Conflicting Thoughts on the Wife of Bath

I'm really torn about where I think "The Wife of Bath" stands on the feminist spectrum, or what precisely is being communicated about the value and nature of women in it. On the one hand, the wife of Bath is a clearly powerful female figure who withstands misogynist energies directed at her from various men in her life. She is symbol, in this sense, of female efficacy, capacity, and independence. On the other, and I found this to be the thinking in a few feminist critiques, the Wife of Bath is clearly a myth. She is so unrealistic and outside of Chaucer's era's conception of women that, if anything she is a fanciful sort of dream to Chaucer, which is not rooted in reality. And if we were to talk about which is worse, to describe women in places of subservience and weakness or to portray their independence as an illusion, I would be hard-pressed to say.

I am realizing that feminist criticism to me up to this point has meant taking apart a text and finding the ways it wrongs women and femininity. And I suppose that has been the case for most of the feminist scholarship I have read, which makes sense considering the whole project is built around righting a 5000 year wrong. But I'm trying to figure out whether that is an excuse/free pass to turn a critical (in the negative sense) eye on everything I read this semester. Who knows, maybe I'll find things in the literature this semester that actually encourages me about the capacity of men to recognize that people different than them matter too.