The Wife of Bath And Satirizing Divorce and Unfaithfulness

Chris Marino Mr. O’Brien English D Block 11/4/13 The Wife of Bath and Satirizing Divorce and Unfaithfulness In “The Wife of Bath” story, Chaucer is satirizing the fact that couples are getting divorced as well as marriages becoming ruined. In today’s society this is constantly happening, and people are getting divorced all the time. In the story “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”, the main woman is married five times and never has a husband that she truly loves, and all the men end up passing away. Throughout the story, Chaucer satirizes adultery, gold digging, and many other situations that cause marriage’s to diminish, which relates to current day issues involving a high divorce rate, and lose of interest within couples. In “The Wife of Bath”, Chaucer says, “Wedding’s no sin, so far as I can learn. Better it is to marry than to burn.” (Page 260) Chaucer’s making some marriages out to be a joke; he says people are being married just to be married. Some may say that Chaucer makes a good point due to the fact that many more couples are getting divorced each year. If Chaucer were around today, he would know that what he wrote is applicable today. Throughout “The Wife of Bath” the knight is going around asking the women what they want most in life. He is required to do this because he raped a woman that he thought was pretty, and was sentenced to find what women wanted within one year or he would be executed. The knight goes around and finds that many women are not very interested in men themselves yet they are interested in what they have to offer them. “Some said that women wanted wealth and treasure, ‘Honor’, said some, some ‘Jollity’ and ‘fun in bed’.” This just go to shows that Chaucer feels woman don’t really want men because they have something special about them that makes them love them, but that they have money and several things that woman want. Chaucer ironically writes this, he never had a problem with married, married once until his wife sadly passed away. (Wikipedia) If a woman was to marry a man because he had a lot of money today she will willing be with him to only benefit herself and live an “alternate” lifestyle. However if the man was to lose his money, then why would she want to be with him any more. Chaucer makes this relevant when he says, “Is not annexed in nature to possessions. Men fail in living up to there professions…”(Page 289) When the men of the family, or the women, are not able to make the money that the other fell in love with, then what are they going to be in love with if they aren’t getting what they wanted. They are going to get rid of that marriage to get what they want. This is always happening in today’s societies. The most common form of this is young women with older men, and is known as being a gold digger. In the prologue this is also made very clear due to the fact that the woman that is telling the story about the knights has been divorced five times, and never really was in love with any of the men. According to Sabrina Thompson, of the Huffington Post online, it said that the average marriage length is about 8.8 years. This is a very short period of time. People are being married so quickly, and do not know what they are getting themselves into. In the prologue Chaucer satirizes the fact that the woman is being married five times to many different men and not one of them does she stay with for a long period of time. In todays world this is made clear when looking at Kim Kardashian’s short marriage with Kris Humphries. It lasted about 72 days and had no real purpose to it. Chaucer is getting this across quite well during that time period, and examples of this are still relevant today. One way that you can interpret these different situations is almost as if the man is being belittled by the woman in the relationship. Not physically but mentally. In the story, Chaucer is talking about how woman want certain things, and if they can’t get them, then bad things are going to happen to the relationship. All the woman want is money and they can divorce and find another man, and that is something that the knight realizes in the story. He decides that rather than picking someone that has the looks, he picks someone that is going to be in love with him and stay loyal. He doesn’t want for his heart to be broken because he had fallen in love with someone that was in love with his money not himself. If you put the pieces together with evidence from Chaucer and from today, its safe to say that they are somewhat close. No one really knows the exact date that this book was written, however it says that it was to be written from 1387-1400, which was time that Chaucer was alone after his wife died. (Libarius.com) So maybe after Chaucer’s wife past, he got jealous and started to point out the flaws in other peoples marriages to make up for the fact that he was not a part of one any longer. But no one truly knows why he is so critical towards marriages in the story, because that is for you to decide. Works Cited Biography. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Nov. 2013. . Huffington Post Online. TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc., n.d. Web. 5 Nov. 2013. . Libarius. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Nov. 2013. .