The Duality of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath: How Her Prologue and Tale Reflect Her Character

Eng 2423-8A World Literature I
19 April 2013
The Duality of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath: How Her Prologue and Tale Reflect Her Character Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales details a company’s pilgrimage to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Thomas a Becket, the Archbishop who was brutally murdered on the altar of his own cathedral (Leeming 125). This journey was a common one, often made by those seeking some form of moral or spiritual renewal, and it is no coincidence that the pilgrims’ journey takes place in the spring, a time utterly symbolic of rebirth and renewal. Within Chaucer’s framework, the characters include a host, who also serves as the narrator of the story, and twenty-nine other “sundry” characters representing all classes of society. The journey itself is rather lengthy, especially when one considers that transportation during medieval times consisted of walking, riding a horse or other four legged pack creature, or riding in a cart of some kind. Chaucer begins his work with a Prologue, during which time the reader is briefly introduced to each one of the pilgrims making the journey. When the host suggests telling stories to pass the time while traveling, it becomes clear that “each tale reflects the milieu of its teller;” in other words, the general, everyday qualities thought to be possessed by the persons telling the tales are reflected within the tales themselves (Damrosch 1386). Evidence of this lies in the character Wife of Bath, whose prologue and tale reflect the duality of her character as a feminist (prologue) and as a romantic (tale).
The feminist version of the Wife is a bold, much-married woman who has travelled extensively; she is lively and fair, and she often gives advice to the lovelorn since she has had so much experience with the opposite sex (Chaucer 1397). In her prologue, the Wife seems to exude an authority reserved only for men: She openly discusses her sex life, her views on virginity, and the anti-feminist literature that her last husband attempted to force her to endure (Chaucer 1408-1425). When it comes to her marriages, especially the first three, she freely admits to the “manipulative strategems” she employed in order to control both her husbands and their wealth (McTaggert 42). These characteristics of the Wife are reflected in the tale in the character of the old hag, who seems to revel in her power over the knight’s fate—just as the Wife “revels in the attractions of power and argues that her…desire for it is justified by [what] she wins from it” (Crane 214).
Within the actual tale told by the Wife, the reader begins to slowly see a change in the Wife’s character. The knight, guilty of raping an innocent girl, desperately seeks to avoid death by answering one simple question posed to him by King Arthur’s queen: “I’ll grant you life if you can tell to me/What thing it is that women most desire” (Chaucer 1427). According to Thomas, the “impossible part of the knight’s quest is not finding the answer, but understanding the meaning of it” (87). Ironically, the answers that the knight does find in the tale all apply to the Wife herself: “Some said that women all loved best riches,/Some said, fair fame, and some said prettiness;/Some, rich array, some said ‘twas lust abed/And often to be widowed and re-wed” (Chaucer 1427). None of these is the answer to the question that the knight is seeking, but they all apply to the Wife as per the host’s description of her in the General Prologue. This leads one to wonder—if the Wife is so sure that she knows what women want, and if the answers that the knight gathers are not correct but still apply to the Wife…then it could be possible that the even the Wife herself does not know the answer (Crane 216). In her prologue, Alisoun also tells the pilgrims the story of her fifth husband, Jankyn, whom she says she married for love. It is this relationship that sets the scene for the tale’s climax of the relationship between the old hag and the knight. Jankyn is 20 years younger than Alisoun, but she feels that her zest for life, as well as his lack of experience, will aid her in keeping him submissive; however, much to her surprise, he refuses to back down when she begins trying to establish her dominance over him. In fact, he resorts to beating her: “By God, he smote me on the ear, one day,/Because I tore out of his book a leaf” (Chaucer 1420). The irony here is the Wife brags about the fact that she has sovereignty over herself, yet the supposed sovereignty comes only after she and her husband have a violent altercation. She even goes so far as to condone his beating of her, saying she was “stubborn as a lioness” and had the “tongue of a very jay--”(i.e., she deserved it) (Chaucer 1420).
According to Crane, this vacillation between the Wife as a feminist (“I am my own master”) and the Wife as a romantic (“But I do what my husband says”) is something that critics have argued over for years (221). Crane further states “Heroines of romance tend to be more delicate emotionally and less capable intellectually than men” (214). In her prologue, as shown above, the Wife is more than willing to accept the beatings; furthermore, in her tale, the Wife—as narrator--condones the actions of the knight just as she condones the actions of her violent husband. This is most evident when, at the end of the tale, the knight avoids his death, marries the hag, and watches as she becomes a beautiful young woman—his reward for figuring out what women want. In a twist, McTaggert puts forth that the Wife is not the hag—she is actually the knight-rapist (43), and Crane supports this when she writes “the admirable women of romance wield their emotional sovereignty…but finally yield in harmonious accord with male desire” (215). This is exactly what both the knight and the hag do: he gives her freedom to choose her path, she chooses, and she gives him her freedom right back when she tells him “do with my life and death as you like best” (Chaucer 1434). Thomas argues that the knight actually ends up “enslaved since he does not freely substitute his wife’s freedom for his own” (88). Again, this reflects the duality within the Wife’s character: she claims sovereignty over her husband Jankyn, who has abused her sorely, while she relates the tale of a woman who willingly gives up power over herself when she finally gains the sovereignty she claims that all women want. Crane sums it up nicely when she states that the Wife is “inarticulate, even about the meaning of the sovereignty she imagines” (221-222).
In conclusion, the character of the Wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales can be seen as a woman filled with contradiction. In her prologue, she portrays herself as a sovereign woman with mastery over herself and everything she attempts; she discusses her manipulation of her first three husbands, as well as the fact that she was having an affair with the man who became her fifth husband while she was still married to her fourth. She claims that she has a great deal of experience in dealing with issues of love, and she even tells the Pardoner, a fellow pilgrim, that she can help him in his upcoming marriage when he asks her to “teach us younger men of your technique” (Chaucer 1411). In her tale, however, it becomes increasingly clear that the Wife also has a more romantic side, which means that the female characters “control men’s devotion not by force…but by reason of their excellence” (Crane 218). Unlike the Wife and her husband Jankyn, the knight and the hag do not come to violent blows. In the end, both the hag and the knight give up their sovereignty to one another; however, when the hag becomes the beautiful woman—the epitome of everything a man could want in a woman—and gives her will fully over to the knight, it seems as if the tale becomes less concerned with what women want and more concerned with what men desire. In this, it becomes apparent that the duality of the Wife’s character is reflected one way in her prologue (feminist) and another way in her tale (romantic).

Works Cited
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “from The Canterbury Tales.” The Longman Anthology of World Literature.
Compact ed. Ed. David Damrosch and David L. Pike. NewYork: Pearson/Longman,
2008. 1386-1435. Print.
Crane, Susan. “Alison’s Incapacity and Poetic Instability in the Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Critical
Insights: The Canterbury Tales (2010): 213-227. Ebsco Host. Web. 10 Apr. 2013.
“Geoffrey Chaucer.” The Longman Anthology of World Literature. Compact ed. Ed. David
Damrosch and David L. Pike. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2008. 1384-1386. Print.
Leeming, David A. “The Middle Ages: 1066-1485.” Elements of Literature, Sixth Course:
Essentials of British and World Literature. Ed. Kylene Beers. Orlando: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 2008. 125-126. Print.
McTaggert, Anne. “What Women Want? Mimesis and Gender in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s
Prologue and Tale.” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Memesis, and Culture 19 (2012):
41-68. Ebsco Host. Web. 10 Apr. 2013.
Thomas, Susanne S. “The Problem of Defining Sovereynetee in the Wife of Bath’s Tale.”
Chaucer Review 41.1 (2006): 87-97. Ebsco Host. Web. 10 Apr. 2013.

Cited: 2008. 1386-1435. Print. Crane, Susan. “Alison’s Incapacity and Poetic Instability in the Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Critical Insights: The Canterbury Tales (2010): 213-227 and Winston, 2008. 125-126. Print. McTaggert, Anne. “What Women Want? Mimesis and Gender in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale.” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Memesis, and Culture 19 (2012): 41-68. Ebsco Host. Web. 10 Apr. 2013. Thomas, Susanne S Chaucer Review 41.1 (2006): 87-97. Ebsco Host. Web. 10 Apr. 2013.