It can be said that a true authority does not pass laws, does not judge & does not instruct but instead teaches through action & example. In this essay I am asked to focus on the spoken & the written leaving action out. It is difficult to know how to judge someone to be an authority without some proof. The character of the Wife of Bath can only boast of herself & recall choice texts, but she’s frank & knowledgeable so why can’t we believe in her & her ‘authority’?
In this essay I will argue that the Wife of Bath’s ‘authority’ in the prologue is self-supporting, & is only as authoritative as much as we can believe what she says, while the tale is merely an illustration to her main thesis of marriage.
We can accept that she is the authority of her own life & to an extent the author. No one else speaks for her as she takes command of her own biographical portrayal. Already this communicates her understanding of power residing in words. The Wife, according to Elaine Tuttle Hansen, ‘views words as strategic weapons, like sex and money, in the war between the sexes’[1] Here we see her using words to transform her authoritative experience into authoritative wisdom, albeit self-proclaiming:
If there were no authority on earth except experience;…all goes to show that marriage is a misery & a woe (Canterbury Tales p276)
This focus on her life is all-important. H. Marshall Leicester observes that ‘her life adds up to a final meaning to which the tale merely confirms’[2] bringing to attention the greater weight that the prologue is given over the tale. ‘This long preamble to a tale’[3] is actually the main point of what the Wife has to say & her forthright manner demands to be paid attention to.
Despite this concentration on experience to show the misery of marriage she has to fall on patriarchal references to back up her own arguments. She uses a range of texts such as the writings of St. Paul, Ptolemy’s Almagest, Solomon’s parables, Ovid’s Art of Love as well as sprinkling reference to Dante, Boethius & Seneca within the tale, & in doing so demonstrates her ability to argue like a man. Marion Wynne-Davies writes that ‘Chaucer offer us a pervasive dialogue on gender and sexuality…the female voice of personal experience against the male voice of textual authority’[4] but this is to make an unnecessary distinction. Here it is important to note that this male voice is spoken in combination with the female but also that the female makes use of it in her own way. This either makes her arguments satirically subversive or hypocritically self-defeating.
She takes a passage from Corinthians to argue that her husband should be:
Both debtor and slave…for mine shall be the proper power/ over his proper body, and not he,/ thus the Apostle Paul has told it me,/ and bade our husbands they should love us well; (‘The Canterbury Tales’ pp280-281)
Hearing this well known reference to the founder of the Catholic Church employed in such an argument it becomes understandable why the Friar in his, vastly shorter, prologue tells her to ‘leave the authorities…to preachers and to schools for ordinands’[5]. He says this in a tone of low-level horror not only because it is a woman having an argument but also because a layperson tackling, & misusing, a scholarly idea.
Robert M. Jordan points out that ‘Paul’s balanced phrasing, “Let the husband render unto the wife her due, and likewise the wife unto the husband,” becomes in the wife’s paraphrase, “…man shal yelde to his wyf hire dette”’[6] Due to the lack of feminine textual voice & tradition she has to rely on the masculine voice distorting it to her own ends.
She bewails the silence of this female voice as she says ‘if women had but written stories/ like those the clergy keep in oratories/ more had been written of man’s wickedness/ than all the sons of Adam could redress.’[7] What she wants is a historical feminine tradition that can be relied on supporting her instead of the catalogue of wicked women that is read by her fondest & used against her. To make up for this lack she tells a strongly female tale of man’s weakness.
It’s important to point out, in this characterisation of an outspoken woman, that the husbands are silenced. They are not with the Canterbury journey & cannot disagree or adjust with their Wife is saying & who may be doing them an injustice. Just as the textual voice of the female is suppressed so is the physical voice of the male. There are male voices interrupting & joking but none that can vouch for her story. Interestingly there is an extent to which the Wife can no longer physically obey men as a consequence from their mistreatment of her.
In the general prologue Chaucer describes the Wife as ‘A worthy woman from beside Bath city/ was with us, somewhat deaf, which was a pity’[8] implying that she could not obey when asked to be quiet. Her deafness cause by male cruel actions has become a defiant defense against men’s words. It also implies that prideful in her own arguments her deafness covers this weakness of character while giving her license to voice her own opinion without having to engage with any other sort of dialogue. It is as if no one can prevent her vain mock authoritative stance.
This vanity is supported by Chaucer’s description of her as finely dressed ‘bettered those of Ypres and of Ghent’ & quick to anger by any overshadowing dame causing her to be ‘quite put out of charity’. Bearing in mind that she is very worldly having ‘seen many strange rivers and passed over them’.
This is not a picture of a shrinking violet but of a strong adventurous woman comfortable in her forward behavior, her large hats & ‘flowing mantles’. This pride & vanity gives rise to the question of her credibility of her experience. How possible is it that she may exaggerate for the sake of a shocking good story? Did her husbands really bend under her thumb as much as she says? Is she simply recalling her relationships through her own bias & prone to highlight her own strengths while skating over her faults? This question of credibility also questions her authority.
Having seen the problems with her prologue can we not expect similar problems in the tale? Of course anything said about the Wife can be said about the tale as an extension of herself. It does also tell us more about the Wife & about her desire for a communal authority.
Her tale is set in the land of Arthurian Briton where fairies walked the woods & women could agree & get on together in their matriarchal society. The tale paints an anti-Arthurian picture of a knight who is not full of chivalrous & honorable Gawainian sentiments but is an arrogant chauvinist & a sex criminal.[9]
The way out of his death sentence is not through adventure & battle but through talking & listening before being rescued by a woman that ends in a gloomy rather than joyous marriage. It’s a mirror parody of the usual Breton Lay heroics providing us with a gentle romance instead of a romance of action where the male hero is completely in the hands of women.
Her tale is a type of revenge fantasy of the feminine lack. Given the opportunity to speak she takes her revenge up with gusto portraying the masculine as cruel & emotionally ignorant. This ends with the man in a compromising position, similar to that he had forced the lady into at the beginning, pleading, as a rape victim might, ‘Take all goods but leave my body free’[10]
It is not clear where the old women of the tale gets her authority from on the subject of women’s desire. Her credibility comes from the unanimous agreement of her verdict as all women accept what she has said to be true. Knowing how varied each woman’s answer is this simultaneous acceptance is presented as a kind of miracle. It is a type of deus ex of the fairy tales comparable to Sleeping Beauty’s kiss or the Beast’s transformation. This happy ending is a common idealised ending of female dominance, ‘Whatever pleases you suffices me’[11], which is revealing different considering the Wife’s own experience since her fondest happiness comes from a man who she could not dominate.
The difference between the woman’s authority of the tale and the Wife’s authority of the prologue is support & solidarity of other women. In the tale one woman wronged causes a ‘petitioning to the king’ & each different woman comes to a unifying agreement with the knight’s answer, which is merely parroting another woman. There is an actual female sovereignty in the form of the Queen who offers royal assistance that entails a legal dimension that in turn enforces the feminine authority.
This common sistership between the Wife & other woman makes no appearance in her prologue.
This should make us speculate what women would have thought of the Wife of Bath. Was she too unusual for sympathy, too grotesque & caricatured a woman to identify with? Or was she really their spokesperson for the ills of malekind & really acting as their figurehead? What we are missing here, which is vital to our judgment of the Wife’s authority, is another women’s opinion of her.
The Wife is alone, as an individual, in her contest with her intimate men without a supportive court to put on the legal binders of cuckolding mastery. She knows that, as much she wishes her fantasy to be possible, mastery & sovereignty comes down to the difficult navigation of human relationships then from the simple sentencing of law from an obeyed ruler. Part of that navigation is taking command & becoming, through speech, her self-supporting authority.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chaucer, Geoffrey, ‘The Canterbury Tales’ (Great Britian: Penguin Books, 1951)
Hansen, Elaine Tuttle, ‘Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)
Jordan, Robert M, ‘Chaucer and The Shape of Creation’ (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967)
Kendrick, Laura, ‘Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbary Tales’ (Berkeley: University of California Press,1998)
Leicester, H. Marshall, ‘Of a fire in the Dark: Public and Private Feminism in the Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in Woman’s Studies 11 (1984) pp 157-178
Rogerson, Margaret, ‘The Wife of Bath: standup comic’ in Sydney Studies, vol 24, (1998) <http://escholarship.usyd.edu.au/journals/index.php/SSE/article/view/526> [accessed 3 November 2010]
Wynne-Davies, Marion, ‘The Tales of the Clerk and The Wife of Bath’ (London: Routledge,1992)
[1] Elaine Tuttle Hansen, ‘Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) p28
[2] H. Marshall Leicester, ‘Of a fire in the Dark: Public and Private Feminism in the Wife of Bath’s Tale’ in Woman’s Studies 11 (1984) pp157-178
[5] ibid, p311
[6] Robert M Jordan, ‘Chaucer and The Shape of Creation’ (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1967)
p219
[8] ibid, p31
[9] Rogerson, p1
http://aberoccupied.blogspot.com/2010/12/12-much-better-after-dark.html
ReplyDelete