Chaucer's the Wife of Bath
Making a Couple of the Beastly Bride and the Hunter Hunted
It is a commonplace when digging into the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale to stress the anachronism of calling Chaucer a feminist. Yet it is also a commonplace to find Chaucer attractive for his play with gender in his book, nowhere better demonstrated than in the reconstitution of various misogynist diatribes into the charismatic Wife of Bath who talks back defiantly to “auctoritee”. If Chaucer is not actually endorsing the strident voice he gives to the Wife, he is certainly making play with textuality, with subjectivity, and with the construction of ideas about sexuality. Despite the fact that the Catholic Chaucer presumably is not using the Wife of Bath to present his own views, he allows her to express radical ideas on gender theory and to tell a tale that demonstrates some of what she has theorized in her Prologue. The motif central to the Wife’s tale (that a shapeshifting hag becomes beautiful once she gets her own way) makes it more feasible that the Wife’s tale is centrally about liberation from gender role restriction. Scholars have made the connection between Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s hag and other loathly ladies. Including the Irish Sovranty Hag and Dame Ragnell. Specialists in early Irish literature (the earliest extant versions) note that the motif recurs with variations. Medievalists equipped with twentieth-century theory have discussed Chaucer’s hag in relation to the Wife of Bath, noting the similarities between the two and the suitability of the tale’s motif to the Wife as tale teller. Many scholars have explicated the personal politics of the Wife and her tale, but no one to date has centrally interrogated Chaucer’s exploitation of the motif’s mechanisms. Chaucer’s foregrounding of gender exploits the shapeshifting loathly lady motif as a vehicle for examining the sphere of heterosexual power contestation.
The earliest appearance of the loathly lady motif comes in the figure of
It is a commonplace when digging into the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale to stress the anachronism of calling Chaucer a feminist. Yet it is also a commonplace to find Chaucer attractive for his play with gender in his book, nowhere better demonstrated than in the reconstitution of various misogynist diatribes into the charismatic Wife of Bath who talks back defiantly to “auctoritee”. If Chaucer is not actually endorsing the strident voice he gives to the Wife, he is certainly making play with textuality, with subjectivity, and with the construction of ideas about sexuality. Despite the fact that the Catholic Chaucer presumably is not using the Wife of Bath to present his own views, he allows her to express radical ideas on gender theory and to tell a tale that demonstrates some of what she has theorized in her Prologue. The motif central to the Wife’s tale (that a shapeshifting hag becomes beautiful once she gets her own way) makes it more feasible that the Wife’s tale is centrally about liberation from gender role restriction. Scholars have made the connection between Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s hag and other loathly ladies. Including the Irish Sovranty Hag and Dame Ragnell. Specialists in early Irish literature (the earliest extant versions) note that the motif recurs with variations. Medievalists equipped with twentieth-century theory have discussed Chaucer’s hag in relation to the Wife of Bath, noting the similarities between the two and the suitability of the tale’s motif to the Wife as tale teller. Many scholars have explicated the personal politics of the Wife and her tale, but no one to date has centrally interrogated Chaucer’s exploitation of the motif’s mechanisms. Chaucer’s foregrounding of gender exploits the shapeshifting loathly lady motif as a vehicle for examining the sphere of heterosexual power contestation.
The earliest appearance of the loathly lady motif comes in the figure of