In the prologue to the Wife of Bath's tale, Geoffrey Chaucer explores some issues that remain in contention even in today's society. He explores the role of women in a fading chivalric tradition, often letting his personal feelings about the matter slip through.
In many ways, the Wife of Bath is the polar opposite of a good medieval woman. Chaucer seems to deliberately leave us to wonder if he meant the Wife as a positive example for what he would like to see or simply a caricature of an untamed shrew. To me, it seems likely that Chaucer was doing both. Often, like in Swift's Gulliver's Travels, a satirist uses his satires to criticize society and rationalize elements that the common person may dislike. Therefore, it is entirely possible that Chaucer probably meant to support the Wife of Bath's ability to marry more than once but probably didn't support women who enjoyed manipulating their elderly husbands and driving them to an early grave. He also fairly clearly intended the Wife of Bath to be an extreme example of such a woman to make the satire even plainer.
Of course, this could all be my modern bias reading entirely too much into the story, but I do believe Chaucer was intelligent and forward thinking enough to see which way the wind was blowing, so to speak.
I'm not entirely sure how Chaucer intended for the Wife of Bath to come across, but I feel that regardless of the time period in which people read it, the main point of the character is to make people start questioning how woman are supposed to act, and then right when the reader feels that they might have a grasp on what the "correct" answer is, the Wife of Bath shatters that with her tale by making the reader realize that nobody should decide how a woman except for the individual woman herself
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