The Gospel According To The Wyf Of Bath

Let me start. Let see, what can I say about this tale? Through the reading of the Tale of The Wyf of Bath, and taking into account it comes after The Miller’s Tale and The Knight’s Tale, I find it important the way Chaucer arranges this stories in order to contrast their different themes and points of view. In a way, these are different ways of telling the same story, not literally, off course. Plainly, the stories of each of the tales are quite different, but if you take their meanings into consideration, they aren’t quite different. All of these are told in order to transcend the idea of love in different perspectives. As I have discussed in earlier entries about the presence of love in The Miller’s Tale and The Knight’s Tale, here, the Wyf of Bath takes a completely different perspective: being love a tool to achieve what they most want in the world.

Good point, but, I thought of The Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John: each of them narrating a similar thematic through different perspectives, but all leading to the same message. Then, what is Wyf’s perspective? “Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee / As wel over hir housbond as hir love, / And for to been in maistrie hym above” (Chaucer, 1038, 1040). In my personal opinion, considering the fact that women had the complete control of men in a society of circa 1300 is quite idealistic, but still, leaving clear her message. Also, this idealism transmitted by the Wyf with statements like such mentioned above, might be further interpreted as skeptical towards a patriarchal society. Through this skepticism, the Wyf portrays men as completely untrustworthy and superficial, by demonstrating the knight’s shallow transformation through the tale compared to the old woman’s notorious change.

Still, why does this old woman appear?

Just to change everything and give it a happy ending?

It sounds to me as deus ex machina.

Yeah, sort of, but she sounds to be representing the Wyf herself. Even though she is old and a bit aged, she is able to display all her inner beauty and heartiness when the right man (the knight) appeared in her life: “But, for ye speken of swich gentillesse / As I descended out of old richesse, / That therefore sholden ye be genti men, / Swich arrogance is nat worth an hen” (Chaucer, 1109-12)…

But then the knight also appears to give happiness to the old woman.

Yes, but he is also happy, he provides her what a woman most wants in the world, and as a reward he receives all her inner beauty. Just as it happened to the Wyf of Bath, as she found the real feeling of love in her fifth husband.

As I told you in the beginning, she, the Wyf of Bath, considers love a tool, a way to reach total happiness and those things women most want in the world. It’s a different version of love. Not the noble and loyal one as portrayed by the Knight, or the one The Miller depicts, full of adultery, and mockery.

Yes, this sounds like The Gospel according to The Wyf of Bath.