The Wife of Bath’s Tale

1.      Give significant background information about the author or the literary piece

Answer:

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 25 October 1400), known as the Father of English Literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. While he achieved fame during his lifetime as an author, philosopher, alchemist and astronomer, composing a scientific treatise on the astrolabe for his ten year-old son Lewis, Chaucer also maintained an active career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Among his many works, which include The Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde, he is best known today for The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is a crucial figure in developing the legitimacy of the vernacular, Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were French and Latin.

2.      Write the synopsis or summary of the literary text

Answer:

 One day a knight of King Arthur’s court attacks a young maiden, raping her violently. By law he should be beheaded, but Arthur allows his wife, Queen Guinevere, to make the final decision. The queen says that she will let the knight live if he can answer one question: What is the thing that women most desire?

He has one year and a day to complete his quest and find the answer.

After searching unsuccessfully for a year, the knight meets an old woman. She has the answer to the question, and she vows to save his life if the knight will promise to do whatever she asks. He does, and the two journey to the king’s court where the knight delivers the correct answer to the members of the court of King Arthur. In the presence of the king, queen, and nobility, the old lady makes her demand on the knight—he must marry her. He does so unwillingly and complains that he can never love her because she is old, ugly, poor, and common (not of noble birth).

3.      List down three questions that come to mind while reading the text, then choose one explore it more fully

Answer:

       What is the character of the wife? And describe it!

             What is the representation of The Wife of Bath?

       Who is the interpretation of text?

I would like to answer the first question. The Wife as an idealistic character who believes that bad men can change. If we choose the latter, the Wife becomes a much more cynical character, inclined to mistrust all men. In the second interpretation, both transformations—the knight’s shallow change in behavior (but not in soul) and the hag’s transformation into the physical object of desires—are only skin deep. Perhaps she is giving him exactly what he deserves: superficiality

4.      Explain the emotion that literary text awoke in you or which you felt while or after reading the piece.

Answer:

For the most part, the emotion tone of "The Wife of Bath's Tale" is straightforward, narrating the incidents it relates with little embellishment or emotion. When the knight rapes a young maiden, causing the people of the land to clamor for his punishment, this tone results in lines like "Dampned was this knight for to be deed / By cours of lawe, and sholde han lost his heed – / Paraventure swich was the statut tho" (897-899). This is basically the Middle English way of saying, "this guy was sentenced to die, because that's the law." Period, end of story, no hand-wringing or hysterics. Only two things really seem to get the Wife exercised enough to break her fiction of being an impartial narrator. The first is the knight's audacity in sighing deeply upon being tasked with discovering what thing women most desire; at this, the Wife remarks, "But what! he may nat do al as him lyketh" (920). The other incident that prompts an outburst (of sorts) is some women's desire to be "holden secree," or perceived as able to keep a secret. This error prompts her to break into the narrative to comment "that tale is nat worth a rake-stele," or rake handle. But even this outburst is tame compared with those of which we know the Wife is capable.

5.      Copy a part of literary text (sentence, paragraph, dialogue) which is striking, puzzling

But now, sir, let me see what shall I sayn?

Aha, I have my tale again (585-6).

This part of literary text showed the  women intelligence that can answer all of the question from the king, the answer is not straight forward but in tale which is very meaningful

6.      Identify the theme of literary piece.

"The Wife of Bath's Tale" is part of the quest genre. A protagonist is missing something (the answer to the queen's question) that he must travel near and far to find, encountering trials and tribulations along the way. Although the trials and tribulations our knight suffers don't amount to much more than the fact that women, being individuals, all desire different things, the loathly lady he meets at the end of the quest could qualify as a monster. Consider: she's very, very ugly, and despite helping him to answer the queen's question, she also prevents the knight from reaching what we presume is his other goal, marriage to a suitable young damsel. Like the protagonist of any quest, the knight is only able to "vanquish" the monster once he shows inner growth – in our knight's case, a sensitivity to women's desires.

7.      Write the critique of the works using an appropriate literary approach or theory (Example: Feminism, Marxism, formalism, behaviorism, etc)

Answer:

Most of "The Wife of Bath's Tale" is narrated from a limited third person perspective, the same one we get in fairy tales ("Once upon a time . . ."). Even very emotional happenings are narrated without comment, indeed, matter-of-factly, like when the knight "saugh a mayde walkinge him biforn, / Of whiche mayde anon, maugree hir heed, / By verray force he rafte hire maydenheed" (892-894). Yet the Wife of Bath often interrupts her straightforward third-person style to insert her opinions or comment on the story, like when she narrates the accounts of what women love best entirely with the first person pronoun "we." It's almost like the Wife can't let the story "speak" for long without being tempted to insert something of herself into it. For this reason, the combination of the third person limited with first person voice is not only a way of describing the tale, but an indication of the personality of its narrator.