496 The Wife of Bath (with Marion Turner)
The History of Literature
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The Wife of Bath
She's almost like Robin Hood or King Arthur who has kind of stepped out of the page, so to speak. The wife of Bath comes very specifically from one author, but then he's taken up by so many others. And for Pasalini, this middle-aged sexually active woman is a figure of death. So having sex with her literally kills her fourth husband and she ends up biting him on the nose. She's absolutely the worse that Chaucer had been in his tales. We don't see things getting better steadily across time - we've seen real steps backwards'
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