Wife of bath character analysis

One of the most serious crimes that go generally unnoticed is domestic abuse. Typically the abused’s family will either not notice or ignore the signs until it is too late. Physical abuse is the easiest to spot, sexual abuse leaves the deepest scars, and emotional abuse is the hardest to recover from. The most under reported abuse stems from wives abusing their husbands due to shame, fear of retaliation, and the fear of not being believed by authorities. Anyone can be abused, any day, any time, even in the past abuse like this existed, but there wasn’t a term for it, especially if it was your wife. Likely you would be told that she’s a little rambunctious or noisy and she will calm down, but that may not be the problem. The Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales can be classified as an abuser by the methods she uses to control her husbands. Emotional abuse is the Wife of Bath’s greatest tool against her first husbands. In the Wife’s Prologue, she tells of the accusations of unfaithfulness she would hurl at her husbands constantly to gain pity (235-245). She later admits that she was only saying these things to torture and gain luxuries from them, but over a long period of time this type of emotional abuse can permanently affect a person’s mind. “Often, emotional abuse builds over a long period of time until it becomes so unbearable that victims lash out in frustration and anger, only to appear unstable and aggressive themselves” (Rotella). Possibly, the husbands died before reaching that point, as they were older men when she first married at age twelve, but the lives they must have lived under the shadow of the Wife’s opposing will seems daunting. Later in the Wife’s Prologue, she makes light of her second tactic, to tell her husbands, who were drunk the previous evening, that they spouted off a tirade about their wife being out to ruin them, which causes them to feel guilty (360-383). This is an emotional abuse tactic called gas-lighting where the