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Wife of Bath corruption essay
English Literature essay on how corruption is presented in the Wife of Bath's Tale and Prologue.
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Explore the ways in which Chaucer presentscorruption in Wife of Bath in lines 857-881
and lines 95-112
Chaucer presents corruptness as a societal flaw that is derived and propagated by the Church
and its’ patriarchal narrative. Therefore, Chaucer uses corruptness as a construct to expose the
hypocritical nature of the Church in which women are defined through the male gaze and
labeled as corrupt. There is a moral corruption that motivates the antagonization of women,
trapping them to a domestic domain so the Church and men can exercise the maximum
amount of control. In a patriarchal domain, corruptness is ironically defined by male authority.
The Wife of Bath is eventually corrupted by this faulty narrative that the Church spins as she
internalizes and parrots it. Women are objectified and made into inescapable victims by these
labels. Chaucer intends to make the reader question the spun narrative and the diminutive
stereotypes surrounding women through exposing the flaws of the Church and male double
standards.
Chaucer uses the fairy tale form as a satiric contrast to the harsh societal reality; he creates a
meta-narrative to use as a shield for his true intentions of exposing the Church’s corruption. He
plays on fictional tropes that exist within Arthurian legend such as courtly love to highlight how
far society has fallen in Jacobethan times. The shift towards this idealized, pagan world,
extricated from the corrupted narrative of the Church reveals a much purer, freer reality. The
dust imagery in the sunbeams is a simile for the pollution of the Church and its’ doctrinal
patriarchy. Behind the so-called chivalry and the façade of the aristocracy and the upper-class
Chaucer uses the ironic lexical ‘dishonour’ as well as the noun ‘thinges’ to highlight the reality
of how the Church operates. In the 14th Century, the use of the Vulgate made the bible
inaccessible to the masses, allowing the Church’s superiority and narrative to remain
unquestioned. Chaucer’s own writing in Vernacular suggests he is thinking on parallel lines
about the democratic availability of the written word. The sarcastic undertone in ‘greet
Charitee’ and the repletion of ‘every’ denotes the Church’s greed in how it constantly seeks
opportunities. The extensive listing, ‘Blessynge halles, chambres, kichenes, boures’ shows the
corrupting intentions of the Church with its’ extensive reach and influence, encroaching into
the common people's lives. The modal language in that women only ‘may’ go ‘soufly up and
doun’ suggests that outset of this idealised world Chaucer has created women do not have that
luxury. There is therefore a sense of the sexually transgressive intentions directed at women. In
lines 95-112 the Wife suggests that the Church is hypocritical in its’ interpretation of the Bible
and undermines the Church by instead suggesting that the didactic message of Jesus is not as
understood. As she asserts everybody has their own ‘gifte’, using the natural language of the
‘tree’ to juxtapose the materialistic lexical ‘gold’ to denote the real capitalist intentions of the
Church. The so-called spirituality by the metaphor that ‘somme had been of tree’ which
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