Summary
Summary The Wife of Bath: Form
- Module
- Unit 3 - Poetry (9ET0)
- Institution
- PEARSON (PEARSON)
The Wife of Bath: Form
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Wife of BathForm
Poetic Narrative- a form of poetry that tells a story, often using the voices of both a narrator
and character.
Dramatic Monologue- The brief interruptions by other pilgrims remind the reader of this
form.
An Allegorical Confession- This was a medieval genre which plays on morality play
conventions. A personified vice confesses their sins to the audience through a life story
A Work of Rhetoric- Language used to motivate, inspire, inform, or persuade readers and/or
listeners. Was formed in the ancient world but reformed in the Middle Ages to suit religious
purposes, so sermons often had features of rhetoric in them. Aristotle taught logos (reason:
reality, logic, proof), Ethos (character: the creditability of the speaker), and pathos (emotion:
the listeners values and emotions)
A Frame Narrative- a tale in which a larger story contains, or frames, many other stories.
This is what all of the Canterbury tales are.
Conventions of a Frame Narrative
The frame story functions to create a reason for someone to tell the other stories, meaning the
frame story doesn’t have much plot of its own. The subsequent ‘inner’ stories within the
narrative have a clear beginning, middle, and end, and usually fall into their own individual
genres.
In The Canterbury Tales, the pilgrimage to Canterbury provides the frame for the work, and
the device of the storytelling context provides a circumstance for the tales.
Courtly Romance- the chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was
popular in the noble courts of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe.
The Wife of Bath was based off of courtly love characters. He combines description taken
from La Duenna Vieille ("The Old Woman") and from La Jaloux ("Jealousy"). Like the Wife
of Bath, La Vieille has been married numerous times, she knows the arts of manipulating
men, and engages in a lengthy confessional revelation of her controlling techniques and
avoiding the potential miseries of marriage. Chaucer’s version of the Wife of Bath also
appears to originate in the French poem, Le Roman de la Rose.
Conventions of a Courtly Romance
Upper class romances that often focused on unrequited love. The male lover would pine and
the woman would be untouchable, being mysterious and occasionally setting her lover
impossible tasks.
They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a chivalric knight-errant
portrayed as having heroic qualities, who goes on a quest.
Breton lai/narrative lai- a form of medieval French and English romance literature.
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