Chaucer's Wife of Bath is the most fully and vividly realized character of the Canterbury Tales and its long prologue and short narrative have a strength and vitality that derive from perfect integration of character and message. The wife's account of her own life and her own account are both, apparently, intended to establish the principle that happiness in marriage comes from the woman's "mastery" over her husband. Almost everything he says goes against theological authority, church preaching, and conventional social notions about relationships between men and women. This has led everyone from Chaucer's fictional Clerk to many twentieth-century scholars to conclude that the Wife's views are heretical and astonishingly unconventional. But his clash with the religious and social conventions of his era was probably not as shocking as it superficially appears. The Wife of Bath's autobiography and her account are comically exaggerated and she warns, after all, that she "entente nys ma per pleye" (190). While there is a very serious side to everything she says, it doesn't seem reasonable to assume that the Wife of Bath is actually advocating the complete overturning of all conventional notions of marriage in a way that would mean men would simply become as miserable as they are. women were under the old rules. But she is intent on contrasting the wisdom of experience (i.e., a genuine knowledge of what really happens in marriage) with the sterility (and, often, malice) of the theological and social foundations of conventional views of marriage that not only promise misery for many women, but have little practical relevance to marriage in the real world because, as... at the heart of the article... the Chaucer character presented the point of view of a woman who actually experienced marriage and, as such , this is a radical innovation in and of itself. Works Cited Aers, David. Chaucer, Langland and the creative imagination. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Carruthers, Mary. “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions.” PMLA 94 (1979): 209-22. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Ed. Daniele Cuoco. Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1961. Kittredge, George Lyman. "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage." PMLA 9 (1911-12). http://icg.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/ canttales/franklin/marriage.htmlLee, Brian S. "Exploitation and Excommunication in 'The Wife of Bath's Tale.'" Philological Quarterly 74 (1996): 17-35 .Shoaf, R. A. Dante, Chaucer and the Currency of the Word: Money, Imagery, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry. Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1983.