It is not
possible to say at what point in his life Chaucer wrote most portions of the Canterbury
Tales. Certainly the Wife of Bath¡¯s Prologue and Tale are generally
considered to belong to his most creative years, whenever they were. Perhaps
around 1390? It is also not possible to know whether he had already decided to
develop the Wife¡¯s attitude to sex and the story of her marriages in this way
when he briefly mentioned them in the General Prologue.
No other
pilgrim is given such a developed self-narration. The nearest parallel is the
Pardoner, whose Prologue also allows a pilgrim to portray a questionable
way of life from a personal point of view. But the Pardoner talks only of his
present ¡°professional¡± activities, while the Wife evokes some of the most
private aspects of her life across the years.
Other
parallels may exist between Pardoner and Wife. His Prologue and Tale
offer an ¡°Anatomy of Sin¡± according to which ¡°Avarice (greed) is the root of
all evil¡± but in his portrayal of the ¡°tavern sins¡± there is almost no mention
of sexuality. The dominant activities are eating, drinking, and gambling. The
Wife of Bath makes up for what he lacks, by speaking mainly of sex, but with a
strong element of material greed breaking through. The stress that the GP lays
on the Pardoner¡¯s sexual limitations and on the Wife¡¯s sexual experience might
suggest that the distinction was intended by Chaucer.
The Wife
of Bath is also powerfully present at certain other points in the Canterbury
Tales, always as a dominating female figure. She is directly mentioned in
line 1170 near the end of the Clerk¡¯s Tale. It could be suggested that the
Clerk¡¯s Tale is told in part as an indirect refutation of her attitudes, just
as the Clerk¡¯s portrait in the GP stands in strong contrast to hers. It has
also been suggested that in the GP she recalls personifications of Rhetoric
(the art of persuasive speaking) while the Clerk is a champion of Logic (the
art of clear speaking). On a more immediately ¡°realistic¡± level, the Wife¡¯s
fifth husband was a clerk from Oxford. He is now dead and she has presumably
come on this pilgrimage in search of her sixth. The Clerk is the obvious
candidate and he does not seem to welcome the prospect.
On a wider
scale, the Wife of Bath is the main focus of one of the major themes of the
entire Canterbury Tales ¡ª the nature of Woman. Early in the second
half of the 20th century, many critics claimed to discern what they
termed the ¡°marriage group¡± of tales. This term is now widely rejected. It is
nonetheless certain that a very large number of tales are about the troubled
and troubling relationship between women and men.
There is
nothing like the Wife of Bath¡¯s Prologue in medieval literature.
Scholars have compared it to sermons, confessions, and tracts. Yet it is none
of those. Chaucer has created a text which is a strongly individualized
dramatic monologue, at a time when such things did not exist. The tone, or
¡°voice¡± is quite different from the standard narratorial voice of the Tales and
the Prologue especially clearly demands to be spoken aloud.
The
sequence of ideas is guided by a fluid process of association that looks
forward to the Shakespearean soliloquy. Although the speaking style of the
Prologue is not very ¡°colloquial¡± (that is reserved for the quotations of
things she claims to have said to her old husbands) we are always conscious of
a very individual voice expressing a personal set of thoughts and memories with
no ¡°authorial¡± intervention or interpretation. The nearest parallel in
literature would be some of the works of the Greek satirist Lucian, popular in
the Renaissance but probably unknown to Chaucer..
It has
often been suggested that Chaucer¡¯s first inspiration for the Wife of Bath came
from the portrait of La Vieille (the old woman) in Le Roman de la Rose
(12932-43). This elderly whore recalls with seeming nostalgia the scandalous
sexual fun and adventures she had in her younger days, in words that are
closely echoed by the Wife of Bath (469-73). Here Chaucer could have found the
idea of writing the words of a woman asserting in a lively manner the positive
value of a life that corresponds closely to the worst models found in clerical,
antifeminist works.
Both
Pardoner and Wife speak their Prologues in a self-justifying manner designed to
convince their hearers that they are right to live as they do. This technique
was also used by Chaucer in the GP portrait of the Monk, where ¡°indirect
reported speech¡± strongly advocates a way of life quite in contradiction with
ideals or standard practice and the pilgrim Chaucer, quite overwhelmed, says that
¡°his opinion is good.¡±
The key
term in most modern interpretations of the Wife of Bath is ¡°antifeminism.¡± The
main question is to what extent she expresses a rejection of antifeminist
attitudes to women and to what extent whe incarnates and justifies them.
Antifeminism is the generic name given to attitudes that are systematically
hostile to women. It is often a corollary of Patriarchism, which claims a
privileged position for the male in society and human relations. Almost from
the start, the Christian Church was deeply afraid of sexuality, even within
marriage. Virginity, celibacy, and chastity were widely considered to be a more
truly Christian way of life from early on. Monasticism naturally stressed the
importance of such values and in the West-Euopean (Latin) Church there was
always a tendency to demand that ¡°secular¡± (parish) priests should also not be
married. A widow was under strong pressure not to remarry.
After the
Lateran Council of 1215, deacons and priests were strictly forbidden to marry
and one reason for the proliferation of texts hostile to women may have been
the need to encourage clerical chastity. The universal obligation to make an
annual confession before a priest also made clearer the power of sexual desire
in human lives. The less specifically Christian notion known as ¡°patriarchy¡±
was also always present. According to this ancient Indo-European social model,
social order was only assured when power in all aspects of society belonged
wholly to men Woman soon came to be seen as the greatest threat, not only to
male chastity but to male authority. There were many texts which denounced the
dangers women represented. The archetypal female in Christian antifeminist
writing is Eve, who was considered to have tempted Adam and made him fall by
her sexual charms.
La Vieille
in Jean de Meun¡¯s continuation of Le Roman de la Rose is a standard
antifeminist figure in a strongly antifeminist work. The Wife of Bath¡¯s
Prologue is also mainly composed by reference to antifeminist texts,
commonplace notions, and familiar stereotypes, yet the result is quite
different. It is, together with Chaucer¡¯s Tale of Melibee, the portion
of the Canterbury Tales that refers to the greatest number of textual
¡°authorities.¡± The main manuscripts offer a particularly large number of Latin
¡°glosses¡± (marginal notes and comments) to the Wife¡¯s Prologue, some
explicitly antifeminist.
The text
of the Prologue transmitted in many manuscripts, including the Ellesmere
manuscript, includes a number of lines (mostly related to the Wife¡¯s fifth
husband) that are not found in some of the oldest manuscripts, including the
Hengwrt manuscript (lines 575-584, 609-12, 619-26, 717-20). It seems impossible
to decide if they were added by Chaucer in a revision or if they are the work
of another writer. Since the text remains fully coherent without them, they
seem to represent an addition to an earlier state of the text. Their style is
so completely in accord with the rest that most scholars incline to think they are
by Chaucer.
The first
portion of the Wife of Bath¡¯s Prologue (1-162) is devoted to a general
defense of her right to marry as often as she wishes. It opens with a statement
of her overall theme ¡ª the antifeminist term ¡°wo that is in
mariage¡± ¡ª and it only later becomes clear that the
¡°wo¡± in question is experienced by her husbands far more than by her. The
opposition in the first line between ¡°experience¡± and ¡°authority¡± prepares for
the double direction of what follows. At first she refers to the teachings of
recognized authorities found in books, but later she speaks of her personal
experience, culminating in the moment when she attacks her husband¡¯s book
containing the texts of those authorities.
She first
expresses gratitude for her five marriages, begun it would seem at the amazing
age of twelve. That was the age at which marriage was legal in canon law; it
might be argued that line 4 means ¡°since the time I was legally able to marry¡±
rather than ¡°I was married when I was twelve.¡± She qualifies her gratitude,
though, with a question in line 7 as to whether she could (legally) marry so
often. The reason for her doubt is made clear from line 9: ¡°me was toold,
certeyn, nat longe agoon is¡± that Christ taught she should only marry once. She
does not specify who told her this, or why, but judging from the intensity of
what follows, she has been troubled by it and is determined to settle the
question by argument based on recognized authorities.
In actual
fact, the source of this initial idea and of most of what the Wife quotes and
argues against in the opening part of her Prologue is St. Jerome¡¯s tract Adversus
Jovinianum (Against Jovinian). Jerome (345-420) was a very great scholar,
responsible for the Latin version of the Bible known as the Vulgate, and
a vehement antifeminist. A certain Jovinian (otherwise unknown) seems to have
written that marriage and virginity were equally acceptable to God and in his
tract, Jerome sets out the opposite opinion, using the Bible to support him in
every possible way. In the course of his argument, he quotes a long section
from a lost work by a Greek philosopher, Theophrastus, and this passage was
sometimes copied separately. Theophrastus is mainly interested in listing the
¡°wo that is in marriage¡± for husbands with domineering wives and is the origin
of most of the accusations that the Wife falsely claims her husbands made when
drunk, as well as of the strategy itself.
Later in
the Prologue (672-680), when the Wife enumerates the contents of her
fifth husband¡¯s antifeminist anthology which he called ¡°Valerie and
Theofraste,¡± we learn that it included Jerome¡¯s tract too. We may therefore
assume that her Prologue starts because her physical attack on the book,
then on her husband, and his subsequent (claimed) surrender of the ¡°maistrie¡±
or ¡°sovereynte¡± to her, have not in fact completely succeeded in putting
her mind to rest. It was her fifth husband, as he read from his book, who
¡°told¡± her that she should only marry once. Now he is (we may assume) dead and
she has to find a new partner or live alone.
Critical
approaches that treat the Wife as a ¡°real person¡± are less popular in today¡¯s
age of intertextuality and post-modernism. The ¡°persona¡± constructed in
the opening 162 lines can perhaps best be seen as a parodic opposite of Jerome.
Where he was determined to affirm that virginity is the only truly Christian
way, she is resolved to assert her ¡°right¡± (actually a very modern concept) to
be sexually active in repeated marriages. As he uses the Bible in every possible
way to support his idea, so does she, quoting mostly the same texts. Where he
shudders with horror at the thought of repeated marriages (though he is obliged
to admit that widows are free to remarry), she shudders with pleasure.
Indeed,
the Wife speaks against Jerome¡¯s arguments almost as if she were the Jovinian
against whom Jerome wrote. The main difference she introduces is her bias in
favor of women. Where the theologians were writing in general terms, the Wife
stresses the duty of husbands and the rights of wives.
When the
Pardoner interrupts her in line 163, it is to make the unlikely claim that he
had been intending to marry soon. The GP cast grave doubts on his sexual
abilities (¡°a gelding or a mare¡±) and that may be why he is happy to report
that the Wife has taught him to think again. The Wife replies that she has not
started yet and indicates more clearly than before her pride in having been the
¡°whip¡± by which her husbands had ¡°tribulation¡± in marriage.
This
serves as the starting point for the main part of her Prologue. Having
established her right to marry and speak of marriage, she now begins the ¡°tale¡±
of her life with her five husbands. The first three she describes as ¡°goode
men, and riche, and olde¡± and she makes no distinction between them. After
evoking the difficulties they had satisfying her in bed at night and keeping
her happy by day, she boasts of her total control over them. Line 224 begins a
new topic, stated in lines translated from the Romance of the Rose ¡ª women¡¯s
skill at lying. The Wife knows from Theophrastus that women have long known the
art of controlling their husbands by falsely accusing them of misdeeds. She
boasts of her own skill in this art and sets out to give the pilgrims a
demonstration of what she used to say to her three old husbands.
Lines 235–378
therefore form a dramatic monologue inserted within the dramatic monologue of
the Prologue as a whole. In the first ten lines, the Wife pretends to be
jealous and suspicious of her husband(s) in response to their suspicions of
her. Lines 246-7 then serve as preface to the rest: ¡°Thou comst hoom as dronken
as a mous / And prechest on thy bench, with yvel preef.¡± In the following 130
lines, she repeats ¡°Thou seist¡± over twenty times as she reels off (with hardly
a pause for breath) a series of comments and proverbs hostile to women, mostly
drawn from Theophrastus that she claims she accused her husbands of using
against her when they came home drunk. Concluding her lengthy scolding, she
joyfully informs the pilgrims, ¡°And al was fals¡± (382).
This is an
even more complicated point in the Wife¡¯s narrative than readers normally
perceive. ¡°Al was fals¡± has the superficial sense that the poor old husbands
had said no such things. How could they? They were no experts in antifeminist
literature, they too (like her) had ¡°experience¡± but no ¡°authority.¡± But there
is another sense in which the reported scolding may be false. These are words
that the Wife is supposed to have addressed to her first three husbands. Yet in
¡°realistic¡± terms, she cannot have had such extensive knowledge of ancient
Latin authors and the Bible until she had been taught antifeminist doctrine by
her fifth husband, the ¡°clerk¡± Jankyn. It is therefore possible that her
brilliant display of dominating discourse owes a lot to her female skill in
lying, that she could not in fact have spoken as she claims she did.
In what
follows, it becomes clear that she sees marriage as a struggle for power and
that she is determined to win. She cannot endure the idea of being subject; her
goal is ¡°maistrie¡± far more than it is sexual pleasure. At line 452 she
suddenly shifts to her fourth husband. It is very hard to sense her ¡°tone¡± when
she describes their life together, in part because she interrupts the
description with the long passage of nostalgia for her lost youth (469-79)
translated from the Romance of the Rose. The fourth husband does not
receive a fuller treatment, we feel, because he did not ¡°play her game¡± but had
relations with another woman while he was married to her. She mainly stresses
the pain and humilation she inflicted on him in revenge for that. She seems to
be in a hurry to talk about her fifth husband, though she pauses to note that
she had her fourth buried in a quite expensive location inside the church.
The Wife¡¯s
evocation of her fifth husband, Jankyn, (lines 503-827) is very different from
what has gone before it. As a fictional autobiography, it is unequalled. The
prayers for his soul in lines 504 and 525, as she begins, and line 827, as she
ends, suggest very strongly that he is dead, although she never directly says
so. The affectionate tone that dominates the entire account is extremely well
done, and a great challenge for the reader. Modern feminist critics stress the
element of physical violence in their relationship (line 506) and claim that
although the Wife demands to have the ¡°maistrie¡± in marriage, in fact she longs
to be dominated and physically overpowered. It cannot be denied that there is
something of this in the lines that begin the story (505-524).
The
element of ¡°Lucianic¡± satire indicated ealier is especially strong here. The
Wife is completely unable to see anything wrong with the story of her first
encounters with Jankyn (presumably not the same man as the apprentice mentioned
previously). She gaily tells how she spent Lent (a time of prayer and
austerity) ¡°playing¡± while her husband was in London and describes how she
directly told Jankyn that she wanted to marry him once she was a widow. She
even invented (line 577-81) a symbolic dream (in which he killed her) to
express her ambiguous desires. She tells her audience that it was her standard
practice to have the next husband lined up before the previous one was dead.
Once again, as at the beginning of the Prologue, we sense how terrified she is
of the thought of not having a husband. The couplet 585-6 in which she ¡°loses
the thread¡± then finds it again only remind us that she is not as young as she
used to be.
That
awareness, and the relative coldness of her descriptions of her fourth husband,
perhaps help soften the effect of the outrageous lines that follow. First she
relates the effect the sight of Jankyn¡¯s legs had on her as she followed her
dead husband¡¯s bier. Then she admits that she was already forty to his twenty.
She speaks of her sexual character feely and without any ¡°complex¡± before she
starts the story of their marriage, which turned out in ways she had not
anticipated because Jankyn, being a ¡°clerk,¡± came well-armed with a big
antifeminist anthology and the clear intention of not being over-ruled.
In lines
642-785 we return to the now familiar antifeminism of Jerome and Theophrastus
but with the difference that here the words being quoted are Jankyn¡¯s, not the
Wife¡¯s, and they are now being used directly against her in their normal sense,
furnishing support to male claims to a right of control over female desire. It
is not surprising that the Wife, unwilling to accept such a claim, and not yet
able to appropriate it for her own ends, resorts to violence.
The
description of their fight and the ultimate settlement of their relationship
leaves critics divided. On the one hand there is physical violence
(wife-beating) but on the other hand the Wife seems to negate the effect of
this and of her ultimate victory (which seems mainly ¡°psychological¡±) by
stressing the intense mutuality of the resulting partnership. Nothing could be
more modern. The main difficulty is that, after so much deception, readers
cannot be sure of the truth of what the Wife is saying. Like all the other
husbands, Jankyn¡¯s voice is not heard telling his side of the story.
Before the
Wife can begin her ¡°Tale,¡± Chaucer inserts a brief quarrel between Friar and
Summoner, looking ahead to the conflict enshrined in their tales. It is
generally agreed that at first, Chaucer intended to give the Wife of Bath what
is now known as the Shipman¡¯s Tale. There, in lines 11-19, the narrator
speaks of the financial needs of ¡°us¡± wives. Since there is no other wife among
the pilgrims, it seems reasonable to assume that this was once the start of the
Wife of Bath¡¯s Tale. The story that follows is about sex, money and deceit. The
present Wife of Bath¡¯s Tale relates in far deeper ways to what is said
in the Prologue.
It is not
certain whether Chaucer invented the story or adapted it. A very similar story
is found as the tale of Florent in Gower¡¯s Confessio Amantis (i
1407-1864) but it is possible that Gower received the story from his friend
Chaucer. Other parallels are probably later in date: a romance, The Weddynge
of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell and a ballad, The Marriage of Sir Gawaine.
The fundamental story, of a young man who is obliged to marry a ¡°loathly (ugly)
lady¡± but is then given a chance of having her magically transformed into a
beautiful one, feels like a folk-tale but may have been invented by Chaucer.
Chaucer uses the motif within the structure of an Arthurian romance.
In any
case, the Tale is very strongly marked by the concerns and desires of its
narrator ¡ª probably more than any other of the Canterbury
Tales. This is also one of the only tales, with the Pardoner¡¯s and the
Nun¡¯s Priest¡¯s, where the specific voice of the ¡°frame¡± (pilgrim) narrator
breaks through clearly (in lines 929-982, using the same ¡°we¡± as at the start
of the Shipman¡¯s Tale).
None of
the other versions starts with the same violence. Of course, the Knight¡¯s
casual rape of a passing girl establishes clearly the theme of ¡°maistrie,¡±
reflecting a world in which male desire is dominant. Yet most critics are
puzzled by the lack of narratorial emotion at this point. The Wife, as
narrator, shows little concern for the victim of the violence who vanishes from
the tale. Critics stress that the way the Knight and other main characters are
never given names helps to strengthen the theme of the ¡°battle of the sexes.¡±
The same ambiguity about the seriousness of the crime is shown by the way the
court women ask Arthur to show ¡°grace¡± when he wants to execute him.
The speed
of the initial narrative can be explained by the narrator-Wife¡¯s eagerness to
get to the riddle the Knight must seek the answer to ¡ª what it is that women most desire? This kind of
riddle is familiar from folk-tales but the narrator seems not to realize how
humiliating it is for a knight in a romance to set out on such a quest, instead
of going out to fight. The situation is only made worse by the feeling that the
narrator knows in advance what the ¡°correct¡± answer is.
In lines
925-950, the narrator-Wife summarizes and evaluates (using ¡°us¡±) a variety of
possible replies, some likely and some not, culminating in the preposterous
suggestion that women want to be faithful and keep the secrets men tell them.
This strikes her as so amusing that she digresses to tell half the Midas story,
adapted to make it his wife who betrays the secret, as an exemplum
proving that women cannot keep secrets. We seem to be close to the style of the
Nun¡¯s Priest here.
Returning
to the tale in line 983, speed again overcomes coherence as the Knight sees 24 ladies
(fairies? we are never told) dancing; they vanish and an old hag of uncertain
nature is left. She offers to help and demands the familiar folk-tale ¡°rash
promise¡± which the Knight gives, having nothing to lose, as he thinks. He does
not learn at once what he will be required to do, unlike in the other versions.
That only comes after he has given the answer to the queen and court, an answer
that the readers only learn then too.
The story
then advances extremely quickly, through a secret wedding with no party
afterward, to line 1083 when the young knight and the ugly old wife go to bed.
The comedy of the situation is hardly exploited because the wife directly
challenges her husband, asking him what she has done wrong that he is not
making love to her as he should. He replies that she is ugly, old, and of low
class. The wife replies that she could change all of that, if only he would
behave correctly (¡°bere yow unto me¡± line 1108).
In lines
1109-1206 she makes a formal rebuttal of his accusations that is most
unexpected. Whereas we have sensed the Wife of Bath¡¯s presence until now, here
it cannot be felt. The dignified, reasonable tone of this lecture does not
address feminist issues. The first section, lines 1109-1176, is a lofty
discourse on the nature of true nobility, distinguishing between noble actions
and mere ¡°noble¡± birth. Lines 1177-1206 are an even loftier meditation on the
positive value of poverty, quoting the example of Jesus from the Gospels as
well as quoting classical writers. It is all quite disconcerting. The 6 lines
1207-12 in which she recalls that courtesy demands that young men should
address all old men as ¡°Father¡± maintain the same poise.
Equally
abruptly, the previous ¡°chirpy¡± tone returns with line1213 as the old wife
reminds her young husband that since she is ugly and old, he will have no need
to worry about being cuckolded. Then without waiting to see if he has learned
anything, she offers the choice of transformations that seems to have been part
of the original folk-tale, if there ever was one. In Gower¡¯s tale of Florent,
the choice is a more obvious one: either ugly by day and lovely by night, or
the opposite. This is also found in the other versions; it depends on the
polarity of public image and private pleasure. In the Wife of Bath¡¯s version
the choice is more complicated: ugly and old but surely faithful or young and
lovely and no promises made. The outcome, though, is the same in all version.
The knight gives the decision to the woman, surrendering the ¡°maistrie¡± to her.
The other versions offer explanations for the magic that follows, but not the
Wife of Bath. Instead we are reminded of her description of her fifth marriage
with its claim that the two attained a perfect harmony of mutual surrender, as
the wife undertakes to be both fair and faithful.
It should
be said that an element of ambiguity and uncertainty remains. The transformed
wife asks God to punish her with death if she is not as good and true to her
husband ¡°as evere was wyf¡± (1244). Some critics like to see irony here (one
theme in many of the Tales is that women cannot be good and true) but their
reading is not supported by the narrator¡¯s claim a few lines later that ¡°she
obeyed hym in every thyng¡± (1255).
Critics
are sometimes disappointed that the Wife of Bath does not finish on such a
happy note. Instead she concludes the tale, as was normal, with a prayer, only
it is such a prayer as only the least admirable aspects of the Wife could offer
¡ª for wives always to have young partners, good in bed,
who die first. Worse still, she adds two curses, against unsubmissive and
miserly husbands. The violence of these last lines supports those who wish to
read the Wife of Bath¡¯s Prologue and Tale as an antifeminist exemplum.
The more the Wife resists the antifeminist teachings of the texts she quotes
and attacks, the more she becomes the kind of woman the texts warn men against.