“All I know for sure is, God has plainly
Bidden us to increase and multiply–
A noble text, and one I well understand!
And, as I’m well aware, He said my husband
Must leave father and mother, cleave to me.
But, as to number, did He specify?
He named no figure, neither two nor eight–
Why should folk talk of it as a disgrace?
‘And what about that wise King Solomon:
I take it that he had more wives than one!” (pp 151)
I am well aware that much of my writing in this course has focused on the portrayal of women in the Chaucerian texts; specifically their lack of voice, choice, and agency. Still, The Wife of Bath is such a complex, self contradictory, and question- inspiring character that I wanted to revisit her in all of her flawed feminism one final time. Indeed, she is such a puzzle of portrayal that more scholarly critique has most likely been dedicated to her than any other of Chaucer’s creations.
The Wife is the subject of much debate to this day: is she a strong female character who has agency and belief in her opinions? Or is she yet another stereotype of the medieval woman: manipulative and deceitful? Or is she simply meant as satire; a sort of parody of the lower class person who has risen above their station but has yet to learn polite conduct? Her opening ten lines are like looking into a bedroom, and court of law, and a debate hall all at the same time. She doesn’t politely knock and ask to speak, she barges into a philosophical brawl over which is superior: textual authority or lived experience. She is intelligent enough to use both to sustain her defense of having married multiple times.
Indeed, in reading Chaucer’s tale of “Dame Alisoun”, we are immediately introduced to a woman who stands very far apart from Chaucer’s other female characters, such as Crisyde of Troilus and Crisyde and the characters of The Legend of Good Women. In contrast to these other female characters, The Wife of Bath is widely traveled, arrayed in fine garments, vocal almost to a fault, and:
“She knew all about wandering—and straying:
For she was gap- toothed, if you take my meaning.” (pp 15)
To be “gap-toothed” was, at the time, supposedly an indicator of unbridled lustiness. Combine that with the insinuation that she was no stranger to “straying” (presumably sexually) and Chaucer leads the reader to believe that The Wife is a spitfire of sexual excess and indulgence.
Despite this early description in the General Prologue, The Wife, while she does ultimately proffer her opinion on sexual relations, does so by utilizing legalese, scholastic syntax, and sermon- style logic, only she molds these to prove her own ends. She defends her position by offering examples from the ultimate authority of her day: the church and the Christian Bible. She quotes the Abrahamic God in Genesis 1:28 when he commands Adam:
“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Dame Alisoun doesn’t quite cite the quote correctly or in its entirety, rather she quotes only the section that supports her having had five different husbands. It is clear that we have a woman who is intelligent enough (or deceitful enough) to put forward only mandates that frame her argument in a persuasive manner and in her favor. She returns to scripture to once again justify her having married five times, asking:
“He named no figure, neither two nor eight–
Why should folk talk of it as a disgrace?” (pg150-151)
The second line reveals that The Wife has been subject to gossip and scandal by the locals and she is none too pleased about this. She wraps up her self defense, or, rather, testimony, angling for agreement from her fellow pilgrims, by, yet again, referencing Biblical figures:
“And what about that wise King Solomon?
I take it that he had more wives than one!” (pp 151)
This is especially clever on her part, as it reveals the hypocrisy of Biblical teachings while also pulling back the veil on the ways in which men and women were granted different rights and, thus, were unequal in status.
In writing The Wife of Bath, Chaucer almost seems to be wrestling with himself, trying to decide in which direction he wants to take The Wife. He gives her a very long prologue, which features such agency claiming lines as:
“Experience—and no matter what they say
In books—is good enough authority
For me to speak of trouble in marriage.” (pp 150)
These three opening lines carry a meaning beyond their mere words; in a culture and society that valued male dominated textual authority, The Wife is countering that lived female experience is a legitimate source of knowledge as well, pitting her against the clergy, academia, and male authored discourse. It’s a ‘flex move’ and foreshadows future feminist thought: that the personal is the political and, often, the political gets muddied by the personal. Her opening ten lines do not serve to establish her as morally reliable, but they do serve to demonstrate that one can argue oneself into existence via assertion, contradiction, and amplification. The Wife overstates, generalizes, and negates objections that have yet to be raised. She weaves her argument like a tapestry; threading together nonsequiturs, bawdy detail, concrete opinions, and rhetorical questions like a master weaver.
Not only is The Wife defending her life choices by referencing The Almighty, she is doing so endlessly, publicly, and unapologetically. Her lengthy prologue covers everything from morality in marriage to her own values and ethics (or lack thereof):
“He (Yeshua) spoke to those who would live perfectly;
And, sirs, if you don’t mind, that’s not for me.
I mean to give the best years of my life
To the acts and satisfactions of a wife.” (153)
She even discusses how she handled spousal violence after her fifth husband:
“…punched me with his fist upon the head
Till I fell to the floor and lay for dead
And when he saw how motionless I lay….
I…burst at last out of my swoon.
“He came close to me and kneeled gently down,
…But once again I hit him on the cheek:
‘You robber, take that on account!’ I said.” (pp170)
Now, violence in any context should not be condoned, but the fact that The Wife struck her abusive husband back is truly revolutionary, for Chaucer’s time as well as to this day. The Wife is positioned as a strong and independent woman who is not shy about using her voice, or her fists, to protect herself. This is a vast departure from earlier literary works, such as the Arthurian Legends, where women were mostly silent, spoken about, idealized or demonized (The Madonna and the Whore Trope), or treated as mere objects. The Wife, by being loud, embodied, argumentative, and bent on being heard transforms The Wife herself into being the story, not just an element of it. She’s not just stage dressing; she’s the main attraction.
But reading The Wife as some sort of feminist trailblazer requires the reader to ignore some rather unsavory aspects of her portrayal. The thornier side to The Wife is that she embodies many Medieval misogynistic tropes: she is manipulative, sexually excessive, materialistic, domineering, and deceitful. To wit, she boasts about controlling her elderly husbands through a mixture of guilt, sex, lies, and emotional coercion:
“Ladies and gentlemen, just as you’ve heard
I’d browbeat them, they really thought they’d said
All those things to me in their drunkenness.
All lies-but I’d get Jankin to stand witness
And bear me out….” (pg 159)
If The Wife contradicts the establishment, then aspects of her story like the ones above only serve to underscore the prevailing notion at the time that women in power would be naturally corrupt, selfish, and a force of destabilization. Indeed, Dame Alisoun sees power through the lens of domination, not equality; her ideal marriage is not mutual partnership but a reversal of hierarchy. She doesn’t want to dismantle the patriarchy, she wants to turn it upside-down and perch upon it like a throne. The takeaway? The Wife’s feminism is not egalitarian, it is adversarial. She believes that power exists, and she wants to wield it, reinforcing the idea that female authority is inherently tyrannical.
Despite this, author and critic S. H. Rigby, in his critique “The Wife Of Bath, Christine De Pizan, And The Medieval Case For Women”, makes a rather convincing case for The Wife’s proto-feminism:
“She is thus presented as a perceptive critic of misogynist orthodoxy who beats male
scholars at their own game and creates her own authoritative position
from which to speak in defense of her sex and to convince us of her
views. For such critics, Alisoun is a persuasive defender of the vision of
equality in marriage achieved through the surrender of male sovereignty which concludes both her prologues and her tale.” (pp 134)
Rigby’s assessment is not wrong, and his summation holds water, particularly when he writes that The Wife is a “perceptive critic” who “creates her own….position from which to speak” and is a “persuasive defender”. But his analysis glosses over all that is inherently not feminist about The Wife, mainly that “surrender of male sovereignty” does not engender equality in marriage. Equality engenders equality in marriage. Masculine submission merely creates feminine supremacy and domination.
Notably, Rigby acknowledges the trouble of attempting to qualify or quantity The Wife in one camp or another:
“Indeed, if, as Helen Cooper once said, there is less of a critical consensus on what Chaucer was doing “than for any other English writer,” then there is probably less agreement about what he was doing in the case of the Wife of Bath than for any other part of his work.” (pp 133)
He also notes that the issue is a prickly one, even in academia:
“On the other hand are those critics,…who argue that the Wife does not provide a refutation of medieval stereo-types of women but is herself meant as the supreme embodiment and
confirmation of such stereotypes.” (pp 134)
If Rigby acknowledges the issues with interpreting The Wife of Bath, and other critics from various schools of literary thought and philosophy cannot agree either, where does that leave the humble reader? Once again, Rigby has a solution, “Here at least, one’s choice of literary interpretation cannot simply be read off from one’s political preferences.” (pp 134). What he is endorsing is that it would be a mistake to attempt to apply personal, present- day political ideologies when evaluating such a dynamic and mercurial figure, one that was created some six hundred plus years ago.
For instance, when The Wife details how she would convince her husbands that they had been cruel to her when intoxicated and proceed to shame them into giving into her desires, is she exerting her feminist muscle by using the situation at hand to her own benefit? Is she being the Medieval stereotype of the manipulative and shrewish wife, lying shamelessly to her husbands to procure her own ends through deceit? Or is she merely trying to get her needs met in a society that is patriarchal in construction and dismissive of women? Is there really any way to discern which of these scenarios is ‘the truth’? Are the scenarios mutually exclusive? Does there have to be one ‘truth’? Is it proper to analyze The Wife through a twenty first century lens, or is that anachronistic of critics?
To answer this, Rigby writes:
“Chaucer means his readers to judge Alisoun by the standards commonly applied to women in medieval culture, such as those of the “perfect wife” of the book of Proverbs (31.10–31), who renders her husband “good, and not evil, all the days of her life,” and of the “good wife”
of Ecclesiasticus (26:1–4, 16–24), who fills the years of her husband’s life with peace. That Alisoun fails to meet such standards is indicated by her embodiment of many of the faults of
the harlot of Proverbs (7:10–12) (unable “to be quiet, not able to abide still at home”), of the wives denounced in misogamist works such as Matthieu of Boulogne’s Lamentations of
Matheolus (c.1295, translated from Latin into French c. 1371 by Jehan le Fèvre), and of the women criticized with monotonous regularity by medieval preachers for their vanity, lust, disobedience, and garrulity. Alison is seen as one of those ruddy-faced Epicureans attacked by Jerome for sophistically employing scriptural authority to justify their own sexual incontinence: “of the scriptures they know nothing except the texts which favour second marriages but they love to quote the example of others to justify their own self indulgence.” (pp 134-135)
Rigby makes an interesting point here about The Wife’s employment of scripture to defend her position, but it raises an obvious question: How does he (or anyone, for that matter) know what Chaucer intended his readers to do? Chaucer wasn’t writing out of boredom, he was writing to earn currency, to entertain, and, as any writer would wish, for posterity. He, therefore, had to at least hope that his works would be enjoyed by future generations and, while he obviously could not foretell the advent of First or Second Wave Feminism, he had to know that society and culture were liable to change, just as he saw the changes happening all around him with the rise of Mercantilism and the growing middle class. It is most likely that Chaucer was aware that his works would be interpreted differently with each coming generation.
A third, though less explored analysis, sees The Wife of Bath as meant to be read as satire. She is so over the top with her proclamations and opinions that her character simply must be meant as ironic: she is just a little too boastful to be realistic, just a little too willing to discuss her sex life to be serious, and just a little too fond of talking about her ‘queynte’ to be anything but humor. Rigby writes about this interpretation thus:
“The debate thus comes down to the problem of who is speaking in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue: is it “quite certain” that Alisoun is the mouthpiece for Chaucer’s own views, or is there a gap between the Wife’s discourse and Chaucer’s own voice, one which allows us to see the irony at work in her prolonged confession?” (pp135)
But merely viewing The Wife as satirical seems like an indolent take on such a dynamic character. The Wife simply cannot be put into a box, wrapped up, and topped off with a bow; she is much too complex for such treatment.
The debate surrounding The Wife of Bath will never, nay, can never be settled with any semblance of certainty: there are simply too many facets to her characterization, too many contradictions, and too many paradoxes to say, once and for all, The Wife is feminist in nature, or that she is actually a misogynistic representation, or that she is not meant to be taken seriously as she is satire. And this is a good thing: the ongoing discourse surrounding her keeps alive vital questions regarding gender, authority, and power, not only in marriage but in the wider world. It is imperative that humans, as a species, constantly check in with the status quo and ask “How are we doing? Is there anything that we could be doing better or more equitably? Do all people have agency, freedom, and basic legal rights?” It would be immensely interesting to conduct a study where everyday, random people read The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and to then record their impressions and feedback. I imagine that this would be a long term, large scale endeavor that would chart not only the changes in interpretation of the tale over the last few centuries (and even the last fifty to sixty years), but would reveal modern thought on the nature of the work and The Wife herself. Such a study would go a long way to providing data about antiquated versus modern norms, gender relations, and general thought about morality and authority. The study results would inform our current social constructs as well as pave the way for future improvements. I imagine that Chaucer, and The Wife, would approve.