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Compare and contrast the Wife of Bath with the old woman in "The Wife of Bath's Tale".
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The Wife of Bath and the old Crone are alike in sharing the conviction that what women desire most is the upper hand in marriage and romance. They are also willing to use stratagems to get what they want from a man. However, the old Crone is not materialistic and she becomes an obedient wife, two traits the Wife of Bath doesn't share.
We learn from the Prologue that the Wife of Bath knows what she wants and is good at getting her needs met. We also know that she likes to be in charge in a marriage (even if her fifth husband, who she marries for love, won't let himself be ruled by her). She likes material goods and a comfortable life, as her bright colored clothes show, goals she has achieved by marrying and inheriting wealth from older men. We also know she has no shame about stooping to just about any stratagem to get her way with a man.
Like the Wife of Bath, the old woman is old at this point in her life. Like the Wife of Bath, she knows how to drive a hard bargain, and she exacts a high price for the life-saving knowledge she imparts to the knight. After the knight marries her, she has...
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him as confused and hapless as we can imagine the Wife of Bath having her first four husbands, until he lets her decide whether to be old by day or by night. Both woman like to be charge.
Unlike the Wife of Bath, the old woman has supernatural powers and is in a position to reward the knight by making herself appear young. She also comes across as wiser than the Wife of Bath and as having a greater willingness to be kind and generous to her husband, while the Wife of Bath relies on manipulation to get her way with men.
The old woman in the Wife of Bath's story is one of several examples of the
'loathly lady' archetype in medieval poetry. Readers of the tale would have
been broadly familiar with her story: she is ugly, and indeed 'a fouler wight
ther may no man devyse' (1005). She is also of low birth and is older than the
ideal wife, making her far from the preferred marriage partner for the knight
who weds her. The loathly lady knows, however, that despite these
considerations, the knight has made a binding promise to her, which she repeats
before the court. She achieves her ends through shrewdness and
strategy.
This level of strategy and cunning is one of the reasons many comparisons have
been drawn between her and the Wife of Bath herself—she is also skilled in
rhetoric, as is made evident in the speech she delivers to her husband on
issues such as the advantages offered by old age and poverty, and the true
source of gentility. Like the Wife of Bath, she is a woman above marriageable
age who marries a younger man and then lectures him severely when he criticizes
her for things she cannot change. There are obvious parallels between this
behavior and the Wife of Bath's treatment of Jankyn, her younger husband. Much
has been written, therefore, on the subject of how far the loathly lady is a
stand-in for the Wife of Bath—an avatar in her own tale.
There are, however, other elements working against this interpretation. In the
first instance, although both the Wife and the lady give long and skillful
speeches, the topics of their speeches are quite different. We know from the
Wife of Bath's prologue that she would never allow herself to be forced into
poverty and would also never return power to her husband after it has been
given to her, as the loathly lady does. Furthermore, at the end of the tale,
the loathly lady transforms into a beautiful young woman, a male-gaze fantasy
of obedience and attractiveness. The Wife of Bath, meanwhile, has no intention
of changing under pressure from society (men), and she remains the voice of
female sovereignty even while the loathly lady loses her own
sovereignty.
Both the Wife of Bath and the old woman in "The Wife of Bath's Tale" are similar thematically, being two women who are knowledgeable through many lived experiences.
Compare the Wife of Bath with the old Crone in "The Wife of Bath's Tale."
The Wife of Bath shares with the Crone the conviction that women want the upper hand in marriage and romance. In her prologue, she makes it very clear that with the exception of her last, younger husband, she has her husbands completely under her command.
Both are also willing to use stratagems or power plays to get what they want from a man. The Wife of Bath does things such as accusing her husbands of having affairs in order to get control of them. The old Crone extracts a promise from the desperate knight that he will marry her if she saves his life. She holds him to this promise even though he begs her to release him.
However, the likenesses diverge after that. Once she is married to the knight, the Crone shows herself to be less materialistic than the Wife of Bath. While the Wife likes her bright red clothes and the wealth she has inherited from her husbands, the Crone states to the knight, who is ashamed of her low birth, that true poverty is greed: the state of never being satisfied. True wealth is in living simply and being content. It is almost impossible to imagine the Wife of Bath believing in such a creed.
Furthermore, once the Crone gets to choose for himself whether to be beautiful by day or night, she becomes an obedient wife. This is something that also seems impossible to imagine the Wife of Bath doing, if only because she would get too bored.