Poetry: The Wife of Bath's Tale

Overview
Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Tale," told by the outspoken Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales, stages a vivid debate about marriage, power, and sexual politics within a late medieval setting. The tale itself is a short romance embedded in a longer, famously candid prologue in which the Wife outlines her own theatrical marital history and defends female sovereignty. Chaucer pairs comedy, moral instruction, and folktale motifs to unsettle conventional authority and to explore what women desire most.

Plot
A knight of King Arthur's court commits a brutal crime by assaulting a young woman. Condemned to death, he is spared when the queen and her ladies demand that he must discover, within a year, what women most desire; if he fails, he will die. The knight searches the countryside, asking many women and receiving a variety of answers until he encounters an elderly, ugly woman who promises him the correct reply if he grants her request.
He returns to the court and answers that women most desire mastery or sovereignty over their husbands and lovers. The queen accepts this answer and spares his life, but the loathly lady insists that the knight must marry her. On their wedding night she gives him an apparently impossible choice: she may remain old, ugly, and faithful, or become young, beautiful, and possibly unfaithful. The knight, finally recognizing the wrongness of commanding his wife, yields the decision to her. In response to his grant of sovereignty, she transforms into a young and faithful wife, and the tale closes with the restored harmony of respect and love.

Prologue and Narrative Voice
The tale must be read alongside the Wife of Bath's expansive prologue, where she narrates her experience of five marriages and offers a spirited critique of clerical misogyny and scriptural interpretation. Her voice is worldly, witty, and self-assured; she claims experience as a source of authority and delights in overturning rules that deny women sexual and economic agency. That persona shades the tale's tone, inviting readers to question whether its moral lesson is sincere, ironic, or deliberately ambiguous.

Themes and Motifs
At its heart, the tale centralizes "sovereignty" as both a thematic and ethical claim: true married happiness requires that women have a voice and autonomy within the relationship. The story engages medieval debates about authority, juxtaposing bookish clerical doctrine with the practical knowledge expressed through female experience. The loathly lady motif, common in folktale and Celtic tradition, dramatizes the moral that inner worth and agency outweigh external beauty, while also exposing anxieties about female sexuality and the limits of male honor.
The narrative also plays with courtly romance conventions by punishing a knight who violates courtly ideals and by replacing aristocratic conquest with moral education and restitution. Its comedic elements coexist with darker realities, sexual violence, legal power, and the transactional nature of marriage, so that the tale resists a single, neat interpretation and instead stages a contested moral space.

Significance
The Wife of Bath's Tale remains one of Chaucer's most discussed and taught stories because it compresses complex gender politics into a brief, rhetorically rich narrative. Its interplay of prologue and tale, its blend of humor and unease, and its reliance on folklore and courtly critique make it a powerful meditation on consent, authority, and the possibilities of mutual respect within marriage. The tale continues to provoke and illuminate debates about voice, power, and the ways stories shape social expectations.