The Wife of Bath’s
Prologue and Tale
‘Abide,’ quod she, ‘my tale is nat bigonne.’ (169)
‘Telle forth youre tale; spareth for no man,
And teche us yonge men of youre praktike.’ (186-187)
‘Now, sire, now wol I telle yow forth my tale.’ (193)
‘Now wol I seye my tale, if ye wol here.’
The Frere logh whan he hadde herd al this;
‘Now dame,’ quod he, ‘so have I joye or blis,
This is a long preamble of a tale!’ (829-831)
‘What spekestow of preambulacioun?
What, amble, or trotte, or paas, or go sit doun!
Thou lettest oure disport in this manere.’ (837-839)
‘Lat the womman telle hir tale.
Ye fare as folk that dronken ben of ale.
Do, dame, tel forth youre tale, and that is best.’
‘Al redy, sire,’ quod she, ‘right as yow lest,
If I have licence of this worthy frere.’
‘Yis, dame,’ quod he, ‘tel forth, and I wol here.’ (851-856)
Experience, thogh noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right inogh for me
To speke of wo that is in mariage. (1-3)
But me was toold, certein, nat long agoon is... (9)
Men may divine and glosen, up and doun,
But wel I woot... (26-27)
Eek wel I woot, he seyde... (30)
‘Experience’ is a more reliable source of knowledge than ‘glossing,’ it would seem, because, like ‘the body,’ it constitutes a realm
of authenticity free of the idealizing and prudish distortions that attach to a supposedly authoritative clerical hermeneutics...
[I]n the first words of her prologue she declares that experience would be a reliable source of knowledge even in the absence of
any public authority… In imagining a world with no authoritative discourse, but in which experience would still authorize her to
speak, the Wife indicates the conceptual center of her attempt to carve out a space for feminine agency. If her experience
would tell her all she needs to know even in a world devoid of ‘auctoritee,’ and if her voice issues directly from her body, that is
because her experience of that body constitutes a private realm of subjective certainty, a realm whose deliverances of
knowledge are completely independent of the public world in which authority is established and conferred. (Mark Miller,
Philosophical Chaucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 198-199)
Both the Wife [of Bath] and January [in the Merchant’s Tale] clearly believe that the conjugal debt gives them the right
to take sexual possession of the body of their spouse, but this is only a mockery of the Church’s teaching on the
subject, which in fact emphasizes, not possession, but reciprocal submission. The Wife’s assertion: ‘I have the power
durynge al my lyf / Upon his propre body, and noght he. / Right thus the Apostol tolde it unto me’ (III, 158–60) is a
conspicuously one-sided rendition of what the Apostle (St Paul) actually says: ‘The wife hath not power of her own
body, but the husband. And in like manner the husband also hath not power of his own body, but the wife’ (I
Corinthians 7: 4). What St Paul emphasizes is not only the absoluteness of the physical connection created by
marriage, but also that it bears equally (‘in like manner’) on both parties to a marriage. It has been argued that the
Wife’s misappropriation of the idea of the conjugal debt only exposes the limitations of such thinking, showing how
readily the contractual metaphor justified seeing sex as a kind of transaction; but there is nothing intrinsically wrong
with the principle that partners should reciprocally defer to each other’s sexual needs, nor is the word ‘debt’ (Latin
debitum) necessarily mercantile in its connotations. The point of the Church’s teaching on the conjugal debt is that
‘paying’ a moral debt of this kind is specifically not like paying a sum of money: since both partners are perpetually
indebted to the other, neither can ever legitimately profit from their relationship. (Neil Cartlidge, ‘Marriage, Sexuality
and the Family’, in A Concise Companion to Chaucer, ed. Corinne Saunders (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), pp.
218-240; 222)
Critical judgments are very harsh on the Wife as biblical interpreter. It has been argued that "she mangles St. Jerome
sadly, and the Bible with him“… Such a view underrates the subtlety of Alison's debate with Jerome's intemperate
treatise, the inconsistencies and absurdities of which she exposes at many points… It is a key ingredient in anti-feminist
satire, to which Jerome…conforms, that women are seen as all-powerful and that men cringe and submit helplessly to
the commands of their cruel and greedy wives. That men must submit to many indignities from women is one of the
main arguments Jerome uses elsewhere against marriage, and is key to the argument of Theophrastus which Jerome
quotes (AJ 1:47). The Wife in this instance deliciously turns Jerome's argument against him by following up his
reasoning, quoting the phrases from Paul only in the sense that Jerome interprets them, and welcoming the
submission of men as part of the fruits of marriage. These fruits include the "tribulations in the flesh" of I Cor. 7:8,
which Alison happily interprets in a sense easily derived from Jerome - as the sexual struggles of a man who seeks to
satisfy his wife. (Warren S. Smith, ‘The Wife of Bath Debates Jerome’, The Chaucer Review 32. 2 (1997), 129-145; pp.
130, 141)
The Romance of the Rose (Le roman de la rose)
by Guillaume de Lorris (first 4000 lines, c. 1225-1230)
and Jean de Meun (remaining 18,000 lines, c. 1269-1278)
English text from The Romance of the Rose, trans. Frances Horgan (Oxford: OUP, 1994); French text from Le roman de la
rose, ed. Armand Strubel (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1992)
In this allegorical dream vision, a young man (the Lover) wanders into
a beautiful walled garden, falls in love with a rosebud, and tries to
have sex with it. Along the way he is aided, hindered, advised and
discouraged by various emblematic figures, including the Friend and
the Old Woman (both of whom provide source material for the Wife
of Bath’s Prologue).
The Friend warns the Lover about jealousy:
Thus we see that in marriages where the husband imagines that he is wise to scold and
beat his wife and fill her life with wrangling, and tells her she is silly and foolish for
spending so much time dancing and so regularly frequenting the society of handsome
young men, truly love cannot last, since they inflict so many evils upon each other and he
wants to be master of his wife’s body and possessions. ‘You are too flighty,’ he says, ‘and
your behaviour is too foolish. When I go to work you immediately start dancing and capering
and making so merry that it seems positively immoral, and singing like a siren. God send you
a bad week!’… And when the lady experiences this torment and this dispute, and sees
what a charming viol her jongleur plays for her, do you think she will love him more as a
result?... [He would] fail to perceive the danger into which he had fallen, unless he had seen
all the deceits that women can think of to protect and defend themselves. If he then sleeps
with her, he seriously imperils his life; indeed, whether sleeping or waking, he should go in
great fear lest she take her revenge by having him poisoned or cut to pieces… Women care
nothing for honour or shame when they get an idea into their heads, for it is true without a
doubt that women know nothing. Valerius even calls them bold and cunning towards those
they hate and those they love, and very intent on doing harm. (Horgan, pp. 130, 143-144)
The Old Woman gives advice to Fair Welcome on how to be a good lover:
My time for joy as all departed but yours is yet to come… [I]f you follow my advice you will come
safe into port… I was young and beautiful, silly and irresponsible, and I have never been to the
school of Love, where they teach the theory, but I know it all through practice. Experience, which
I have pursued throughout my life, has made me wise in love’s ways… Not everything that is very
old is to be fled from or despised: sense and experience are to be found there… [T]he memory of
my heyday still gives me pleasure… The thought and the recollection of it rejuvenates my whole
body; it does me all the good in the world to remember everything that happened, for I have at
least had my fun, however I may have been deceived. A young woman leading a life of
wantonness is not idle, especially not when she takes care to make enough to over her expenses.
(pp. 196-199)
La pute vieille redotee... (line 12,574) = The senile old whore... (p. 194)
fausse vieille et serve (line 12,992) = false and servile crone (p. 200)
And Fair Welcome [who can give access to the rosebud/lady] was imprisoned high up in the
tower, whose door was so well barred that it was impossible for him to escape. An old woman,
may God bring shame upon her, was with him to guard him. Her only job was simply to watch
him in case he did anything foolish. No one could trick her by sign or gesture, for there was no
deception with which she was not familiar, having in her youth enjoyed her share of the joys and
torments that Love metes out to his followers. (pp. 59-60)
Of five husbondes scoleying am I.
Welcome the sixte, whan that evere he shal...
Som Cristen man shal wedde me anon. (44f-48)
For evere yet I loved to be gay,
And for to walke in March, Averill, and May,
From hous to hous to here sondry tales...
And for to se, and eek for to be seye
Of lusty folk. What wiste I wher my grace
Was shapen for to be, or in what place?
Therfore I made my visitaciouns
To vigilies, and to processiouns,
To preching eek, and to thise pilgrimages. (545-558)
Gat-tothed I was, and that bicam me weel;
I hadde the preente of Seinte Venus seel.
As help me God, I was a lusty oon,
And fair, and riche, and yong, and wel bigoon!
And trewely, as mine housbondes tolde me,
I hadde the beste quoniam mighte be. (603-608)
Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe. (458)
In felawshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe. (474)
At large within the turbulent and ill-defined middle ranks of society was Chaucer himself. Born the son of a wine
merchant…Chaucer was by 1368 an esquire of the king’s household… [He retained this title] after his technical move
outside the household to assume a customs appointment in 1374… Later, in the 1390s, he was to be known simply as
‘esquier’ or ‘armiger’, possessing the title more or less independently of the service in which he had received it…
Insightful commentators have taken note of his royal service on the one hand and his urban involvements on the
other, and have attributed to him an amalgam of aristocratic (or court-derived) and bourgeois (or city-derived)
valules. (Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 10)
[The Wife of Bath] may strike us as cynical, vulgar, and immoral, but we must remember that by the standards common to her class
Alisoun’s behavior is simply shrewd business… The practical bourgeois wife clearly contradicted the idealized image of the subservient wife
held up as a model by "gentility" and by the church. Yet the wit Alisoun directs at traditional marriage lore, coming as it does from the rich
experience of her class, should not horrify her audience (though they may take exception to some of it) because they would recognize the
common truth of what she is saying… As Alisoun knows from experience, the true fruits of marriage are described neither in Jerome nor in
the deportment books but are set in the marriage bed. Its important spoils for her are neither children nor sensual gratification but
independence. Marriage is the key to survival, and that is what Alisoun seeks and finds. Her parents married her off when she was twelve,
an early enough age to suggest either notable greed or straitened financial circumstances on their part... The lesson that Alisoun has
learned is obvious: marriage is contracted for money, and the acquisition of money is equivalent to the attainment of honor, respect, and
independence. (Mary Carruthers, ‘The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions’, PMLA 94.2 (1979), 209-222; pp. 211-214)
[E]arly readers generally portrayed Alisoun as a wanton and stereotypically shrewish wife, which fits succinctly with her satirical textual
origins... As history ran its course, the widespread view of Alisoun as a stereotypically shrewish wife eventually waned. Though pejorative
comments continue to be found over the years in some — notably male — quarters, the Wife of Bath gradually was seen with increasing
respect. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the “good wif” customarily was read as an ironic and comical female figure who did
not deserve the scorn of her early readers... [B]y the late nineteenth century, comments of the following sort became the norm, rather
than a quiet exception: Matthew Browne argued that the Wife of Bath represents a “most distinguished mouthpiece” for “a vein of
deliberate irony addressed to the notion of ecclesiastically excising certain of the facts of life,” while Henry Morley went so far as to claim
that Alisoun illustrates “the beauty and honour of true womanhood.” (Geoffrey W. Gust, Constructing Chaucer (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), pp. 130-131)
For trusteth wel, it is an inpossible
That any clerk wol speke good of wives,
But if it be of holy seintes lives,
Ne of noon oother womman neverthemo.
Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?
By God, if wommen hadde writen stories,
As clerkes han withinne her oratories,
They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse
Than al the mark of Adam may redresse. (688-696)
[T]he Wife of Bath refers to the Aesopian fable of the painting of the lion: the lion complains of a picture
showing a man killing a lion and suggests that if a lion had painted it the result would have been
different… The moral of the fable expresses an aspect of that general concern with the relationship of
"auctoritee" to "experience" which she announces in the first sentence of her prologue. (Mary
Carruthers, ‘The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions’, PMLA 94.2 (1979), 209-222; p. 209)
The children of Mercurye and of Venus
Been in hir wirking ful contrarius:
Mercurye loveth wisdam and science,
And Venus loveth riot and dispence...
Therfore no womman of no clerk is preised.
The clerk, whan he is old, and may noght do
Of Venus werkes worth his olde sho,
Thanne sit he doun and writ in his dotage
That wommen kan nat kepe hir mariage! (697-710)
When the Canterbury Tales deal with marriage, sexuality or the family, they tend to register a similar contradiction
between theory and practice – and, correspondingly, between ideal and reality, authority and experience. They also
tend to exploit the intrinsic irony of the Church’s involvement in social/sexual policy – that an organization spiritually
dedicated to another world should so deeply concern itself with the physical intimacies of this one. As a result of this,
the right to determine the nature of the responsibilities created by marriage, sexuality and the family had become the
prerogative of a class of men who were in most cases professionally celibate – and so, by definition, remote from all
such concerns. It is a sense of the incongruity of this situation that justifies the Wife of Bath’s claim to ‘speke of wo that
is in mariage’ (III, 3) – much more obviously than any incipient leanings towards a heretical belief in the rights of
women to teach. She is not directly challenging churchmen’s ‘auctoritee’ so much as observing their lack of
‘experience’ in the field in which that ‘auctoritee’ is exerted. (Cartlidge, p. 219)
Al sodeynly thre leves have a plyght
Out of his book, right as he radde, and eke
I with my fest so tooke hym on the cheke
That in oure fyr he fil bakward adoun.
And he up stirte as doothe a wood leoun,
And with his fest he smoot me on the heed…
He yaf me al the bridel in myn hond,
To han the governance of hous and lond…
And made him brenne his booke anon right tho…
After that day we hadden never debaat. (790-795, 813-822)
He was a bad man – I never saw a worse one – and he had nothing but contempt for me, calling me a
common whore… However much he beat me, I would still have had him fall upon me, for he was so
good at making peace, whatever hurt he might have done me… And so he had me on the end of a rope,
the false, thieving traitor, because he was so good in bed. (The Romance of the Rose, p. 223)
It is a commonplace when teaching the Wife of Bath s Prologue and Tale to stress the anachronism of
calling Chaucer a feminist. Yet it is also common to find Chaucer attractive for his play with gender in the
gap between the book and the body, 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. (Susan Carter, ‘Coupling the Beastly Bride and the Hunter Hunted: What Lies Behind
Chaucer's “Wife of Bath's Tale”’, The Chaucer Review 37.4 (2003), 329-345; p. 329)
Two other versions of the Wife of Bath’s Tale:
John Gower, ‘The Tale of Florent’, in the Confessio
Amantis:
http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/peck-gowerconfessio-amantis-book-1#florent
Anonymous, The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame
Ragnelle:
http://d.lib.rochester.edu/teams/text/hahn-sirgawain-wedding-of-sir-gawain-and-dame-ragnelle
Of whiche maide anon, maugree her heed,
By verray force he rafte hir maidenhed. (887-888)