The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

Reading Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale is entertaining, especially some arguments of marriage and some attitudes of the relationship with the husband from the wife of bath.

At the very beginning, she argues against that “Christ went to a wedding only once.” For the wife of bath, she has married five times, and she does not agree that her life is “a sin and scandal;” otherwise, she enjoys sharing her “experiences” of her five marriages without feeling guilt.

The wife of bath has her own opinions about how the sex can assist her to get what she wants, such as her husbands’ wealth. She says her first three husbands were good because “they were kindly men, and rich, and old.” She uses her ways to let her old husbands feel guilty, like her husband is having an affair or when they got drunk, and she teased them at the night. Then, her old husbands will promise to give her money to satisfy her.

Although she gets wealthy, she does not feel love until she met her fifth husband, Jenkin. She claims that “to him I gave land, titles, the whole slate of goods that had been given me before.” She can give away everything just because she loves him. “I took for live, not money.”

Along with the wife of bath’s marriages’ experience, we sort of can realize that, in order to get the satisfaction, she always pay for it. To be wealthy, she pays her old husbands with her activities of sex and her youth. In order to marry the one that she truly loves, she lies to him about her forth husband’s funeral, and she completely disregards the big age gap. However, after Jenkin keeps reading the book about wicked women, she punches him, and he strikes her head which leads her one ear deaf.

We all know everything has two sides, so whatever we do affects other things, and that’s why life is expensive.

Man’yoshu

After reading several poems from Man’yoshu, I strongly feel the great influence of Buddihim which is presented in those poems, especially some poems of Yamanoue Okura.
In his poems, he mentioned the emotion of helplessness many times, for instance, “our helplessness in this life,” “I am living in this world and cannot hold time back,” “the cold leaves me helpless,” “is it so helpless and desperate , the way of live in this world?” “…but I cannot fly away-I am not a bird.” Through reading these words, do you feel helpless? Do you have the feeling of helplessness because you have no alternative when you are suffering?
The suffering idea in Okura’s poems comes from the Buddhism view of suffering. The notion of suffering conveys that the birth, the old age, the sickness, the death, the separation, the anger, the covetousness and the pain of human beings are unavoidable. For Buddhists, they believe that suffering is a pragmatic belief which inhibits people’s desire and assists people to receive the real happiness in their life.
People never can be satisfied in their life time. Pursuit of enjoyment is what we can reach if we know how to deny the pursuit of unrealistic.