Wife of Bath has certainly had 'experience', and is keen to justify it against biblical authority.

She has had 5 husbands and justifies it in the scripture: Christ never taught that people should only
be married once, the Bible says 'go forth and multiply', and Solomon had more than one wife.

She is looking for a 6th husband. And she points out that Jesus never lays down a law about
virginity, and essentially states that we have the parts for sex and shpuld use them as such.

3 of her husbands were good, 2 were bad: the three were good, rich and old and gave her all their
land, which resulted in her withholding sex from them in order to get exactly what she wanted.
STILL MODERN?

Women, she says can lie and steal better than any man. She reveals her tactics for manipulating her
husbands – deliberately attacking her husband with a whole fistful of complaints and several
biblical glossing and starting an argumenti, with the result of her getting what she wants. By
accusing her husband of infidelity, the Wife disguised her own adultery – even calling her maid and
Jankin in false witness to back her up.

She is one of Chaucer's most enduring characters and one of the most famous of all the pilgrims.
Her voice is distinctive – loud, self-promoting, extremely aggressive – and her lengthy prologue
silences the Pardoner and the Friar for daring interrupting her.

The general prologue describes her as being swathed in textile, and, of course, 'textere', the Latin
word meaning 'to weave' is the key to a close relationship between 'cloth' and 'text' in the Middle
Ages.

For the Wife, as well as being excellent at spinning a tale, is also excellent at spinning cloth – and is
surrounded, problematically in the text in just the way the Prologue has her covered in cloth.

The Wife claims to represent female voices – and her tale consists of a set of women representing
each other. She speaks on behalf of women everywhere: and against the male clerks who have
written the antifeminist literature that Jankin reads in his book of wicked wives.

It is odd then, that the Wife, who claims to stand for 'experience', spends much of her prologue
dealing with written 'authority', glossing the Bible in precisely the manner she criticises the clerks
for doing. The Wife is against text, but expert in text; against clerks, but particularly clerical. And,
of course, venomous about anti-feminist literature, but also made up of anti-feminist literature.
When the Wife throws Jankin's book in the fire, she is in fact burning her own sources which
constitutes a bizarre act of literary self-orphanage. It is as if she burns her own birth certificate.

However, we must always bear in mind that she is ventriloquised by Chaucer, a clerk and a man.
Is this Chaucer's opinion of proto-feminism and a disavowal of the anti-feminist tradition? Or is
Chaucer endorsing the anti-feminist tradition by giving it a mouthpiece which, in arguing against it,
demonstrates all of its stereotypical arguments as facts?

The key fact is that you cannot have a Wife without a Husband. Whether married to Chaucer,
whether Chaucer in drag, or whether a feminist persona all of her own, it is important to view the
apparently proto-feminist Wife of Bath from a point of view which understands her strong links to
the men in her fictional – and literary – lives.
The Wife's prologue is unique in that it is longer than the tale itself. The Wife of Bath uses the
prologue to explain the basis of her theories about experience versus authority and to introduce the
point that she illustrates in her tale: The thing women most desire is complete control
("sovereignty") over their husbands. Because she has had five husbands, the Wife feels that she can
speak with authority from this experience, and, in the prologue, she tells how she got the upper hand
with each of them.
In Chaucer's time, the antifeminism of the church was a strong controlling factor. Women were
frequently characterized as almost monsters; they were sexually insatiable, lecherous, and shrewish,
and they were patronized by the church authorities.
Women were not allowed to participate in church doctrine in any way. Likewise, in Chaucer's time,
a second marriage was considered suspect, so the Wife of Bath carefully reviews the words of God
as revealed in scripture. And her knowledge of scripture (although confused at times) reveals that
she is not simply an empty-minded woman.
Nowhere, she confesses, can she find a stricture against more than one marriage, save the rebuke
Jesus gave to the woman at the well about her five husbands. But this, she confesses, she cannot
understand. Furthermore, in Chaucer's time, perpetual virginity received considerable praise; some
of the saints were canonized because they preferred death to the loss of their virginity, or some
struggled so fiercely to retain their virginity that they were considered martyrs and were canonized.
After the Wife of Bath departs from the holy scriptures, she appeals to common sense — if
everyone remained a virgin, she offers, who would be left to give birth to more virgins? Even more
basic, she maintains that the sex organs are to be used for pleasure as well as for procreation: She
admits that she is a boisterous woman who enjoys sex and is not ashamed of it — a violation of the
medieval view that saw sex as justified only for procreation. She also denies the popular belief that
women should be submissive, especially in matters of sex.
The reader should remember that the Wife's arguments, in all cases, go against the authorities of the
church and that she is a woman who prefers her own experiences to scholarly arguments. The truly
remarkable aspect of the Wife of Bath's prologue is not her argument with the mores of her time or
with the strictures of the church, but the very wonderful portrait of a human being. She is a woman
of great vitality, a woman who is wonderfully alive and responsive. And after five husbands and
hardships — she has lost her beauty and her youth — she has survived. She has the power to enjoy
life with a zest denied the other dour pilgrims, and she has the will to enjoy what she cannot change.