The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer (Book Analysis)
The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer (Book Analysis)
Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide
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This practical and insightful reading guide offers a complete summary and analysis of The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. It provides a thorough exploration of the tale’s plot, characters and main themes, including marriage, authority and women’s role in society. The clear and concise style makes for easy understanding, providing the perfect opportunity to improve your literary knowledge in no time.
This clear and detailed 54-page reading guide is structured as follows:
- Biography of Geoffrey Chaucer
- Presentation of The Wife of Bath’s Tale
- Summary of The Wife of Bath’s Tale
- Character study
- The Wife of Bath
- The Knight
- The Loathsome Hag
- Analysis of The Wife of Bath’s Tale
- Historical context
- Sex
- Authority and control
- Feminism
- Pilgrimage
- Language and style
- Rhyme
- Exemplum
- King Arthur and courtly love
About The Wife of Bath’s Tale
The Wife of Bath’s Tale is one of the most popular stories in The Canterbury Tales. It consists of two parts, the Prologue and the Tale. In the Prologue, the Wife of Bath introduces herself as the widow of five successive husbands and discusses her belief that women should not be forced to submit to their husbands, but rather exert sovereignty over them. She then narrates the Tale, a fable reflecting her beliefs in which a knight embarks on a quest to discover what women really want in order to escape execution. To avoid failing this quest, he is eventually forced to marry a ‘loathsome hag’, who claims to know the answer he seeks – an answer that will also determine whether or not his marriage to the hag will be a happy one.
About Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer was a courtier and diplomat in medieval England, who rose to occupy a relatively high position in the royal court in spite of his humble origins. He is best known as the author of The Canterbury Tales, a collection of fables presented as stories told by a group of pilgrims to entertain themselves on their journey. The Canterbury Tales are one of the oldest surviving examples of literature written in Middle English, and as such hold tremendous literary and cultural value. Indeed, Chaucer is credited with the popularization of new vocabulary, which was often borrowed from Greek, Latin or Arabic, and as such can be said to have shaped the development of the English language itself.
Product details
ISBN | 9782808015516 |
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Publisher | Plurilingua Publishing |
Collection | Brightsummaries.com |
Format | |
Pages | 54 |
File size | 2.2 MB |