The Wife of Bath is one of the several pilgrims going to Canterbury.

She is introduced in the "General Prologue" to Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales". The only piece of information the reader can have from the title is that she comes from Bath. He or she also understands her social status from the word "wife".

The woman's characterization is built up resorting to different aspects of her personality. In the present paragraph I am going to illustrate the ways the narrator exploits in order to bring the woman to surface.

The first reference plays on irony, since Geoffrey Chaucer immediately informs the reader that she is "somewhat deaf". He also tells about her origin: she comes from Bath or in the neighbourhood and besides he praises her skill in clothes making. He also adds that she could compete with the dressmakers from Ypres and Ghent, two important towns famous for their clothes and materials in the Flemish countries. The language used relies on a rhyme scheme that ties lines together, that is the rhyming couplet. The reader's attention is immediately drawn by the narrator's choice of the typical incipit of fables, when he says "there was...". Also he exploits word order deviation when he says "at making clothes she had a skillful hand", because this is not the ordinary word order. In this way, the stressed part of the line is "had a skillful hand", which rhymes with Ghent.

On a second moment the narrator indirectly underlines her ambition and vanity: he tells the reader that nobody in the parish dared to go and proceed her in the offerings, because if somebody did so she would immediately get angry. Such behaviour shows the woman was not really interested in charity, but she rather enjoyed always to be in the front or on the stage. The characterization goes on with reference to the way she dresses and the narrator focuses the reader's attention on two aspects of her dressing style: the first one ("her head-dresses were of fines woven ground") highlights the fine quality of her style of wearing, but immediately afterwards he parodises it because he informs that "they weighted about ten pounds". Further more, he makes it clear and loud that she used to do this on Sundays, that is on the day when she went to mass, and this implies that she wanted everybosy to look at her. In a way or another, the narrator's judgment unveils the double nature of the woman's behaviour. Also when the narrator describes the stockings she would wear he insists on the colour res: "the finest scarlet red" makes the effect exaggerated and therefore ridiculous. The colour is an additional way to underline that whatever the woman did was in excess, and therefore once again the narrator wants to convey a rather critical point of view about the woman, to whom he always refears with the noun "The WIfe of". The intelligent reader wonders why a married woman should choose a dressing style just for the pleasure to focus everybody's attention on her, in the style of today's "veline". Probably she was more interested in attracting men's attention than any other possible matter. The idea is immediately confirmed by the narrator's description of the way she wore her stockings, which he says were "tightly fastened". He also insists on the money she used to spend on her physical appearance, which makes the lady dearing and rich. This allows the intelligent reader to understand thet the narrator sets the character among the merchants in the Middle CLass, one that had risen consistently in that period.

Again, the narrator plays on the woman's personality in line 460, since he speaks of her as of a "bold" and "fair" and, and this is the point of irony, "red in hue".

The Wife of Bath is a woman of excesses even in marriage, since she has already had five husbands. The narrator parodizes the figure of the woman when he says "She had been respectable throughout her life" and even when he tells the reader that all her weddings had been religious ones ("married in church"). He seems to suggest that as a man there is high rosk to court her. Irony is underlined also when the narrator reinforces the woman's worldly attitude adding " not counting other company in youth". The narrator concludes his chatacterizations about the Wife's reputation saying that there is not even need to discuss about her behaviour.

The characterization makes now reference to the woman's passion for travelling: she seems to be continually moving around the world, considered that she has been in Jerusalem, Rome Boulogne, Santiago and Cologne, all places connected to the idea of religion in that they are all sights of pilgrimage. But no such spiritual bent comes out of Chaucer's lines as for the Wife's spirituality and therefore the intelligent reader may rightly suppose she has exchanged religious sights for touristic resorts. The insistance in cataloguing pilgrimage aights adds to the narrator's irony, because it sounds rather improbable that a still young woman of the period could have visited all those places.

The Wife's desire to talk and to talk with men in particular comes immediately to surface at line 469, when the narrator plays on her pleasure to tell of her wandering. The narrator does not hide the double-faced nature of the woman's behaviour, since he metaphorically parodizes the way she sits on a horse. She looks more as a trophy. In addition the narrator focuses the reader's attention on her exaggerated style of dressing even on a horse. He seems to ridicule the woman openly in lines 472-473 once again, reiforcing the idea he had hinted out at line 407, focusing on her being "gap-toothed".

The characterization ends highlighting all of the woman's wise attitude in giving advice on love matters and the conclusion sticks in the intelligent reader's mind because Chaucer plays on repetitive double senses to let the reader know the Wife of Bath is not at all the respectable woman she professes to be.

After a careful reading activity of the Wife of Bath's characterization one can rightly assert that in order to make the character memorable the poet plays with different literary devices that range from the intentionally use of the rhyming couplet to the use of a metaphorical language to indirectly unveil aspects of the woman's personality that were not openly acceptedduring the middle ages. Indeed the Wife of Bath seems to exhibit all the features that would make men be afraid of women with straight forward manners. In Chaucer's opinion, such a woman from Bath was clearly an object of desire that he rather portraises as a toil of pleasure.

Surely she did not at all represent the kind of woman approved by the mentality of that time: her gap-toothed quality, her "buttocks large", her skill in the "old dance" make her a memorable character.