The Wife of Bath can be described as both an anti-religious and amoral character. The Wife of Bath is anti-religious and this is seen throughout the prologue in which she questions scripture more than once, as well as the fact that she was married five times before going on this pilgrimage and she is currently looking for husband number six. She is also an amoral character since she lacks morality in the way she speaks to the others telling them her story and the way she has acted in her marriages. The Wife of Bath has been married five times, outliving all of her husbands. Since Christ only attended one wedding, at Cana, multiple marriages are frowned upon by the church since they destroy the sanctity of the sacrament of Holy Matrimony. …show more content…
Of her five husbands, “three of them were good and two were bad. The three good men were good, rich, and old.” These three husbands were also very submissive giving her complete control over them. She openly admits to using sex to manipulate her husbands and marrying four of them for their money not out of love. Which she proves when she admits to not crying during her fourth husband’s funeral since she already had husband number five ready to marry her. The Wife also spoke of how she manipulated her first three husbands through sex after they gave all their wealth over to her. She confesses that to her fourth husband she was his purgatory on earth since she was always finding ways to make him jealous. Her fifth husband was the exception since she married him out of love and he had the upper hand in the marriage, until when he beat her and she pretended to die and spoke to him until she convinced him to give her control of their marriage, to which Jenkins’s agrees. The way the Wife tells her story is as if it were to serve as a lesson to others of what marriages are like, which is why the Pardoner interrupts her prologue to state “Now madam…You are a noble preacher in this matter.” The Pardoner goes on to say he was supposed to get married later that year, but now he no longer will because he does not wish to pay the price of marriage “so dearly with his flesh” as the Wife’s husbands