The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

Background The Middle Ages had, to put it mildly, a woman problem. Women were viewed—legally, morally, and spiritually—as extensions of the men in their lives, dependent upon either a father or other kinsman as protector, or legally identical to their husbands. It was very rare for a woman to be a femme sole under the law and own property; medieval law was far more comfortable with femmes couvert, women who were “covered” by some man’s control. (In fact, in the 15 th century, the average time for a London mercantile-class widow to remarry was around a month.)

The Church The Church provided the underpinning for this status. It saw women as essentially two- sided. One the one side, they were images of the Virgin Mary—the mother, nurturer, intercessor, chaste and worshipped on their pedestals. The term used by Gabriel to greet Mary in the gospels— Ave gratia plena [Hail, full of grace!] is used to summarize this position.

At the same time, the Church taught, women were descendents of Eva [Eve]—and thus instruments of temptation and sin. They were carnal, not spiritual; they dragged men down by the lure of their physicality. When men desired a woman spiritually, they committed a sin; thus, women were the instruments of men’s damnation.

Men were expected to chastise women—to keep them in their place, reduce their ability to tempt me, and above all maintain control ( maistrye or sovereintee ) over the women in their lives. (Wife-beating or daughter-beating was in fact legal within certain constraints). Letting a woman run things is an admission that men were not doing their spiritual duties. A whole genre of misogynist or antifeminist literature sprang up that told of the dangers caused by wicked women—much like the book Jankyn reads to Alys.

So when Chaucer comes to represent a woman in the Canterbury Tales, he has a difficult choice to make: does he represent the Ave side or the Eva side? He chooses Eva, and in doing so, creates a famous character in English literature—the Wife of Bath.

From her first sentence—“Experience, though noon auctoritee is in this world, is right enough for me to speak of wo that is in marriage”—Alys announces to us that she is arguing on the devil’s side, for the evidence of physical senses (the province of the lewed) against the learned auctoritees of clerks, government, and the Church. She turns the biblical texts upside down to make her case that God intended women to use their bodies carnally—that after all, if women didn’t have sex, where would the next generation of virgins come from? She has no problem with those who choose virginity or a more spiritually “pure” life, but she argues vigorously for the fact that using her “instrument” with her husbands does not condemn her.

In a series of famous metaphors—gold vs. wooden dishes, white vs. barley bread, the flour vs. the bran of a grain of wheat—she argues that who she is and what she does are perfectly defensible from a spiritual sense. Like the Pardoner, the Wife is a vice character whose prologue is a confession of her techniques and an exposure of her sins—yet unlike the Pardoner, we warm to her because of her [that is to say, Chaucer’s] good humor, her liveliness, and her considerable rhetorical skill.

She has had five husbands (and is seeking a sixth): three elderly rich ones, whom she nagged constantly but also satisfied sexually; a fourth “revelour” with whom she had epic sexual battles; and her fifth (and ‘true love’) Jankyn, the young clerk who marries her for her money and makes her life a living hell by beating her, reading her antifeminist literature, literally deafening her, and finally almost killing her. Only when he fears he has killed her does he relent and grant her maistrye —which she embraces by socking him in the face, then turning around and telling a tale of what would happen if women ran things.

Would you argue that Chaucer means his readers to admire the Wife or to laugh at her? Does the Wife of Bath’s Prologue confirm or combat medieval perceptions of women?