The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, the Parson's Prologue and Tale, and the Retractions

Key terms: antifeminist or misogynist literature; romance; flat vs. round characters; experience, auctoritee, maistrye, spiritual autobiography, mystic

The Middle Ages had, to put it mildly, a woman problem. Women were part of two of the three estates (those who worked and those who prayed), but yet they were also a fourth estate outside the system. They were viewed—legally, morally, and spiritually—as extensions of the men in their lives, dependent upon either a father or other kinsman as protector, or legally identical to their husbands. It was very rare for a woman to be a femme sole under the law and own property; medieval law was far more comfortable with femmes couvert, women who were “covered” by some man’s control. (In fact, in the 15^th century, the average time for a London mercantile-class widow to remarry was around a month.)
 

The Church provided the underpinning for this status. It saw women as essentially duplicitous. One the one side, they were images of the Virgin Mary—the mother, nurturer, intercessor, chaste and worshipped on their pedestals. The term used by Gabriel to greet Mary in the gospels—Ave gratia plena [Hail, full of grace!] is used to summarize this position.

At the same time, the Church taught, women were descendents of Eva [Eve]—and thus instruments of temptation and sin. They were carnal, not spiritual; they dragged men down by the lure of their physicality. When men desired a woman spiritually, they committed a sin; thus, women were the instruments of men’s damnation.

Men were expected to chastise women—to keep them in their place, reduce their ability to tempt me, and above all maintain control (maistrye or sovereintee) over the women in their lives. (Wife-beating or daughter-beating was in fact legal within certain constraints, since women obviously were so intellectually weak that you couldn’t convince them to change their ways through reasoned argument. <<irony!!!>>) Letting a woman run things is an admission that men were not doing their spiritual duties. A whole genre of misogynist or antifeminist literature sprang up that told of the dangers caused by wicked women—much like the book Jankyn reads to Alys.

So when Chaucer comes to represent a carnal woman in the Canterbury Tales, he has a difficult choice to make: does he represent the Ave side or the Eva side? He chooses Eva, and in doing so, creates the first round character in English literature—the Wife of Bath.

Evidence in the unfinished Tales suggests that Chaucer originally had a more flat, stereotyped character in mind for the Wife, who probably would have told the very coarse fabliau that survives as the Shipman’s Tale. Instead, as he created her character, he seems to have fallen in love with his own creation—and the Alys he creates jumps off the page at us as a vibrant, if spiritually misguided figure.

From her first sentence—“Experience, though noon auctoritee is in this world, is right enough for me to speak of wo that is in marriage”—Alys announces to us that she is arguing on the devil’s side, for the evidence of physical senses (the province of the lewed) against the learned auctoritees of clerks, government, and the Church. She turns the biblical texts upside down to make her case that God intended women to use their bodies carnally—that after all, if women didn’t have sex, where would the next generation of virgins come from? She has no problem with those who choose virginity or a more spiritually “pure” life, but she argues vigorously for the fact that using her “instrument” with her husbands does not condemn her. In a series of famous metaphors—gold vs. wooden dishes, white vs. barley bread, the flour vs. the bran of a grain of wheat—she argues that who she is and what she does are perfectly defensible from a spiritual sense. Like the Pardoner, the Wife is a vice character whose prologue is a confession of her techniques and an exposure of her sins—yet unlike the Pardoner, we warm to her because of her [that is to say, Chaucer’s] good humor, her liveliness, and her considerable rhetorical skill.

She has had five husbands (and is seeking a sixth): three elderly rich ones, whom she nagged constantly but also satisfied sexually; a fourth “revelour” with whom she had epic sexual battles; and her fifth (and ‘true love’) Jankyn, the young clerk who marries her for her money and makes her life a living hell by beating her, reading her antifeminist literature, literally deafening her, and finally almost killing her. Only when he fears he has killed her does he relent and grant her maistrye—which she embraces by socking him in the face, then turning around and telling a tale of what would happen if women ran things.

Her Tale, a romance, has a lady rescuing a knight rather than a knight rescuing a lady. In an uncanny prefiguring of Freud’s famous “What do women want,” Chaucer has the Wife tell a story of a man’s search for the answer to that question. When he proves to be surly and unappreciative of the woman who gives him the answer, she lectures him on gentilesse—the true nobility of the spirit—which comes not from high-class birth but from the soul. (How deeply ironic—in a tale whose message overthrows everything a good medieval Christian should have believed—to have this sermon, which is apparently “straight,” and full of sound advice.) The knight, finally chastised, yields the sovereintee or maistrye to his wife, and in doing so gets the happy ending he wants. The Wife’s solution reinforces her Prologue and at the same time sets medieval spiritual values on their ear by arguing that women should run men’s lives, and not vice-versa. She is the ultimate rebel—and you have to love her.

The measure of Chaucer’s unease with what he created is seen both in the Parson’s Prologue and Tale and in his Retractions, which circulate with most copies of the Canterbury Tales. The Parson’s Tale is a translation and adaptation of a catechism—a manual teaching strict and standard Christian beliefs. In the “Remedy for the Sin of Lechery,” the Parson strictly defines a wife’s duty to her husband, a husband’s responsibilities to his wife, the limitations on sexual conduct consistent with Christian moral practice, and celebrates chastity—all in direct contrast to the Wife’s ebullient argument. If the Parson is an ideal figure, we have to assume that his version is what Chaucer and his society thought was the “right” conduct—but the popularity of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale suggests that her argument, too, had its enthusiasts.

When Chaucer in his Retractions (traditionally believed to be the last thing he wrote) apologies for those works that might lead people into sin (by being too morally subtle or by making sin too appealing), he is apologizing (and at the same taking pride in) works like The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. It is one of the marks of his greatness that he can reflect so many sides of a complex moral picture without forcing a decision upon us—that he, in fact, trusts us as readers to evaluate the conduct he portrays and the stories he tells and make our own judgments about them.

The King's Lynn of Margery's time was a flourishing mercantile center that participated in a great deal of England's lucrative textile trade with the Low Countries (Belgium, Holland, and northern Germany--all of which Margery lumps together as "Deutschland"). The guilds of Lynn were powerful and profitable, and a woman of Margery's connections would have been a socially recognizable person. (See the picture of the medieval Guildhall in Lynn, on the left.) Though she would probably have learned little to no Latin, and therefore been considered "illiterate" by the standards of the lerned, she was undoubtedly given enough schooling in the vernacular to read basic prayers, keep household and business accounts, and pursue her interests in reading--which she describes thoroughly in her Book. However, literacy among the lewed was a dangerous, even potentially heretical skill in early fifteenth-century England--and Margery lived in East Anglia, where anti-Lollard persecutions were particularly fierce. Thus, she is always careful to stress that her reading is conducted under the guidance of a spiritual director (usually a priest or monk); that she does not "preach" but merely carries on "holy conversation;" and that she cannot translate Latin without divine inspiration. Drawing on the models of the lives of women like St. Bridget of Oignes, she either created the persona of or actually used the services of a priest who wrote down her experiences for her--thus covering her experience with the patina of auctoritee. Many scholars repeat the statement that "Margery Kempe was illiterate" without much consideration--but the evidence shows otherwise.