The Wife of Bath’s Prologue dramatic

 The Wife of Bath’s Prologue dramatic

The Wife Of Bath’s Prologue Dramatic, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue provides an introduction to medieval ideas about marriage and love. The Wife Of Bath’s Prologue Dramatic, The Prologue begins like a sermon and then takes on the terms of misogyny and misogamy as the Wife describes her first three marriages, demonstrating her success in manipulating the marriage system to her own advantage as a means to consolidate money and power.

The Wife Of Bath’s Prologue Dramatic, When the Wife speaks of her fourth and fifth husbands, however, the Prologue becomes more personal, like a modern autobiography, exploring the role of love in marriage and its relationship to gender hierarchy and domestic violence. The Wife Of Bath’s Prologue Dramatic, In her prologue, Chaucer’s Wife defends marriage against religious teachings that claim that it is inferior to celibacy, maintaining the association of marriage with sex but embracing a more modern perspective that sexual pleasure is a virtue and rejecting the idea that wives should always obey their husbands.

The Wife Of Bath’s Prologue Dramatic, The Prologue presents both the challenges to women’s agency posed by medieval marriage and, conversely, the ways existing practices of medieval marriage could be manipulated to empower women. As the information in the “Tools” section below will demonstrate, marriage teachings and practices in late medieval English culture were far from homogeneous, despite a persistent modern idea that medieval marriage exemplified patriarchy at its most extreme.

The Wife Of Bath’s Prologue Dramatic, Instead, medieval marriage was represented in complex and contradictory ways that combined, for example, an insistence on marital sexuality with a definition of marriage that did not require sex and a demand for both mutual love between the spouses and the rulership of husbands over wives.

The Wife Of Bath’s Prologue Dramatic, Perhaps because of the complexity of ideas about marriage in the period, the topic was broadly central to late medieval literature, and a topic through which medieval culture debated topics as diverse as the roles of gender, sexuality, social hierarchy, and the relationship of lay and clerical authority.

The Wife Of Bath’s Prologue Dramatic, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue manipulates existing conventions of marriage in innovative ways, providing a model for social change that is not radical but provisionary and partial. Although the Wife of Bath challenges masculine and clerical authority, she does not challenge a conventional association of marriage with sexuality in the late medieval period.

The Wife Of Bath’s Prologue Dramatic, Many modern feminists see sexuality as a form of agency and female empowerment, but the Wife’s Prologue engages with paradigms of clerical teaching that associate sexuality with sin.

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