"Beaten for a Book": Chaucer's Wife of Bath (The Canterbury Tales Part 3)

 Alisoun, the Wife of Bath, is perhaps the most psychologically complex character in all of medieval English literature.  Bawdy, rebellious, haughty, and rambunctious, the Wife smashes the patriarchy . . . or does she?  

Transcript

I’ve noticed recently an increasingly common rhetorical tick in conversations and in the media.  I hear it most often in those “man or woman on the street” segments in news broadcasts or in interviews.  Whenever someone is asked a question about some current issue or event, they frequently begin their response with something like “Speaking as a mother” or “speaking as a doctor” or some other assertion that their position or occupation confers on what will follow a certain authority, a trustworthiness.  On the editorial pages of newspapers and magazines, too, I increasingly find click-bait headlines such as “I am a personal trainer.  Here’s the truth about free weights.”  In rhetoric, this is called an “ethos” appeal – using your own expertise and trustworthiness to lend credibility to your point-of-view.

Yet, while the ethos appeal dates at least back to Aristotle, it is only comparatively recently that we have accepted it as a basis for argumentation among the hoi polloi.  For most of history, and especially here as we are in late medieval Europe, authority resided solely in the established texts of antiquity and Church teaching.  Writing still had, even in the late Middle Ages, quite a talismanic power.  One’s personal, first-hand, empirical experience counted for little when compared to the pronouncements of written authority.

And this is what makes Chaucer’s Alison the Wife of Bath, such a marvellously fascinating character.  Her prologue and tale are arguments asserting the primacy of personal experience over established authority – put into the mouth of a woman!  It’s rather punk rock, when you consider it.

Let’s have a look at her verse portrait in the Canterbury Tales General Prologue:

A worthy woman from beside Bath city 

Was with us, somewhat deaf, which was a pity

In making cloth she showed so great a bent 

She bettered those of Ypres and of Ghent. 

In all the parish not a dame dared stir 

Towards the altar steps in front of her, 

And if indeed they did, so wrath was she 

As to be quite put out of charity.

Her kerchiefs were of finely woven ground; 

I dared have sworn they weighed a good ten pound, 

The ones she wore on Sunday, on her head. 

Her hose were of the finest scarlet red 

And gartered tight; her shoes were soft and new. 

Bold was her face, handsome, and red in hue. 

A worthy woman all her life, what’s more 

She’d had five husbands, all at the church door, 

Apart from other company in youth; 

No need just now to speak of that, forsooth.

And she had thrice been to Jerusalem, 

Seen many strange rivers and passed over them; 

She’d been to Rome and also to Boulogne, 

St James of Compostella and Cologne, 

And she was skilled in wandering by the way. 

She had gap-teeth, set widely, truth to say. 

Easily on an ambling horse she sat 

Well wimpled up, and on her head a hat 

As broad as is a buckler or a shield; 

She had a flowing mantle that concealed

Large hips, her heels spurred sharply under that. 

In company she liked to laugh and chat 

And knew the remedies for love’s mischances, 

An art in which she knew the oldest dances.

Chaucer Pilgrim describes a rather wealthy and vivacious woman of middle years, who is also a little deaf sadly, with extravagant clothing and an expansive ego.  She is a member of that rising middle class in post-plague England – she is a clothmaker, and seemingly a very successful one.  Her wares surpass those made in northern Europe, renowned textile areas at the time (though some scholars see this as an empty boast, that west English textiles were woefully substandard).  Either way, she can afford scarlet cloth herself, very expensive to produce, and she wears new shoes and ten pounds of kerchiefs.  A huge hat.  Fashionably flamboyant to say the least.  And she’s done a fair bit of travelling: Jerusalem (three times) and other famous pilgrimage sites like Rome and Compostella.  A trip to the Holy Land and back in the 14th century could take upwards of a year, and this woman has had the money to go several times!  You’ve come a long way, baby!

Of course, the thing most people notice about her is the fact that she has been five times married (not to mention several lovers, Chaucer Pilgrim discreetly implies, punning on “wandering by the way” as both an experienced traveller and a promiscuous woman).  Once we note that, details like her scarlet red hosiery, large hips, and gap-teeth point to her energetic sexuality.  Yes, gap-teeth was a medieval shorthand for sexy.  Curious.  Well, it worked for Lauren Hutton back in the ‘70s.

And it's sex and marriage that are the core of her prologue and tale.  When it’s her turn to speak, she, like the Pardoner, offers a lengthy literary confession justifying her life. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.  She begins:

Experience, though no authority

Were in this world, were good enough for me,

To speak of woe that is in all marriage;

For, masters, since I was twelve years of age,

Thanks be to God Who is for aye alive,

Of husbands at church door have I had five;

For men so many times have wedded me;

And all were worthy men in their degree.

It’s a declaration of war right from the start: she says that, because she has been married five times, since the age of 12, that she has more credibility to speak of marriage than do all of the established authorities of the Church – who are entirely male and entirely celibate.  Seems obvious to us, perhaps, but it’s a remarkable assertion in 1380 – and again, from the mouth of a woman, who would usually be regarded as without any credibility.

She proceeds to cite Biblical evidence, including Jesus’ presence at the wedding at Cana, his conversation with the Samaritan woman by the well, and the Genesis injunction that “God bade us all to wax and multiply / That kindly text I well can understand.”  Note the word “text” – she’s explicitly contending on traditional authoritative – that is to say written – grounds.  She gilds the lily by pointing out King Solomon’s exhaustive, and frankly (it seems to me) exhausting, harem.  The first part of her speech includes deconstructing the examples of the Patriarchs, especially Abraham and Jacob, then she turns to the admonitions of St. Paul.  I must also note, however, that she often misquotes or misrepresents some of her texts, leading to speculation that she is illiterate and only repeating what she imperfectly remembers or that whatever priests or monks have taught her have been mistaken in their understanding.

Throughout her discourse, the Wife also uses the language of a merchant, a middle-class businesswoman, to characterize the marital relationship.  There is an analogy drawn between virgins and gold and wives and wood, noting that both have their use in a noble household.  Marital sex she refers to in terms of commerce and exchange: “A man must yield his wife her debt” and “Whenever he likes to come and pay his debt” and “I’ll have a husband yet who’s both my debtor and my slave.”  Remember that she is a wealthy clothmaker and business is her business.

And here’s an interesting point.  We know her as “the Wife” of Bath.  Everyone else on the pilgrimage Chaucer identifies by their profession: a knight, a nun, a pardoner.  Why is she not “a weaver” or a “clothmaker”?

You can search the 1300 lines of the Wife’s texts and not find any significant reference to her business.  It’s only mentioned in her verse portrait but doesn’t play any important role anywhere else in her prologue or tale.  

So follow me on this one: for most of pre-modern European history, women had no legal or economic status.  A woman was, in English law, “sub virga viri sui” – under the rod of her man.  She was “covered” by the dominant man in her life: her father as a child and her husband as a wife: “femme converte de baron”.  Even widows were not given any legal recognition at this time.  Yet, after the social disruptions occasioned by the black plague, widows were afforded the right to inherit property.  This casts the middle section of the Wife’s prologue into a quite revealing light.

To wit:  the Pardoner interrupts her to say that he had intended to marry (really, dude? Really?) but she has convinced him otherwise.  This prompts her to embark upon a recital of her first-hand experience of marriage: “Those husbands that I had, three of them were good and two were bad.  The three that I call good were rich and old.”

And there the farthing drops.  These husbands are good because they are wealthy, old, and submissive.  She can exploit their, shall we say, enthusiasm for a young wife and when they perish of exhaustion, she inherits their wealth.  So, it seems that she is something of a “professional wife.”  Her wealth seems to come from canny marriages, not necessarily quality textiles.

She repeatedly insists that she has no interest in their lovemaking except to secure her mastery over them in all other matters.  How she does so, however, many readers find puzzling. She behaves in the most self-consciously shrewish way she can, exploiting every vile misogynistic assumption ever held by a chauvinist.  She gossips and nags and insults; accuses her husbands of fancying the neighbor’s wife.  She says, “A knowing wife if she is worth her salt can always prove her husband is at fault.”  Odd that she, at the beginning of her speech, seems to champion female freedom in the face of sexism, yet comfortably exploits patriarchal stereotypes for her own benefit.  She continues to catalogue the misogynistic attitudes held at her time (and at our own, too, troublingly): that women are too expensive, risky, superficial, lecherous, indulgent.  While these seem to be criticisms, she also embodies them.

She then gets to a description of her fourth husband, the first of the bad ones.  He’s a bit of a player, has an affair, and the jealousy drives Alison to distraction.  So she fights fire with fire, flirting with all the pretty fellas, but never being disloyal, she insists..  Then she notes that “he died when I came back from Jordan Stream.”  Hmm . . . she pops off on a bit of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and he shuffles off his mortal coil upon her return.  Curious.

There’s an intriguing little passage in which Alison, who in her flirting has met the young man who will become husband number 5 and before her jaunt to the Holy Land, makes him an offer: “And I suggested, were I ever free and made a widow, he should marry me.”  Well, well, well.  Is it possible that she has husband number 4 murdered?  Alas, we never know.  But it is such a fascinating notion!  The stuff of soap opera and cheap erotic thrillers: wealthy, buxom widow has her boy toy whack the husband.  Deliciously tawdry!

Then we hear about husband number the 5, and he is a special one.  His name is Janekyn, or Johnny, and he is, she says, “the one I took for love and not for wealth.”  The only husband with a name and the only one for love, yet “he was my worst, and many a blow he struck me still can ache along my row of ribs, and will until my dying day.”  And the only one who was an abuser.  He was a clerk at Oxford, so studying perhaps for holy orders and would have read all the texts which Alison disputes earlier in her prologue.  And every night, he would read to her from a book he calls Theophrastus and Valerius, a work by an 11th century writer named Walter Map.  The book is partly a satire on matrimony and scornfully rehearses all the evil women of classical and Hebrew antiquity: a “book of wicked wives.” Pasiphae, Delilah, Livia.  She says, “Here’s how I got a beating for a book.”

One night, Alison can take this mental abuse no longer, and violently tears a page (or three pages – she doesn’t recall precisely) from the book. He starts up and strikes her on the head, knocking her down unconscious and shattering her eardrum.  That’s how she became deaf.  He panics, thinking he has killed her and, no doubt, remembering that medieval justice was often of the torturous kind, thinks of running away.

But she wakes: “O have you murdered me, you robber, you, to get my land? . . . Was that the game? Before I’m dead I’ll kiss you all the same.” Oh, so romantic.  She does love him despite it all!

And he apologizes! “My love, my dearest Alison!  So help me God I never again will hit you, love.  And if I did, you asked for it.  Forgive me!”  Not the best apology on record – rather confirms our suspicions that Johnny is a bit of a trouser snake.

Alison agrees, for when he leans down to her kiss she fetches him a right clobber upside the head!  By this means, she masters him, like she mastered her other husbands, and crows “He gave the bridle into my hand, gave me government of house and land, of tongue and fist, indeed of all he’d got.”  

Is this a happy ending?  I mean, she wins, I guess – gets what she has always been after: sovereignty, freedom, self-determination, agency, whatever we may call it today.  But I’m confused by her rather blithe acceptance of physical and mental abuse, as if it was a small price, or at least an affordable one, to pay.  Dame Alice appears to us a quite conflicted or contradictory woman: she vocally challenges the myopic misogyny of the Bible, St. Jerome, Ptolemy – all the books that have ever beaten her – but she also exploits that sexist culture to her own advantage.  Very curious.

And curiouser still is the tale she tells.  She returns us to romance, Arthurian romance, with a tale about a knight’s quest to find out what women really want.

She begins: 

When good King Arthur ruled in ancient days, 

(A king that every Briton loves to praise.)   

This was a land brim-full of fairy folk.     

The Elf-Queen and her courtiers joined and broke 

Their elfin dance on many a green mead,         

Or so was the opinion once, I read,        

Hundreds of years ago, in days of yore.    

But no one now sees fairies any more. 

Note both the “fairy tale” quality of this introduction as well as its pronounced elegiac tone (remember elegies from the Anglo-Saxons, those poems that mourned the passing of a golden age?).  In a pre-Christian era, when Arthur ruled, Britain was an enchanted kingdom, but, she adds in what at first seems an editorial digression, that enchantment has been destroyed by the arrival of Christianity, of the Church.  What was once a land of magical forests and meadows is now “civilized” – Alison notes the “ the halls, the chambers, kitchens, bowers, Cities and boroughs, castles, courts and towers, Thorpes, barns and stables, outhouses and dairies” blessed by wandering holy friars.  So we get a classic contrast between the natural and the civil, and the latter drives out the former.  But, she says, now maidens can freely wander because there are no mischievous fairies to harass them; a maid only need worry about that holy friar: “there is no other incubus but he, so there is really no one else to hurt you, and he will do no more than take your virtue.”

Whoa!  Hang on!  That was a heck of a swipe at the Church.  She says now that those pesky fairies are gone, you only need worry about a monk (whom she calls an incubus, which is a demon that takes physical form in order to have sex) and even he’s not much of a worry because he’ll only rape you!  Alison’s tone turns quite darkly ironic for a moment here.

She then begins the plot proper: 

Now it so happened, I began to say,          

Long, long ago in good King Arthur’s day,           

There was a knight who was a lusty liver.       

One day as he came riding from the river           

He saw a maiden walking all forlorn           

Ahead of him, alone as she was born.           

And of that maiden, spite of all she said,           

By very force he took her maidenhead. 

Right, a knight of Arthur rapes a country girl.  Why?  Because she was there. Justly, Arthur is outraged and calls for the knight’s immediate death.  Alison quips, “It seems then that the statutes took that view,” implying that now, in the post-fairy, Christian world, rape goes unpunished. 

But curiously, “the queen and other ladies, too, implored the king to exercise his grace” and let them decide the knight’s fate.  Arthur acquiesces, giving his wife the power (remember that!).  The queen gives Sir Rapist a year and a day to answer this question: “What is the thing that women most desire?”  If he does, his life is spared.  Hmmm . . . . the women of the court offer a way out for a brutal rapist, a rapist that the men of the court wanted dead.  Curious.

He goes on his quest, hearing answers like, “Women want money, they want sex, they want clothes, they want to be widows” and so on and so on and so on.  None of these, of course, is the right answer.

So, as the year wanes, 

 . . . he rode home in a dejected mood           

Suddenly, at the margin of a wood,           

He saw a dance upon the leafy floor           

Of four and twenty ladies, nay, and more.           

Eagerly he approached, in hope to learn   

Some words of wisdom ere he should return;           

But lo! Before he came to where they were,           

Dancers and dance all vanished into air!           

There wasn’t a living creature to be seen           

Save one old woman crouched upon the green.   

A fouler-looking creature I suppose           

Could scarcely be imagined. She arose           

And said, “Sir knight, there’s no way on from here.           

Tell me what you are looking for, my dear, 

For peradventure that were best for you;     

We old, old women know a thing or two.” 

Oh, we’re back in the sylvan world of Faerie!  Magical dances and wise crones.  She says that she will tell the Knight the answer he seeks, but he must grant whatever request she makes of him.  He, naturally, agrees, hoping to avoid the axe.

He returns to court, stands before the queen and says: 

“A woman wants the self-same sovereignty  

Over her husband as over her lover,          

And master him;; he must not be above her.           

That is your greatest wish, whether you kill           

Or spare me;; please yourself. I wait your will.” 

Oho, we have a winner!  Yes, sovereignty, mastery . . . . that’s what women want, like Alison had over her husbands, like the queen had over Arthur and the Rapey Knight.  

But what does the Old Crone want?  Sir Rapist is in her thrall.  She demands that she be nothing less than his wife, nay his very love!

Now who saw that coming?  Oh, all of you? Well, very well anticipated.  But the knight hesitates, not, at first, for her foul looks, but because she is not of the aristocracy: “Alas that any of my race and station should ever make so foul a misalliance!”

Then we get what scholars call “The Pillow Talk.”  The couple are married, but the knight refuses his conjugal duties.  The Old Crone launches into a sermon, the theme of which (as we have seen before in romance literature) is that nobility is not determined by birth, but by character. “Gentle is he that does a gentle deed,” she reminds him, citing such textual authorities as Boethius and Seneca.  Curious.

Then, most curious of all, she offers him a choice: she can remain old and ugly, but she will be a true and loyal wife, or she can become young and beautiful, but he will always be suspicious of her fidelity.  He says, you ready for it – “You make the choice yourself . . . whatever pleases you suffices me.”

And so she has won the mastery – she has gained her sovereignty!  As a reward, she promises him that she will be both hot and sexy and loyal and true.  We have a winner!

Alison concludes her happy ending by saying

So they lived ever after to the end           

In perfect bliss; and may Christ Jesus send    

Us husbands meek and young and fresh in bed,           

And grace to overbid them when we wed.           

And—Jesu hear my prayer!—cut short the lives   

Of those who won’t be governed by their wives.  

OK, those six lines are so confusing.  She prays that women always get submissive studs for husbands and that those who don’t knuckle under should die an early death.  But how does this satisfactorily sum up the tale, or the prologue that preceded it?

Here’s my problem: in her prologue, the Wife of Bath seems to challenge patriarchal bigotry and violence, calling out St. Paul and St. Jerome.  Then she tells a story that seems to long for a time before folks like Paul and Jerome spoiled the natural world and its justice.  But that tale takes its focus off justice – what happened to the girl who was raped?  Anyone know?  Did anybody care? – and instead focuses its energy on the reclamation of the knight, a reclamation completely facilitated by women.  The Queen offers the rapist a way out, the Old Crone gives him the solution, and at the end, a sexual brute gets everything he wants.

How do we square this?  Many argue that Alison is some kind of proto-feminist champion, challenging the chauvinistic mores of late medieval culture, a culture that roots its power in the authority of the written word.  But others argue that rather she is the embodiment of patriarchal nightmares – she is the epitome of the grasping, conniving, libidinous, greedy shrew ancient authorities have always described.

I’m not sure it should be squared.  Alison is not a polemical vehicle, a mouthpiece for some sociopolitical perspective.  Like the Pardoner, she is irreducible.  Maybe it helps, and perhaps this is unscholarly, to think of her as an actual woman, a real person.  She married at 12, the youngest age possible, and so has known no life other than that of wifehood.  Being bright, she understands the disadvantages of women in her time, but sees ways to exploit them.  She does so, appropriating male biases and weaponizing them, making herself quite wealthy. 

But, despite such ruthless strategizing, somewhere inside she still longs for love.  Once she has secured herself in a masculine world, she can afford to marry for love.  Unfortunately, Johnny is a violent abuser, maiming her for life.  And yet, she still loves him.  She is both literally and figuratively "beaten by books", not only Johnny's physical violence, but by the misogynistic violence of patriarchal texts of the kind that she challenges in her prologue. But is the romance, the fairytale, too, a subtle kind of violence – the impossible promise of a nonexistent world? Alison is so disturbingly reminiscent of the stories domestic abuse victims tell even today: how they love their abusers, how it's not really as bad as it seems, how they maybe even deserve it.  This internalization of sexual violence is so heartbreaking, and heartbreakingly common.

Look at Alison’s tale: it’s a romance in which the knight and the lady live happily ever after.  Is there something of the little girl still inside the world-wise and canny wife?  Despite her experience of the “woe that is in marriage,” does she still nurse a wistful, nostalgic longing for true love as imagined in the fairy tales?  Is that why she’s travelling to Canterbury? “Welcome the sixth [husband] whenever he appears,” she says early in the prologue. Does she speak the Pillow Talk through the Old Crone, not only as admonition, but as pleading?

I think Chaucer has created quite a startlingly complex psychology here.  But, of course, as we puzzle through an interpretation of that psychology, we must be aware that it is, in fact, Chaucer’s creation – the projection of a male understanding of female experience.  And, I should add by way of disclosure, that Chaucer himself had been charged in 1380 with raping one Cecily Chaumpaigne, the daughter of a London baker.  The key word in the charge, the Latin “raptus”, has a somewhat ambiguous English meaning – it could mean sexual assault or abduction, but abduction is not necessarily synonymous with “kidnapping” here.  Recent evidence has suggested that Chaucer took the young woman into his household as a servant when she was bound to another household – like poaching an employee – and that action counted legally as “abduction.”  At any rate, however, this detail should be taken into consideration when contemplating the motives and desires of Chaucer’s most famous character, one who is herself a victim of sexual violence.

Umm, yikes.  That feels a rather grim way to end an episode.  Think of something splendid and delightful: fairies dancing in a ring.  They exist if you believe they do!  

No, on second thought, maybe it's better to leave on an unsettling note.  Maybe we need to consider the grimness lurking behind this apparently comedic woman and this apparently romantic tale.

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