Hello, dear Reader, and welcome to the beginning of the end of my exploration of The Canterbury Tales.
As we begin this three part series, I wish to embark upon extended analyses of two specific tales and their narrative pilgrims as opposing points of entry into a specific topic that I believe Chaucer has made invaluable contributions to through his narrative constructions (both characters and stories).
Having contemplated this aspect of his work for awhile, I have also chosen theoretical criticism which I believe will be suitable for providing a critical framework.
Let us begin there.
“Endowed with an absolute truth. . . to the dispersed, contingent, and multiple existence of women, mythic thinking opposes the Eternal Feminine, unique and fixed; if the definition given is contradicted by the behavior of real flesh-and blood women, it is women who are wrong: it is said not that Femininity is [not] an entity but that women are not feminine. Experiential denials cannot do anything against myth. Though in a way, its source is in experience.”
~ Simone de Beauvoir from “The Second Sex”
Simone de Beauvoir was a French philosopher who was born in 1908. Largely recognized for her hugely influential work The Second Sex, this manifesto offered a critical lens for the treatment of women in literature as well as explored their status and role in society (Leitch).
Beauvoir’s work was an invaluable source that provided sound theoretical foundations for second wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s, and her contributions were both keen and ahead of her time (Leitch).
It is for these reasons that I choose to employ her insights into our own interests; for the critical lens that I have mentioned was not useful only to past feminists, but, I believe, for our present endeavors as we turn back to the 14th century to look at perhaps one of the first feminist, Chaucer’s own literary construction of the feminine.
The Wife of Bath is a complex and, at times, deeply paradoxical character; in fact, I would venture to say she is flawed and hypocritical.
But she is original, and like Beauvoir, the Wife of Bath exists as a literary creation that Chaucer had written ahead of its (her) own time.
William Mead writes of “the women in Chaucer’s earlier poems”, constructions that he says would “meet us in the French romances, in saints’ lives, in stained glass window”; he criticizes their intangibility, describing them as “pale, bloodless shadows [especially] when put beside the Wife of Bath” (390). It is their “flawless perfection which” Mead claims is “seldom attained in this earthly life”, thus creating a narrative distance that leaves them inaccessible and Other.
“Other” is capitalized purposefully. Within the context of Beauvoir’s work, she argues on a larger scale something not unlike Mead’s own insightful deconstruction of Chaucer’s other feminine creations.
Beauvoir’s idea of the “Other” is born of “the myth of woman,” which produces a “‘division’ of humanity” that is “endowed with an ‘absolute’ [my quotes] truth” (Leitch 1214).
But it is from this “truth” that Beauvoir’s concept of the “Eternal Feminine” is incepted–a rigid and restricting idea ingrained in society which chooses “to posit the Woman” as “the absolute Other, without reciprocity, refusing, against [the male] experience, that she could be a subject, a peer” (Leitch 1214).
For reference, what I am disassembling here are lines from the larger quote that I began this Substack with (return later and read it in its entirety; the connections it has to not only Chaucer but all female constructions, both literary and corporeal, are numerous and perceptive).
I would argue that its applications, or Beauvoir’s argument within it, are realized in the Wife of Bath. In fact, the Wife of Bath’s purpose in her prologue and tale can almost be seen as a preliminary form of Beauvoir’s own.
The opening lines of the Wife of Bath’s prologue are, without dispute, one of the most important–and progressive–aspects of her piece.
Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynough for me (Lawton lines 1-2)
Here, the Wife of Bath takes a hard stance on where information should be sourced from. In a time where conduct and expectations were taught from “auctoritee”, written texts (like Scripture) and oratorical tradition (think of all the retelling and borrowing that is done by Chaucer himself in these tales–stories he has repurposed or cycled from other poets, authors, and styles), the Wife of Bath subverts this by prioritizing her own experience as a worthy teacher.
Now Beauvoir posits that “Experiential denials cannot do anything against myth”; however, the Wife of Bath certainly tries (Leitch 1214).
Some myths that the Wife of Bath was put up against were ones that constructed the medieval woman to be:
Chaste
Obedient
Unorthodox
This is not a comprehensive list, but these are some of the most important traits which I think the Wife of Bath refutes for the good of women.
The question I had raised to my peers before on this subject was:
Is the Wife of Bath a productive figure of a woman? From her prologue and tale, is she made out to be a sort of caricature of femininity or is she an admissible example of proto-feminism?
A question I would raise from Beauvoir to guide our discussion here is:
Who or what predicates the merits of femininity that which women (specifically the Wife of Bath) can fall short of?
More harshly:
In what ways does the Wife of Bath fail women in her actions and narration?
Again, the opening lines of her tale are the key to begin answering one of my questions here. By having her reject Scripture as a teacher, Chaucer makes the Wife of Bath take an anti-clerical stance within the framework of the tales that proves her to be a perceptive figure of a woman.
In fact, if we consider her most vocal critics, the Friar and the Summoner–pilgrims who interrupted her during her prologue–, we are presented with the undeniable anti-feminist rhetoric of those associated with the Church.
The most inflammatory example the Wife of Bath produces for her from her own experiences would be her fifth husband, “a clerk of Oxenford” (Lawton line 527). The Wife of Bath’s retelling of their marriage pieces together where her anti-clerical stance may have taken hold:
He hadde a book that gladly, nyght and day,
For his desport he wolde rede alway;
He cleped it Valerie and Theofraste,
At which book he lough alwey ful faste.
And eek ther was somtyme a clerk at Rome,
A cardinal, that highte Seint Jerome,
That made a book agayn Jovinian;
In which book eek ther was Tertulan (lines 669-676)
The footnotes provided by Lawton tell us that the book Against Jovinian was written by a Latin church father named Jerome who was an antifeminist; the additional text from Tertullian was also written by someone associated with the Church, a theologian who “wrote treatises on sexual morality” (217).
From this book, the fifth husband would read to the Wife of Bath nightly, attempting to instruct her on feminine behavior through Scripture that had been purposed by clerical rhetoricians interested in restricting the female presence through Biblical allegory (Lawton 217). But the Wife of Bath would not stand for this, ultimately ripping pages from the text during an evening session and burning them before striking her own husband across the cheek (Lawton lines 790-792)
Though I would not go so far as to say that the Wife of Bath is against the Bible or religion itself, she is sharp enough to discern the ways in which its content is abused by clerically associated people for a limiting and minimizing rhetoric that is posited against her sex.
Funnily enough, she inverses these actions in her own prologue, referring to Scripture (at times out of context or limitedly) in order to further her own arguments, such as using the examples of Solomon, Abraham, and Jacob to justify her multiple marriages (Lawton 204).
For me, the Wife of Bath is a strong figure of proto-feminism; and at the same time, I recognize that the prefix “proto” embodies and defends the flaws and hypocritical instances in which she is more detrimental to femininity than helpful.
I think the strongest testament of her merit as a feminist is her unapologetic nature and fierce rhetorical ambitions.
The Wife of Bath is a maritally and sexually-liberated figure. We are told that she has five husbands; this detail quickly places her in a different category of women. She is unapologetic here in her desires and, as mentioned before, uses Scripture unorthodoxly: “God bad us for to wexe and multiplye” (Leitch line 28).
Furthermore, she makes no effort to hide her carnal indulgences: “Of five husbondes scoleiyng am I / Welcome the sixte, whan that evere he shal / For sothe, I wol nat kepe me chaaste in al” (Leitch lines 44-46).
Most importantly, what encapsulates all of this is her boldness. She is unafraid to speak (more on the importance of voice in my final segment!). If we compare the length of her prologue to her tale, we find that it more than doubles the length of her tale.
The significance of this? Again, the Wife of Bath has placed heavier importance upon personal experience over written and oral traditions. We see a physical manifestation of this new and progressive ideology in her section of the tales; by spending not just more but a significant difference in amount of time on her prologue (which covers her personal life and marital relations) over her tale (which is a reworked version of a common medieval narrative known as the Loathly Lady that always involves a questing knight who needs to right a wrong), the Wife of Bath defiantly places herself in the spotlight to be criticized and ridiculed. Despite it all, she is true to her purpose and opinions, continuing to speak about personal experience even when interrupted by both the Friar and the Summoner (note that the Friar complains that she talks too much: “This is a long preamble of a tale!”; thereby showing his preference for oral tradition and rejection of experience–especially female experience) (Lawton line 831).
Unfortunately, the Friar’s issue with her prologue (talking too much) might be one of the only valid detractions I must point to; The Wife of Bath does, in some ways, uphold and reaffirm stereotypes about women. She reinforces the myth of a “talkative, gossipy” woman who is unable to “censor” herself or remember to “hold her tongues”.
The worst of it is demonstrated in how she misconstrues another woman and diminishes her own rhetorical power within her tale as she includes an aside on King Midas.
She says “Pardee, we wommen conne nothing hele” (Leitch 950).
- Here, we have evidence of her affirming a trope.The actual act of her interruption of her own story to tell a different (and loosely connected) tale minimizes a bit of her rhetorical strength (consider the canons of invention, arrangement, and style and how she fails them through her digression).
The tale itself would not have been an issue had she not either misremembered it (proving the unreliability of women) or purposefully lied about its events (a mark on her morality and an oversight that does not benefit her argument for women). The footnote tells us that “The secret is not disclosed by Midas’ wife but by a male servant who had cut his hair” (Leitch 224). But the damage is already done.
However, I strongly believe that for all her missteps throughout the prologue and tale, the rhetorical presence Chaucer imbues her with more than makes up for her errors and even underscores the strengths of her piece and the work she does to pave the way for more empowering female discourse.
I have chosen a particularly powerful moment with which to end this opening segment on; I have found a line by line translation so that as you read, nothing is missed here:
Now herkneth hou I baar me proprely,
Now listen how well I conducted myself,
Ye wise wyves, that kan understonde.
You wise wives, that can understand.
Thus shulde ye speke and bere hem wrong on honde,
Thus should you speak and accuse them wrongfully,
For half so boldely kan ther no man
For half so boldly can there no man
Swere and lyen, as a womman kan.
Swear and lie, as a woman can.
I sey nat this by wyves that been wyse,
I do not say this concerning wives that are wise,
But if it be whan they hem mysavyse.
Unless it be when they are ill advised.
A wys wyf, if that she kan hir good,
A wise wife, if she knows what is good for her,
Shal beren hym on honde the cow is wood,
Shall deceive him by swearing the bird is crazy,
And take witnesse of hir owene mayde,
And prove it by taking witness of her own maid
Of hir assent.
Who is in league with her.(Harvard lines 224-234)
What is incredible and anachronistic here to me is how the Wife of Bath positions a woman’s handle on rhetoric to be more influential, more powerful than a man’s.
She argues that women can readily subvert men through wielding their own voice. Not only that, but whatever men are able to do, a woman who knows how to employ rhetorical pressure is able to do it better and is thus able to dominate the dialogue.
This is an assertion that battles Beauvoir’s concept of the other which posits that in society women are often forced to identify as the Other–an entity which is as inessential as man is essential (Leitch 1214). It is only when they submit (think back to how the Friar had hoped to diminish the Wife of Bath by interrupting her prologue) that they are understood and accepted; thus it is necessary that women be defined only in opposition to the male nature (1214). Beauvoir finds that “it is not enough to have a woman’s body or to take on the female function[s]... the real woman is one who accepts herself as Other” to man (1220).
But we see the Wife of Bath reject this notion in this section I have selected. Not only does she refuse to be submissive, quiet, or Othered, she demands that the second sex is capable of being equal and even dominant in the same forums as men.
A detail I wish for you to hold onto, my Reader, are the lines 231-232. I think the theoretical events of her prologue will find their way back into the text in an interesting but very different context.
I hope you have enjoyed this exploration so far.
Until the next <3
Harvard. "3.1 The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale." Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer
Website, chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/wife-baths-prologue-and-tale-0.
Lawton, David, editor. The Norton Chaucer. E-book, W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.
Leitch, Vincent B., et al. “Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex.” Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism. Third ed., Norton & Company Limited, W.W., 2018.
Mead, William E. “The Prologue of the Wife of Bath’s Tale.” PMLA, vol. 16, no. 3,
1901, pp. 388–404. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/456482. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.