The Wife of Bath 'S Prologue and Tale: El Izabe TH S Cala

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EL IZABE TH S CALA
The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
The most recognizable figure from the Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath has
attained a celebrity that few premodern figures can rival. Mention the title of
Chaucer’s most famous literary work, and she is recalled almost immediately as
the avatar of his story collection and its bustling pilgrim figures. Even in
Chaucer’s lifetime she appears to have enjoyed a certain notoriety. His satiric
poem on marriage (written to a friend named Bukton) cites her authority on how
“hard is to be bonde.”1 Within the Canterbury Tales itself she looms larger than
life – at least the frame story’s imitation of it. In The Merchant’s Tale, Justinus
advises his brother against marrying by recalling her exemplary wisdom: “The
Wif of Bathe, if ye han understonde, / Of mariage, which we have on honde, /
Declared hath ful wel in litel space” (i v. 1685–87). Audible well beyond her own
performance, then, the Wife’s words resonate at impossible levels of the Tales’
fictional discourse. And it’s something of a surprise that they do. For the Wife is
the only secular woman on the pilgrimage and, as such, could have been a minor
voice in the cacophony of male social types that the poem presents.
Despite the fact that she’s hardly the kind of figure that ought to speak for the
Middle Ages, the Wife carries representative status because she offers the
premier example of Chaucer’s extraordinary powers of representation.
Provoking arguments about the authenticity of her feminine “voice” and
quarrels about treating literary figures as real people, the Wife operates as
a foundational example of what Chaucer can do with rhetoric, with institu-
tional discourses, and with artistic license to create a near-perfect illusion that
someone else, with her own subjective viewpoint and limitations, is speaking.
This feature, above all, is what has made Chaucer’s writing seem modern at any
historical moment, including our own. But it has also placed the Wife of Bath at
the center of nearly every critical controversy about the tale-collection.
A creation of highly gendered discourses, anti-marital polemic, and predatory
market economics, she also speaks beyond them and reveals their limits. As the
representative of Chaucer’s powers of representation, the Wife dominates (in
more ways than one) the Canterbury Tales.
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The Wife’s Sermon Joyeux: Structure and Sources

Chaucer gives three pilgrims – the Wife, the Pardoner, and the Canon’s
Yeoman – long prologues that allow them to develop a more personal
introduction to their tales, ultimately conflating material from an ostensible
extra-textual existence with their fictions. These prologues are responsible
for some intense self-characterization and heated controversy, complicating
the stories they precede and psychologizing their tellers by offering motive
for their speech. The Wife’s is the longest of these prologues and the most
fully autobiographical, describing more than her habitual behavior but her
past as such. After sermonizing on marriage and the condition of wives, she
retails her own marital history, tracking her experience of five increasingly
difficult husbands. Treating the “wo that is in mariage” (iii.3) in this
intimate way, the Wife both exemplifies and contests what others have
meant by that phrase. For the Wife not only describes the kind of “tribula-
cioun” (iii .173) that she has experienced but also revels in the way she has
herself “been the whippe” (i ii.175) and caused some of it, even if only as
a countermeasure. Her Prologue thus provides a source of dramatic intensity
and thematic richness in the Canterbury Tales for a number of stories that
follow hers, inaugurating what Eleanor Prescott Hammond labeled the
“Marriage Group.”2 George Lyman Kittredge’s later essay on the connec-
tions among the tales responding to the Wife’s provocation – those of the
Merchant, Clerk, and Franklin – made the Marriage Group an influential
heuristic, part of a larger “dramatic principle” in which these tales, much like
the speeches of dramatis personae, make for “a whole act of [Chaucer’s]
Human Comedy.”3 More than a mere linking device, the professional rival-
ries and competitive spirit of the frame narrative, according to the dramatic
theory, are elevated to the work’s generative principle. In the Marriage
Group fragments (largely, iii, i v, and v), Chaucer closely coordinates the
pilgrims’ stories, sketching in more and less rivalrous terms their claims to
winning the contest, or at least besting each other on the topic of marital
hierarchy, and making rather divergent claims for sovereignty.4
Dramatic provocation is already embedded within the conflicts held at bay
in the Wife’s Prologue. So lengthy that two different sets of pilgrims – both
clerical – remark on it, the Wife’s Prologue is interrupted first by the
Pardoner and then by the squabbling Friar and Summoner. These episodes
help to make the Wife’s somewhat rambling discourse manageable by break-
ing it into two parts – a shorter revisionist sermon of about 180 lines and
a long confessional autobiography of more than 600 – before her actual tale
begins. Moreover, they provide a thematic means of reading her Prologue.
For as long as the Wife has been read, she has always been read in disruptive
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terms. Indeed, the Wife’s Prologue starts as a disruption of something – even

if the state of the manuscripts as well as the Wife’s garrulous personality leave
us unsure of what it is, where it comes from, or if Chaucer meant it, finally, to
be a localizable threat.
Beginning in medias res at the start of a new fragment, the Wife’s discourse
counters someone’s contempt for her speech:
Experience, thogh noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right inogh for me
To speke of wo that is in mariage. (i ii . 1–3)
What is “right enough” for her implies someone for whom it is not, even if we
are unsure who this someone might be, and her defensive qualification of the
value of her experience contradicts authorized, clerical conceptions of female
propriety and wifely submission, ideas lauded by the Man of Law in the one
tale occupying the preceding fragment.5 But the Wife herself is disruption.
Not only does she disrupt patriarchal norms governing the behavior of
secular women, her own rhetorical style also works in disruptive ways. She
can hardly get one idea out before she qualifies, modifies, or otherwise
interrupts herself, digressing in stereotypically “feminine” fashion. These
disruptions, from within and from others, make her a figure remarkable for
what has been continually called her “vitality,” making us believe that a real
person is speaking.
Complimenting the Wife in the process of interrupting her, the Pardoner
calls her a “noble prechour” (ii i.165), wryly announcing one of the main
offenses the Wife commits in speaking the forthright way she does. Women
were specifically prohibited from preaching on the authority of St. Paul (“It is
a shame for a woman to speak in the church,” 1 Corinthians 14:35: turpe est
enim mulieri loqui in ecclesia). Paul and Jerome are early Christian writers
devoted to female subjugation, particularly in the service of a male celibacy
they sought to promote. Women’s speech is dangerous more generally too, as
both many classical literary stories and the seductive example of Eve evi-
dently taught. Much of the Wife’s preaching, in both form and content,
ironically draws upon St. Jerome, who was vociferous in his condemnation
of women’s speech. The most important text for the Wife – because used in
a variety of ways – is Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum, a treatise that argues
against the monk, Jovinian, who claimed that virginity and marriage were
equal states. Jerome argues vehemently for the superiority of virginity over
marriage and, especially, remarriage – topics near and dear to the Wife’s
heart. But her defense of married life responds on practical grounds rather
than the absolute terms such clerics would use. If everyone were a virgin, the
Wife asks, where would virginity come from? Attacking on multiple fronts,
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she uses other biblical examples, like Solomon’s many wives, to turn matters
in a different direction or brings Aristotle’s natural philosophy on generation
into the argument. Even more to the point, the Wife argues in the manner of
the early Church fathers themselves by citing scriptural precedents out of
context that serve her immediate purpose.
But rather unlike her scriptural sources, the very ones that would stipulate
her silence, the Wife turns to the question of origins, asking from where
certain opinions derive and questioning the status of those who hold them.
Her most famous of these questions, “Who peinted the leoun, tel me who?”
(i ii.692), reminds us that our understanding of any situation depends upon
the point of view of the one controlling the means of its representation, the
“pilgrim” who gets to tell a tale.6 She thus reminds us how few women get to
speak. This point is central to Chaucer’s fictional project in the Canterbury
Tales as a whole, in which he has turned explicitly to different narrators, with
their own generic choices and points of view, for his framing fiction. The
Wife offers one of the sharpest articulations of what is true everywhere in the
larger poem: one’s assumptions change with each narrative performance.
This sophisticated relativism has long been taken as evidence of Chaucer’s
modernity, and especially so here where it questions the very masculinist
foundations of Church teaching about marriage, sex, and women. It is both
the methodological ground of her performance and the thematic point it
seeks to make.
Appropriating various misogynous texts and drawing on extravagant
allegorical figures like La Vieille from the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer reas-
signs quotations from them as the Wife’s own speech in what Lee Patterson
has identified as a parodic “sermon joyeux,” comically explicating St. Paul’s
text in 1 Corinthians 7:28, “If you accept a wife, you do not sin. And if
a virgin marries, she does not sin: but they will have bodily tribulations from
this” (Si autem acceperis uxorem, non peccasti. Et si nupserit virgo, non
peccavit: tribulationem tamen carnis habebunt huiusmodi).7 Part of the
comedy here is, again, methodological rather than merely thematic: the
Wife operates in the mode of dilation that preachers are wont to exercise
but does so, of course, to defend women’s behavior rather than condemn it.
Such methods were taught in the ars praedicandi (the art of preaching),
a process of textual exposition and illumination that works to entice and to
frustrate its audience simultaneously. By dividing a text and its themes into
discrete parts to be dwelt upon and opened up, dilation extended matters to
reveal a fuller significance not seen at the surface. Given her appearance of
spontaneity and liveliness, another of the subtle ironies of the Wife’s
Prologue is its conventionally clerical, compilational form. Nearly every
line is a quotation of one text or another. She thus aggregates and adapts
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for her own ends, and not for the last time, the practices of those opposed
to her.
In fashioning the Wife from these misogynous sources, Chaucer makes her
more than a simple reflection of what they claim about women. He makes her
aware of her sources as such and allows her to undermine their assumptions as
she argues explicitly against them. He thus produces the effect of a text
unraveling against its own construction and revealing the problems inherent
in the materials he has used. Our sense of her deep self-consciousness is borne
out of her knowledge of the authoritative matter of her own making, as she
names and contests the very texts qua texts out of which she is fictively drawn.
These materials are cited in her Prologue as the contents of her fifth husband
Jankyn’s “book of wikked wives” (iii .685), which contains such infamous
works as “Valerie and Theofraste,” as well as “Seinte Jerome[’s] . . .
book again Jovinian” (i ii.671, 674–75). Not only has she read (or, more
likely, heard) them, she has rather dramatically torn them up, literally,
rending pages from Jankyn’s volume and consigning them to the fire. Her
incendiary action might best define the Wife’s larger role in the Tales –
attempting to destroy the clerical “auctoritee” that has brought her into
being.
The Liar’s Paradox

If the first part of her Prologue used biblical precedents and refutations to
bolster her heterodox opinions, the autobiographical portion that follows
the Pardoner’s interruption works even more subversively with these same
materials. For example, one source of anti-feminist opinion is a writer men-
tioned earlier, “Theofraste,” a Greek philosopher whose Liber Aureolus, or
Golden Book, considers the question of whether the wise man marries. (Of
course, the answer is a resounding “no.”8) Theophrastus is not merely an
external authority whose writing is contained in the volume with which
Jankyn continually abuses her, it is also already inside her Prologue, supply-
ing some of the Wife’s memorable theatricalizations of her husbands’ com-
plaints in which she mimics both their voices and her own in a vivid
performance of how she “b[ar] hem wrong on honde” (iii .226). That is,
the Wife reproduces Theophrastus’ complaints about women “in quota-
tion,” as she mimics her husbands’ voices, the source’s discourse merging
with theirs.
The Wife’s own status as Chaucer’s ventriloquization of a woman is thus
sustained and further complicated by these acts of ventriloquism, the perfor-
mance of which she clearly enjoys. Such acts are typical of her Prologue more
generally, part of the expertise she is so willing to share:
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Now herkneth how I bar me proprely.

Ye wise wives, that konne understonde,
Thus sholde ye speke and bere hem wrong on honde,
For half so boldely kan ther no man
Sweren and lien as a womman kan.
I sey nat this by wives that been wise,
But if it be whan they hem misavise.
A wis wif, if that she kan hir good,
Shal beren him on hond the cow is wood.
And take witnesse of hir owene maide
Of hir assent–but herkneth how I saide: (i i i. 224–34)
According to the Wife, marital relations operate within a stable hierarchy of

power defined by economic forces and dictate a zero-sum game of domi-
nance, a lesson she has learned, it seems, in the commercial markets in which
she has attained financial success. Hence her continual recourse to “bearing
on honde,” a phrase she uses three times in this one passage (and elsewhere)
in her Prologue. Glossed in the Riverside Chaucer as both “to deceive by…
swearing” and “to accuse,” the phrase shifts slightly in different contexts.9
Always related to verbal trickery, it might be considered through a later
idiom that articulates its literal manipulations: “to get the upper hand.” Since
the Wife explains nearly everything in terms of the dominance she refuses to
relinquish, the more modern expression translates something important
about her signature phrase. To be sure, the expertise the Wife reveals here
is powerful, but it is also potentially damaging to her case. In the process of
otherwise defending her behavior, indeed exulting in it, the Wife admits to
the truth of what these misogynists have said about women: “For half so
boldely kan ther no man / Sweren and lien as a womman kan” (i ii.227–28).
What is the Wife revealing with this admission and for what audience?
On one hand, we might note that she speaks to a company of largely male
pilgrims that she calls “Ye wise wives” more than once, suggesting a different
coterie audience than the group addressed here. In displaying her expertise,
the Wife rhetorically recreates the audience of gossips and friends with whom
she used to make “visitacions / To vigilies, and to processions, / To preching
eek, and to thise pilgrimages, / To pleyes of miracles, and to mariages”
(i ii.555–58). The Wife not only mimes for them just “hou [she] saide”
(i ii.234) to her husbands, she courts admiration for her manipulation of
these men. In these instances of imitating herself and directing her husbands’
words back at them, the Wife’s Prologue offers both the unique pitch of her
voice and its characteristically Chaucerian tone, in which the Wife – like
Chaucer himself – speaks as someone else in the kind of free indirect dis-
course also heard in the narrator’s speech in the General Prologue. In those
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introductory portraits of the pilgrims, the language of various professions

seeps into the narrator’s objective descriptions. Thus, for example, we hear
the idiom and voice of figures like the Monk, asking “How shal the world be
served?” (i.187) in the narrator’s description of this cloisterer’s disdain for
reclusion and bookish study. If what is most Chaucerian about the Wife is
her ability to perform another’s discourse, then what is most identifiably
“her” – the singular voice of the Wife of Bath – turns out to be nothing less
than Chaucer’s signature style.
But, on the other hand, the more global aims of her Prologue put this
kind of local detail into problematic, indeed self-contradictory, focus.
The Wife is honest about her dishonesty, contained as it is by her need to
keep the upper hand. It’s why she dramatizes so carefully what she says
(in response to what she hears, of course) to her husbands: “and al was
fals,” she confesses on a number of occasions. Still part of her economic
outlook, the Wife’s deceit is even a matter of competition:
I koude pleine and I was in the gilt,
Or elles often time I hadde been spilt.
Whoso that first to mille comth, first grint;
I pleined first, so was our werre ystint. (i ii . 387–90)
The Wife knows that the best defense is a good offense: by complaining first she
gets the better of her husbands, and she uses their inebriated confusion to accuse
them falsely “of [cavorting with] wenches . . . / Whan that for sik they mighte
unnethe stonde” (iii. 393–94). The Wife knows how to keep these men busy,
distracted by “thing of which they nevere agilte hir live” (i ii.392), indeed by
accusing them of acts they seem incapable of physically performing as she
flatters them with her performance of jealousy. One of the lessons the Wife
has learned in life concerns priority. Just as she seeks to go first to the “offringe”
before the other parish wives (i.449–52), the Wife knows the importance of
making one’s accusations first. But her quickness to control the terms of marital
debate and thus to deflect criticism from herself potentially indicts her in the
end. Here in her confession, as in the argument with her husband that she has
related, the Wife has cannily distracted us from noticing her behavior as she
submerges it behind another story. When she says she could complain and yet
“was in the gilt,” does she admit her guilt or merely reveal that she could
complain even if she were guilty? And does that skill make her guilty or not?
The Wife’s revelations are thus not always fully under the Wife’s control.
Despite her openness, she seems to imply something beyond what appears at
the surface of her speech. For example, at the core of her Prologue she tells
the story of a false dream, a ruse – she openly admits – by which she artfully
seduced her fifth husband. Her idioms will seem familiar:
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I bar him on honde he hadde enchanted me;

My dame taughte me that soutiltee.
And eek I seide, I mette of him al night;
He wolde han slain me as I lay upright,
And al my bed was ful of verray blood –
“But yet I hope that ye shal do me good,
For blood bitokeneth gold, as me was taught.”
And al was fals; I dremed of it right naught,
But as I folwed ay my dames loore,
As wel of that as othere thinges moore. (i i i. 575–84)
The power of the Wife’s discourse is alive in this inset story and at a number
of levels, across which she moves easily with this “soutiltee.” She seeks to
arrest the attention of a man to whom she is attracted, not simply by telling
him she’s been dreaming about him, but by cultivating his submerged desires,
revealing to him what he might not yet recognize. She hardly begins to
describe her fixation on him when she quickly turns, in her dream narrative,
to put him in the active, aggressive role. He goes from being the object of her
dream (“I mette of him”) to the subject of its action (“he wolde han slain
me”) within the space of a single line. A breathless parataxis (“and . . . and . . .
and . . .”) links her claims together and aligns them in a recognizable dream
logic in which she goes from the dreaming subject of discourse to its object,
becoming the victim of his submerged desire. The bed full of blood exposes
a secret ardor (that she hopes he shares) in a surprising spectacle of unrest-
rained violence. And there is something violent about such submerged sexual
desire, not merely in the dream but in the flirtatious recounting of the dream,
which is supposed to excite this would-be lover’s interest. Brilliantly, the
Wife has turned her aggressive designs on Jankyn into his violent passion for
her. Yet, she does not leave him in this aggressive state for too long. In yet
another neat countermove, the Wife works to soothe his apprehensions and
disarm the scene’s violence with the suggestion of another desire: “But yet . . .
/ . . . blood bitokeneth gold, as me was taught.” Beneath the erotic revelation,
the Wife intimates the profitability of her amorous gesture. A rich forty-year-
old widow has much to offer this young man she hopes to seduce with this
story.
And who knows how many times she used this trick? The Wife is aware of
the extent to which she must go to get the upper hand and shares those secrets
with us, lending authenticity to her performance. But the story is also more
complicated than simple willing self-revelation or aggressive feminine manip-
ulation might suggest. The Wife’s dream speaks beyond what the forthright
revelation seems to know. This subterfuge, she says, she learned from her
mother, another woman who evidently knew how to lie to get a man’s
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attention. But no story works better than one “that lies like truth,” even if it’s
a different truth than the one she presumes to reveal.10 The faked dream of the
bloody bed that ultimately betokens wealth sounds remarkably like the kind of
story a mother might tell a girl of twelve, the age at which the Wife was first
married, about her impending wedding night. A new husband’s sexual ardor
could indeed appear to a child as if “he wolde han slain me as I lay upright”
(iii .578), and she could certainly expect blood on the sheets after this first
sexual encounter, disturbing experiences that would nevertheless betoken
riches for such a young bride.11 The “soutiltee” her “dame” taught her,
then, is not merely a story to entice prospective marks. It is also a story
about the Wife herself. Intending for us to understand her secret sharing in
one way – as her deft cultivation of the sexual and economic desires of men for
her own ends – the Wife also reveals other things, the significance of which
exceeds her strategic intent. Chaucer’s “soutiltee,” rather than the Wife’s, has
here disarmed many a reader, offering a touch of the real beyond the Wife’s
rather knowing strategies and discourse. The Wife understands, even justifies,
the fallibility she exhibits as a woman.12 But Chaucer takes the inventive
potential of her fallibility to a new level, making out of it, and indeed con-
structing beyond it, something we might be tempted to call character.
Glossing the Wife

In addition to the various tropes of anti-feminist and anti-matrimonial
polemic, we also encounter in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue efforts to manip-
ulate the academic language of glossing and to exploit the pragmatic lan-
guage of economics, both of which, she shows us, have gendered dimensions.
Originating with the Greek word for “tongue, language,” glossing is a form
of biblical interpretation, an exegetical method by which a text is analyzed
word by word and line by line to show how it conveys its significance and
authority. And many of the Wife’s opening comments in the Prologue
regarding the proper number of spouses one might have rehearse the logic
of a textual gloss. But the gloss does more than expound on what is legible at
the surface. Revealing a text’s hidden meaning or associations, the gloss had
the power to overtake the text, surrounding a single line with an extraordi-
narily lengthy commentary. While explanatory and illuminating, glossing
could also become confusing, intimidating, digressive, and suggestive: the
erotic potentials of such practices of exposition are important to consider, as
are their more deceptive and appropriative connotations. The gloss the
Wife’s Prologue offers on the scriptural texts she cites imitates, as it con-
fronts, clerical interpretations typically critical of female behavior. Seeing
herself as the subject of such texts, indeed as one of the texts in need of such
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ministration, she describes herself metaphorically as “glossed” by her most

sexually adept husband:
But in oure bed he was so fressh and gay,
And therwithal so wel koude he me glose,
Whan that he wolde han my bele chose,
That thogh he hadde me bet on every bon,
He koude winne again my love anon. (i i i. 508–12)
This last expression of the idea of glossing has been extensively analyzed by
Carolyn Dinshaw for the way it reveals the reading and production of texts
as highly gendered activities. As such, the text is always feminine, an unruly
body in need of some coercion to yield its treasure.13 Chaucer’s Wife revels in
both her manipulation of texts and the manipulation of her textual body,
even as she ultimately questions the superiority of textual authority: “Of five
husbondes scoleying am I” (iii .44 f). This rhetoric contests, even as it
deploys, the language of schooling and learning.
The delight of her bravura performance, its comic self-reflectiveness and
worldly critique of the culture around her, was from the beginning seen as the
Wife’s unique charm. But such appreciation was vitiated by an influential
mid-twentieth-century “historical” interpretation by D. W. Robertson from
which the Wife has never fully recovered.14 Arguing for her status as an
ironic portrait of the female libido run wild, Robertson turned sharply
against even skeptical celebrations of the Wife’s naturalistic attractions and
toward an exegetical mode of reading that set the moral hierarchies of
Augustine as the grounds for any properly historical understanding of med-
ieval writing. As such, Robertson sought to interpret the Wife in the very
terms under debate in her Prologue, taking her as little more than an ironic
presentation of their claims. Largely refuted as the sole basis for interpreta-
tion, Robertson’s reductive method still foregrounds the contradictions at
the heart of the Prologue’s discourse – her problematic performance of the
behaviors for which she has been criticized in the very act of refuting them –
and readers thus continue to be compelled to respond to his charges.15
But the Wife does more than argue with men (or texts) that presume to
understand her business; indeed, the Wife of Bath is hardly ever doing only
one thing at a time, a practice that seems to derive from her commercial
expertise. We know from one of her favorite proverbs that she doesn’t think
it wise to have only one recourse in any given situation: “I holde a mouses
herte nat worth a leek / That hath but oon hole for to sterte to, / And if that
faille, thanne is al ydo” (iii.572–74). She certainly won’t be caught in such
straits, and much of her rhetoric exhibits a concern for “purveiaunce”
(i ii.566), in both mental readiness and proximate opportunity that we
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might generally label “where-with-all.” The most famous example of this

resourcefulness has to be her efforts securing husband number five in
advance of the funeral of the fourth (iii .564–71). Such “purveiaunce” is
where her marital expertise intersects with her economic know-how.
Throughout her Prologue, the Wife draws on her professional expertise as
a cloth seller with a rhetoric informed by the forceful economic and compe-
titive logic of the marketplace. Her business acumen pervades her presenta-
tion of human relations, as well as the way she expresses herself more
generally. Whether in love or in business, “Winne whoso may, for al is for
to selle! / With empty hond men may none haukes lure” (i ii.414–15). She
knows how to spread out her wares “with daunger” (iii .521; coyness) to
attract a crowd, as well as the maxim that too “greet cheep is holde at litle
pris” (iii.523). Her seductive skills depend upon her understanding of
supply and demand and are as successful in the marriage market as they
are at the local fair where she might sell her wares. To return to her theolo-
gical arguments for a moment, even her acknowledgment of the superiority
of virginity appears in economically competitive terms: “The dart is set up for
virginitee; / Cacche whoso may, who renneth best lat se!” (ii i.75–76). Little
escapes the commercial and competitive outlook she has developed and that
has perhaps shaped her.
While this economic outlook might appear antithetical to orthodox
Christian marital values (and in many ways it is), the Wife exploits the
Church’s own doctrine of the marriage debt to her advantage. The recipro-
city found in the economics of the marriage debt, by which each spouse
“owes” its body to the other (and therefore cannot deny sex, if requested), is
exploited by the Wife in other aspects of the marriage contract. She uses the
doctrine as a kind of weapon, asserting her control: “I have the power during
al my lif / Upon his propre body, and nat he” (i ii.158–59). Appearing
sporadically throughout her Prologue, this doctrine is invoked to defend
the dignity of marriage through the use of man’s “sely instrument” for
“engendrure” (iii .132, 134). Arguing that God would not have created
such organs without purpose (i ii.115–18), she forcefully defies injunctions
to celibacy by daring to use her own instrument “as frely as my makere hath
it sent” (iii .150). This rhetoric accounts not only for an acquisitive aggres-
siveness that echoes her commercial attitude, but also for her practicality.
Theoretical claims always have an immediate relation back to matters of her
own experience. Such a basis in experience allows the Wife to understand
what few other narrators do: the limitations of one’s rhetorical power and
social agency. The Wife does not merely offer an abstract case for women,
she modulates her tactics based on an assessment of the game’s progress. For
instance, here is her acknowledgment of some of the restrictions of age:
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elizabeth scala
But age, allas, that al wole envenime,

Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith.
Lat go, farwell; the devel go therwith!
The flour is goon; ther is namoore to telle.
The bren, as I best kan, now moste I selle.
But yet to be right murye wol I fonde! (i i i. 474–79)
It’s not merely her self-understanding that arrests us here; also compelling is
the positive attitude of this rhetoric of complaint and reconciliation. The
Wife sees her own history as historical, as past, but still refuses to lament its
passing as mere loss: “The bren, as I best kan, now moste I selle.”16 Knowing
the difference between flour and bran, she determines “yet to be right murye”
and make the best of her lot. There is no bitterness here.
The Wife’s Tale

The practical, economic knowledge in her Prologue might lead us to expect the
Wife will tell a racy fabliau. That genre’s bourgeois setting, politics of cleverness,
and sexual adventuresomeness are consonant with her Prologue’s values.
Indeed, certain residual details in and around some stories indicate that
Chaucer’s early efforts at writing a tale for her resulted in the story now assigned
to the Shipman.17 But when she finally gets to her tale – as if we had not been
entertained enough already – the Wife offers a nostalgic romance set in King
Arthur’s court, a genre that would seem to uphold many of the social priorities
her Prologue otherwise overturns. The Wife tells a “tale of the loathly lady,”
a narrative of a knight compelled by necessity to marry a disgustingly old and
decrepit woman in order to save his life. Contemporaneous analogues couch the
story differently, and in two of the most prominent, “The Wedding of Sir
Gawain and Dame Ragnell” and John Gower’s “Tale of Florent,” the honor
of the knight at its center is established at its opening.18 If such narratives wind
up proving and affirming that honor, the Wife’s story does something quite
distinct.
In the Wife’s version, the knight is “a lusty bacheler” (iii .883), an unnamed
member of King Arthur’s court, and within ten lines of first being introduced, he
assaults a maiden: “By verray force he rafte hir maidenhed” (iii. 888). This
event shocks even audiences familiar with the genre. Starkly different from any
noble sacrifice the protagonist figure makes in other versions, the initial action in
The Wife of Bath’s Tale is rape: a particular crime against women and their
bodily sovereignty. Lest we wonder if we are imposing a meaning on rape that
Chaucer might have overlooked, the Wife finely coordinates this offense with the
knight’s punishments to make those connections explicit.19 According to
116
Arthur’s law, the knight ought to lose his head in recompense for the
“maidenhed” he stole. Here, instead, he must, by the queen’s grace, undertake
a quest to learn “What thyng is it that wommen moost desiren” (ii i.905). The
answer, “sovereintee,” turns out to be the very thing he neglected.
The Wife’s tale also distinguishes itself from other versions in less dramatic
ways. For instance, the old woman whom the knight is ultimately obliged to
marry is never described in detail. Her appearance is veiled by abstraction and
circumlocution: “a fouler wight ther may no man devise” (ii i.999). Unlike the
analogues that detail her rheumy eyes and gnarled fingers, making her a more
abject and monstrous figure, the Wife chooses to leave such details in the eyes of
her beholder, the knight, whose vision we already know is compromised from
his earlier behavior. Indeed, the Wife’s story offers a compelling circuit of
women very different from any other version. Intervening between the raped
maiden and the old crone is King Arthur’s queen; all three women in this tale are
subtly connected to each other and serve to make its lesson distinctly more
focused, as they reveal to the knight the tale’s singular truth: “Wommen desiren
to have sovereintee / As wel over hir housbonde as hir love, / And for to been in
maistrye him above” (ii i.1038–40). This is what the old woman teaches the
knight when she “rowned . . . in his ere” (i ii.1021), as well as what the queen
demonstrates when she beseeches Arthur’s “grace” (iii.895), gaining the power
“al at hir wille, / To chese wher she wolde him save or spille” (i ii.897–98). The
queen’s intervention may be nothing more than a different form of punishment,
a year of suffering contemplation before the knight must submit himself to
a talionic law that demands his head for the one he stole. But even if her action
is meant as a penance of some kind before execution, it ultimately affords him his
opportunity for redemption, a more serious version of the way the Wife herself
presumes to be her husbands’ purgatory on earth. All that is left for him to do at
the end of the story is to act on the lesson in his response to his new wife. In this
way, the Wife assures us of the knight’s learning and his transformation, which
gets reflected in the old woman’s own transfiguration into a beautiful young girl.
This reading of the tale’s closing action argues that the knight learns his lesson
and changes, becoming worthy of the gift of his “delit” (iii .1217), despite how
quickly he has to move from grutching reproof of his wife to putting himself in
her “wise governaunce” (i ii.1231). But this interpretation is not unquestio-
ningly accepted. Like the Wife’s Prologue, which ends with Jankyn giving her
sovereignty – “Do as thee lust the terme of al thy lif; / Keep thin honour, and keep
eek min estaat” (iii .820–21) – the tale closes with the same mutual renunciation
that produces “parfit joye” (ii i.1258). This parallel idealization has tradition-
ally provoked some skepticism. It seems as if the Wife ends her Prologue and her
tale with the same delusions of mutual happiness that render each of those
narrative conclusions suspect.
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elizabeth scala
But the Wife’s tale doesn’t simply repeat the idealisms of her Prologue. She also
coopts the terms of Christian humility for her own sovereign purposes, much as
she does with the misogynist discourses of her Prologue. While the old woman
provides the knight with the answer to his quest, she also schools him on the
nature of his rank and privilege (yet another set of assumptions that needs
reordering). In one of the most comic moments in the tale, the old woman
mocks her new husband for his standoffishness on their wedding night. “Is
this the lawe of Kyng Arthures hous? / Is every knight of his thus daungerous?”
(i ii.1089–90). Punning (as the Wife herself does in most places she uses the term
“daunger”), the old woman comically impugns the knight’s virility – how can
anyone take Arthur’s knights seriously, as lovers or as adversaries, if this is the
way they behave? “Daunger,” of course, literally means “coyness,” but she also
implies the modern meaning of danger. For, to be sure, this knight’s ardor has
been physically dangerous, which is what called the law of Arthur’s house down
upon him in the first place.
The knight’s coyness thus provokes the old woman’s “pillow lecture.” Here
the tale launches yet another surprising disruption of expectations as the old
woman offers a quite orthodox explication of courtly “gentilesse” (i ii.1162) in
terms of the Christian values that the Wife’s Prologue interrogates but also,
importantly, that includes her in its reformulation of gentility.20 With this ending
gesture, her performance has come full circle. In what is either the sharpest
turnabout moment or the most stealthy subversive defense of her feminism, the
Wife returns to the kind of moral discourse rejected in her Prologue as the
ultimate grounds of her tale’s wisdom. This turn may feel disappointing to
both Chaucer’s anti-clerical and anti-patriarchal supporters. But as always, the
Wife does not merely refute such opponents; she turns their principles inside out
for her own ends.
In The Wife of Bath’s Tale, the knight is chastened by his search for the thing
women most desire because he can find no two women who say the same thing.
The “thing” for which he searches doesn’t exist. He must instead come to
understand another way of reading: not what women desire but how they desire.
So too Chaucer refuses to reduce the Wife to her things, or any one thing,
whether understood as material possessions or her body, or just one story. She
is instead, for the Canterbury Tales, an irreducibly disruptive way of reading,
knowing, and desiring.
Notes
1. Text of the “Envoy a Bukton,” l.32 comes from the Riverside.
118
2. For a fuller picture of the way this term has been misattributed to Kittredge, see
my “The Women in Chaucer’s ‘Marriage Group’,” Medieval Feminist Forum 45
(2009): 50–56.
3. Eleanor Prescott Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographic Manual, New York,
Macmillan, 1908, 256; George Lyman Kittredge, “Chaucer’s Discussion of
Marriage,” Modern Philology 9 (1912): 435–67, later incorporated into
Chaucer and His Poetry, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1915.
This quotation from Kittredge comes from this book at 171.
4. Such a structure is also seen in the dramatic rewritings of romance into fabliaux in
Fragment i . It is difficult to say how fully dramatic any completed version of the
Tales might have been, or how much contestatory effort it might have contained.
5. Despite the fact that her performance is not at all attached, textually, to the
Epilogue that closes Fragment ii , there are connections to this fragment, as well
as the broader thematics of wifely obedience and female inferiority against which
she erupts. The Epilogue’s drama disarms the preaching of the Parson, to which
the Host had objected; that the Wife offers next a parodic sermon of another kind
may be one of Chaucer’s subtle situational ironies.
6. The question is a reference to one of the fables of Marie de France in which a man
shows a picture of a lion attacking a man to a lion, and the lion asks whether
a man or lion made the picture.
7. Quotation and translation, modified, from Lee Patterson, “‘For the Wyves Love
of Bathe’: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and
the Canterbury Tales,” Speculum 58:3 (1983): 656–95, at 676–77.
8. Our knowledge of “Theofraste” is dependent on Jerome, whose Adversus
Jovinianum preserved this authoritative material, using it as a pagan precedent
to Christian teaching on the virtue of celibacy. While Jerome’s text is the only
source we have for this anti-feminist tract, the Theophrastian material in Jerome
was excerpted and circulated independently.
9. Riverside, 108 nn. 232, 226.
10. The quotation is taken from William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir,
Arden Edition, London, Methuen, 1951, rpt. 1987, 5.5.44.
11. Compelling discussions of this scene include H. Marshall Leicester, The
Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1990, 101–06; Mark Miller, Philosophical
Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales, Cambridge
University Press, 2005, 194–97.
12. See Alastair Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath,
Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
13. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, Madison, University of Wisconsin
Press, 1990, 124–25; Patterson, “‘For the Wyves Love of Bathe’,” 659.
14. The quotation marks here are meant to indicate the problematic assignment of
character to the Canterbury pilgrims, some of whom seem more typological than
fully dimensional. Exegetical readers, particularly, have refused to read the Wife
as little more than a literary type. For D. W. Robertson on the Wife, see his
A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspective, Princeton University
Press, 1962, 317–31.
15. A. B. Kraebel offers a compelling and much needed corrective to the exegetical
method, noting that “Allegory is neither inevitable nor the only relevant
119
elizabeth scala
interpretive mode” of such reading. See A. B. Kraebel, “Chaucer’s Bibles: Late

Medieval Biblicism and Compilational Form,” Journal of Medieval and Early
Modern Studies 47:3 (2017): 437–60, at 455.
16. This sense of history, what Patterson describes as temporal awareness, marks the
Wife’s powerful rhetoric and rebuts typological readers: “That she has
a biography at all, rather than just a set of typifying habits, marks her off from
the other interlocutors. But that she can dispose it before us as autobiography
shows how fully self-possessed she is” (“‘For the Wyves Love of Bathe,’” 669,
emphasis in original).
17. Materials in the Shipman’s opening display the vestiges of a secular female
speaker to which it was once assigned. These can be linked to the words follow-
ing The Man of Law’s Tale that directly precede the Wife of Bath in most
manuscript compilations (and thus most modern editions). Questions of tale
order and theories of authorial revision make for a thorny set of concerns
regarding the history and development of the Wife of Bath. See, for example,
Joseph Dane, “The Wife of Bath’s Shipman’s Tale and the Invention of
Chaucerian Fabliaux,” Modern Language Review 99 (2004): 287–300.
18. In “The Wedding of Gawain,” the renowned knight selflessly agrees to marry the
hideous Dame Ragnell to save King Arthur, who had trespassed on lands that
make his life forfeit unless the king can find someone willing to take his place. In
Gower’s “Florent,” from his Confessio Amantis, the eponymous young man is
also clearly noble and of good lineage; the aggrieved relatives of a knight he has
slain in self-defense set him the task of finding what women most desire as an
impossible means to save his own life.
19. Here we should note Chaucer’s involvement in a problematic and still somewhat
ambiguous case of raptus, and the legal documents through which it has come to
be known. See Christopher Cannon, “Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s
Certainties,” SAC 22 (2000): 67–92.
20. We might note that, in characteristic fashion, such orthodox material comes yet
from another external source, this time Dante. See the Riverside, 874, nn.
1109–58.
120

The Wife of Bath 'S Prologue and Tale: El Izabe TH S Cala

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7

The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

The Wife’s Sermon Joyeux: Structure and Sources

terms. Indeed, the Wife’s Prologue starts as a disruption of something – even

The Liar’s Paradox

Now herkneth how I bar me proprely.

According to the Wife, marital relations operate within a stable hierarchy of

introductory portraits of the pilgrims, the language of various professions

I bar him on honde he hadde enchanted me;

Glossing the Wife

ministration, she describes herself metaphorically as “glossed” by her most

might generally label “where-with-all.” The most famous example of this

But age, allas, that al wole envenime,

The Wife’s Tale

interpretive mode” of such reading. See A. B. Kraebel, “Chaucer’s Bibles: Late

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