About The Canterbury Tales:
The Canterbury Tales (Middle
English: Tales
of Caunterbury) is a collection of 24 stories that runs to over 17,000 lines
written in Middle
English by Geoffrey Chaucer between 1387
and 1400. In 1386, Chaucer became Controller of Customs and Justice of the
Peace and, in 1389, Clerk of the King's Works. It was during these years
that Chaucer began working on his most famous text, The Canterbury Tales.
The tales (mostly written in verse, although some
are in prose) are presented as
part of a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims as they
travel together from London to Canterbury to visit the
shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury
Cathedral.
The prize for this contest is a free meal at the Tabard Inn at Southwark
on their return.
The Wife of Bath’s Tale:
In a land populated by fairies and elves, in the days of King
Arthur, a young knight rapes a maiden he sees walking from the river one day.
For his offense, Queen Guinevere and her ladies rule that his punishment is to
find out within one year what women most desire, or else he'll be beheaded. The
knight departs on his quest to find the answer to this question, but despite
questioning women all over the land and receiving numerous answers, he cannot
find two women who agree on what women most desire.
After a year, the knight returns to King Arthur's court with
a heavy heart, no closer to knowing what women most desire. On the way, he
comes across a ring of 24 fairy ladies dancing. The fairies quickly disappear,
only to be replaced by an ugly old hag. Upon learning of his quest, the hag
agrees to tell the knight what women most desire if he promises to grant her
anything she desires. The knight agrees. The hag tells the
knight what women most desire – to have sovereignty over their husbands and
lovers. The queen and all the ladies assemble agree that he is correct. As the
court is adjourning, the hag petitions the queen to force the knight to fulfill
his promise to her: she wants the knight to marry her. Despite the knight's
reluctance, the queen insists that he must do so, and the knight and hag are
married.
On their wedding knight, the knight doesn't want to
consummate the marriage. The hag asks what ails him, and he tells her that she
is so ugly, old, and low-class that it's no wonder he does not desire her. This
prompts a long speech from the hag on the true origins of gentility, and the
advantages of poverty and old age. The hag concludes her speech by offering the
knight a choice: either he can have her old and ugly, but a good and faithful
wife, or he can have her young and beautiful, but with no guarantee of these
other good qualities. The knight turns the decision over to his wife, asking
her to make the choice. Once the hag has confirmed that her husband has yielded
sovereignty to her, she tells him that she will be both: young and beautiful,
and a faithful, good wife to him. The knight takes his young, beautiful wife in
his arms and they live happily ever after. The wife is not only faithful and
good, but also obedient to her husband for the rest of their lives together.
The Wife concludes her story by praying Jesus to send women
“husbands who are young and fresh on bed and also to show grace to them.” She
also calls down a curse on husbands who refuse to be ruled by their wives.
Themes:
Women and Femininity:
The knight's punishment for rape is a quest in
which he must discover what women most desire. This plot element is an occasion
for the tale to expound upon all of the various things women desire and, in
some cases, what these desires reveal about their nature. Although "The
Wife of Bath's Tale" begins with the sexual assault of a woman, the rest
of it imagines a world in which women are sovereign and in which they mete out
judgments, administer justice, and have power over men's bodies. This world is
the one that women want, at least according to the loathly lady's assertion
that what women most desire is sovereignty over their husbands and lovers. Yet
curiously, at the end of the tale, the loathly-lady-turned-beautiful-wife
yields power back to her husband despite his willingness to grant it to her,
raising questions about what it is women really desire. This
ending is in keeping with the wide variety of things people tell the knight
women most desire, for, at the end of the tale, women turn out to be just as
big of a question mark as they were in at its beginning.
Power:
A knight deprives a maiden of power over her own
body; his punishment, as decided by the women of the court, is that he must
find out what women most desire, which turns out to be power. "The Wife of
Bath's Tale" makes a point of how the knight's punishment fits his crime
inasmuch as he must yield power over his body, first to the
queen and her court, and finally to the hag he must marry. And indeed, after
the disturbing opening, power in "The Wife of Bath's Tale" rests
solely in the hands of women, who mete out punishment, administer justice, and
force the knight to fulfill his promise to the hag. At the end of the tale,
however, the locus of power seems to have shifted when the knight's wife gives
mastery back to her husband. Even the Wife of Bath's
concluding prayer requesting easy-to-dominate husbands can't quite contain our
feeling that, by the end of the tale, power has again reverted to the hands of
men, the place where it was abused at the tale's beginning.
Rules and Order:
At the beginning of "The Wife of Bath's
Tale," a knight commits rape, and the rest of the tale is concerned with
how the law punishes him for his misdeed (or not). The queen immediately asks
for the privilege of judgment over the knight, but rejects the traditional
punishment of beheading in favor of justice that's more rehabilitative than
punitive. "The Wife of Bath's Tale" emphasizes the way in which the
law demands sovereignty over people's bodies in the way you forfeit the right
to determine the fate of yours when you break it. It also emphasizes the way
making a vow has the same effect in one's voluntary yielding of sovereignty to
another. The law and vow-making thus join women as things that demand cession
of a man's sovereignty; since the 'thing that women most desire' is also a
kind of rule for men, this consonance makes sense.
Principles:
The big principle at issue in "The Wife of
Bath's Tale" is gentility. Gentility was thought to be a quality of a
person that caused him to do noble deeds, keep his promises, and generally
behave virtuously. The knight's accusation that the loathly lady is 'lowborn,'
implying that she lacks gentility, prompts a response from the lady in which
she unearths the true origins of "gentilesse." The question at hand
is whether this gentilesse is a quality that naturally inheres in the offspring
of a certain class, or whether it results from one's actions. The lady believes
the latter, and uses logical, educated arguments to convince the knight of it,
too. The upshot of her discussion is that, at the end of it, she's able to
reasonably claim that she is gentle and the knight is not.
Score one for the loathly lady.
Appearances:
Since the plot of "The Wife of Bath's
Tale" has at its heart a loathly lady who shape-shifts into a beautiful,
young damsel, we might expect appearances to be important here. And they are,
just not for the reason you might think. For instead of this being a tale about
how a knight learns to appreciate people for what's on the inside and that
outer appearances don't matter, it's a tale about how a knight learns to give
up sovereignty to his wife. That sovereignty includes power over the body. The
loathly lady's physical appearance becomes an important symbol of that body, so
that, at the end of the tale, when she offers her husband a choice about how he
wants her to look, she's in essence offering him control of her body. He grants
this control back to her, thus proving his understanding of the doctrine of
women's sovereignty in marriage. Medieval stories don't necessarily go in for
the whole 'appearances don't mean anything' maxim anyway, as we've seen in the “General Prologue”.
Old Age:
The loathly lady's old age is what makes her wise,
a fact she establishes definitively when she reminds the knight that the old
age gives wisdom to her. The connection of age with the wisdom of lived
experience is the main idea that we get from the tale of the Wife of Bath. What
we're not familiar with from that Prologue is the linking of
age to "foulness," sexual sterility, or undesirability that occurs in
"The Wife of Bath's Tale." What we need to keep in mind, however, is
that much of the equation of age with ugliness is made by the knight. The fact
is that, in the end, the loathly (old) lady is the one who saves the knight's
neck and reforms him and this suggests
that old age makes one wise and useful. It does not, however, make one a
suitable marriage partner for a young bachelor, which is why at tale's end, the
old lady becomes a young damsel.
Poverty:
When her husband attacks her suitableness as a wife
because she is poor, the loathly lady launches into a long speech in "The
Wife of Bath's Tale" that includes a meditation on the virtues of poverty.
Coming right after her longer consideration of the origins of gentility, the
lady's poverty speech sometimes repeats the same technique, attempting to
convince the knight that, just as those who aren't gentlemen are still
"gentil," those who are poor can still be rich. To do this she points
to various things poor men have that rich men lack, including freedom from fear
of robbery and a general sense of
contentment. These 'possessions,' the lady is saying, actually make the poor
man rich. The lady also points to various virtues of poverty-as-poverty,
including a knowledge of God, self, and who one's friends and enemies are. The
lady's discussion of poverty has nothing to do with the material day-to-day
lives of the poor; instead it explores the concept of poverty in an abstract
way that draws upon a tradition of writings about poverty by authors like
Seneca and Boethius.
