The Wife of Bath Prologue

I find The Wife of Bath to be an interesting tale because for the first time the position of the love story between the men and the women is switched. It is not the man trying to fight for his life for the woman he is truly in love with, or the woman surrendering herself to the "knight in shining armor". This tale is much more different in the way that the Wife of Bath controls the men she marries sexually. She takes initiative in the relationship and does not lower herself to her husbands. She is a free woman and does not care of what the people say about her. In those times it was extremely uncommon for a woman to marry multiple times and specially to be the leader of the marriage. They were sexual times, but only the men would be the ones to ask and have a more sexual life than a woman. The Wife of Bath completely contradicts everything, and she is the one that is choosing who she has relationships with.

I find her to be empowering and like how she chooses her own path. She almost seems as a hero to women in that time. She is portrayed as a modern woman, in which she has more freedom. This story is as if Chaucer knew how it was going to be in the twenty-first century. He describes women being more freely and choosing marriage. Multiple marriages are also something that people never expected. She is what they call now a "cougar" by marrying a man 20 years younger than her,
 "600       He was, I trowe, twenty wynter oold,

 601       And I was fourty, if I shal seye sooth;". 

I enjoyed this tale very much, since it is based on a woman that can choose as she wishes. I also enjoyed it because Chaucer changed the status of the genders, and it was nice to read something different.