Journal 6 -- Wife of Bath and Characters

Ok so the Wife of Bath…. there is so much to say about her. Well I understood the story a lot more in depth than the prologue, but from what I learned in class the prologue was full of a lot of good information. I realized that Allison is the same lady as the same lady in the prologue, and now that we’ve talked about it should have been obvious, though it doesn’t straight out say that anywhere. The wife of bath was a woman who was married five different times which and was known as a black widow for obvious reasons. We haven’t had any female characters with that strong of a background and meaning to the story yet. I like to look at the stories we read and put them into today’s reality. I personally wouldn’t marry a woman that had been married many times before, and after knowing the reputation she had like being a serial killer you’d think the men would think twice about her. I like the fact that Chaucer doesn’t exactly come out and say specific things like who the woman from the prologue is, what the big deal was about the book, or if she really killed all of her passed husbands and why. Leaving things unsaid gives the tale a spark by itself. It probably helps that I like to add my own twist to what is happening too. The assumed reasons for her killing her husbands is to gain riches and it seems she got what she wanted form them, because she would marry them become the rich wife and somehow she always becomes a widow. To compare the 1300s to today’s world, not much has changed with the race of females. There are so many women like that now days, minus that will do anything for wealth, fame and their own free will (just like the women in the tale explained to the knight). Maybe the killing part is a little much because it is a lot harder to get away with murder now, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it happens. To call this type of women evil, I accept; but I also think they are very intelligent women and Chaucer was very intelligent as well by creating a character such as Allison. Another thing I noticed about the characters in the Wife of Bath, excluding Allison this time, is they were very undeveloped characters If I were a girl I’d probably share some of the traits as the characters that didn’t have a strong roll to the story. The knight did but he wasn’t your average knight. One, he raped a girl which pretty much never happened and he never took a stand to anything he felt. I think Chaucer almost wrote this one with backward gender status because it’s usually the opposite. Maybe it was on purpose to make the story stand out or maybe it could have been Chaucer used all of his talent in making Allison that he didn’t have much in him for everyone else.