Her long monologue is a comic drama; she is "drawing on the illusions of a lifetime with roots in social archetypes". She is portrayed as both an imposing and comical figure with her anomalies and contradictions towards marriage and life. Her prologue is the genre of a confession, "the confessional device leapt to Chaucer's hand when he wished to reveal the naked inwardness of a character"4, as he did similarly in the Reeve, Merchant and Pardoners Prologues. Instead of repenting for her wrong doings, her mistreatment of her husbands etc, she boasts about how in her fifth marriage she has sovereignty. .
Chaucer portrays her as a very controversial figure, we are told that she made her fifth husband Jankin burn his book, "The Book Of Wicked Wives", She is usurping the role of the church by burning the books, as it was their job to decide what was blasphemous and what was not. Her prologue is narrated almost in the form of a sermon, which is ironic as women, especially sexually active women, couldn't preach. Many of the theories she relays are contemporary as a group called the Lollards, lead by John Witcliff, were campaigning for the scriptures to be rewritten.
The Wife of Baths Tale is the closest Chaucer comes to an Arthurian Romance and fairytale, albeit his references are ironic but mentioned all the same. Her Tale is a modified version of a traditional Tale, however modified in a way that only Chaucer could. His is the only version in which the hero opens the Tale by raping a woman, the heroine is an ugly old women and it is a court of powerful women who decide the Knights fate. The rape sets in motion the event of the Tale yet almost immediately disappears from the text, never to be spoken about again. Why is such a serious and controversial issue like rape used but never resolved or even discussed as the Tale progresses? The Rape essentially becomes a game for the knight and the Queen in which she poses a riddle to the knight, which he must solve in order to escape his sentence of death.
