The Wife of Bath, a pilgrim in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, has strong opinions on many topics, such as sex, marriage, men, and the Bible. She speaks her mind clearly and thoroughly, but she is also a manipulative, devious, and unreliable narrator who strives to control her audience just as she has controlled her husbands. He is both an agent and a target of satire; as she attacks men's unfair portrayals of women, she becomes such a vilified woman herself, an act of her own committing. But although Chaucer uses her as both a satirical target and an object of amusement, she is indifferent; although she uses satire, her goal is not to be a satirist but to control her husbands. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The Wife of Bath's complaints and attacks are many; she spends more time complaining about her husbands than telling her story. She had five husbands; her first three were "good, rich, old" men (187) with problems in bed. She controls them by telling them all the things they supposedly say about her, that "'You say we wives will hide our vices / Until we are safely married, and then we'll show them; / This is certainly a fit proverb for a gruff scolding !'" (195). He admits that "everything was false" (199) but his method works. His other technique is to bargain using sex, "giving them no pleasure...until he has paid me his ransom" (201). Both methods show the weakness of older men who are willing to submit to a wife and confess to offenses they did not commit, in order to obtain sex and peace of mind. Alice's more subtle methods of dealing with these men satirize not only them but also the cultural roles in marriage. Her husbands think they are flattered when Alice goes around at night supposedly to "spy on the girls they [were] lying with" (201), but in reality she enjoys her business at the moment. Her first husbands are foolish, impotent men, easily deluded and governed by their wives' manipulation of their roles. She plays the shrewish wife who lashes out at her husband, and calls her husbands the louts they're too old to be, "charging them for girls / when they were so sick they could barely stand" (201). Shrews, like Xanthippe, mentioned by a husband, are not pleasant wives, but they don't cheat either. He defends his reproach by saying, "'since a man is more reasonable / than a woman, you must be patient'" (203), using female weakness as a tool. Even marriage itself is satirized by its pragmatism. “'If I sold my fair choice, / I could walk fresh as a rose / But I'll keep it for your taste'” (203), Alice tells her husband; marriage, for her, is only useful because monogamy helps her make older men feel guilty enough to give her all their money. The only husband she marries "for love and not for money" (207) is the one who beats her. Alice's technique of embracing and using her role as a wife confuses all her husbands. Her fourth is guilty of many crimes of which she has accused others, but Alice's response to her lustful husband is the opposite of that which she has used with her energy-less husbands. He has no business of his own, but only pretends to be one. She has no reason to cheat for herself, as she has done in her previous marriages, but she is acting like a bad wife to cause her husband pain. Jankin, his fifth, captures by telling him a dream he hadn't actually had. She gives him control of all her properties, but he beats her and hertells stories of ancient unworthy women and tormented husbands. Alice finally subdues him by melodramatically proclaiming, "'now I will die'" (219) after he hits her. She accuses him as she did the first three, asking, "'did you kill me like this for my land?'" (219), the land she already controls, when she knows he struck her in anger because she tore up a leaf from his book. With pragmatism, intelligence and reproach, the Wife of Bath dominates her five husbands, demonstrating the flaws of men and marriage. But she herself is not entirely perfect. For their husbands there is little difference between a wife who thinks they are going to bed and a wife who only pretends, between a woman who has affairs and one who simply gives the impression of having them, between one who feels offended and one who exaggerates her sense of betrayal. Alice is a woman that few men would want to live with, yet she justifies her behavior with an attack and parody of the interpretations and writings of male authors. Preachers and theologians are the main targets of Alice's satire. "'I was surely told...that since Christ only went once/to a wedding...by that example he taught me/that I should not marry more than once'" (183) he says, quoting a absurd example of exegesis. She counters with her argument, strong and weak in many ways. He cites Solomon, Abraham, and Jacob as having had more than one wife, the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply,” the perfection of the genitals, and the absence of any virginity commandment. His argument is in part a refutation of St. Jerome, who wrote that women should not marry, and in this respect it works; but as a defense for remarriage after widowhood it is not very convincing. The only woman she mentions who married more than once is the Samaritan woman, and Jesus hardly approved of her multiple marriages. The Wife of Bath knows this; she innocently remarks on Jesus' words, "'so he spoke, certainly; / what he meant by this, I cannot say'" (183) and proceeds with her argument. When they support her, Alice cites the authorities, but when they oppose her she dismisses them with a "'I will not conform to this text/and this column is worth a gnat!'" (199). Alice manipulates and ignores the texts the same way she treats her husbands; she also combines these techniques when she accuses her husbands of saying that "there are three things/that trouble this whole earth...that a hateful wife is considered one of these misfortunes" and "just as worms destroy a tree/just so a the wife destroys the husband" (199). When he uses him as an example, he names Solomon's many wives, but when he discredits him he puts his words into the mouths of their husbands. He employs a similar tactic when explaining the misogyny of Jankin's favorite authors, saying, "the clerk, when old and unable to do any work of Venus... writes... that women cannot keep their marriage vows! ” (215) Attack the credibility of these authors or attribute their words to a less credible source; he even creates sources for his favorite feelings, maintaining that «in the Almagest [Ptolemy] speaks this proverb:/'The wisest of all men is he/who never worries about who has the world in his hands'" ( 197). But Chaucer does a similar thing with the Wife of Bath and her satire. By creating a manipulative and biased character, it casts some doubt on his opinions. The perceived virtue of one of her greatest characteristics, her desire for sex, depends on her current husband's point of view, but his proclivities can be disturbing. At her fourth husband's burial, she says that she "behaved sadly, / as wives must do, for it is the custom... but since I was provided with a companion / I have cried but little" (209). HisDeception satirizes marriage by emphasizing how Alice's emotions differ from the grief expected from a wife, but it also shows a woman wholly indifferent to her husband's death as long as she is provided for. The man she next marries is Jankin, of whom she said in her rants, "'I wouldn't want him even if [my husband] died tomorrow'" (197). Although she lies throughout this speech, Alice's greatness and unexpected contradiction mock her, if only slightly. She falls in love with Jankin as she "[sees] walking behind the coffin" (209) of her late husband. Jankin beats her, but she doesn't care, because he's good in bed; “in our bed he was so tireless and unrestrained…that even if he had beaten me to every bone, / he could soon win back my love” (205), she says. Dame Alice's tendency to love men who mistreat her and detest her "good" husbands (187) based solely on sex creates a puzzling character. Despite being satirized as a shrew and a sex-obsessed woman, Alice uses these roles to control not only her husbands, but all men, establishing herself as an authority over women. "'We women have, to tell the truth, / a strange fancy.... Forbid us a thing, and we will desire it; / impose it on us, and then we will flee'" (205) she says. In context, as Alice describes the husband she "loved more because he was so cold in his love" (205), this seems to mean that women like to be neglected, but it also has a more subtle meaning, it is not possible; force women to do anything, or forbid them anything. “'Even if you ask Argus… to be my bodyguard… he cannot protect me unless I want him to'” (199) tells her husbands that “no man can perjure himself and lie/ half as brazenly as a woman can do” (193) and “God gave women by nature deceit, weeping/and spinning” (201). While these sayings primarily describe Alice herself, she uses them to intimidate men as a whole, her stated goal to the Pardoner: that he "distrust [marriage]" (191). Her goal is not to portray women in a positive way, but to indicate their power. "'Many saints... lived always in perfect chastity... let them be white bread... and we wives are called barley bread'" (189) he says; she wouldn't mind its satirical portrayal; holiness is not his goal. “‘Who painted the lion[?]'” (213) Alice asks rhetorically, referring to writers who portray women as sinners. She herself is a far from perfect lioness painted by a man, but she tries to create her own image of the women in her tale. The Tale of the Wife of Bath is a retelling of a legend of King Arthur; Alice's version of the story contains many details to support her claims. In this version, the knight sent to find out what women want is not King Arthur but a rapist whose life is spared by the queen and whose response is evaluated not by an evil baron but by women, including widows "since widows they are so wise” ( 229). The crone this knight is forced to marry gains power by being able to, as she puts it, "'rectify all this, / if I would... if you would do right by me'" (233) instead of being the victim of a curse . In this story, women want "to have dominion/over their husbands as well as their lovers" (229), a desire that Alice carefully distinguishes from the desire "to be free and do as we please" (225), the desire of women in the original story. Alice points out that "in all the court there was neither wife nor maid/Nor widow to contradict what [the knight] said" (229), but the desire is hers, not necessarily that of the women. The ending of the story does not confirm Alice's moral; The.