The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale
Within The Canterbury Tales, the Wife’s of Bath is unique. In her Prologue she addressed “wise wives,” but there aren’t any on pilgrimage. Only two other women are travelling to Canterbury, and they are in holy orders: the Prioress and “Another Nonne.” So the Wife of Bath alone speaks for women in the secular world, in marriage, and in the emerging mercantile class.

The General Prologue portrait of the wife (lines 447-478) is one of Chaucer’s great character sketches briefly conveying personality through a few tidbits of personal appearance, biography, manners, skills, and habits of thought. Her chivalric hat (as big as a shield, the narrator says) and sharp spurs are domineering. The picture of her as Mother Earth is suggested in her prologue, where she boasts of her acquisition of her many husbands' treasures and their payments to her of their sexual "debts." Her repeated widowhood is the chief sign of her wisdom and experience; and her red face and hose suggest the Hebrew Bible's "Whore of Babylon" (i.e. priestess of Ishtar, the love goddess). She is bold, direct and vain, loving the sound of her own voice, boring others with her autobiography while traveling on pilgrimages, a habit she has in common with historical women interested in religious life, like Margery Kempe (whose writing we will read later).

The Prologue
The Wife is a talker. Her prologue is long and dense (too long for the Friar), spanning many episodes of her past but also including a tremendous number and variety of quotations about women and marriage. Here Chaucer demonstrates that he is learned in a way that his predecessors in English literature were not. Either he maintained a great number of manuscripts, or he had a photographic memory or, most likely, he kept a commonplace book full of "sentences" (brief quotations) on a variety of subjects so that he could pull up relevant sources as he wrote. The Wife of Bath's Prologue may seem to us to be an inappropriate place in which to display all of these sources--it makes the Wife seem particularly bookish--but her battle with Jankyn over his misogynist book of wicked wives points up the cultural themes on Biblical encouragement of marriage vs clerical (but non-Biblical) attacks on sexuality.

Jankyn the clerk has a book full of clerkly commentary against women; perhaps it is his literacy that is the problem in the marriage, from her point of view. It is the wrong kind of literacy. Alison describes her own body as a text, a document authenticated with “sainte Venus seel” on it (line 610), or a book that Jankyn can “glose” (line 515) both sexually and textually. The battle of the sexes is a battle of the books, with the wife representing the book of nature.

As you might expect, the Wife’s Prologue and Tale have been the object of study by feminist scholars. For two major statements, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Politics, (1989), chapter 4, and Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, (1992), chapter 2. Assessments vary. Is Alison to be approached as a positive model of economic independence and self-determination? Or is she a kind of unhappy warning of the unavoidable costs of rebellion against social stereotypes? Responses seem to depend on the critic’s estimate of Chaucer himself, and the degree of independence from the more conservative values of the era that is attributed to him.

The Tale
The wife's tale is splendidly adopted for her character. It is a brilliant counter-version of the great bearer of aristocratic male values, the Arthurian tradition. Alison reverses a pattern of conventions encountered in the texts in “Arthurian Romance” in our anthology. Instead of a Guinevere who manipulates law as an instrument of unjust vengeance (as in Marie deFrance’s "Lanval"), the merciful but just queen of the Wife’s Tale seeks to have punishment that fits the crime. The Wife’s Arthurian knight (“chivalrous” only in the technical sense of “mounted”) is a common rapist who does not know anything about what women want. It is his quest to find out that they don't want to be raped.

From the fairy queen to Arthur's queen to the crone who is the knight's savior, women are are charge in the Wife's Tale. Further, the raped girl and the crone are commoners. In the Wife's world, aristocracy is irrelevant. True “gentillesse” comes from gentle deeds. Although Chaucer wrote for the court, the king was the remarkable Richard II, who ran the first meritocracy on record in English kingship. His promotion of commoners to positions traditionally held by aristocrats (such as his promotion of Chaucer, a commoner, to ambassador) would be his undoing, as he was deposed by a baronial faction in 1399. Chaucer did not long survive Richard. There is speculation that both may have been murdered. For excellent reading material introducing Chaucer and his time, see Terry Jones, Who Murdered Chaucer: A Medieval Mystery (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2003).

In Alison's tale, the knight’s submission to the crone, and her miraculous transformation into a young lady both beautiful and faithful, mark the wife’s entry into a fantasy as complete as in Marie de France's "Lanval." It is a tale that has attracted other writers. Shakespeare's knowledge of the Wife of Bath is evident in Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer's Night's Dream.