The multitude of readers who have been captivated, since Chaucer's own time, by the Wife of Bath, is matched by the multitude of different interpretations of her. She is shrew, virago, femme fatale; she is the voice of feminism, or the projection of centuries of male misogynist fantasy. She represents Eve, or all of mankind that refuses to be born again in the Redemption; she stands for joy and vitality against a life-denying and cheerless orthodoxy. Her character is a mirror of Chaucer's own, a patchwork pastiche of other people's writings, open to deep Freudian psychoanalysis, or the greatest creation before Falstaff. She is the antifeminists' nightmare come true, whom no man within the fiction of the Tales can resist when once she has marked him down.

There is some evidence for all of these contradictory readings in the text, and Chaucer adds yet more through the way he tells the Wife's Prologue and Tale. The one thing that everyone who has ever heard of the Canterbury Tales knows about it, that the Wife demands female sovereignty in marriage, is itself put into doubt by the end of both her Prologue and her Tale. The vicissitudes of her relationship with her fifth husband, the clerk Jankin, end not with their fight but with their reconciliation: