Summary:
A discussion concerning whether or not the character of "The Wife of Bath," by Chaucer, conforms to medieval stereotypes regarding women.
The Wife of Bath is, without a doubt, one of the most carefully studied characters in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and certainly one of the most seemingly contradictory. She has been described as both proto-feminist and a stereotype of Medieval misogynist ideas. This controversy has perhaps arisen due to a confusion over the definition of Medieval female stereotypes, namely how women are perceived to act, and how those stereotypes differ from Medieval ideals about how women should act in order to be deemed moral by society. Indeed, some commentators have seemed to see no distinction between the two, and therefore claim that the Wife of Bath, as a character, serves as a negation of St. Jerome and Theophrastus' antifeminist ideas of what constitutes medieval stereotypes of women. The Wife of Bath, it is clear, lives.....
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