It is easy to be daunted by the apparent complexities of Middle English when reading Chaucer. However, Middle English isn’t as foreign as it looks once you’ve grasped a few principles, and then you discover how lively and relevant Chaucer’s writing still is.
Jan Kott published his radical Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1961, which refreshed critical approaches and dramatic performances. I do not claim anything so profound with Chaucer, but working on The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale recently has struck interesting chords.
Independent Women
In her Prologue, the Wife presents herself as a formidable figure. In the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer has already introduced a woman who is unabashed and bold in her appearance. Not only does he tell us that her head gear must weigh a hyperbolical ‘ten pound’, but her ‘hosen were of fyn scarlet reed’. As red is a colour associated with sexuality, the fact that she wears red stockings to church on a Sunday is particularly noteworthy.
It is in her own narration of her life story, though, that Chaucer reveals most about the Wife of Bath. Most readers will have ambivalent responses to her, but there is no doubting her experience (the first word, significantly, of her Prologue) or her forthright nature. In mixed company, on a pilgrimage, she talks freely about not only her five marriages, but about relationships and sex.
She explicitly rejects the Christian valuing of chastity – virginity might be ‘greet perfeccion’, but the aim only applies to those, she argues, who strive to ‘lyve parfitly’ and she accepts that she cannot aspire to such perfection. Her defence of her position is a lengthy tribute to human genitalia:
Telle me also, to what conclusioun
Were membres maad of generacioun,
And for what profit was a wight y-wroght?
Trusteth right wel, they were nat maad for noght.
Her conclusion is that she will use what she coyly refers to as her ‘instrument’ freely, and will enjoy sexual activity at ‘bothe eve and morwe’.
Alys B the Rapper
While the Wife’s largely iambic pentameter doesn’t quite match the syncopated 4/4 of rap rhythm, there is much in her attitudes and narration which are reminiscent of contemporary female rappers such as Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion.
They made waves and controversy in 2020 with their infamous ‘WAP’, a celebration of female sexuality and in particular female genitalia. However, Dame Alys, the Wife of Bath, got there before them in the fourteenth century.
She too has a vigorous enjoyment of sexual activity, at times more than her husbands as she jokes about their sexual labours to please her:
How pitously a-nyght I made hem swynke!
She uses several terms to refer to her own sexual organs, some more euphemistic than others, like ‘instrument’, ‘bele chose’, ‘quoniam’ and ‘queynte’. She promises her husbands ‘queynte right ynogh at eve’ and professes that:
…trewely, as myne housbondes tolde me,
I hadde the beste quoniam myghte be.
She admits that Jankyn, her fifth husband:
…therwithal so wel koude he me glose,
Whan that he wolde han my bele chose
Crucially, like Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion in America, she demonstrates pride in her body and in her own sexuality, pushing back against religious and societal expectations of women.
Jankyn for Jordan
The Wife’s biggest battle is with her fifth husband, who brings the ‘auctoritee’ of scholarship to bear on their relationship. Books in the Middle Ages were hugely expensive items, but Jankyn has, ‘bounden in o volume’, a compendium of antifeminist texts which the Wife calls his ‘book of wikked wyves’.
He is reading from legends, from Classical sources, from the Bible and Biblical exegesis. Today, that might be his iPhone, and he might be scrolling through antifeminist tweets, vlogs and YouTube videos.
Jankyn starts with Eve, as all Christian-based misogyny does, and continues with a litany of tales which present women as weak, duplicitous and dangerous to men. Jordan Peterson perhaps doesn’t go that far, but has become popular for his biologically-determinist views on the roles of the sexes. He defines the differences between the sexes like this:
Boys … are more disobedient – negatively – or more independent – positively – than girls, and they suffer for this, throughout their pre-university educational career. They are less agreeable (agreeableness being a personality trait associated with compassion, empathy and avoidance of conflict) and less susceptible to anxiety and depression, at least after both sexes hit puberty. Boys’ interests tilt towards things; girls’ interests tilt towards people. (from Twelve Rules for Life)
While many of Peterson’s right-wing followers are guilty of cherry-picking controversial sound-bites without considering the wider argument, just as the Wife of Bath does with St Paul and the Bible, we can see that his rigid definitions are limiting.
As feminist philosopher Kate Manne says:
Misogyny, to me, is more about policing and controlling women’s behavior. Belittling her intellect or acumen in competitive domains is certainly one way of doing that — especially when backed by the sense that it’s in her womanly nature to be oriented to people rather than abstractions.
The Wife of Bath is very aware of the effects of dominant male voices and ways in which these voices are used to define, police and control women’s behaviour. With perhaps conscious irony, as the one telling her own story, she says:
By God, if wommen hadde writen stories,
As clerkes han withinne hire oratories,
They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse
Than al the mark of Adam may redresse.
The irony is doubled, though. It’s the Wife’s narration, but the author is Geoffrey Chaucer.
Further Reading
The site’s Chaucer page.