Question

As a narrator, the wife of bath comments exensively about the various answear to the knight question. What do her comments reveal about her own values and ideas? Use evidence from the poem to support your analysis

Answer 1

In the story of the Wife of Bath, the knight has to travel all over the kingdom to talk to women in order to find the answer to a pressing question. This is the question of what it is that women desire the most. If he is able to find the right answer to the question within a year, then he will not be killed. However, the knight finds a different answer every time he asks this question to a woman.

The Wife of Bath comments extensively about the various answers to the knight question. For example, one of the answers that the knight gets is that women want to be considered discreete and secretive. The Wife of Bath argues that this is a silly desire, as women are incapable of being secretive. She explains this through Ovid's story of Midas wife. She also comments on the superficiality of the knight, who is dismayed at the thought of ending up with an old, ugly woman.

The comments that the Wife of Bath makes reveal a lot about her own values and ideas. On the one hand, many of the Wife of Bath's comment reflect stereotypes of the time when it came to women. For example, the fact that women loved gossip. However, in other cases, the Wife of Bath is extremely modern. This is the case with her description of her many marriages, or with the veiled criticism of the knight's superficiality.