In Class Activity or Online Discussion: Wife of Bath Literary Quick Take
Overview
The literary quick takes are weekly discussions and in-class activities that I use to frame the text for the students. This is mostly formative and graded based on engagement.
Literary Quick Takes
I use this for group discussion in both online and in-class formats. It is intended to allow students to explore the meaning of the text in relation to themselves and to engage in meaningful discussion with peers.
In this discussion, I would like to highlight an important point illuminated by the Wife of Bath, especially in her prologue: there is nothing "wrong" with men. The problematic aspects of the society include the demonization of others, such as misogyny. These elements are highlighted in many of our stories: the Knight learns to respect women's agency, Shahrayar is redeemed, Achilles finds his way back to compassion, and Gilgamesh can accept his mortality.
Rather, it is the persistence of destructive and negative methods of denying reality and others' rights to happiness that lead us astray. With that in mind, here is a former Police Special Operations officer Shane Horsburgh on redefining masculinity (please note there is mention of suicide):
Horsburgh notes that he created a "false image" and a "false map" or manhood. Alyson shows us a similarly nuanced view of manhood through her five husbands, most notably through her tale. The Knight has a similarly destructive view of women as an object at the beginning of the tale. To be blunt, he rapes a virgin, and this is a reality that we must reckon with:
Why does Queen Guinevere not execute the knight, and what might Chaucer indicate about the problematic way some men relate with the world?