The most obtentatious of the travlers, the Wife of Bath has been married five times and is currently searching for another man to marry. The Wife of BAth is opinionated and boisterous, and her tale which centers around the question "what do women want?," promotes her view that women wish to have aut...

Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, women were encouraged to aspire to marriage. In The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits, Sarah Stickney Ellis, a best-selling author, maintained that women were "clothed in moral beauty," which was best applied to raising vir...