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.
The Wife of Bath’s Tale is referred to technically as an exemplum, a story told to illustrate an intellectual idea. In this case, the tale is to provide an answer to the question “What do women most desire?” Even though Chaucer had some of the ideas from other sources (the Roman de las Rose as elaborated by Jean de Meun, and St. Jerome’s comments on celibacy in Hieronymous contra Jovinianum), he reshaped the tale to fit in with the Wife of Bath’s introduction and her basic thesis that women most desire “sovereignty.” For example, Chaucer uses an older shrew — the Wife of Bath who has just married a man twenty years younger than she is — as the narrator telling a story about an old hag who gains sovereignty over her youthful husband and the result being that the couple live a contented and a long, happy life.
