For any "scholars," this may be fun.
The Feminist Forerunner in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”
The Wife of Bath, one of the most beloved characters in English literature, asked provocative questions: Why shouldn’t widows remarry? Why must we procreate?
By Joan Acocella
As she says at the outset, she is entitled to speak on this subject, because she’s had a lot of experience. Married first at the age of twelve, she has tied the knot five times so far. At the beginning, she liked her husbands old and feeble, so that, in gratitude for her youth and beauty, they would give her whatever she wanted, including their property—all of it, please. To show them what a prize they had won, she often scolded them, especially in bed: “I put them so to work, by my faith, / That many a night they sang, ‘Woe is me!’ ” (I’m quoting from the 1948 translation by Vincent F. Hopper, which helpfully puts the modern English version and Chaucer’s Middle English on alternating lines.) But she chided them everywhere else, too. “Sir old dotard,” she addresses one poor man. “Old barrel full of lies,” she calls another. “Jesus shorten your life!” she yells at a third. When Jesus answers her prayer, leaving her widowed for a fourth time, she does not wear widow’s weeds for long...
Chaucer, Turner writes, was the first English poet to present a woman in this way: “The Wife of Bath is the first ordinary woman in English literature. By that I mean the first mercantile, working, sexually active woman—not a virginal princess or queen, not a nun, witch, or sorceress, not a damsel in distress nor a functional servant character, not an allegory.” Alison is a regular person, who gets up on her horse and reels off eight hundred and twenty-eight lines (her prologue is much longer than any other pilgrim’s) of reminiscence, opinion, and merriment. Instruction, too, much of it wise. She is clearly Chaucer’s favorite.
For the whole article:
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/02/13/the-feminist-forerunner-in-chaucers-canterbury-tales-marion-turner-wife-of-bath