where what is traditionally thought of as a shortcoming, a woman’s inability to keep a secret, is the one and only thing that can save him. As a matter of fact, in this case we perceive the court a site of justice, because instead of killing him the queen wants to judge him. On the whole, women have absolute power, which is shown when the king accepts that the queen could decide about the punishment and the fear the knight has to the women of the court, even the ugly woman have a major capability to persuade the knight. 13. Do you think through this character Chaucer is attacking or supporting chivalry Do you hear any echoes of social strife in this story? I personally think that Chaucer is probably “attacking” chivalry. Chivalry was a code of honour that knights during the middle ages used in order to become honourable and attain courage. But in the tale, we can see clearly that the knight broke the code. The knight is an ungrateful person. The old woman saves him from a certain death and then requests that he marry her. In light of the events, the knight should be grateful to escape death, but instead he views the marriage to his saviour as another form of the same punishment. He agrees only because he is bound by the promise, and the chivalric code forces him to keep it. When the knight is lectured by the old woman on their wedding night. He accepts all her arguments as truth right away, without arguing. To be absolutely sure, his wife's talk is convincing and morally right, but the point is the knight doesn't like to fight or skirmish for his beliefs. The knight comes across to the reader as a mindless fellow, who tries to avoid confrontations, who has no respect for other people, and who doesn't like to think and does so only when he has to, which is to say when thinking is necessary to protect himself. The knight is someone who doesn't follow any of the chivalric codes and acts like a fool raping a maid, being punished by a royal court and mistreating a woman who is claiming his love. Also, behind his superficial skills, there is no substance. His goal in life is just to live. We see echoes of a social strife due to the superficial way we see some people and how we treat them, not only amongst love connection or relationship between men and women, which is the main purpose of the tale. Consequently, the maleness characterized by the knight at the time of persuasion by the idea of having a virtuous woman who any man desires after confessing the shame of being married with such an ugly woman. 14. What genre does the tale belong to? Why? “The Wife of Bath's Tale” is actually a Breton lai, which is a short romance that features knights, noble ladies and many supernatural incidents. This kind of tale originated in a north-eastern part of France called Brittany, hence the adjective “Breton” to describe it. The tale, itself, is an Arthurian romance, typified by its knight errant protagonist, its quest to answer a question. So, in other words the tale can be considered a Romance, and these are basically collections of fantastic stories about a knight's adventures who has heroic features and who usually goes on a quest and courtly love is represented as well. However in this poem, the knight doesn't behave valorous because of the punishment of the queen.

Bharat Mohan Bhagwani Hemnani P1

15. Do the contents and the style of the story coincide with the narrator’s interests? Does the knight learn a lesson? From my point of view, I don’t think so. There are other aspects of the Wife's Tale which seem inappropriate to the narrator. For example: The bourgeois wealthy Wife has to relate the Old Woman's defence of poverty. The setting of the tale wouldn't seem to be one that would immediately have captured the interest of the earthy Wife. However, Chaucer can seem to have changed or “customised” this tale to the Wife. In this story, the knight is probably meant as a symbol of all men in a tale whose point seems to be that men need to be taught to learn a lesson and listen to women's desires and yield sovereignty to them. The knight eventually learns his lesson, although it takes him a while. With him, then, the tale seems to be encouraging women not to give up hope on the men in their lives; they may make some mistakes, but they'll come around in the end....