What type of tale does the wife tell

When he gets back to the grove, his two friends kill him. The other two sit down to eat and drink, swallow the poison, and die painful deaths. Then they stood up, furious and very drunk, and set out for that village the bartender had told them about. All three indulge in and represent the vices against which the Pardoner has railed in his Prologue: Gluttony, Drunkeness, Gambling, and Swearing.

These traits define the three and eventually lead to their downfall. His plan is to return and have the men toast, allowing the men to drink the poisoned wine so he can have all the gold for himself. When he returns he is stabbed to death, and the men take the poisoned wine to celebrate their success. Nonviolent resistance NVR , or nonviolent action, is the practice of achieving goals such as social change through symbolic protests, civil disobedience, economic or political noncooperation, satyagraha, or other methods, while being nonviolent.

Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Philosophy What type of tale does the wife tell? Ben Davis July 12, What type of tale does the wife tell? What is the moral of the Pardoners tale? He refuses because she is so ugly and old, and "thereto comen of so lough a kynde" l. Unable to decide, he yields to her wisdom in the choice and she makes herself both beautiful and faithful for him.

Interpretive issues and general research sources:. The "Wife of Bath's Prologue" is a work of literature so compellingly realistic that many students believe she is real, that the "Wife" is the author rather than Geoffrey Chaucer. That is an astonishing achievement for a medieval author, and also an odd one. Medieval authors wrote for fame, not for money, since copyright and print publication were, in this case, about years in the future. To create a character capable of usurping your own fame is a rather interesting strategy.

What about the prologue creates this "realizing effect"? Can you spot specific moments when the Wife seems to materialize in your mind? Her tale, by contrast, is a traditional medieval romance, though in miniature, modeled on those told of Gawain and set in King Arthur's court.

Nevertheless, the Wife-as-teller has left her mark on this tale because of the issues it raises which we can find in common in her prologue. What's on her mind? Students like to ask whether the Wife is a "feminist. She also takes great delight in demonstrating her ability to dominate her older husbands, and in recounting her successful struggle with young Jankyn, her fifth and last husband so far!

If the travelers are engaged in what Paul Strohm called "the social contest," struggling for the esteem and cooperation of their fellow pilgrims, how does the Wife expect her rhetoric to affect them? Pay close attention to the two pilgrims who interrupt the Wife. Why would the Pardoner, the Friar, and the Summoner be roused to break the unspoken law of silence tale-telling usually imposes on an audience? See what she is talking about immediately before their speeches, and note what the Friar and Summoner come to quarrel about.

The Wife of Bath has been interpreted as Chaucer's deliberate moral satire upon the human, especially female, sexual appetite. She can be read as a type of the fallen woman or, in biblical terms, Eve. For a careful discussion of this reading, see D. Robertson Jr. Robertson is a "patristic" critic, reading the medieval text no matter how secular in terms of its potential for reference to religious doctrine. Defenses of the Wife are a commonplace among Feminist critics, especially, and New Historicists, as well, who doubt the patristic critics' ability to read culture through only one cultural "lens," that of church doctrine and literary texts influenced by it.

The Wife begins her tale by depicting the golden age of King Arthur as one that was both more perilous and more full of opportunity for women. Every time a woman traveled alone, the Wife suggests, she was in danger of encountering an incubus, or an evil spirit who would seduce women But the society is also highly matriarchal.

Instead of finishing the story, she directs the reader to Ovid. The wife could, therefore, be slyly trying to point out that men, too, are gossips.