Wife of Bath

The Wifes is the sixth tosh (of twenty-four, including two by Chaucer), temporary hookup Coghill in his modern version places it fourteenth. In both, her tale (from what is known to scholars as Fragment III, containing Group D of the tales) precedes the Friars and the Summoners. In Robinson she follows the Cook, while in Coghill she follows the Pardoner. In both cases, her tale is the first of a root word of seven (Wife, Friar, Summoner, Clerk, Merchant, Squire, Franklin) known as the Marriage Group, as all of them deal with the subject of authority (where it lies and how it is exercised) in unify life.

The Wife is unusual in that her prologue is longer than her tale and is removed and away the longest prologue Chaucer gives to any storyteller (only the Pardoner comes remotely near her for length). For more or less tales the prologue is usually an instructive introduction to the tale; here the tale is more of a sequel to the prologue, which is of more interest to the Wifes hearers and us, the modern readers. Like the Pardoner, the Wife tells us a lot about herself, but her account is almost a skillful autobiography; it appears, again like the Pardoners prologue, as a miscellany of confession and attempted self-justification.

The Wife speaks directly from her experience of marriage, while her tale is presented as a kind of model exemplification of her theories. She has married, while young, three wealthy older husbands; her fourth husband, adpressed in age to herself, resisted all her attempts to dominate him. But her most bitter struggle has been with her fifth husband, though ultimately, she got the better of him. She has been widowed five times but is eager to find a new husband. Having inherited the wealth of her various husbands, she...

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