Directions: After reading Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale”, choose one prompt and construct a brief paragraph (5-6 sentences). Make sure to edit your work. This is fifty percent of your grade for this assignment. Additionally, respond to the posts of at least two of your classmates. Do not just agree and do not like/love (this isn’t social media). Add to their discussion by citing another example, for example. Connect their discussion to another poem. Disagree (politely) by commenting on the meaning of words or phrases. Consider how this impacts your understanding of the work or of a different work. Your responses to your classmates (2 required) are the other fifty percent of your grade for this assignment.
Prompts:
- Is the Wife an example of the antifeminist tradition, or is she a counter to it?
- How does the Wife manipulate argument and textual authority? Is she justified in manipulating texts and argument in the way she does?
- Does the Wife expose power relations that are inevitable in marriage?
- Is the “Prologue” simply about one woman’s history, or is it also about how literary tradition is determined by structures of power?
- What does “beastliness” represent in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale?”
- What does the knight learn? Does he earn his happy fate?
- Does this tale change your understanding of medieval ideas of social order or class?
- Why should the hard-headed bourgeois Wife choose a romance about aristocrats ending happily ever after for her tale?
