Canterbury Tales Essay: Importance of the Tale of Wife of Bath

Importance of the Tale of  wife of Bath   Some critiques of wife of Bath make the claim that the Tale is an anti-climax after the lively intromission of the Prologue. Certainly, the prologue of wife of Bath is robust. With its unstoppable vitality, strong language (queynte etc.) and homely, vigorous diction (eg. the references to barley-brede and mice), it is the Wifes personality -- certainly an extremely robust one -- that dominates. There is a certain brash energy to the whole of the Prologue, whether because of the forcefulness with which the Wife presents her arguments against the antifeminists (eg. her comments intimately clerks being unable to do Venus werkes and taking it out on sely wyfs in print), or because of her histrionic presentation of the methods with which she amply gave her husbands the wo that is in mariage. The Wife, as speaker of her Prologue, has an indecent, homely vigour that pervades the whole of the Prologue as such, it would certainly be f itting to apply the epithet robust to the Prologue. good paragraph             In contrast, the Tale (or the Wife as speaker of the Tale) is arguably lacking in a similiar robust vitality. Its very opening, with its Arthurian/fairy-tale references, sets the general tone -- quasi-courtly, learned, fantasy rather than the earthy reality presented with such subversive attractiveness in the Prologue by the Wife (eg. dronken as a mous, goon a-caterwawed). Elegant and learned -- even a little pedantic (redeth eek Senek, and redeth eek Boece as well as the references to Dante) -- there is, comparatively, a lack of the energy that galvanised the Prologue. Moreover, given what the rea... ...          As such, it would not be all in all accurate to speak of the Tale as being an anticlimax. While its probable gentillesse may be found somewhat colorless after the Prologue, it yet reinforces the Wifes ideas of fem ale maistrie, and certainly this is obvious by the end also, the ending arguably serves as a climax, summarizing many of the Wifes themes (that women should have the maistrie, that she wants a constant bestow of young virile husbands, that marriage can be happy if a husband first resigns authority to his wife (cf. her ending the Prologue with the kindness she showed to Jankin and their seeming(a) happiness)). Therefore, even if the Tale does not work up inexorably to a climax as the Prologue per se does, it would be unfair to claim that it has no climax, or that it is an anticlimax.