The Wife of Bath

1
The Wife of Baths Prologue and Tale

• ENGL 203
• Dr. Fike

2
Review

• What is the difference between Chaucer the poet
  and Chaucer the pilgrim?
• What are the first 18 lines of the General
  Prologue about?
• How do many of the ecclesiastical figures
  compromise your answer to the previous question?
• How is pilgrimage a metaphor in The Canterbury
  Tales? (see next slide)

3
Pilgrimage

• Jesu in mercy send
• Me wit to guide your way one further stage
• Upon that perfect, glorious pilgrimage
• Called the celestial, to Jerusalem.
• --The Parsons Prologue

4
Point

• This is a Medieval view life is not to be lived
  for its own sake but instead for the sake of
  heaven.
• This changed in the Renaissance with Humanism.

5
Something Really Negative About the Prioress

• She tells a tale in which a Christian boy is
  murdered and thrown into a privy-drain by Jews.
• The Nuns Priest critiques the Prioresss taste
  for high culture by creating a poor old widow
  who ate full many a slender meal and whose diet
  is worse than what the Prioress feeds her dogs.

6
The Wife of Bath

• Connections between the tales
• Her prologue scandalizes the Clerk
• She subverts a dropout of the Clerks own
  universityOxford.
• She advocates sensuality over celibacy.
• Here is the Wife For trusteth wel, it is an
  impossible / That any clerk wol speken good of
  wyves, says the Wife in Middle English at lines
  698-99.
• The Clerk, in turn, mentions her in his remarks
  and then tells a tale that praises a good wife.

7
Outline of the Wifes Prologue

• Three sections
• She tries to defend her having married five times
  and not being a virgin.
• The Pardoner interrupts her.
• She tells the story of her five husbands.

8
The First Section

• Here she attacks three aspects of medieval dogma
• Authority is more important than experience
  (irony she uses authorities to attack
  authority).
• The husband should control the wife.
• The spirit (mind) is more important than the
  body.
• POINT She is opposed to all of these principles.

9
The Wifes Positions

• Experience gt authority
• Wife gt husband
• Body gt spirit

10
Her Prologue Her Marriage Advertisement

• Her history
• Her terms and conditions
• Her readiness for a new husband
• Womens gentleness if men will let them have
  their way
• Gentilese a good decoy

11
Contradiction

• Line 290 We women hide our faults but let
  them show / Once we are safely married, so you
  say.
• But she is NOT hiding her faults she is
  publicizing them!
• This is highly ironic but may also indicate that
  she is not in complete control of her utterance
  she may be revealing more about herself than she
  intends.

12
Small Group Writing Exercise

• Write a personal ad for the Wife of Bath. Draw
  on your knowledge of her from her description in
  the General Prologue and from her
  self-description in her Prologue.
• Work in groups of 2-5 people.
• You have 10 minutes.
• Be prepared to share your ads.

13
What Do We Know About the Wifes Life?

• What is her economic situation?
• Zodiac sign?
• Appearance?

14
Her Economic Situation

• Very different from the financially secure
  Prioress.
• The Wife has had to make cloth and to use her
  body to gain security.
• She has married to get wealth.
• She travels to meet men (she is a kind of
  professional pilgrim). (see next slide)

15
The Risk Pregnancy

• Chaucer implies that she knows something about
  abortion
• And she knew the remedies for loves
  mischances, / An art in which she knew the oldest
  dances (GP 485-86).

16
Her Zodiac Sign

• Venus and Mars and Taurus Wifes Prologue,
  lines 613-30.
• See Oxford Anthology, page 216, note The
  wifes ascendant (the sign of the zodiac just
  rising in the east at her birth) was Taurus, the
  Bull therefore, she would be industrious,
  energetic, prudent, a money-maker, one who
  usually comes out on top florid, bold-eyed,
  wide-mouthed, short-legged, big-buttocked,
  gossipy, given to love affairs. Venus in her
  mansion of Taurus makes people cheerful, with
  good figures, attractive, lovable, passionate and
  voluptuous, lovers of fine clothes there is,
  essentially, no evil in them. Mars, masculine,
  baleful, and angry, in conjunctionwith Venus in
  Taurus counteracts these good influences and has
  made the Wife into the holy terror that she is.
  She cannot keep her chamber of Venus from a good
  man. Between them, then, Taurus and Mars take
  away or change for the worse her most agreeable
  characteristics.

17
Source for the Information in Some of the
Following Slides

• Walter Clyde Curry. The Wife of Bath. Chaucer
  Modern Essays in Criticism. Ed. Edward
  Wagenknecht. New York Oxford UP, 1959. 166-87.

18
Venus Alone

• Beauty
• Good character
• Pleasant disposition
• Imaginationsee fantasy in her Prologue, line
  194.
• Artistic nature

19
What the Wife Might Look Like without Mars and
Taurus
20
Another View
21
The Wifes Actual Appearance and Nature

• Stocky, ungraceful, buxom, powerful, energetic.
• Her hips indicate excess virility.
• She has a heavy face, coarse features, and a red
  complexion.
• She is immodest, loquacious, and likely to drink
  too much.
• Her voice harsh, strident, and loud.
• Gap-toothed envy, irreverence, boldness,
  deceitfulness, faithlessness, and suspiciousness.

22
http//www.luminarium.org/medlit/wifimg.htm
23
http//faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sechard/WIFE.HTM
24
http//travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-2793459-acti
on-imgsearch-wife_of_bath_the_bath-i
25
http//travel.yahoo.com/p-travelguide-2793459-acti
on-imgsearch-wife_of_bath_the_bath-i
26
The Point

• The Wifes physical features and personality have
  been warped by the Venus-Mars conjunction in
  Taurus.
• Artistic nature instead of music, she weaves
  cloth.
• Her religious instinct she goes to church to
  show off her finery and goes on pilgrimages to
  find another husband.
• Mars impels her to gain sovereignty over her
  husbands.

27
Mars

• The mark of Mars is still upon my face / And
  also in another privy place (629-30).
• Everyone has printed upon his or her body, at
  conception or birth, the mark of at least the
  dominant star.
• Mars prints some kind of mark on her face, and
  Venuss mark is perhaps on her loins (signifying
  a lascivious nature).

28
Levels on Which To Understand the Wife

1. A woman speaking to other women You knowing
   women, line 229 (Chaucer reading to ladies at
   court).
2. A liberated woman who uses her only resources to
   make her way in a male-dominated world.
3. A spokesperson for male anti-feminism, yet she
   harbors great anger at men because of years of
   submersion.
4. An aging woman who has lost the only husband she
   ever loved (at lines 595-96 she loses the thread
   of her own argument, as old people tend to do).
5. A realistic psychological portrait wanting what
   we do not have and then disdaining it when we
   have it. See lines 518-34. Key lines I
   think I loved him best, Ill tell no lie. / He
   was disdainful in his love, thats why.

29
Discussion The Pardoners Interruption

• See lines 167ff.
• What does the Pardoners interruption add, or is
  it gratuitous? Read and discuss.

30
Possible Answers

• The Pardoner (a preacher himself) admires her
  preaching, though St. Paul says that no woman
  should preach.
• He is eager to establish his own virility (the
  pilgrim Chaucer thinks that he is a gelding or a
  mare) and to be accepted as one of the guys.
• He uses fiscal language that recalls her sense
  that sex is a transaction (lines 134, 157, and
  159 as well as 419, 422, 424, 430, and 433).
• The interruption helps the Wife make a transition
  from celibacy and marriage in general to her own
  history. Tell us your tale, spare not for any
  man. / Instruct us younger men in your
  technique, says the Pardoner at lines 190-91.
  The interruption, then, is a hinge.

31
Question for Large Group Discussion

• Do you find anything ironic about the Wifes
  Prologue?

32
Some Possible Answers

• The wife praises matrimony, then debunks it.
• First she uses church doctrine to prove her
  point. Then she attacks church doctrine insofar
  as it is anti-feminist. THEN, as if to agree
  with Church doctrine, she argues that women are
  shrews and says that she is one herself!
• She is looking for a new husband, but her
  prologue ought to scare off potential suitors.
• She is not hiding her faults now that she is 40
  she needs to hide them.
• She opposes anti-feminism, but she is the very
  type of woman mentioned in the offending book
  Theophrastus and Valerius at line 682.
• Although she is supposed to be lecturing the
  pardoner on woe in marriage, the prologue ends
  happily and harmoniously.

33
Another Discussion Question

• How does the Tale fit the teller?
• In other words, how does the tale manifest the
  Wifes personality and character?
• Begin by thinking of what the Tale is about.

34
Some Possible Answers

• This is a tale of gentilesse that begins with a
  rape! She is modifying an Arthurian tale in the
  image of her own earthy sensualityand Zodiac
  sign.
• Common sense (the friars drive all the fairies
  away ? no danger) and preoccupation with sex
  (rape danger!) structure the opening. It is
  ironic that the rape occurs after the threat from
  the supernatural has been removed.
• Female sovereignty.
• Experience is valued highly the old woman knows
  the right answer.
• The tale ought to be a fabliau however, as a
  child of Venus, she does have a latent artistic
  streak I should speak as fantasy
  imagination may move me, she says at line 194
  (my italics).
• Also re. fantasy She regrets losing her youth
  and fantasizes in her tale about going back to
  it. Telling a tale about an old woman who turns
  into a young woman is fitting. Prologue, lines
  484-85 But age that comes to poison everything
  / Has taken all my beauty and my pith.
• A learning process She has learned gentilesse
  with Jankyn, and her tale includes a curtain
  lecture on the subject, and the tale ends with
  the same kind of happiness that she finally
  achieved with Jankyn (again, via female
  sovereignty).
• Her own marital rape at the age of 12 parallels
  the rape of the young maiden in the tale.

35
Another Answer

• Theophrastus elaborated on antitheses in
  marriage, and we get one in the tale chastity
  and beauty.
• Chaucer has inserted a dilemma transmitted
  through the literature of social satire and of
  theology. More than that he has taken it from
  the very sourceswhich the Wife of Bath overtly
  discusses in her own right when she speaks in the
  first person (Schlauch 424).
• As the next slide illustrates, the
  chastity/beauty antithesis endures in our own age.

36
If You Wanna Be Happy by Jimmy Soul

• If you want to be happy for the rest of your
  life,
• Never make a pretty woman your wife.
• So from my personal point of view
• Get an ugly girl to marry you.
• http//youtube.com/watch?vQh9ZZgDqzAg

37
both fair and faithful as a wife (line 387)

• W. Russell Flint's illustration to the Wife's
  Tale from the 1913 Medici Society edition of the
  Tales (http//faculty.arts.ubc.ca/sechard/WIFE.HT
  M)

38
Question

• How do you reconcile the rape with the fact that
  the knight gets a young, beautiful, faithful wife
  out of the deal?

39
A Possible Answer

• From Huppés Rape and Womans Sovereignty in the
  Wife of Baths Tale
• The victim is a peasant, not a lady. Still, the
  crime is a capital offense.
• But the law does not apply if the knight is part
  of the queens court of love.
• Under HER law, the crime is at worst an
  indiscretion (Capellanus if a young man is
  overcome by attraction, rape is okay if
  persuasion fails).
• The queen is protecting the knight from a law
  that does not apply if courtly love is the
  standard of behavior.
• The point of the riddle is for him to demonstrate
  that he understands that women are sovereign.
  Giving the right answer satisfies the
  technicality.
• But the knight does not truly embrace this
  principle until his wedding night when, forced to
  choose, he abdicates sovereignty to his wife.
• Therefore, he gets a wife who is young AND
  beautiful because he has developed an attitude of
  which the wife approves!
• END