Is This Truth The Real Truth?

I seriously doubt about the sincerity and authenticity of this Wyfe of Bath’s stories and memories about her past husbands. As she tells the pilgrims, and us, every once in a while after talking about something she did, or said, she would end the sentence uttering, “and all was fals” (Chaucer, 382). How credible can a source of information, in this case our dear story teller, the Wyfe of Bath, if every so often she regrets of what she says and makes a correction? To me, not quite reliable. But anyways, since she is the narrator, she can decide the truth. The narrator is the manipulator of this truth we, as readers, or the pilgrims, as listeners, are spoken of. The Knight, and the Miller are also narrating their tales, and hence the truth of them, their verisimilitude is abstract since everything that happens is subject to their manipulation of the truth.

Is this truth the real truth? We don’t know, this reality of which we are reading changes in every tale. First we have loyalty, heroic men, manipulating deities. Then, we have adultery, farts, and weak characters. Now what? What will be the truth according to the Wyfe of Bath? I really hope it’s a bit more reliable and less contradictory than the stories about her husband’s. Also, this bias of the Wyfe’s story toward feminism is relevant to her point about Church’s writings, which portray women as evil due to the fact they were written by men: “If women hadde writen stories, / As clerkes han withinne hire oratories, / They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse” (Chaucer, 693-95). Hence, every single story, tale, legend, or allegory told in the world throughout history, every single one is subject to the truth its narrator wants us to comprehend. Then, as you read this blog of mine, you might ask yourself the same question, is this truth the real truth?