I wonder how much experience one requires to make a rational statement. An account, that is sensible enough to substantiate serial marriage. And I believe, I know just the right person to solicit.
5 marriages with no regrets and still having enough caliber to hunt down “the sixth”, Wife of Bath proves to be the appropriate someone to inquire. Wife of Bath’s prologue begins with the launch of torpedoes and missiles aimed at ‘authority’. It’s more like a full scale war; her very first lines are like ‘Super marine spitfire’s’ intercepting ‘Luftwaffe’. The authority here is the pseudo-male favoring society. Wife of bath questions this authority based on her experience, she uses her experience as a tool against the church and the aristocracy prevalent during those days, where it were the men who said what women should be or should not be. She challenges the authority of these powerful men who were part of the clergy, who laid down principles for women, whom they had very little knowledge, and their everyday lives. Wife of bath tries to triumph over this authority; she believes in experience over authority and certainly considers herself as a power on marriage and sex, given her five marriages. She establishes herself as an authority on all matters of marriage. Women, in the time of Chaucer, were cast into very specific roles. In her prologue, the Wife of Bath addresses the general code of conduct and other commonly accepted behaviors of women and dismisses them to justify and rationalize her own life style of being married many times. This Authority works on certain scriptures that have been passed on for generations, the ideology that came out of these scriptures were breeding grounds for the male supremacy, ideologies which mentioned that ‘‘Men were expected to chastise women—to keep them in their place, reduce their ability to tempt me, and above all maintain