The Wife of Baths Tale is a fantastical tale of magical creatures such as fairies, forests, romance, strong Knights and fair maidens, set in the time of King Arthurs counsel in Britain, While the tale is seen as a fairy tale set in an ideal world, it touches on dark subjects such as rape and using power for evil. A Knight overcome with lust for a fair maiden uses his power for evil and rapes this lady dishonouring her. Instead of being sentenced to death as King Arthur wished the King listens to his wife 's advice and gives the Knight one year to redeem his life. In this year he must find out what it is women truly want. Already the Wife of Baths tale puts women to …show more content…
Chaucer also exercises the narrative technique of pace within this Tale which deals with the space and time within the tale. For example the lengthy proportion of the tale in which the Old Hags lecture on 'gentilesse ' takes up slows down the pace of the tale in order to put more importance on this particular …show more content…
The Geoffrey Chaucer Page, "The Wife of Baths Prologue and Tale", accessed 4 March 2013, http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/wbt-par.htm.
Bibliography.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale.” The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry Dean Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987. Lines 1109-76.
"Iambic Pentameter". Entry 1, def 2. Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2nd ed. Oxford UP, 1989. Web. accessed 1 March 2013.
Malone, Kemp, 'The Wife of Baths Tale ', The Modern language review, Vol 57, No.4 (1962): pp 481-491. Jstor, accessed 3 March 2013.
McTaggart, Anne, "What Women Want?: Mimesis and Gender in Chaucer 's Wife of Baths Tale and Prologue, Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Vol 19. (2012), pp41-51, Project Muse, accessed 3 March 2013.
Crossref-it.info, accessed 4 March 2013, http://www.crossref-it.info/textguide/The-Wife-of-Bath 's-Prologue-and-Tale/30/2075.
The Geoffrey Chaucer Page, "The Wife of Baths Prologue and Tale", accessed 4 March 2013,