The Wife of Bath

I must start off by saying that the Wife of Bath is awesome! Not that I support everything she has done to her husbands, but not many women can do the same and get away with it. She is definitely a man-eater!! I know there was a movie that reminded me of this story, where a woman bribes and manipulates older men into marrying her, and then tries to murder them in order to get their money ( I just can’t remember what it’s called).

I love how she explains that in order for virgins to exist there must be someone out there who is creating these virgins and that we should leave virginity to those who strive for perfection and indulge in our sexual powers. What I like about this is that she is going against everything people believed back then and isn’t afraid to be rebellious. I can see her as one of those people that you would see in a movie, grey and old, sitting in a rocking chair and talked about her wild young years and crazy experiences, while her grandchildren listen (only in this case she had neither children nor grandchildren).

I love the irony in the fact that she married all of her husbands for money, and the one and only time she falls in real love with a man, is the one that treats her like crap. As we already mentioned in class, the fifth husband’s name is the only name mentioned out of all the husbands she had, which shows how significant he is and that she really did love him. She explains that women always desire what is forbidden to them, which makes total sense to me.  All girls want attention, but too much attention is never too good because it becomes annoying after a while. As guys like a challenge so do we, therefore I agree that forbidden is not necessarily what we desire but what we always imagine and think about. This also makes me think about the saying “women like bad boys “or “players”.  We always say we want a guy who treats us like a princess, but then many times we see women in relationships that are bad for them, but they don’t want to leave because they are in love with the jerk that never turned out to be the prince charming she thought he was or “wanted” him to be.  This also ties in with the fact that was mentioned in class about us not knowing what we want from men, which I completely agree with. We like to pretend that we have a set of standards for a perfect guy, but most of the time we settle for something that is nowhere near our standards and then we wonder why we are in love when “he” is everything we did not want in a man. We are very confusing beings and I will proudly admit that!

I couldn’t help but think of how cruel and selfish the Wife of Bath is, when she wasn’t even worried about her fourth husband dying, because she already had another one lined up. She is heartless and maybe her unlucky fifth marriage was a punishment for all the marriages she ruined by being cruel and manipulating. This reminds me of a random thing that I am about to mention. One of my very good friends dated three girls at the same time.  It turned out, that he fell in love with one of them just when all three found out that they have been played all along. It also turned out that all three girls were willing to forgive him and stay with him (if he left the other ones of course) except the one he fell in love with, who was disgusted and never talked to him again. This is somewhat relevant to Wife of Bath’s situation, because it was almost like karma that the first man she fell in love with treated her like crap.