- The document discusses the character of the Wife of Bath from Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Specifically, it asks whether Chaucer intended to empower the Wife of Bath or poke fun at her, and whether he can be seen as an advocate for women. - While some scholars view Chaucer and the Wife of Bath as misogynistic, the document argues that through giving the Wife authority based on her own experience over male authority, including in her tale the motif of the loathly lady who gains power over her husband, and parallels to historical women's advocate Christine de Pizan, Chaucer experimented with advocating for more equal gender and marriage roles. - The document

1. Dana Corbett
ENG309

2.  Being the most widely known story in The Canterbury
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Tales, why would Chaucer give the Wife of Bath so
much character and authority?
What was Chaucer’s intent when he created the Wife
of Bath’s character?
Is he poking fun at her or is he empowering her and
her claim to authority through her own experience?
Is Chaucer an advocate for women?
Does the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale have any
parallels to historical women of the time?

3. Although a large amount of Chaucerian scholarship is
dedicated to Chaucer and the Wife of Bath as antifeminist and misogynist, through his use of the Wife’s
own experience over male authority, the loathly lady
motif, and the parallel to historically notable women like
Christine de Pizan, Chaucer experimented and
advocated for gender and marriage equality in The Wife
of Bath’s Prologue and Tale.

4.  Medieval English women were oppressed in such a way that they
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were expected and required to remain in the private sphere
whereas men moved freely through the private and public
spheres (Eaton 216).
Women lived confined lives both physically and consciously
(Eaton 217).
For a woman, remaining within the private sphere without
hesitation or resistance meant she was a true, pure, and virtuous
woman and those who tried to cross gender lines were
considered hazardous to society (Eaton 217).
If a woman were to travel into the public sphere accompanied by
a male, she was expected to remain silent (Eaton, 217).
Of course, the Wife of Bath moves freely into the public sphere
without the guidance of a male and speaks freely while on her
pilgrimage.

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The Prologue is twice as long as the Tale and is meant to be a teaching vessel. “Of
suffering in marriage, of which I am expert in all my life…Whoever will not be warned by
other men, shall be an example by which other men shall be corrected.'” (173-174, 181-182).
The Wife of Bath married five times. She explained that “Three of them were good, and
two were bad” (196).
Her first three husbands were much older than her at marriage and easily manipulated
and took the Wife’s verbal abuse. She claimed “they were very glad when I spoke to them
pleasantly, for, God knows it, I cruelly scolded them” (222-223).
Her fourth husband was not easily manipulated and controllable like her first three.
She described her fifth husband as “he was to me the greatest scoundrel” because he
treated her poorly and read anti-feminist biblical and classical rhetoric to her (505).
After their verbal and physical exchange, the fifth husband submits to his wife’s will in a
mutual sense.
“After that day we never had an argument. As God may help me, I was to him as kind as
any wife from Denmark unto India, and also true, and so was he to me” (822-825).
She hopes to find a sixth husband on the pilgrimage to Canterbury.

6.  The Wife consistently challenges the male authority regarding negative
feminine qualities such as desire, manipulation, sexuality, and multiple
marriages:
 “Thou also compare women's love to hell, to barren land, where water may not
remain. Thou compare it also to Greek fire; the more it burns, the more it has
desire to consume every thing that will be burned. Thou sayest, just as worms
destroy a tree, right so a wife destroys her husband; this know they who are
bound to wives’” (371-378).
 However, she admits that she is not a perfect wife by their standards and
embodies the misogynist rhetoric:
 “It pleases them to be clean, body and spirit, of my state I will make no boast”
(97-98).
 “He spoke to those who would live perfectly; And gentlemen, by your leave, I am
not that. I will bestow the flower of all my age in the acts and in fruit of
marriage” (111-114).
 “In wifehood I will use my instrument as freely as my Maker has it sent” (149150).
 “My husband shall have it both evenings and mornings, when it pleases him to
come forth and pay his debt” (152-153).

7. After a hunt one day, a “lusty bachelor” of King Arthur’s court came
across a young woman and took her by “utter force” (883, 888).
Rape was punishable by death, but King Arthur advised his wife to
sentence the knight. She tells him to return in a year’s time and tell
her “what thing it is that women most desire” or else be sentenced
to death (905). On his quest, the knight asked multiple women
and the answered varied from lust, marriage, honor, and material
goods (925-928). On his journey to return without a solid answer,
the knight came across ladies dancing in the forest, and among
them was the “ugliest creature” who promised to help the knight if
she pledge his word to her (999). He returned to the Queen and
told her that "My liege lady, without exception," he said, "Women
desire to have sovereignty as well over her husband as her love, and
to be in mastery above him” (1037-1040).

8. Because the knight gave the loathly lady his word, she asks
the Queen to give the knight to her in marriage as she saved
his life, much to the knight’s dismay. Not only is the loathly
lady unattractive and old, she is also poor. The knight
claimed both her ugliness and ancestry would degrade his
family. On their wedding night, the loathly lady confronted
her knight by asking why he is distant and cold, for “certainly,
I did you never wrong yet… What is my offense? For God's
love, tell it, and it shall be amended, if I can” (1093, 10961097). He insisted that its her looks and low birth that is
offensive. She explained that she can change his view on this.

9. The loathly lady argued that on the case of her low birth, true
honor and nobility does not come from worldly goods and riches,
but from Christ, whom “wants us to claim our nobility from him,
not from our ancestors for their old riches” (1117-1118). She
continued that “Thy nobility comes from God alone. Then our true
nobility comes from grace” and not social rank (1162-1163).
Through her explanation, she claimed that her virtue makes her
noble. She presented him with an ultimatum; she can continue to
be ugly and true to him so he would never become a cuckold, or she
can be young and beautiful and potentially stray from their
marriage. The knight puts his faith in the loathly lady’s hand and
asked her to choose what suits her best and gives her authority to
choose for herself. At their agreement, a metamorphosis occurs
where the loathly lady becomes both a true and virtuous wife and a
beautiful young wife.

10.  The Wife immediately makes her claim in her prologue that she has more
experience in marriage than any written authority provides because she has
been married and widowed five times. Because men wrote all of the material
she quotes in her questioning, she is challenging male authority in general and
their concept of marriage, womanhood, and femininity because they had no
experience being a woman (Suprayitno 9-10).
 Based on Greco-Roman classical literature as well as biblical scripture about
the negative characteristics of women, women were totally oppressed by men
who considered women to be inferior.
 However, as the Wife questioned, how can men possibly understand what it
meant to be a woman when they are male? Her point is to prove that the men
who portrayed women in such a derogatory fashion had little knowledge of
women’s daily lives and activities (Surpayitno 9).
 To be fair, the Wife made a disclaimer in her argument that “It pleases them to
be clean, body and spirit, of my state I will make no boast,” “ (97-98). She
admitted that some men are correct in their prejudices but they do not
outweigh her experience with marriage and husbands (Suprayitno 10).

11.  Women were not supposed to speak or preach so the Wife took a
doubly chance by speaking against the church and it’s view on
woman and marriage (Suprayitno 10). Speaking out against the
church based on experience and knowledge was considered
vulgar (Suprayitno 11). For example, wives were supposed to
remain chaste virgins in men’s eyes, and the Wife challenged the
paradox by asking why “God commanded us to grow fruitful and
multiply” if “God commanded maidenhood, then had he
damned marriage along with the act” (69-70).
 In her mind, a couple cannot multiply if virginity is required and
thought to be superior in a marriage (Suprayitno 11). Again she
demanded her experience in marriage was superior to that of
written male authority. “Of suffering in marriage, of which I am
expert in all my life…Whoever will not be warned by other men,
shall be an example by which other men shall be corrected.'”
(173-174, 181-182).

12.  The Wife discounted male authority altogether by alluding to the
Aesop fable about man painting himself strangling the lion.
Going with her theme of experience over authority, she claimed
that men would fully understand women’s degradation at their
hands had the tables been turned. She asks “Who painted the
lion, tell me who? By God, if women had written stories, as
clerks have within their studies, they would have written of men
more wickedness than all the male sex could set right” (692696). The Wife is not portraying herself to be anything other
than herself, whereas men portray themselves to be upstanding
gentleman which is not always to case.
 If she could, she would paint men like her fifth husband. She is
able to do so in her tale to the other pilgrims who are mostly
men. In a way, the Wife is successful in painting a negative
picture of abusive men like the knight in her tale through
Chaucer’s words for the Medieval word to read.

13.  Female experience and authority is also seen within the
Wife’s Tale. When the young girl is raped by the knight,
instead of men sentencing the knight to his punishment,
King Arthur gives the authority to his Queen, who is a
woman and is better experienced based on her own
experience as a woman. She tells him to find out what
women want. She is advocating for women to voice their
wants from men based on their own experience as a woman
in an oppressive world (Suprayitno 13). Again, Chaucer
plays with the idea of letting women have an authoritative
voice by airing their grievances with men and their
oppressive nature.

14.  One of the pivotal characters in the Wife of Bath’s Tale is the
loathly lady in the forest. While its debatable whether Chaucer
was aware of the loathly lady motif in other medieval literature,
the similarities between the Wife of Bath’s loathly lady and other
medieval loathly ladies, specifically the Irish Sovranty Hag, show
unappealing women disband gender boundaries and differences
(Carter 330).
 Typically, loathly lady characters are found in forests where men
were not in control and social structure, such as the patriarchal
society in a city, do not exist. (Carter 330).
 It was also understood that women embodied nature, so the Irish
Sovranty Hag and the Wife’s loathly lady have sovereinty in
nature and social structures are weakened (Carter 332).

15.  The earliest example of the loathly lady motif is Niall and the
Nine Hostages which tells the story of a group of brothers who
contest for the kingship in Ireland by going on a quest to prove
themselves (Carter 331).
 While hunting, the boys were approached by a loathly lady who
pursues him for a kiss in exchange for water. The Irish Sovranty
Hag, like the loathly lady in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, is extremely
ugly and repulsive, and once Niall submits and kisses her, much
to his reluctance, the hag also shape-shifts into a beautiful
woman and rewards him with the kingship of Ireland(Carter
331).
 In both literary cases, the king and knight have to accept and
submit to the loathly ladies in a sexual way in order to achieve
their honor and reward. The Irish Sovranty Hag king, Niall,
achieves his kingship and the knight achieves both a beautiful
and virtuous wife in the Wife of Bath’s Tale.

16.  In the context of the Wife of Bath’s tale, the loathly lady
provided the knight with the answer to the Queen’s
question, and saves his life. She tells him that “Women
desire to have sovereignty as well over her husband as her
love, and to be in mastery above him” (1038-1040). It is not
sovereignty in the sense that women want complete power
over men and husbands, but rather that women desire to
have some control and mutual agreement in their
relationships with men. Men, in the Wife’s mind, do not
need to exercise total control over women (Suprayitno 14).
Once the knight understands the loathly lady’s lecture and
submits to her knowledge, she, in return, becomes what
they both want based on her will alone. The Wife of Bath
asked for mutual agreement and gender equality within
marriage in her tale (Suprayitno 14).

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The Wife questioned and challenged male authority and its misogynistic undertones in
marriage and women in her prologue. The Wife of Bath has been compared to fifteenth
century woman’s advocate Christine de Pizan in their dismissal of misogyny in medieval
culture (Rigby 136).
The Wife of Bath’s extensive prologue is said to resemble Christine de Pizan’s books
defending women such as Letter of the God of Love, The Book of the City of Ladies, and
The Book of the Three Virtues(Rigby 136).
Born in 1365 in Italy and later moved to France, Christine and Chaucer would have been
contemporaries even though the lived in separate countries. They were both involved in
court life as Christine’s father was Charles VI’s astrologer and Chaucer was husband to
Katherine Swynford’s sister, who later became queen of England (Lloyd).
Both women argued that the men who made the misogynist claims against women were
old, bitter, and weak (Rigby 136).
Like the Wife asked about Aesop’s fable and the painter of the lion, Christine also argued
that if women wrote similar texts about men, then women, too, would show men in a
wicked light (Rigby 137).
Both the Wife and Christine think that personal experience is superior to the works of
misogynist texts (Rigby 137).
Christine de Pizan wanted gender equality for women in a political and legal sense in the
Middle Ages, and not a revamping of social strictures (Rigby 137).

18. 
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Being the most widely known story in The Canterbury Tales, why would Chaucer give the
Wife of Bath so much character and authority?
What was Chaucer’s intent when he created the Wife of Bath’s character?
Is he poking fun at her or is he empowering her and her claim to authority through her
own experience?
Is Chaucer an advocate for women?
Does the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale have any parallels to historical women of the
time?
In summary, the Wife of Bath is a memorable critical character because of her constant
disbanding and defeat of misogynist male authorities regarding women and marriage
based on her female experience. The Wife admits that she is not a perfect wife, all she
wants for herself and other women is a mutual relationship with husbands based on
equality and not oppression. This is shown by the wife’s experience with her fifth
husband and the loathly lady’s marriage to the knight. While it is unknown what
Chaucer’s purpose was, whether he meant to speak for women’s equal marital
advancement or whether he let the story tell itself, it is certain that gender restrictions are
broken down by both the Wife, and the loathly lady in the Wife’s Tale through Chaucer’s
words. Because of the literary Wife’s similarities to Christine de Pizan, it makes the
Wife’s agenda of her experience over male authority more feasible and realistic.

19.  Carter, Susan. "Coupling The Beastly Bride And The Hunter Hunted: What Lies
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Behind Chaucer's Wife Of Bath's Tale." Chaucer Review 37.4 (2003): 329. Web.
20 Oct. 2013.
"Chaucer: The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale -- An Interlinear Translation."
The Geoffrey Chaucer Page. Trans. Larry D. Benson. Harvard College, 08 Apr.
2008. Web. 27 Oct. 2013. <http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/wbtpar.htm>.
Eaton, R. D. "Gender, Class And Conscience In Chaucer." English Studies 84.3
(2003): 205. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.
Lloyd, Jean. "Christine De Pizan." Christine De Pizan. King's College, Dec.
2005. Web. 25 Oct. 2013.
<http://departments.kings.edu/womens_history/chrisdp.html>.
Rigby, S.H. “The Wife of Bath, Christine de Pizan, and the Medieval Case for
Women.” The Chaucer Review, 35.2 (2000): 133-165. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.
Suprayitno, Setefanus. "Experience versus Authority: The Search for Gender
Equality in Chaucer's ‘The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale’." A Biannual
Publication On The Study Of Language And Literature 1 (1999): 9. Web. 20 Oct.
2013.