Wife of Bath

Having read and blogged about this woman before, I had a prior understanding on her liberal beliefs. 5 husbands sounds like a lot, but the Wife of Bath (Alison) is certain to justify herself and spends a lot of her introduction explaining and defending her choices, as well as delving into her marriages: good, bad, and ugly. She resents the idea that people accuse her of bigamy because her marriages are sequential and not simultaneous. I think Chaucer was probably making fun of the "gold-digger" or "black widow" tropes, but it doesn't quite work like that for me. To quote an idea I mentioned about the WoB in the aforementioned previous blog post, she gestures to the idea of not "following a rubric, and following her own path" which I still find empowering especially at a time where women weren't generally thinking like that/acting on it.