The Wife of Bath
One
of two female storytellers (the other is the Prioress), the Wife has
a lot of experience under her belt. She has traveled all over the
world on pilgrimages, so Canterbury is a jaunt compared to other
perilous journeys she has endured. Not only has she seen many lands,
she has lived with five husbands. She is worldly in both senses of
the word: she has seen the world and has experience in the ways of
the world, that is, in love and sex.
Rich
and tasteful, the Wife’s clothes veer a bit toward extravagance:
her face is wreathed in heavy cloth, her stockings are a fine scarlet
color, and the leather on her shoes is soft, fresh, and brand new—all
of which demonstrate how wealthy she has become. Scarlet was a
particularly costly dye, since it was made from individual red
beetles found only in some parts of the world. The fact that she
hails from Bath, a major English cloth-making town in the Middle
Ages, is reflected in both her talent as a seamstress and her stylish
garments. Bath at this time was fighting for a place among the great
European exporters of cloth, which were mostly in the Netherlands and
Belgium. So the fact that the Wife’s sewing surpasses that of the
cloth makers of “Ipres and of Gaunt” (Ypres and Ghent) speaks
well of Bath’s (and England’s) attempt to outdo its overseas
competitors.
Although
she is argumentative and enjoys talking, the Wife is intelligent in a
commonsense, rather than intellectual, way. Through her experiences
with her husbands, she has learned how to provide for herself in a
world where women had little independence or power. The chief manner
in which she has gained control over her husbands has been in her
control over their use of her body. The Wife uses her body as a
bargaining tool, withholding sexual pleasure until her husbands give
her what she demands.