The Wife of Bath has definately had an intersting life. I know that she is not my favorite character at all, she wasn't in the General Prologue and after this story, she definately isn't. I think she is a very strong women and knows what she wants and life and definately knows how to get it, but I don't like the way she has used her husbands to get what she wants. Since her first three were old, she would pretty much drive them insane telling them they were flirting with other girls, and they did all this stuff, just so they would feel guilty and she could get away with the things she wanted to do.
She tells everyone that she has had five husbands and the first one was when she was twelve years old. I'm pretty sure that at that time twelve years old was about the age when girls got married, but at twelve years old girls didn't know how to use there husbands the way she used hers!!
I think it's pretty funny how her last husband was the only one that she really "loved" and he treated her the exact same way that she treated her other husbands! I like the part when she tells about her "fight" with her last husband, and the fact that the fight was all over a book! I keep thinking about why she got so fired up over the book that he always read, I mean she was an evil wife to all of her husbands except this last one. Unless, she took it offensive now because she did not want him thinking thats they way she was, because that is not the way she treated him!
The only passage I really did not understand was lines 581-589, when she tells everyone about when she told Jankin that she had a dream about him, and that he slained her. Then after she tells about her dream, she says that she never had that dream. I understand about the dream that she says she had, but I do not understand why she would even tell Jankin that, or why she would tell everyone that part, if she did not dream about it?? Why did she make up the dream??
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I wonder if she told Jankin about the dream to get attention just like she did the rest of her husbands. She had a way to always make her husbands feel bad for something they did not even do; in order to gain control over them. Possibly, it was a control issue. Or maybe I may be making a stretch out of this, but before she would "kill" her husbands by torturing them to death, making them feel bad, and taking them for everything they are worth (for the most part) possibly the slaying was metaphorically meant that because Jankin was just like her that he was "killing" her by torturing her the same?
ReplyDeleteI agree with you on the first part of what you wrote! I never thought of her using the "dream" as a way to get his attention. But now that you mention it, and the way she protrays herself in the story I'm sure that's why she told him the made up dream!
ReplyDeleteI'm not really sure about the last part, about the "killing" her by torturing her, because The Wife of Bath didn't know that she wouldn't have the power in their marriage! Because at that point she had just met Jenken. Unless she said it because since Jenken was younger & the Wife of Bath was older now, she kind of knew that he would have the power in their marriage. Like she did, when she married the older guys!