Week 1 Storytelling

Week 1 Storytelling - The Wife of Bath's Prologue and The Wife of Bath's Tale

Returning to the course, our first assignment is The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and The Wife of Bath’s Tale are what we had to read this week and discuss in class. 

What we know about the story is that it was originally told by the Marriage Group of the Canterbury Tales. It was written specifically by Chaucer Factoids. It is basically a bunch of pilgrims talking about their philosophies on both love, sexuality and marriage. It’s even set in when King Arthur was king.  The prologue is just the narrator, discussing and talking before they tell the tale. It’s giving context to the story that is going to be told, maybe she is relating to the story itself. It’s her interpretation of the story. This is telling us as readers what the storyteller is to the story and how they think. It’s put in here to already set a perspective on the tale.

The story is basically a romance that’s taking place in a medieval time period, in which a knight is punished for not acting… knightly. He knight is ordered to be executed by the court of women. As a punishment instead of dying he has to figure out what women “truly desire” and is challenged to try to find the answer. The knight looks around and tries to find the answers to the questions. The knight ends up finding 24 ladies dancing and tries to approach them, and instead they disappear and it appears to an old lady who offers to help him. After giving him the answer which is giving power and respect to women and after saving his life she wants him to marry him even if she’s old and poor to him. She even tries to rationalize and say that because of those reasons she would never run away or cheat. The knight ends up letting the old lady decide if they should be married. He is giving power to her in this moment. It’s because the Knight became a bit more wise from what happened before, and lets her take control of the situation. After this, he either sees her in a different way or she changes to be young and pretty to the Knight. This is kind of a "happy ever after" scenario. I'm pretty satisfied with the storytelling and how this story is being told and it's theme. I think the most interesting part was the Knight himself and how he became different and grew to be better and learn from what he did wrong.