Three Readings of the Wife of Bath
The Wife expresses a dream of masculine reading that is not antifeminist and a feminine relation to the condition of being read that is not antimasculinist-but she does so after having been bruised and battered, permanently injured by that clerk Jankyn in their concussive renovation of patriarchal discourse.
– Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics
A few years ago a colleague and I were talking about sexual harassment on the New England campus where we both worked. "Of course," she said, "no one would try anything like that with us!" Secretly flattered at her inclusion, I said nothing to counter her impression. My feminist colleague would not have understood the parts of my story I edit out in my work life.
During the four years I was married, I structured my days around not getting hit. I examined everything I said and did carefully in the hope of circumventing my husband's rage. We divorced over a decade ago. I don't look like a "battered wife" - although I would not set myself apart from the experience of women who fit the stereoptype more readily. I go for weeks and months now without thinking of it. I've grown accustomed to a self-imposed silence about these years. I brush away the urge to share this experience. My life runs more smoothly if people don't know. But a longthin scar still scores the center of my abdomen, marking my body with the memory of the only time I fought back.
The Wife of Bath is introduced in the prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales by her marital scar, "she was somdel deef" (445). Her deafness, we learn later, is a vestige of the night she ripped a page from her cleric husband's Book of Wikked Wyves, interrupting his lecture on all the sinful failings of womankind. He knocked her cold.
The pilgrims introduced in the prologue are all male except for the Wife and a submissive nun. They share their stories and their view of the world. With widening hips and voracious gap-toothed curiosity for all things sensual, the Wife elbows her way into the old boy's tale-telling circle of the Canterbury Tales prologue. We hear the Wife's sharp and confident voice in the prologue to her tale insisting that her bawdy experience carries more weight than patriarchal authority.
Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right y-nogh for me
To speke of wo that is in marriage:
For, lordinges, sith I twelf yeer was of age,
Thonked be God that is eterne on lyve,
Housbandes at chirch-door I have had fyve.
(1-6)Experience rather than written authority
Is in the world certainly enough for me
To speak of the woe that is marriage
For, sirs, since I was twelve years old
Thanks to eternal God
I have married five husbands.
The vectors of courage and foolhardiness intersect in her telling-she is both comic and poignant, but she will not be silenced.
I silence myself, by tasteful omission of my "tale" in the public world, but I too am a veteran, a seasoned campaigner in the war between the sexes. My scar is there as one testimony. Every time I see a doctor, share a dressing room, take a new lover, I revisit the experience of whether or not to tell, to gloss this mark on my body.
We were both drunk the night it happened. My hands finally insistent around his thick throat, he panicked, throwing his full weight behind the punch that ruptured my spleen. This did not feel that different from other beatings, except that a mysterious dull ache traveled back and forth between my abdomen and my shoulder. He left me lying on the kitchen floor.I called the local shelter just to talk. I blacked out while I was on the phone. I remember waking up on the floor with the phone in my hand and thinking fleetingly, "They sure didn't cover this at Riverdale Country Day School for Girls on Hudson." Someone came from the shelter and took me to the hospital, where emergency surgery was performed.
Once hitting became part of our relationship's vocabulary, it was a place we would always end up sooner or later. The spans of time varied where we thought it could be different. This job, this opportunity, this big break, we thought, could ultimately soothe the tension that sooner or later spilled over into the shouted insults and heavy pushes that signaled another attack. I would stand outside myself, watching myself become someone else, watching the man I loved become a monster.Sheltering my head or crying afterwards, I analyzed, as if to pass the terrible time, what I had done this time to elicit his outsized response. If I could understand, I could make it stop.
It is this desire to understand, the feeling of attachment to the oppressor that feels so shameful. A few weeks after the splenectomy, when I returned to have the stitches removed, the doctor ripped the bandage off. He looked at me with contempt, "Twenty minutes later and it would have been over."Maybe he'd seen the predictable aftermath of too many domestic incidents. I just wanted to leave the office as quickly as possible. My husband and I separated shortly after this incident, but it took me over a year to finalize the divorce.
People tend to focus on a woman's "going back for more." What is not examined is the intimate, ambiguously complex and explosive context within which the aggression occurs. It makes it so much harder to get help from authorities or even from other women.
The Wife of Bath does not apologize for her attachment to her husband.Jankyn was the husband she loved best, even though he beat her. The pattern of abuse and remorse, the sexual healings that follow the beatings arefamiliar to the twenty-first-century reader:
But in oure bed he was so fressh and gay,
And therewithal so wel koude he me glose,
Whan that he wolde han my bele chose;
That thogh he hadde me bete on every boon,
He coude winne agayn my love anoon.
(508-12)In our bed he was so fresh and gay
And could read me so well
he could always win my belle chose [literally, "good" or"beautiful thing"]
Even though he'd beaten me on every bone
He could again win my love anon
But what is not familiar is the Wife's happy ending in her tale of this marriage. It is with Jankyn that she eventually attains the "sovereigntee"that her tale asserts as the first desire of all women. Sovereignty, a balance struck between intimacy and autonomy, serves as the real life backdrop for her tale, a fable about a rapist-knight sentenced by a court of women to search out what it is women most desire.
My husband was so tender and remorseful after each incident, so attuned and committed to putting us back together after each shattering time, that I was seduced into believing that this time it would be different. We were mutually intoxicated again and again by the promise of the fresh start. I was too ashamed of my collaboration to get help or even to examine the experience. I was exhausted but enthralled by believing in him - his resolve, renewed and more fervent after each episode. We were cleansed and bonded and it would never happen again. We were a tiny nation in whatseemed a dangerous world, with an iron pact of mutual protection and solace.
Everyone told me not to marry him. He was uneducated, irascible, frequently unemployed. He was also funny, imaginative, passionate, sensitive, and crazy about me. Always in trouble as a young man growing up in a small rural town, at seventeen he was given the choice of juvenile detention or military service. Three tours of Vietnam made this unformed boy a volatile man. Civilian life cramped him. Stretched too large too early, he was stung by the reception he received as a returning veteran of an unpopular war.
It has taken me this long to come to terms with this experience, one which many of my friends still find distasteful to talk about. I no longer indulge in the victim's quiet shame, or the survivor's defiant pride. Trying to understand this experience has led me to trace how I came to think about being a woman, a lover, and a wife. Oddly, this medieval text and its centuries-old cross-dressed female character from a strictly patriarchal world has reentered my life at different stages, reflecting something different each time.
The first time I read the Wife of Bath's tale I was in high school, a private girl's school, where most students were upper middle class and Jewish. The teacher accepted that most students would not connect to this poem from the Middle Ages-ours was the era of relevance in education. But at sixteen I found the poem very relevant: it was about the dynamics between women and men. I was turned off by the Wife's mercenary marriages to her first three husbands, who were older and wealthy, but I was intrigued by her bawdy reveling in her sexual power and prowess. Most of the promising, virginal girls in my class saw the Wife as a laughable cartoon of a middle-aged slut.
It was the late sixties. The girls at my school had professional ambitions and considered themselves beyond Carolyn Dinshaw's observation of the Wife's approach to marriage "gaining control of [her] husband's property by ransoming her sexual favors" (213). Yet they practiced an updated version of the fifteenth-century sexual economics Chaucer has the Wife of Bath describe. "Virgin" was a term of art at our school. Girls would go pretty far, cordoning off only intercourse and the ring finger of the left hand for marriage. Marriage fantasies involved the prospective lawyers or doctors among us, those skinny boys with high SAT scores.
I had no intention of marrying for social position-I had my mother's career as an example of a woman distinguishing herself on her own merits. If I thought then about marriage at all, I thought of it as the deathbed of passion, like the civil companionate marriage my parents shared until I finished high school. Marriage seemed to me an arid lifeless refuge women turned to because they couldn't hold their own economically, selling their belle chose short for security's sake.
I was fully sexually active in high school. As the shiksa who "would," I felt both achingly vulnerable and smugly superior. I loved the passage where the Wife condemns with faint praise the purity of saints' virginity compared with the sexual solace that experienced wives could offer. Thelines helped me feel like a toothsome loaf of whole wheat on a shelf of "precius" Wonder bread in the burgeoning age of health food.
• • •
The second time I read the Wife of Bath's tale I was in college. I played the Wife and doubled as the loathly lady of the tale for a student-made film. We sat around in heavy costumes under shaky, jury-rigged lights, eating messily out of trenchers and hoisting foaming chargers of beer for take after take.
The women at my college were forming consciousness-raising groups. The serious, angry tone of the women's groups made me feel shallow and inadequate. Sisterhood, as it was practiced at this small Vermont college, seemed to preclude the 100-watt flirtation I enjoyed in the company of men. I was equally taken aback by the men's response, the chilly aftermath of late-night passionate discussions of literature that ended in bed.
Like Emma Goldman, I wanted a free-love revolution where we could dance. The Wife of Bath lectures her fellow pilgrims on the fallacy of celibate men of the church imposing their canonical authority as having more weight than her hands-on experience. Like the Wife, I perceived the censure and ridicule from my peers and it only fueled my defiance. I opposed my experience to the would-be authority of both, men's double standard and women's doctrinaire exclusion.
In the Wife's tale I found a compelling image of marriage not evident in either the old-style oppressive marriages of my parents' generation or the newly minted "equal" liaisons my peers were forming. From another century came the ghost of a promise that men and women could be equal in love and erotically energized. The tale promised a mutual "sovereigntee" between men and women, warmed by a visceral understanding of each other's experience.
The Wife's tale opens with a rape. The rapist-knight is to be beheaded but the queen and her ladies intercede, proposing an alternative sentence. If he can return to court in a year and a day with the right answer to the question "What do women most desire?" his life will be spared. As the Wife is forcibly educated by her husband in the prevailing negative view of women through nightly readings from his Book ef Wyked Wives, so the rapist-knight is forced, on fear of death, to educate himself about women.
This year and a day exercise in forced empathy brings him to a teachable moment. After nearly a year of interviewing women who told him women most desired gay clothes and flattery, he meets the loathly lady, described as an ugly old woman, an archetype of the wise crone. He is so desperate about his impending settling up with the ladies of the court that he assents when she tells him that she knows women's greatest desire and will tell him, if he agrees to marry her. He hastily agrees and rushes to court with the loathly lady's answer, that women most desire "sovereigntee."
The ladies of the court agree and his life is saved. He then tries to circumvent his bargain with his elderly, unattractive counsel. He is forced, as he forced the maid, when the ladies at court learn of his deal with the loathly lady, to have the price exacted on his body. He must submit to the attentions of someone he did not choose. The knight tries to buy her off, begging "Tak al my good, and lat my body go" (1061).
But unlike the maid, he is given a choice of his hell. The loathly lady poses him the following riddle on their wedding night: would he prefer an ugly but true wife or a trophy wife who must be guarded from the attentions of other men? Utterly undone, the knight defers to his new wife in the Middle English equivalent of "You decide, dear." The loathly lady pulls aside the bedcurtain, revealing herself transformed into a beautiful and true wife for having had her "sovereigntee" conferred by her husband and lord. She will share his bed and his life as a sovereign being. This mythic happyever-after ending amplifies the Wife's ending to her prologue, where she closes with a final reconciliation with Jankyn.
A year after our separation, my husband and I went on a date. The evening started out great, but somewhere after the third or fourth drink, the trapdoor dropped out of our good time, as it always did. We argued in the parking lot. He slapped me. Not hard, but we both knew instantly that normal wouldn't ever have our name on it. He rode off on his motorcycle in a rage and later, going over sixty miles an hour, hit the back of a van, rupturing his spleen.
The next day, I stood over him in the intensive care unit, watching the labored rise and fall of his chest and stomach, now stapled closed, a brawny version of my own healing scar. Tears coursed down my face. Since the slap the night before, I knew the relationship was over. But I still felt loyal to his body, trained to his moods, sensations, and experiences. He was not awake yet. I knew from my operation a year earlier that when he did wake it would hurt him even to breathe.
While I was married, I worked in bars. Occasionally I told the truckers and fishermen some of the raunchier Canterbury Tales. Sometimes I told the story of the Wife of Bath just to watch my listeners' faces when I told them the punch line: when the story was written.
Women of the Middle Ages had little place in public life and were totally subjected to their husband's will in the home. With no legal or economic recourse, women could not inherit land or represent themselves in court. Yet the patristic readings that form the social backdrop for the Canterbury Tales (the text for Jankyn's Book of Wikked Wyves, the catalyst of the final battle with the Wife) attribute frightful atavistic power to women's sexuality:
Thou lykenest eek wommanes love to helle,
To bareyne lond, ther water may not dwelle.
Thou lyknest it also to wilde fyr;
The more it brenneth, the more it hath desyr.
(371-374)You liken women's love to hell
To barren land, where no water may dwell
You liken it also to a wood [forest] fire
The more it burns [consumes], the more it desires.
A powerful loathsome creature with a million vices, she will drain a man dry, rob him of his earthly goods, and make heaven's doors slam shut on him by inciting his uncontrollable lust.
In neighborhood bars like the ones in which I worked, the same stereotypes prevailed. The woman who drains you and deceives you, wielding tremendous power in the home even while she is publicly powerless, is a perennial figure in after-work bar talk and the country music on the jukebox.
Misogyny hasn't progressed very far.
When my husband was angry, he would rail against me in ways that made no sense at all. The vision he painted of me in these moments sounds eerily interchangeable with the patristic pronouncements of the fifteenth century. In the twisted lens of his rage I became somebody so powerful, so selfish and harmful to him, that within the logic of the rage the only response was to hit hard, to silence and bully into submission. I let myself believe, or failed increasingly to question, the text of his rages, relinquishing any agency in the shape and quality of my own life.
The Wife of Bath describes a similar passivity in her marriage to Jankyn. In the free-fall of love, she gives up the resources she so painstakingly acquired over the course of her former marriages: the land and riches that provided her a degree of autonomy within a culture and economy where women were invisible. He beats her. She forgives him or reconciles herself to the beatings because of the passionate sexual aftermath. He attempts to isolate her, limiting her "gadding about." She is drawn in again and again by his "disdainful" love.
In my twenties, I was a fringe dweller, accumulating wreckage and the bruised glory of life lived at the edge. Marriage and career were for those others-those satisfied to live life small and safe. Another friend described those experimental years before we recognized that the meter was running, that there are no free miles: "I was always the front runner-way ahead of the crowd in the first lap. But there was no second lap around the track for me." Near thirty, I collapsed under the burden of too much open-ended choice and married eagerly, having a baby right away. Something to structure the next twenty years.
Unlike many women who are stalked indefinitely, or who suffer a deadly response to their leaving, I had married someone with just enough sanity or fear of public censure to fold when I finally took action and solicited support to leave. It took a long time to regain my sense of agency and to trust my own ability to make decisions, to finish a sentence, to disagree with a loved one. I am still ashamed of how easily I could be coaxed and persuaded to try again, of how much I wanted to believe that this time it would be different.
Since we broke up, my ex-husband has been only with women who are survivors of abuse, as though he can only speak the language of recovery with fellow expatriates. My ex-husband is a limited man in some ways, but I am moved by his struggle and thankful for the extent to which we have been able to become, intermittently, safe enough with each other to talk about what happened.
I still hang a fragile hope for men and women on my ex-husband's recovery. Through sobriety, the support of other men who have battered, and his wife's shared experience of abuse, he has developed a broader range of capabilities for dealing with his rage, short-circuiting his own shame and self-loathing. If he offers no other legacy to our son, he offers the cautionary possibility that blinding rage can be forcibly reversed, can be somehow managed or understood, can be overcome, with few resources beyond love and the desire to change.
• • •
In taking a Chaucer seminar in graduate school, in my forties, I was moved almost to tears listening to the professor quietly read the prologue of the Canterbury Tales:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures sote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour(1-4)
It was an auditory madeleine moment, invoking my youth and all the scarring authoritative experience that had passed, bringing me again to hearing these words. I was hearing them again in the company of smart young women with promising futures, now twenty years my junior, leaning into our teacher's scholarly passion for this lilting obscure language.
As a younger reader, I was drawn to the Wife's outlandish appetites and voracious energy. I now found poignant and precipitously close to home the passages in her prologue where she reflects on the surging gradations between the life stages of maid and matron:
But Lord Christ! whan that it remembreth me
Upon my yowthe and on my johtee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte roteUnto
this day it dooth myn herte bote
That I have had my world as in my tyme.
But age, alias! that al wol envenyme,
Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith.
Lat go, farewel! the devel go therwith!
The flour is goon, ther is namore to telle;
The bren, as I best can, now moste I selle;
But yet to be right merye wol I fonde.
But Lord Christ when I remember
my youth and beauty
It tickles me to my heart's root
And even now does my heart good
(469-479)That I have had my world as in my time.
But age, alas, would poisen everything,
Has bereft me of my beauty and my pith -
Let go, farewell, the devil take all!
The flour is gone, there is no more to tell;
The bran as I best can now must I sell;
But yet to be right merry will I try.
She is defiant, grateful for her checkered past, paradoxically reconciled to having to sell the bran as best she can having had her world and time. The most brilliant colors appear just as the leaf is ready to fall.
Critic Barbara Gottfried reflects on the Wife's "growing awareness both of the impossibility of comprehending the ultimate causes or reasons for things in one's life, and concomitantly, her sense that she has never really been fully in control of her life" (217).
In rereading the tale in the graduate seminar, I tried to solicit the opinions of the young women in my class on whether the Wife can be used as a feminist model. They looked blank-not seeing her as an exemplar, perhaps, of anything worth having. I did not disclose the personal history that fueled my curiosity. How would she be viewed by the next generation of women, who all seemed to me sodefiant, smart, and hopeful? Maybe I was afraid of how they would then view me.
The tale is a fable, its happy ending and the Wife's reconciliation with Jankyn a myth, written by a male author six centuries ago. What draws me in about this character is not that she is a battered wife who returns again but that she is willing to do battle, to be a worthy opponent despite all, fiercely insisting on a relationship that is both equal and mutually transformative. Bloody but unbowed, she insists on her autonomy, her freedom of speech, and her sexual enjoyment of her partner.
Amos Oz, a Middle Eastern writer, described in an interview what he called the Chekhovian versus the Shakespearean victory. In the Shakespearean victory, someone wins, a clear, glorious conquest—the stage is littered with corpses. In the Chekhovian model, there is no clear victor—everyone gets something but must give something dear for it. The curtain falls on the characters sitting around the table clenched, committed. The samovar hums. If we are, as nations, to survive, Oz says, we must learn to embrace the Chekhovian victory.
REFERENCES
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Edited by V. A. Volve and Glending Olson.
New York: Norton, 1989.
Dinshaw, Carolyn. Chaucer's Sexual Poetics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1990.
Gottfried, Barbara. "Conflict and Relationship, Sovereignty and Survival: Parables
of Power in the Wife ef Bath's Prologue." Chaucer Review 19 (1985): 202-24