Can you please help me with writing an essay for a literature class?
Name
English 204
Date
Dr. Rand
Annotated Bibliography of “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”
Coghill, Nevill. The Poet Chaucer. London: Oxford University Press, 1949. 141-150.
Coghill is primarily concerned with the Wife of Bath’s personal character, which he describes in relation to two basic themes. The first is the opinions she voices about marriage, and the second is the “seeking” that she does through her many pilgrimages. Coghill finds Alison full of contradictions. She is comic but melancholy; spiritual, but coarse. He finds her a “great comic figure” and claims that her prologue is the first autobiography in English fiction. The chapter on the Wife of Bath barely mentions the events of Alison’s tale, but her prologue is discussed in great detail, particularly her marriage to Jankyn.
The analysis of the Wife of Bath’s character was interesting and easy to read, although not as concerned with secondary sources as the other works in this bibliography. Coghill sees sensitivity in Chaucer where other authors have found complexity and genius. Unlike Malone, Coghill seems to believe that the character of the teller outweighs the importance of the tale itself, and is therefore worthy of greater analysis and discussion. The contrast between the two is interesting. Coghill is also more concerned with Alison’s pilgrimages, which illustrate her searching for not only power and sovereignty, but also for love.
Cooper, Helen. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Oxford Guides
to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. 139-166.
Cooper’s chapter on “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” is divided into separate discussions of date and text, genre, sources and analogues, structure, themes, and finally, style. The greatest of these sub-chapters is sources and analogues. In this section,
Cooper divides the prologue into three parts: Alison’s defense of marriage, based on the writings of Jerome; Alison’s description of her husbands and marriages, based on Theophrastus and supplemented by “The Romance of the Rose”; and finally, her marriage to Jankyn, supported by his anti-feminist literature.
The following chapter is about “The Wife of Bath’s Tale and Cooper’s form of analysis is the same. Date and time, genre, sources and analogues, structure, themes, context and style are all discussed in individual essays, with the essay on sources and analogues dominating. The sources of “The wife of Bath’s Tale” are primarily English in origin and have been modified to suit Alison and the moral of her tale. Cooper points out that Alison, not Chaucer, has misrepresented the stories from Arthurian legend, the bible, Jerome, and Ovid in support of her own message to her audience. Cooper also asserts that the wife has been left behind by the time the hag/fairy delivers her speech on gentilesse, and that here Chaucer himself is the true speaker.
Cooper’s essays were effectively structured and filled with useful information. Each of the sub-divisions in these essays is relevant, thorough, and thought-provoking. Like Cooper, I believe that the hag/fairy speaks more for Chaucer than for Alison, because the problem being resolved has changed from the differences between women and men to the differences between vice and virtue. Alison does discuss vice and virtue in her prologue, but only where they apply to marriage and sex. Cooper’s analysis of how Chaucer’s voice infiltrates the Wife of Bath’s Tale helped me appreciate the subtlety of Chaucer’s use of narrative point of view.
Hoffman, Richard. “’The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” Chaucer
Review 27.2 (1994): 37-45.
Hoffman sets out to examine how Chaucer wove stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses into the fabric of “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” He argues that Ovid is an important presence not