Geoffrey Chaucer's the Wife of Bath appears to be one of the most overplayed and ideologically overcharged characters of the English literary history.
Although a weaver by profession, she thrusts her reader into a parallel world of ideologies tailored to suit her own purposes.
Her textual manipulation and historical distortions form the major content of her prologue and subsequently her tale.
Helen Cooper notes that the wife both draws on and critiques the tradition of anti-feminist literature.
she asserts blatantly and unapologetically the most intimate details of her marital life giving concrete evidence of no theoretical justification to the number of successive marriages a person can have in his/her lifetime.
She quotes from the bible stating that god had himself commanded man "to wexe and to multiplye".
This use of the bible and the ecclesiastical texts are recurrent in advancing her arguments.
She understands the significance of economics in marital relationships and wishes to control it so as to have sovereignty in her conjugal relations.
The clerical examples which she uses to illustrate her stand are those of Lamech, Abraham and Jacob all of who married more than once.
Historically she elucidates the example of King Solomon who is presumed to have 700 wives and 300 concubines.
Thus she had in-depth knowledge of religion, history and politics which she devoured literally combined with a capricious memory and the capriciousness of women.
To call her a feminist ahead of time would not be wrong since feminism was not an organized movement at that time.
Barrie Ruth Straus avers that the wife of bath insists on her right to speak by silencing the other.
The content of the prologue is unequivocally hers and it cannot be confused with anyone else's.
The caustic nature of her argument is made evident right from the beginning wherein she chides and rebukes men and questions their parameters of judging a woman.
Some choose their "richesse" some "gentilesse" while some choose "fairnesse".
She is well aware of the advantages that femininity entails and alters them to her best advantage.
She cleverly plays "hard to get" and exploits her first three husbands for their wealth, power and resources.
The ultimate secret she reveals is that all who think they can penetrate into and control such texts she represents as deluded avers Strauss.
Oddly enough this ebullient figure has many of its essential features borrowed from Chaucer's reading of the Middle Ages.
Her outpouring is a confession of sorts without a trace of the penitent's 'mea culpa'.
Her glossing of texts or hermeneutics is essentially oral in tradition within a patriarchal paradigm and eventually succeeds within a male-discourse by using a male-language.
She perpetually subverts the natural hierarchy of gender roles prevalent in the fourteenth-century.
She calls into question the normative practices of society by her "experience" and "auctoritee" and her life becomes the micro-narrative to the meta-narrative of all suppressed women in society who are termed as ''cats''.
Carolyn Dinshaw argues that since the wife of bath is intrinsically the creation of a male poet, he uses feminism in the tight compact of the patriarchal.
Thus the ideology that is oppressive to women that confines women to the domestic sphere is interrogated rigorously.
A phallocentric reading of the wife of bath terms her as a ''whore'' since she boldly exploits her marital relations using blasphemous words against the church.
A traditional reading encourages sympathy for her and a proto-feminist reading supports her stand.
Samuel Jonson avers that "language is the dress of thought", it is the semiotics that work to her advantage as she uses words without trivializing her incidents.
Even her digressions prove to be clues for the reader to understand her individual psyche.
She does not argue for a revolutionary social or political change, but her ideology engages with the notion that women-dominated relationships lead to long-lasting bliss for the individual and for the society.
The prevalent marital structure has the capability and capacity to accommodate her independent will but does not do so since the dominant ideology is patriarchal.
Chaucer creates this flamboyant character giving her the lengthiest prologue among all the other pilgrims and she has no comparison to any other character in English literature except perhaps Shakespeare's Falstaff or the characters of dickens.
The Wife of Bath scrutinizes the existing battle of the sexes with a sprinkle of irony and humor, although her intentions are absolutely clear.
Being a woman in the Middle Ages would ideally mean a silent victim of suffering and subjugation but the wife of bath consciously deviates from the ideal notions and instead does exactly what the deportment books say not to.
Marriage for her means sexual satisfaction and not procreation.
The sources for the narrative include 'The Holy Bible', Gospel of St.
John, and Theophrastus's 'the golden book of marriage'.
thus as a character, the wife of bath can be considered as an amalgam of ideologies including the feminist, religion, gender, historical and patriarchal.
She has concrete substance to rely on.
Her agonistic skills set her apart from any other woman of her times.
Aaron Steinberg avers the content of the wife of bath's prologue to be a war of ''maistrie'' (absolute control) between males and females.
Chaucer with his eager experimentation and eye for observation wanted readers to note the subliminal messages that the wife conveys in her debate as well as the explicit ones and gives her an ending of which is optimistic and appears to fulfill what she had always desired.
Matthew Arnold views Chaucer as the "father of splendid English poetry" racing ahead of his contemporaries and his time expressing as well as questioning subtly the working and psychological underpinnings of ideology and society of his times and those to come