The Balance of Power in the Wife of Bath

722 Words3 Pages
The prologue to The Wife of Bath is about power. The Wife goes through many explanations of how and why she struggled to gain power from each of her five husbands. Each husband is described to have served her, and she enjoyed that position of power over them, as she describes throughout the prologue. The Wife talks about how it is the power of how she was created that allows her to use her reproductive organs in the manner that she does. This connects with power, because she is establishing the fact that she knows better than others about what humans were meant to do, and what they were not. She then goes on to say "In marriage I'll use my equipment as freely as my maker sent it." (Chaucer, 188) Here she is again establishing the power that she is inferring was given to her by God. When the Wife goes into talking about her husband being her "debtor and my slave" she is definitely showing how powerful she was with her husband. (Chaucer, 188) She then goes as far to say that "I have the power over his own body and not he" which confirms that she controlled her husband. (Chaucer, 188) On page 191, the Wife talks about how she "made them work at night" as if they were her property. This shows that she was really in control of them, and the way that she goes about describing it makes it appear that she is somewhat proud of what she did. Each husband seems to be only a source of gaining property, wealth, and their love, before she simply gives up and stops loving them because she has everything that she could possibly want. This is proven when she says "They had given me their land and their treasure; I no longer needed to be diligent to win their love..." (Chaucer, 191) This also shows her as very shallow and materialistic. This may be in a way be Chaucer arguing that this is what girls try to do with their husbands and then when they do they stop loving them. "I
Open Document