Wife of Bath Tale
Can an Immoral Storyteller tell a Moral Tale? Geoffery Chaucer has gone into such depth to describe the characters in Canterbury Tales. He focuses on their immoral character, physical appearance, and their main purpose. Many of Chaucer’s stories parallel with each other acknowledging the sinful nature of the characters. The comparison of the three stories “Miller’s Tale, Pardoner’s Tale, and The Wife of Bath Tale”, will show how immoral can sometimes bring moral values into a person’s life. Immorality plays a big role in all three stories reflecting sinful and immoral acts: rape, adultery, and falsification. In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”, a knight rapes a woman and must suffer the punishment and shame of losing his life. He is given an automatum of finding what women really want or be put to death. He searches far and wide asking various women for the answer but is unsuccessful. His quest leads him to an old woman which gives him the correct answer but with many request that must be granted. (The old woman insist that the knight marry her.) 260 In”The Pardoner’s Tale”, the pardoner is a very immoral man selling fake relics and being a hypocrite. He deceives many with his knowledge of religious appearance and preachings. (The Pardoner is describe as having yellow locks as wax and a voice as small as a goat. ) 289 The “Miller’s Tale” talk s about a student named Nicholas who persuades his landlord’s wife to have sex with him. He tells a lie about there is a flood coming so that he and the wife Alison can have sex. (Nicholas tells the landlord the only way to save himself is to spspend him and his wife from the tub in rafters) 243. The three stories show characters with immoral values and selfish greed. They all had a scheme to get what they wanted, deceiving others. In the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” the knight immoral act lead him to descover moral values. The knight comes to the crossroads and have to choose between life or death than to marry the old woman.