The Wife of Bath and the Ending of her Tale

I found the voice of the Wife of Bath in the ending of her tale with the knight and the magical old woman. The old woman tells the knight in their wedding bed that she would be old and ugly but the best wife that he could ever ask for. Or the knight could chose her to be young and beautiful, but not necessarily a good wife and he would have to accept the consequences. This is symbolic of the Wife of Bath. In her youth when she was more beautiful, she played around more and was extremely manipulative. She is still so in a way while she is telling the story, but it has been toned down over the years. Now she is older and probably less attractive, and she was a fantastic wife to her last husband. In the tale, the magical old woman was able to be both good, young, and beautiful for the knight because he gave her the choice of which lifestyle she wanted to follow. And the Wife of Bath's point is that all three qualities together can only exist in fairy tales. In reality you would get a life that looked more or less (probably less) like her own.

As erotic and passionate as the Wife of Bath is, I feel bad for her. No one can go through that many relationships without having some bad side effect: which we see a little bit in the nightmare which she can't remember and her "best friend" having the same name as her- possible meanings of that were talked about in class. The negative moral of her tale makes her a more pitiable character, and as the tale ends her long continuous words, Chaucer leaves her that way for now.