Explain what makes Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" so unique and interesting.

"The Wife of Bath's Tale" is a uniquely clever and bafflingly well-constructed tale that eludes any easy answers to its many questions.

According to the General Prologue, the Wife is excellent at cloth-making and is covered in a huge amount of cloth (weighing, according to the Narrator, almost ten pounds). The Latin verb to weave, 'textere', was the basis for a verbal connection between writing texts and weaving cloth. So the Wife of Bath being wrapped in cloth metaphorically means that she's wrapped in text.

How are we to read that? Perhaps that this woman, who argues so forcefully for women's rights and the right of women to have a voice, is being written (and so, almost ventriloquised) by a man, Geoffrey Chaucer. Underneath all the cloth/text, is there a real woman? Or is it just Chaucer in drag?

The sources for the Wife are all real texts, many of them quoted in Jankyn's book of Wikked Wyves. So when the Wife throws Jankyn's book in the fire, she is a text destroying her sources - somewhat like a voice destroying its words. At what point does the Wife - as a character, as a voice, or as a text - have any reality that we can rely on?

To relate this text/cloth point back to the tale itself, notice that at the end of the tale, the lothly lady asks the knight to "Cast up the curtyn" - pull aside the cloth - to see her revealed as a beautiful young woman. But by now, you'll have realised that it's hard to know where the cloth/text stops.