Bohr 1 Skylar Bohr Dr. Stephen Jones LIT 2021 10 December 2022 Throughout history, literature has often been a reflection of the society in which it was written. Literature tells of the values of a community. The texts The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, The Faerie Queene, and The Lady’s Dressing Room were written with the intention of showing how women were viewed during that time. Unfortunately, this was most widely a negative viewpoint, and the men in the literature were in command of the language used to describe women. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, written by Goeffrey Chaucer, was written with “centuries-old tradition of misogynist writing that was…nurtured by the medieval Church (Chaucer 300). Women were associated with negative attributes such as irrationality, materialistic, and earthly. The Wife in the story tells of her experiences with five husbands. The clerks she is confronting already think her a horrid woman because she has had five marriages, while one or none at all is deemed appropriate. The wife states herself to be an expert on marriage, since she has had so many of them. She recounts, in detail, the marriages she has had since she was 12 years old. While doing so, she is confirming the accusations of the clerks (that she is immoral), while also making fun of the stereotypes they hold about marriage and women. The clerks argue that God commands virginity and if one must marry, it should only be once. The woman questions whether God actually commanded that you should only marry once (Chaucer 304), while there were several men in the Bible who were married multiple times, such as Abraham and Jacob. She argued that these men are considered holy, but it was seen as acceptable that they were married multiple times Bohr 2 (Chaucer 302). She also states that because virginity is so highly praised, that if everyone remained virgins, there would be no more virgins born to praise (Chaucer 302). She uses Biblical evidence against the clerks to support her choice of lifestyle. In The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, the woman argues that she has experience on her side in the realm of marriage, so she should be the expert opinion and have sovereignty over her life instead of what the Church demands morally acceptable (Chaucer 300). “Not liking the exempla that are offered to her by the male world in the guide of “auctoritee,” she turns to her own experience with the intention of becoming an authority herself” (Leicester Jr. 159). Why would she allow men who have never married, or have only had one marriage, be the experts on marriage? The wife is seen as argumentative, combative, and rebellious; however, today she would be described as clever, logical, and boisterous. In The Faerie Queene, written by Edmund Spenser, there is the character Una, who is described as “so pure an innocent, as that same lambe, she in life and every virtuous lore” (Spenser 255). She wears a vele (veil) and a black mourning robe. Una represents purity, virtuousness, and virginity. After the Knight of the Red Crosse defeats the monster Errour, he and Una continue on their travels. One night, a sprite creates a fake woman, meant to impersonate Una after the Sprite made Red Crosse have “fantasies” about Una in his sleep (Spenser 265). This imposter attempts to seduce Red Crosse. The woman is lying in his bed, and he becomes suspicious of her actions. The knight becomes upset that she is not what he thought her to be: pure and virtuous. The Knight of the Red Crosse becomes so upset that he thinking “Much grieved to thinke that gentle Dame so light, for whose defense he was to shed his blood” (Spenser 267). Bohr 3 The Knight is distraught that he has put his life on the line for Una, thinking she was pure and light, but it turns out that she is wanton and frivolous. When Una is no longer acting the role of the virgin he has expected, the Knight sees her as unworthy of risking his life, and leaves her behind to continue with his quest (Spenser 269). Though the lustful visions of Una are simply a dream, they are enough to “significantly shake the faith of this generally virtuous knight” (Cavanagh 43). This is putting a lot of the blame on Una, and women in general. The Knight is known for his virtue, but even a dream of a sexual encounter with Una was enough to deter him from his quest (Cavanagh 43). It is curious that the Knight would be so upset with Una, imposter or not, acting out the fantasies that he was having about her. It seems that Una would never be able to “win” with the Knight: it was acceptable for him to have lustful thoughts of her, but it became an issue of virtue once she began acting on those fantasies. The Faerie Queene, especially in Book I, is a perfect example of how a woman’s sexuality is a threat to Christianity. The Knight of the Red Crosse is the Knight of Holiness. He represents what it means to be a righteous holy man and Una represents what men want women to be: innocent, and pure. Once women no longer fit that mold, they are considered unholy, deceitful, and immoral. The Lady’s Dressing Room was written by Johnathan Swift, a man filled with misogyny. He was a Christian man who hated human pride, which unfortunately correlated with women because they were associated with beauty, romance, and love (Swift 636.) The poem begins with a man, Strephon, complaining that his lady takes five hours to get ready, yet he describes her as “The goddess from her chambers issues” (637). One night, Strephon decides to go into Celia’s dressing room. While in there, Bohr 4 Strephon is disgusted by what he finds. He finds combs and brushes full of hair and dandruff, dirty laundry, and many cosmetics (Swift 637). Strephon could not believe that his love Celia could be so beautiful and come from filth. He was under the allusion that Celia was naturally this beautiful and that every facet of her life would be just as beautiful. Since he came across her dressing room, he believes that men are lying about Celia being sweet and clean. Strephon believed that Celia was beautiful, but after uncovering her “dirty laundry”, he is no longer able to see her as beautiful, now that the illusion was broken (Swift 637). Women were expected to be beautiful at all times, but once a man looked below the surface of her allure, he saw the tools she used to maintain that beauty, and he was disgusted. Women were expected to maintain the illusion of beauty that men had crafted for them. Once Strephon had sight of what went into maintaining that image, he no longer saw Celia as a beautiful creature, but a filthy being (Swift 638). Wendy Weise, in her paper “Seeing and the Difference It Makes: Ocularity, Gender, and Space in Swift’s and Montague’s ‘Dressing Room’ Satires”, she states that Swift’s poem is one of “masculinized, voyeuristic eye invades and constructs female space…and depicting woman as object of visual consumption” (Weise 709). This is to understand that men have an idea, based purely on a visual and a vision they’ve created in their heads, about what it is to be a woman, but most importantly, a beautiful woman. When Strephon finally sees what Celia is like below the surface and he pulls back the curtain, he sees what Celia is truly like, and it does not line up with his made-up vision and no longer finds her beautiful. As long as women are seen as visual creatures and no one looks below the surface, they can still be seen as “beautiful”. Bohr 5 Throughout history and preserved in literature, women, and their sexuality, were thought to be less than, unholy, and meant only for the male vision. The women in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, The Faerie Queene, and The Lady’s Dressing Room are examples of this male-dominated rhetoric. Word Count: 1340 Works Cited Cavanagh, Sheila T. Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires : Female Sexuality in the Faerie Queene. Indiana University Press, 1994. EBSCOhost,https://search-ebscohostcom.ccco.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=649&site=edslive&scope=site. Chaucer, Goeffrey. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale.” Greenblatt, Stephen, gen. Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Tenth Edition. New York: Norton, 2018. Pp 300-327. Leicester Jr., H.Marshall. “Of a Fire in the Dark: Public and Private Feminism in the Wife of Bath’s Tale.” Women’s Studies, vol. 11, no. 1/2, Feb. 1984, p. 157. EBSCOhost, https://doi-org.ccco.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/00497878.1984.9978608. Spenser, Edmund. “The Faerie Queene.” Greenblatt, Stephen, gen. Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Tenth Edition. New York: Norton, 2018. Pp 247-405. Swift, Johnathan. “The Lady’s Dressing Room.” Greenblatt, Stephen, gen. Ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Tenth Edition. New York: Norton, 2018. Pp . Weise, Wendy. “Seeing and the Difference It Makes: Ocularity, Gender, and Space in Swift’s and Montagu’s ‘Dressing Room’ Satires.” Women’s Studies, vol. 35, no. 8, Dec. 2006, pp. 707–38. EBSCOhost, https://doiorg.ccco.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/00497870600945600. Bohr 6
