Thursday, August 29, 2013
Wife of Bath
This prologue was very lengthy and the english gave me a slight headache but I was very interested and captivated by what this woman had to say. This woman has had 5 husbands, and she was first married at the young age of 12. I have a little brother who is 12 and I could never imagine him being married, heck he watches spongebob and can't keep a fish alive for more than a week! Anyway, this woman seemed very cruel and a bit messed up in the head. She would use the Bible and mix up the words to make herself seem sane. Plus, she really only loved one of her husbands, the rest she would lie and take money from them. She explains how she was very sexual, but would only have sex to get money which doesn't make much sense. Out of the husbands that were "good" she describes them as being "gode, and riche, and olde" so it seemed that she went for men who were much older and who were wealthy and took advantage of them. She accused one of her husbands of having an affair and he would give her what she wanted. She took utter and total control of her husbands, as if they were her puppets, in order to get what she wanted from them. My question would have to be, what caused her to be this way? Has she been like this her whole childhood, or did she just figure out how to push all of her husbands buttons?
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Emily, this is fine for a first post, but in the future I really want you to examine something specific in the text. Don't just make generalizations about what happened but pick something out, maybe quote a particular line, and use that to help center your discussion. This discussion of the Wife of Bath and her relationships would be much better if you discussed her description of a particular husband or something like that. Keep working at it, and remember I still need to see a post on Beowulf if you want credit for that blog.
ReplyDeleteI agree that the woman tried to control her husbands and make them do what she wanted. It's hard to say what caused her to be this way, but I think some women feel like their husbands should do everything they want. For example, some girls want their boyfriends to be "whipped," which basically means that their boyfriend will do anything their girlfriend wants them to. I think the woman in this story wants to be in the driver's seat of the relationship. I also agree that she is very manipulative and it causes her to be this way to her husbands. To answer the second question, I think that children learn how to be manipulative at a young age. I think the woman in this story probably was manipulative her whole life, but her skills of manipulation increased greatly when she figured out she could use that to get what she wanted from her husbands.
ReplyDeleteI very much agree that this reading was much different then we are used to understanding. I also found it interesting that the women had 5 husbands. In that point of time I did not expect a woman to have that many husbands. I was surprised that she was what we would consider now a prostitute. That was a very good point about your 12 year old brother. I could never imagine being married with children at the age of 12. That is a very scary thought.
ReplyDeleteThis woman is a typical "gold digger." Her morals don't follow just actions. She thinks about herself first, others second.
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