The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

‘Abide,’ quod she, ‘my tale is nat bigonne.’ (169)

‘Telle forth youre tale; spareth for no man,And teche us yonge men of youre praktike.’ (186-187)

‘Now, sire, now wol I telle yow forth my tale.’ (193)

‘Now wol I seye my tale, if ye wol here.’The Frere logh whan he hadde herd al this;‘Now dame,’ quod he, ‘so have I joye or blis,This is a long preamble of a tale!’ (829-831)

‘What spekestow of preambulacioun?What, amble, or trotte, or paas, or go sit doun!Thou lettest oure disport in this manere.’ (837-839)

‘Lat the womman telle hir tale.Ye fare as folk that dronken ben of ale.Do, dame, tel forth youre tale, and that is best.’‘Al redy, sire,’ quod she, ‘right as yow lest,If I have licence of this worthy frere.’‘Yis, dame,’ quod he, ‘tel forth, and I wol here.’ (851-856)

Experience, thogh noon auctoriteeWere in this world, is right inogh for meTo speke of wo that is in mariage. (1-3)

But me was toold, certein, nat long agoon is... (9)

Men may divine and glosen, up and doun,But wel I woot... (26-27)

Eek wel I woot, he seyde... (30)

‘Experience’ is a more reliable source of knowledge than ‘glossing,’ it would seem, because, like ‘the body,’ it constitutes a realm of authenticity free of the idealizing and prudish distortions that attach to a supposedly authoritative clerical hermeneutics... [I]n the first words of her prologue she declares that experience would be a reliable source of knowledge even in the absence of any public authority… In imagining a world with no authoritative discourse, but in which experience would still authorize her to speak, the Wife indicates the conceptual center of her attempt to carve out a space for feminine agency. If her experience would tell her all she needs to know even in a world devoid of ‘auctoritee,’ and if her voice issues directly from her body, that is because her experience of that body constitutes a private realm of subjective certainty, a realm whose deliverances of knowledge are completely independent of the public world in which authority is established and conferred. (Mark Miller, Philosophical Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 198-199)

Both the Wife [of Bath] and January [in the Merchant’s Tale] clearly believe that the conjugal debt gives them the right to take sexual possession of the body of their spouse, but this is only a mockery of the Church’s teaching on the subject, which in fact emphasizes, not possession, but reciprocal submission. The Wife’s assertion: ‘I have the power durynge al my lyf / Upon his propre body, and noght he. / Right thus the Apostol tolde it unto me’ (III, 158–60) is a conspicuously one-sided rendition of what the Apostle (St Paul) actually says: ‘The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband. And in like manner the husband also hath not power of his own body, but the wife’ (I Corinthians 7: 4). What St Paul emphasizes is not only the absoluteness of the physical connection created by marriage, but also that it bears equally (‘in like manner’) on both parties to a marriage. It has been argued that the Wife’s misappropriation of the idea of the conjugal debt only exposes the limitations of such thinking, showing how readily the contractual metaphor justified seeing sex as a kind of transaction; but there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the principle that partners should reciprocally defer to each other’s sexual needs, nor is the word ‘debt’ (Latin debitum) necessarily mercantile in its connotations. The point of the Church’s teaching on the conjugal debt is that ‘paying’ a moral debt of this kind is specifically not like paying a sum of money: since both partners are perpetually indebted to the other, neither can ever legitimately profit from their relationship. (Neil Cartlidge, ‘Marriage, Sexuality and the Family’, in A Concise Companion to Chaucer, ed. Corinne Saunders (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp. 218-240; 222)

Critical judgments are very harsh on the Wife as biblical interpreter. It has been argued that "she mangles St. Jerome sadly, and the Bible with him“… Such a view underrates the subtlety of Alison's debate with Jerome's intemperate treatise, the inconsistencies and absurdities of which she exposes at many points… It is a key ingredient in anti-feminist satire, to which Jerome…conforms, that women are seen as all-powerful and that men cringe and submit helplessly to the commands of their cruel and greedy wives. That men must submit to many indignities from women is one of the main arguments Jerome uses elsewhere against marriage, and is key to the argument of Theophrastus which Jerome quotes (AJ 1:47). The Wife in this instance deliciously turns Jerome's argument against him by following up his reasoning, quoting the phrases from Paul only in the sense that Jerome interprets them, and welcoming the submission of men as part of the fruits of marriage. These fruits include the "tribulations in the flesh" of I Cor. 7:8, which Alison happily interprets in a sense easily derived from Jerome - as the sexual struggles of a man who seeks to satisfy his wife. (Warren S. Smith, ‘The Wife of Bath Debates Jerome’, The Chaucer Review 32. 2 (1997), 129-145; pp. 130, 141)

The Romance of the Rose (Le roman de la rose) by Guillaume de Lorris (first 4000 lines, c. 1225-1230)and Jean de Meun (remaining 18,000 lines, c. 1269-1278)English text from The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford: OUP, 1994); French text from Le roman de la rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1992)

In this allegorical dream vision, a young man (the Lover) wanders into a beautiful walled garden, falls in love with a rosebud, and tries to have sex with it. Along the way he is aided, hindered, advised and discouraged by various emblematic figures, including the Friend and the Old Woman (both of whom provide source material for the Wife of Bath’s Prologue).

The Friend warns the Lover about jealousy:

Thus we see that in marriages where the husband imagines that he is wise to scold and beat his wife and fill her life with wrangling, and tells her she is silly and foolish for spending so much time dancing and so regularly frequenting the society of handsome young men, truly love cannot last, since they inflict so many evils upon each other and he wants to be master of his wife’s body and possessions. ‘You are too flighty,’ he says, ‘and your behaviour is too foolish. When I go to work you immediately start dancing and capering and making so merry that it seems positively immoral, and singing like a siren. God send you a bad week!’… And when the lady experiences this torment and this dispute, and sees what a charming viol her jongleur plays for her, do you think she will love him more as a result?... [He would] fail to perceive the danger into which he had fallen, unless he had seen all the deceits that women can think of to protect and defend themselves. If he then sleeps with her, he seriously imperils his life; indeed, whether sleeping or waking, he should go in great fear lest she take her revenge by having him poisoned or cut to pieces… Women care nothing for honour or shame when they get an idea into their heads, for it is true without a doubt that women know nothing. Valerius even calls them bold and cunning towards those they hate and those they love, and very intent on doing harm. (Horgan, pp. 130, 143-144)

The Old Woman gives advice to Fair Welcome on how to be a good lover:

My time for joy as all departed but yours is yet to come… [I]f you follow my advice you will come safe into port… I was young and beautiful, silly and irresponsible, and I have never been to the school of Love, where they teach the theory, but I know it all through practice. Experience, which I have pursued throughout my life, has made me wise in love’s ways… Not everything that is very old is to be fled from or despised: sense and experience are to be found there… [T]he memory of my heyday still gives me pleasure… The thought and the recollection of it rejuvenates my whole body; it does me all the good in the world to remember everything that happened, for I have at least had my fun, however I may have been deceived. A young woman leading a life of wantonness is not idle, especially not when she takes care to make enough to over her expenses. (pp. 196-199)

La pute vieille redotee... (line 12,574) = The senile old whore... (p. 194)

fausse vieille et serve (line 12,992) = false and servile crone (p. 200)

And Fair Welcome [who can give access to the rosebud/lady] was imprisoned high up in the tower, whose door was so well barred that it was impossible for him to escape. An old woman, may God bring shame upon her, was with him to guard him. Her only job was simply to watch him in case he did anything foolish. No one could trick her by sign or gesture, for there was no deception with which she was not familiar, having in her youth enjoyed her share of the joys and torments that Love metes out to his followers. (pp. 59-60)

Of five husbondes scoleying am I.Welcome the sixte, whan that evere he shal...Som Cristen man shal wedde me anon. (44f-48)

For evere yet I loved to be gay,And for to walke in March, Averill, and May,From hous to hous to here sondry tales...And for to se, and eek for to be seyeOf lusty folk. What wiste I wher my graceWas shapen for to be, or in what place?Therfore I made my visitaciounsTo vigilies, and to processiouns,To preching eek, and to thise pilgrimages. (545-558)

Gat-tothed I was, and that bicam me weel;I hadde the preente of Seinte Venus seel.As help me God, I was a lusty oon,And fair, and riche, and yong, and wel bigoon!And trewely, as mine housbondes tolde me,I hadde the beste quoniam mighte be. (603-608)

Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe. (458)

In felawshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe. (474)

At large within the turbulent and ill-defined middle ranks of society was Chaucer himself. Born the son of a wine merchant…Chaucer was by 1368 an esquire of the king’s household… [He retained this title] after his technical move outside the household to assume a customs appointment in 1374… Later, in the 1390s, he was to be known simply as ‘esquier’ or ‘armiger’, possessing the title more or less independently of the service in which he had received it… Insightful commentators have taken note of his royal service on the one hand and his urban involvements on the other, and have attributed to him an amalgam of aristocratic (or court-derived) and bourgeois (or city-derived) valules. (Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 10)

[The Wife of Bath] may strike us as cynical, vulgar, and immoral, but we must remember that by the standards common to her class Alisoun’s behavior is simply shrewd business… The practical bourgeois wife clearly contradicted the idealized image of the subservient wife held up as a model by "gentility" and by the church. Yet the wit Alisoun directs at traditional marriage lore, coming as it does from the rich experience of her class, should not horrify her audience (though they may take exception to some of it) because they would recognize the common truth of what she is saying… As Alisoun knows from experience, the true fruits of marriage are described neither in Jerome nor in the deportment books but are set in the marriage bed. Its important spoils for her are neither children nor sensual gratification but independence. Marriage is the key to survival, and that is what Alisoun seeks and finds. Her parents married her off when she was twelve, an early enough age to suggest either notable greed or straitened financial circumstances on their part... The lesson that Alisoun has learned is obvious: marriage is contracted for money, and the acquisition of money is equivalent to the attainment of honor, respect, and independence. (Mary Carruthers, ‘The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions’, PMLA 94.2 (1979), 209-222; pp. 211-214)

[E]arly readers generally portrayed Alisoun as a wanton and stereotypically shrewish wife, which fits succinctly with her satirical textual origins... As history ran its course, the widespread view of Alisoun as a stereotypically shrewish wife eventually waned. Though pejorative comments continue to be found over the years in some — notably male — quarters, the Wife of Bath gradually was seen with increasing respect. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the “good wif” customarily was read as an ironic and comical female figure who did not deserve the scorn of her early readers... [B]y the late nineteenth century, comments of the following sort became the norm, rather than a quiet exception: Matthew Browne argued that the Wife of Bath represents a “most distinguished mouthpiece” for “a vein of deliberate irony addressed to the notion of ecclesiastically excising certain of the facts of life,” while Henry Morley went so far as to claim that Alisoun illustrates “the beauty and honour of true womanhood.” (Geoffrey W. Gust, Constructing Chaucer (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 130-131)

For trusteth wel, it is an inpossibleThat any clerk wol speke good of wives,But if it be of holy seintes lives,Ne of noon oother womman neverthemo.Who peyntede the leon, tel me who? By God, if wommen hadde writen stories,As clerkes han withinne her oratories,They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesseThan al the mark of Adam may redresse. (688-696)

[T]he Wife of Bath refers to the Aesopian fable of the painting of the lion: the lion complains of a picture showing a man killing a lion and suggests that if a lion had painted it the result would have been different… The moral of the fable expresses an aspect of that general concern with the relationship of "auctoritee" to "experience" which she announces in the first sentence of her prologue. (Mary Carruthers, ‘The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions’, PMLA 94.2 (1979), 209-222; p. 209)

The children of Mercurye and of VenusBeen in hir wirking ful contrarius: Mercurye loveth wisdam and science,And Venus loveth riot and dispence...Therfore no womman of no clerk is preised.The clerk, whan he is old, and may noght doOf Venus werkes worth his olde sho,Thanne sit he doun and writ in his dotageThat wommen kan nat kepe hir mariage! (697-710)

When the Canterbury Tales deal with marriage, sexuality or the family, they tend to register a similar contradiction between theory and practice – and, correspondingly, between ideal and reality, authority and experience. They also tend to exploit the intrinsic irony of the Church’s involvement in social/sexual policy – that an organization spiritually dedicated to another world should so deeply concern itself with the physical intimacies of this one. As a result of this, the right to determine the nature of the responsibilities created by marriage, sexuality and the family had become the prerogative of a class of men who were in most cases professionally celibate – and so, by definition, remote from all such concerns. It is a sense of the incongruity of this situation that justifies the Wife of Bath’s claim to ‘speke of wo that is in mariage’ (III, 3) – much more obviously than any incipient leanings towards a heretical belief in the rights of women to teach. She is not directly challenging churchmen’s ‘auctoritee’ so much as observing their lack of ‘experience’ in the field in which that ‘auctoritee’ is exerted. (Cartlidge, p. 219)

Al sodeynly thre leves have a plyghtOut of his book, right as he radde, and ekeI with my fest so tooke hym on the chekeThat in oure fyr he fil bakward adoun.And he up stirte as doothe a wood leoun,And with his fest he smoot me on the heed…He yaf me al the bridel in myn hond,To han the governance of hous and lond…And made him brenne his booke anon right tho…After that day we hadden never debaat. (790-795, 813-822)

He was a bad man – I never saw a worse one – and he had nothing but contempt for me, calling me a common whore… However much he beat me, I would still have had him fall upon me, for he was so good at making peace, whatever hurt he might have done me… And so he had me on the end of a rope, the false, thieving traitor, because he was so good in bed. (The Romance of the Rose, p. 223)

It is a commonplace when teaching the Wife of Bath s Prologue and Tale to stress the anachronism of calling Chaucer a feminist. Yet it is also common to find Chaucer attractive for his play with gender in the gap between the book and the body, nowhere better demonstrated than in the reconstitution of various misogynist diatribes into the charismatic Wife of Bath, who talks back defiantly to ‘auctoritee.’ If Chaucer is not actually endorsing the strident voice he gives to the Wife, he is certainly making play with textuality, with subjectivity, and with the construction of ideas about sexuality. Despite the fact that the Catholic Chaucer presumably is not using the Wife of Bath to present his own views, he allows her to express radical ideas on gender theory and to tell a tale that demonstrates some of what she has theorized. (Susan Carter, ‘Coupling the Beastly Bride and the Hunter Hunted: What Lies Behind Chaucer's “Wife of Bath's Tale”’, The Chaucer Review 37.4 (2003), 329-345; p. 329)

Two other versions of the Wife of Bath’s Tale:

John Gower, ‘The Tale of Florent’, in the Confessio Amantis:http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/peck-gower-confessio-amantis-book-1#florent

Anonymous, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle:http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hahn-sir-gawain-wedding-of-sir-gawain-and-dame-ragnelle

Of whiche maide anon, maugree her heed,By verray force he rafte hir maidenhed. (887-888)