The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale
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The Wife of Bath's Tale is a tale from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
The Wife of Bath gives insight into the role of women in the Late Middle Ages and is probably of interest to Chaucer himself, as she is one of his most developed characters, with her prologue twice as long as her tale. She holds her own among the bickering pilgrims, and evidence in the manuscripts suggests that although she was first assigned a different, plainer tale—perhaps the one told by the Shipman—she received her present tale as her significance increased. She calls herself both Alyson and Alys in the prologue, but to confuse matters these are also the names of her 'gossib' (a close friend or gossip), whom she mentions several times.
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[edit] Prologue
The Wife of Bath believes herself an expert on the relations between men and women, having had five husbands herself, beginning with her first marriage at age 12. She provides a brief history and defends her many marriages with biblical citations, though she frequently misquotes them. She also expands on the status of virginity, claiming that virginity is not necessary to be a good and virtuous person, and asks the rhetorical question of what genitals are for, if not for procreation. Many of her comments are counter-arguments to those put forth by St. Jerome, mainly in his work "Against Jovinianus". She is both direct and opinionated, particularly about the futility of men attempting to gain sovereignty or domination over women, and her opinions prepare the reader for her tale, often mislabeled a breton lai, about the role of sovereignty in marriage.
The tale is often regarded as the first of the so-called "marriage group" of tales, which includes the Clerk's, the Merchant's and the Franklin's tales. But some scholars contest this grouping, first proposed by Chaucer scholar George Lyman Kittredge, not least because the later tales of Melibee and the Nun's Priest also discuss this theme. A separation between tales that deal with moral issues and ones that deal with magical issues, as the Wife of Bath's does, is favoured by some scholars.
At the start of her prologue, the Wife of Bath argues that experience and homegrown wisdom are better guides in life than texts, scripture, and tradition. She posits that her experience makes her eminently suited to tell a tale of women and their true desire, and her tale can be seen as a refutation of the way women have been “glossed” by earlier male writers. Chaucer clearly intends both to poke fun at the Wife of Bath's incomplete understanding of the sources she uses and to show her spunk and native intelligence.
[edit] The Wife of Bath's Tale
Her tale begins with an allusion to the absence of fairies in modern day and their prevalence in King Arthur's time. She then starts in on her tale though she interrupts and is interrupted several times throughout the telling, creating several digressions. A knight in King Arthur's Court rapes a woman. By law, his punishment is death, but the queen intercedes on his behalf, and the king turns the knight over to her for judgement. The queen punishes the knight by sending him out on a quest to find out what women want, giving him a year and a day to discover it and having his word that he will return. If he fails to satisfy the queen with his answer, he forfeits his life. He searches, but every woman he finds says something different, from riches to flattery.
On his way back to the queen after failing to find the truth, he sees four and twenty ladies dancing. They disappear suddenly, leaving behind an old hag whom he asks for help. She says she'll tell him the answer that will save him if he promises to grant her request at a time she chooses. He agrees and they go back to the court where the queen pardons him after he explains that what women want most is "to have the sovereignty as well upon their husband as their love, and to have mastery their man above." The old woman cries out to him before the court that she saved him and that her reward will be that he takes her as his wife and loves her. He protests, but to no avail, and the marriage takes place the next day.
The old woman and the knight converse about the knight's happiness in their marriage bed and discuss that he is unhappy because she is ugly and low-born. She discourses upon the origins of gentility, as told by Jesus and Dante and reflects on the origins of poverty. She says he can choose between her being ugly and faithful or beautiful and unfaithful. He gives the choice to her to become whatever would bring the most honour and happiness to them both and she, pleased with her mastery of her husband, becomes fair and faithful to live with him happily until the end of their days.
- We wommen han, if that I shal nat lye,
- In this matere a queynte fantasye:
- Wayte what thyng we may nat lightly have,
- Therafter wol we crie al day and crave.
- Forbede us thyng, and that desiren we;
- Preesse on us faste, and thanne wol we fle.
[edit] Themes
With her opening words, “Experience, though noon auctoritee/ Were in this world, is right ynough for me,” the Wife of Bath announces a revolutionary new idea to world civilization, stakes a claim for herself as a totally new kind of person in a wholly new world, and launches an argument that still, today, can become occasions of coercion and terror, even outright war.
Throughout the Roman Catholic Middle Ages all authority was in the books and the tiny number of men who wrote them. Dutiful monks, friars and brothers copied the sacred texts worshipfully as depositories of truth; the books, then, were sacred treasuries these men were willing to die defending. They were men of the book, and the book was their distinctive cultural achievement.
But that whole world was swept away by bubonic plague, the Black Death of 1349-51, when Chaucer was ten or eleven and one-third of Europe’s population died. The pilgrims in Chaucer’s poem are all survivors of that cataclysm, new men and women in a new world.
All the truth, all the authority of the old church hierarchy was powerless to stop the plague. The survivors looked about for new sources of authority, and one place a number of them began relying on was their own experience. ‘I know by experience that the old church fathers were wrong when they wrote x (or y),’ these new Europeans claimed. And that is the shape of the Wife of Bath’s opening claim: ‘From experience I know the woe that is in marriage.’
In the Introduction to the Cambridge University Press edition of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale James Winny sums it up this way: “Against the accumulated learning of her times she poses the pungent wisdom of proverbial sayings, and the certainties of knowledge which she has gained in the cut and thrust of daily events. One side of the contest fetches its opinions from written commentaries, not consulting the evidence of tangible fact but regarding the pronouncements of the Church and the Schoolmen as unassailable authority. The other bases itself upon the certainty of everyday events, and the pressing realities of human affairs, where learned opinions seem insubstantial. (16)”
As the author, Chaucer acts as the ferryman between the old world and the new. In the Wife of Bath he brings ashore a totally new kind of human, a Renaissance woman who believes that our experience here on this earth is uniquely valuable, a road to truth and therefore an authority at least equal to all the human wisdom previously accumulated in books. She does not and generations of humans since do not bow down before the written word; if what’s written in the book is not confirmed by our experience, why then the book is wrong.
With the Wife of Bath modern European civilization is born. She is the first observable example of a new type of human only possible in western Europe, the distant early warning signal that an exciting new Europe is astir. Word spreads quickly: within a hundred years Columbus sails out upon his first voyage of discovery. What is written in the books must be tested against the authority of lived experience: if the book is wrong, it must be rewritten.
The tale utilizes the "loathly lady" motif, the oldest examples of which are the medieval Irish sovereignty myths like that of Niall of the Nine Hostages. Other works of the time, such as Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell contains essentially the same story. The usual formula is simply that the woman will be a hag during the day and a beautiful woman at night. Where Chaucer differs from these stories is the initial rape and his emphasis on faithfulness and the redemptive decision of the knight. The knight's decision of faithfulness or fairness, his choice of the most honourable option, and then his eventual reward for making right choice, displays his chivalrous nature. Both the tale and the Wife of Bath's prologue deal with the question of who has control in relationships between men and women.
As for Alyson herself, she is an example of the character of the lewd woman who was, and remains, very popular. There are clear parallels with La Vieille from The Romance of the Rose which Chaucer had recently translated although Alyson is a distinctly Chaucerian character. Critics are divided on the personality of the Wife of Bath. Some see her as a strong independent woman while others regard her as a terrible old harridan. This view is not helped by subtle hints in the text that she may have murdered her fourth husband. Although there are many modern essays that relate this tale to feminism, it was written at least 400 years before feminism emerged as a recognizable movement (which arguably occurred in the early 19th century). Chaucer was taking inspiration from a significant amount of misogynist literature around at the time but it is far from clear whether he is copying these sentiments or slyly lampooning them.
[edit] External links
| Preceded by: The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale |
The Canterbury Tales | Succeeded by: The Friar's Prologue and Tale |
