The Canterbury Tales: Week 4
The Wife of Bath's Prologue: The Beginning of Modern Epistemology?
[Opening page of The Wife of Bath's Prologue Tale, from the Ellesmere manuscript of The Canterbury Tales; public domain]
What is The Wife of Bath’s Prologue if not a critique of medieval “purity culture”?1
Well, it is that, but it’s so much more. I hardly know where to begin. And I surely will have trouble bringing this week’s installment to an end. I have thought long and hard about how to address so many issues raised in this very complicated piece in a way that brings it breadth and depth. I’ve decided to organize my comments on it around its major themes, which entails less close reading (but perhaps this commentary will enhance your own on your own).
1. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is an apology or defense for The Wife of Bath’s lack of virginity (she uses the word “chastity” synonymously).
Modern readers might wonder what Alison’s fuss is all about. Because it is the norm now within the church for both men and women to be married (and therefore not virgins), it might seem to us today that she is attacking a strawman.2
By way of background, there are (at least) two things going on in the Wife of Bath’s defense of her serial marriages. First, pre-Reformation culture was influenced by the so-called Cult of the Virgin Mary, which grew out of pagan worship of virgins more than official church teaching, but certainly was a part of the medieval church’s love and appreciation for the mother of Jesus. (I wrote a more detailed history of this here, if you are interested.) Second, the courtly tradition around Romance literature (such as the tales of King Arthur) tended to portray women either as maidens or hags, angels or whores. Within such a dichotomy, losing one’s virginity even within the lawful bounds of marriage was, in some ways, to be less than the pure virgin idealized within the literary and popular imagination.
This backdrop forms some of the impetus for the Wife of Bath’s vigorous defense—which, notably, she makes primarily from Scripture (we will return to this point later). By my count, Alison makes eight arguments (all very logical!) in support of both her non-virgin state and her serial marriages. Among these arguments are the inarguable point that it takes sex to supply the world with future virgins (lines 77-78), as well as good dose of natural law in Alison’s extended analysis of the naked facts about male and female anatomy (lines 121-44).
But, of course, the Wife of Bath isn’t just defending her sexual status within the context of one marriage—but of five (which, as she points out, is nothing compared to King Solomon’s array of partners, aye yai yai!). Each of her first three husbands bequeathed their wealth upon her each time they left her widowed, so by the time she made her fifth marriage at age 40 (to a man who is 20 [lines 606-07]—what a cougar!), she needed neither provision nor someone to father children, the more common reasons for a widow at this time to remarry. The Wife of Bath is transparent in stating that she marries out of sheer sexual desire and agency as a sexual being. Contrary to a popular twentieth-century self-help book that argues otherwise, this lusty, self-willed woman is from Venus and Mars (lines 609-626).3
2. But what is most shocking about the Wife of Bath is not the sex. The Wife of Bath (the character) is remarkable in literary history for being one of the earliest examples of “the modern subject,” a person whose life is marked by moral agency and autonomy rather than merely accepting one’s lot as given.
Alison’s status as a modern subject and moral agent is most obvious in what was discussed above, her defense of herself as a sexual being who refuses to fall into the given social constructs of either virgin or whore. But her unapologetic expression of her sexuality is only the surface level of her agency and subjectivity.
In describing The Wife of Bath, literary critic Marion Turner explains that “before Chaucer, there had never been characters like this at all in English literature: characters from ordinary life who talk about themselves and their experiences in detail, narrating personal histories and encouraging sympathetic response and identification.”4 The Wife of Bath is remarkable, Turner says, in being a “self-conscious, narrating ‘I’ figure.”5 This is the revolutionary quality of Alison.
Yet, at the same time, the close identification of one’s sexual self with one’s very self which we see so much today really has a very long history. It is defensible to argue that that history begins with The Wife of Bath. Turner quotes an observation made by the medieval historian Georges Duby that is fascinating in this context. Duby says that “human beings do not orient their behavior toward real events and circumstances, but rather to their image of them.”6 (These words crystallize my entire argument in The Evangelical Imagination!)
3. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue exemplifies the age-old phenomenon we call “the battle of the sexes.”
The Wife of Bath spends much of her prologue bragging about the various ways in which she used, manipulated, gaslit, and otherwise controlled her husbands. The greatest details in her account concern her last marriage. Her entire personal narrative, especially this part, foreshadows in many ways the tale she will tell that follows her prologue.
This part of her story—the violence between her and Jankyn—can be hard to read with modern eyes. While Chaucer’s dark, earthy comedy predominates the telling, the violence, abuse, and misogyny sound a note of realism that hits (no pun intended) too close to home in these days when our awareness and understanding of domestic violence (even in churched families) has changed our attitudes. We need not go as far back as The Canterbury Tales, or even the Punch and Judy puppet shows of previous centuries—even some scenes in I Love Lucy ring differently today (and that was less than a century ago). The line between slapstick comedy and abusive behavior can be fine—and shifting.
We learn in the prologue that the Wife of Bath’s fifth husband beat her so badly that she feels the pain in her ribs to this day (lines 509-18) and that his blow to her head that we learn about in the General Prologue is what caused her partial deafness. Yet, despite the abuse, she says with relish that was always won back to his bed because she found her young husband to be so “fresh and gay” (line 514).
To appreciate the work within its own context (and ours) requires us to avoid the error of presentism (just as avoiding errors of our own time requires the same). Accepting the givens of Chaucer’s world allows us to recognize the radical nature of the Wife of Bath’s character—and the universal, unchanging themes she reveals through her story—such as the conflict between men and women that has been a consequence of sin since the Fall.
4. The Prologue foreshadows a central theme in The Wife of Bath’s Tale which is the recurring question that vexes all mankind (by which I literally mean “man”): What do women want?
The answer to this question is made explicit in the Tale, but here in her prologue it is suggested in the resolution Alison and Jankyn finally arrive at following their most violent encounter. He beats her and seeks her forgiveness (after blaming her for his abuse, naturally). The result of this final conflict is that he gives her “the bridle” in their marriage, “governance” over not only their land and home but also over his speech, his hand, and the book he had weaponized against her (lines 817-28).
5. The entire Prologue illuminates the epistemological shift from the pre-modern age to the modern age in challenging the very basis of knowledge itself in terms of how we think we know what we know.
With this conclusion to The Wife of Bath’s story of her fifth husband, the Prologue comes full circle. And it is this circle wherein we find what I think is its most important theme, even more important than purity culture, the battle of the sexes, and moral agency: that is, how we know what we know.
To see this theme, we need to go back to the first line of Alison’s prologue: “Experience, if there were no other authority in this world, is enough for me …” (lines 1-2). She goes on to say that she is speaking specifically of the “woe that is in marriage.” Yet, regardless of the subject, the Wife of Bath boldly declares that experience (which is by nature personal and subjective) is authoritative—and sufficiently authoritative—for her.
This is the very definition and condition of modern subjectivity: experience as a form of authority equal to an external, objective, eternal source. God would, in any Christian society, including the medieval one, be that kind of authority. But so too would his viceroys and representatives: the men who inscribe his word and author their own commentary on it. (It’s helpful to note that “author” is the root word of “authority,” which implies that authority comes from authors.) These men include even the authors/authorities the Wife of Bath cites in defense of her marriages and sexual experience, men and authorities like those Jankyn cites to attack her womanhood and all women.
The Wife of Bath does not disregard external authority. Again, go back and notice how many references to the Bible and other books she cites in making all her arguments. Alison cites the authorities. Liberally. But she also makes room for personal experience and agency.7
So when Alison’s theobro8 of a husband invokes the authority of a misogynist, anti-feminist text9 to taunt his wife about how wicked women are, Alison, provoked to wrath, rips pages out of the book and punches her husband’s face so hard he falls backward into the fireplace (lines 794-799). When they reconcile, she makes him burn the book (lines 817-28).
And here we have in a fictional story a picture of modern epistemology, one in which the authority of the written text is invoked liberally when needed—and called into question when it conflicts with experience.
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Here are the next few weeks’ readings:
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"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil10
Thank you for the gift of paying attention to my work and my words. It means more than you can know.
For the sake of basic definition, by “purity culture,” I mean not sexual morality (which is good) but a culture in which morality is confused with virginity to the point that sexual impurity of any kind (even against one’s will) is understood to hold special, even permanent and irreparable, power over one’s spiritual life and future. In such thinking, virginity can become a goal unto itself, or even an idol. I’ve heard more stories than I should have from those who, being virgins on their wedding night, could not convince their bodies or their minds that consummation was not only wrong, but good. This is an example of the disordered love of virginity. The Wife of Bath seeks to set us straight.
Nowadays (especially within evangelical culture), it is our dear single and/or virgin friends who have to make all the apologies!
So maybe I have the sense of humor of a seventh grade boy, but lines 625-26 crack me up. The rhyming lines, especially in Middle English, are hilarious.
Marion Turner, The Wife of Bath: A Biography. (Princeton University Press, 2023), 3.
Ibid.
Quoted in Turner, 15.
It is a fascinating paradox (or perhaps not a paradox at all) that at the cusp of the age of print and with it mass literacy, the authority of the written word was being brought into tension with the more subjective ground of personal experience.
Thanks to my friend Jack Heller for invoking this perfect term to describe Jankyn. It. Is. Perfect. (There really is nothing new under the sun!)
Such texts circulated widely in Chaucer’s time. It is, in fact, this very context, which would have been well-known in his literary circles, that he is invoking and challenging through the Wife of Bath.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.
One of my favorite features of The Canterbury Tales appears when the pilgrims interact with one another. In The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, at least three theobros—the Friar, the Summoner, and the Pardoner—start arguing and making fun of Alison, and none of those three are paragons of virtue either (probably less virtuous than Alison). Alison’s fifth husband is a clerk of Oxford, and when the pilgrim clerk of Oxford tells his tale, he clearly has heard what Alison has had to say.
Implied but not stated explicitly in this post is that Alison is illiterate, so one source of her conflict with the three chauvinists is that they can read and she cannot. Using her experience, Allison chooses to comment on John chapter 4, Jesus’s visit with the Samaritan woman. Alison makes occasional errors about the biblical text, such as confusing Mark and John (line 145) and wondering why the Samaritan woman’s fifth husband wasn’t a husband (lines 14-22). What’s notable about these errors is that they are minor, and that they are the kinds of errors one might make if one’s encounter with the biblical text is auditory—by hearing. Taking Alison’s prologue as a whole, she has heard plenty of the Bible read, and we shouldn’t confuse illiteracy with unintelligence. Experience is Alison’s authority, but so is the word she has heard, such as when she cites the apostle Paul that it is better to marry than to burn.
(As an aside, oppressive people, including medieval chauvinists and Southern plantation owners, have erroneously believed that they control intelligence when they limit literacy.)
It's interesting to go back to the Samaritan woman story after reading The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. Jesus gets all of the men out of the conversation because if they were present, they would probably do exactly as they do when they return—demean the woman. One to one, the woman wants her intelligence respected, so she asks her question about where is the right place to worship. Jesus answers her question by taking her question to a more interesting answer. When Jesus interacts with the Samaritan woman, his respect is love, and he gains one of the most effective evangelists within the gospels.
Who'd have thought there could be so much in it?? Certainly not the teenage me who so struggled with its Middle English all those years ago! Thank you so much, Karen, for the richness of this installment. I find myself wondering how much was intended by Chaucer as novel and perhaps even subversive in his day - for example, the focus on the sufficiency of personal experience. How much is he, as an author, wielding his (potent/potential) authority through his text? She's such a larger-than-life character that I'd have a hard time thinking he was giving us this merely by some kind of happy accident. Did the reaction to the Tales at the time it was first published recognise what he was doing in this part of the work?