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Full Essay Geoffrey Chaucer The Wife of Bath, Theme of Deception
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English Literature - Pearson Edexcel - Poetry Paper Full Essay Geoffrey Chaucer The Wife of Bath Theme of Deception Language Analysis and Context
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The Wife of Bath recognises that most of the authoritative texts such as the Bible were interpretedby men and more specifically men of the Church, this is one of the key types of deception which can
be found in the Wife of Bath – the phallocentric discourse through discourse by the Church. This
deception by the Church, arguably the highest power of authority at the time (except perhaps the
King himself) meant that oftentimes people would focus on the interpretations of the texts written
in the margins by the clerics or Church Fathers rather than focussing on what the text actually said.
This is especially seen through attitudes to women at the time due to the Church fathers placing
women into a standardised stereotype that women were lustful, untrustworthy and cruel to their
husbands. The Church fathers interpreting these texts would be known as glossators. The word glose
comes from the Greek word Glossa meaning tongue or language, originally meant to give a
definition or meaning to a word but this soon became exposition. The Glossator (person who gloses)
appropriates the meaning of the text and asserts authority over it and so closes it to heterodox
(multiple) meanings. The Wife of Bath herself becomes a Glossator by recognising that it is men that
have always interpreted authoritative texts, leaving women’s voices silenced and unheard, so by
challenging Church fathers/clerics authority of their interpretations of the Bible with her own
interpretations she is speaking out against the stigma against women that the Church has created
(Aristotle taught that ‘silence is a woman’s glory’). She challenges the Church’s deception in this
manner because it is the only way she can – by glosing the very texts that the Church fathers
themselves once glosed and conflating, exaggerating and changing the Biblical texts and theologies
to fit the point she is trying to make she is highlighting to the audience that the Church had done the
very same thing in order to reduce and subjugate women. This is shown in line 26: ‘Men may divine
and glossen up and down’. She positions the noun 'men' emphatically, placing it at the start of the
line to tell the audience that it is men (Church fathers and clerics) that through their interpretations
of texts like the Bible and therefore whilst they may speculate and comment it doesn't mean that
their interpretations are correct or absolute. Because the Wife of Bath has so much experience with
marriage, she believes that she is also an authoritative figure who can glose and comment on Biblical
extracts/authority, this is shown in the next line: ‘But well I wot’; the verb ‘wot’ meaning ‘know’
paired with personal pronoun ‘I’ implies that she knows for definite, what she is talking about. She is
inserting herself as an authority figure and saying that she has more experience and authority than
the Church fathers/clerics with regards to marriage and sex, therefore directly undermining the
Church’s deceptive label that women are below men.
Furthermore, in order to highlight the deception of the Church through their attempts to reduce all
women to one essentialist definition through their teachings and interpretations of religious texts,
the Wife of Bath reinterprets and reconceptualises Biblical extracts. First, she uses two pieces of
Biblical authority to support her view that remarriage is not a sin as the Church fathers teach. She
speaks of the wedding in Galilee: ‘To wedding, in the Cane of Galilee/That by the same example
taught he me/That I ne shouldè wedded be but once’. This reference is from John 2 in the Bible, and
she is addressing the teachings of St. Jerome, one of the more ascetic of the Church Fathers,
suggested that because Jesus is recorded as having attended only one wedding, people should not
marry more than once, he said 'for by going once to a marriage he (Jesus) taught that men should
marry only once'. The Wife highlights this form of deception and refutes it with her own
interpretation, one again stepping outside the convention placed on her by the Church and their
teachings. The Wife of Bath conflates this story of the wedding in Galilee with a second Biblical
extract: the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman from John 4 in the Bible: ‘Beside
a well Jesus, God and man/Spoke in reproof of the Samaritan/‘Thou hast had fivè husbandès/.../that
very man Is not thy husband.’. With regards to this piece of evidence, St. Jerome taught that 'better
to know a single husband...than to know many paramours for where there are more husbands than
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