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There are 32 pilgrims who set out on the journey that frames Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” with two more coming along later. Many of these are mere cyphers (like the five guildsmen, not differentiated), but 23 get brief descriptions in the “General Prologue,” and the same number get to tell tales. Only three of the 34, however, are female—the Prioress, her accompanying Nun, and the Wife of Bath—and though they all tell a tale, only the first and last receive a detailed description.
This marked gender underrepresentation is very largely redressed by the Wife of Bath, who has stolen the show from Chaucer’s time to now, and become (nearly) everyone’s favorite character. It looks as if she was Chaucer’s favorite too, for not only does she get a 32-line description in the Prologue, and a tale of her own, she is also one of the three “confessional” pilgrims, who give a kind of autobiography before their tales. Hers, at 856 lines, is the longest by far.
Moreover, it looks as if Chaucer’s thinking about her evolved. “The Shipman’s Tale” is clearly told by a female narrator, who can’t be him. The tale, about a woman turning the tables on her husband and lover, would have been very suitable for the Wife of Bath. But Chaucer changed his mind, gave it to the Shipman, and gave the Wife a tale of romance instead, much less suitable. Or maybe much more revealing?
In “The Wife of Bath: A Biography,” Oxford professor Marion Turner calls her subject a “bookrunner.” Chaucer’s most famous character keeps on escaping from her own place and her own text and turning up in other people’s. What’s her secret? She’s vital, she’s honest, she’s indecorous—and she is a marginalized voice that dares speak truth to power.
All true enough, but one might add another thought in purely modern parlance. Medieval though she is, she is a clear case of a woman who has succeeded in “having it all.” Sexual freedom in youth (Chaucer only hints at this, but it’s a heavy hint), marriage, respectability and social position later on, and seemingly her own business, as a cloth-maker.
Was this even possible in the Middle Ages? Ms. Turner’s book is in two halves, first looking at the real possibilities for a woman like Alison—her given name—in the late 14th century, and then showing how she has been picked up and re-imagined through the centuries up to now. Ms. Turner’s first conclusion is that Alison is indeed very plausible, but only in the specific environment of northern Europe after the Black Death: The plague, like World War I, was a “demographic catastrophe” that as a side effect opened up opportunities for women.
They gained, for instance, a right to trade as femmes soles. They could own property jointly with their husbands, and even dispose of it. Furthermore, in the north of Europe rather than the south, there was a marriage pattern that favored working women. If a woman kept working after marriage—possibly delaying having children—a married couple might have the means to start their own household, independent from the husband’s family. Englishwomen also had common-law rights to dower and dowry, unlike their Continental counterparts.
Ms. Turner deepens her point with studies of women like Margaret Stodeye, a London heiress who married and was widowed four times (the Wife of Bath made it five), becoming enormously rich.
Alison may be, as Ms. Turner claims, “the first ordinary woman in English literature,” but she could also be seen as a terrible warning. In her autobiography, she writes off her first three husbands as old, rich and feeble. She nagged and sexed them all to death, inheriting every time—Chaucer mentions her jokingly in a letter he wrote to an elderly friend contemplating remarriage. “Read the Wife of Bath,” he says, before you go any further.
But she was a menace to more than old gentlemen. Her real threat to the social order is that she acknowledges no “authority,” by which she means books (including the Bible), the clergy who write them and the whole tradition of celibate misogyny.
Case in point is her choice of husband number five, whom Alison picks out for his fine legs in the midst of burying husband four. He, of course, is the one she really loved; he turns out to be also a literate man, an Oxford clerk, and abusive in that he liked to read misogynist stories to her from his “book of wikked wyves.” In the end it comes to physical violence—she becomes part-deaf from a blow on the ear—but she wins even that contest, and (an iconic victory) makes him burn his book.
It’s no surprise, then, that later reactions to her have varied from admiring (mostly women) to appalled (mostly men). She has been silenced, censored and burned by the authorities. On the other hand, she has been taken up by later writers from Voltaire to (perhaps) James Joyce: was she the inspiration behind Molly Bloom? Ms. Turner suggests that Shakespeare reprised her as Falstaff, another “larger-than-life” figure of enduring fascination.
More recently Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” drops a curtsey in her direction. Most striking has been the wave of “Black Alisons” created by writers like Jean “Binta” Breeze, Patience Agbabi and Zadie Smith. Breeze’s “The Wife of Bath in Brixton Market” can be seen on YouTube, declaimed by Breeze as she walks through multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Brixton, in south London. Ms. Agbabi’s “Wife of Bafa” meanwhile retells the Tale in Nigerian English.
Ms. Smith’s verse-drama “The Wife of Willesden” also retells the Prologue and Tale in couplets through the mouth (mostly) of Alvita, a spirited woman living in Ms. Smith’s own part of northwest London who drops in and out of dialects from standard to Jamaican to cockney; her Tale is set in Maroon Town, Jamaica. Chaucer’s fairies are replaced by the malevolent beings called “duppy,” and the rapist knight who begins the Tale is now a soldier in the army of the rebel leader Queen Nanny.
The Wife’s appeal has always been her rebellious power and unapologetic pursuit of her own needs. And yet one remembers the Tale Chaucer gives her—in which an old woman, given the right husband, magically becomes young and beautiful again.
In your dreams, Alison. Not going to happen. But she’ll resolutely face the reality that returns when the story is over. That’s courage for you.
Mr. Shippey is the author, most recently, of “Beowulf and the North Before the Vikings.”
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发表于 3-9-2023 16:18:57
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