Make up Post: Canterbury Tales-The Wife of Bath and The Rhyme and Reason of Middle English

To start off, I want to say right away how much fun it is to read the Canterbury Tales aloud. I was apprehensive at first, but when I parsed my way through part of the Miller Tale, and I began to really see how it is the English language evolved, like from "yqueint" to quench and "yaf" to gave. I feel that understanding the language and how it flows creates a deeper connection to the body of work. And I have to say, having a better understanding of how the Wife of Bath might sounds gives me more insight into who this character is, and that is definitely something of a proto-feminist character, while simultaneously a satire of greed.
The Wife is feisty, she quips at the other pilgrims, and she isn't ashamed of the fact that she's been married so many time. She really does seem to be using the system for her own gain by capitalizing on people's perception on how a woman should conduct herself. But where there's a positive, there often lurks a negative. The Wife of Bath is definitely a satire of greed. She justifies her life of excess and privilege by claiming that even God would not want to live in poverty, and that the only thing poverty is good for is giving a person less to be concerned about. Her statements seem so over the top that it strains credulity to believe she means what she said.Overall, when these two halves of her persona are combined, it created a larger than life effect for the character, making her role as a satiric character all the more obvious..