Characters:  a rapist knight (unnamed), Arthur’s queen (unnamed), and the "loathly lady" (unnamed) he meets on his quest.

        The "Wife of Bath's Prologue" is a work of literature so compellingly realistic that many students believe she is real, that the "Wife" is the author rather than Geoffrey Chaucer.  That is an astonishing achievement for a medieval author, and also an odd one.  Medieval authors wrote for fame, not for money, since copyright and print publication were, in this case, about 100 years in the future.  To create a character capable of usurping your own fame is a rather interesting strategy.  What about the prologue creates this "realizing effect"?  Can you spot specific moments when the Wife seems to materialize in your mind?  Her tale, by contrast, is a traditional medieval romance, though in miniature, modeled on those told of Gawain and set in King Arthur's court.  Nevertheless, the Wife-as-teller has left her mark on this tale because of the issues it raises which we can find in common in her prologue.  What's on her mind?

        Students like to ask whether the Wife is a "feminist." Of course she could not know any of the modern feminist movement’s political beliefs about the equality of rights under the law, a product of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy and American Revolutionary politics, but she definitely has positions that she marks out on gender lines. She also takes great delight in demonstrating her ability to dominate her older husbands, and in recounting her successful struggle with young Jankyn, her fifth and last husband (so far!).

• What is her point in all this, especially considered in the light of the pilgrimage’s tale-telling game?
• If the travelers are engaged in what Paul Strohm called "the social contest," struggling for the esteem and cooperation of their fellow pilgrims, how does the Wife expect her rhetoric to affect them?
• Pay close attention to the two pilgrims who interrupt the Wife.   Why would the Pardoner, the Friar, and the Summoner be roused to break the unspoken law of silence tale-telling usually imposes on an audience?  See what she is talking about immediately before their speeches, and note what the Friar and Summoner come to quarrel about. Also note how the Wife answers the Friar’s interruption in the tale’s introduction. 

        The Wife of Bath has been interpreted as Chaucer's deliberate moral satire upon the human, especially female, sexual appetite. She can be read as a type of the fallen woman or, in biblical terms, Eve. For a careful discussion of this reading, see D. W. Robertson Jr.'s Preface to Chaucer (1962).  Robertson is a "patristic" critic, reading the medieval text (no matter how secular) in terms of its potential for reference to religious doctrine. Defenses of the Wife are a commonplace among Feminist critics, especially, and New Historicists, as well, who doubt the patristic critics' ability to read culture through only one cultural "lens," that of church doctrine and literary texts influenced by it. There are important advantages of both ways of reading Alison's tale, and the astute student would do well to neglect neither.

        Chaucer's "tales of Canterbury" never existed in a single, bound collection that kept the tales in one order. Rather, it appears Chaucer often performed chunks of the tales orally at court and in other locations, and that he adapted them as he wrote new tales to incorporate more and more intricate relations among tales and tellers. In the case of the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, to whom and to what tale sequence is she responding when she belts out her first lines which challenge "auctority" (book-learning) with the power of "Experience" (what they call, in Hoffberger, empirical knowledge)? What has she just heard that convinces her the pilgrims are ready for an interruption, unmediated by "Our Host," that answers some kinds of questions or adjusts some kinds of imbalances about "the woe that is in marriage"?
Four major tale orders survive, each posing the Wife's "answer" against a different male teller's implicit "question":

1. the oldest manuscript puts her after the Cook's fragment, which ends the tale of a riotous apprentice's hell-bound career with the news that he had shacked up with a London buddy whose wife pretended to keep a shop but really was a prostitute;
2. the "a" group manuscripts have the Wife answering the lawyer's tale of "Constance," who suffers countless indignities at the hands of numerous evil mothers-in-law until finally reunited with her son and husband by divine intervention, doing nothing at all to save herself except being a demure Christian woman;
3. the "b" and "d" group manuscripts' "Wife" answers the Clerk's tale of Patient Griselda, whose husband tests her by pretending to execute her children before restoring them too her ("just testing you, honey!") and the Merchant's tale of an old knight married to a young wife who cuckolds him with the household's young squire;
4. and the "c" group manuscripts put the Wife in the position of answering the Squire's sad tale of Canace, daughter of an oriental king, just after she has heard the marvelous tale of a falcon who has tried to kill herself because a male falcon betrayed her.

See a pattern here? How might that "front-load" the Wife's furious and lengthy tirade about how she dominated her first three husbands, how she and her third competed in adultery, drunkenness and violence, and how her fifth (Jankyn) almost killed her before she tamed him? And how might it shape the tale she tells about King Arthur's rapist knight and the "Loathely Lady" who tames him?  For a link to a list of all the Canterbury Tale orders, click here.  You do not have to master any or all of these approaches to the tale if you are reading it in a survey like English 211, but it is an interpretive opportunity you have before you if you are reading it in a seminar on the Canterbury Tales.  So many kinds of courses, so many ways to read.
 

Some additional textual issues you might find useful for anchoring papers:

• Her prologue's first word, "Experience," is posed against "Auctorite" (book-based learning) as her sufficient source of wisdom.  How does the prologue play, sometimes roughly, with book-based learning, and how does the Wife dramatize her sources of "experience"?  See these images of "Auctorite" in the form of the glossa ordinaria on a page of Justinian's legal code and a scribal illuminator's attempt to represent Alison in the Ellesmere MS illumination of the Wife (from the facsimile edition). 
• Why does the wife describe herself as one who has risen by marrying old men and outliving them, whereas the narrator says she makes lace so successfully that her fame has spread to Europe and back?  Remember that the Canterbury Tales developed over decades of Chaucer's life, and he may have revised them many times.  Some critics have even suggested that the tale now assigned to the Shipman might originally have been hers.  See the summary of the evidence in the first interpretive issue on this web page for "ShipT."  How might these changes, if they are what they seem to be, reveal Chaucer's changing conception of the Wife's character?
• What do those two different kinds of characterization do to the reader's focus regarding the character's motive?
• Why does she choose the type of tale she does, and why does she (or Chaucer) alter the ending from its traditional strategy of forcing the over-bearing knight to accept either a homely but failthful woman at court, or a beautiful but faithless woman in his bed?
• How likely is it that her story is true? That is, given her age at marriage and the ages of her husbands, who would you expect to rule the ménage, and who would control sexuality, according to your own judgment? Might she have any reason to falsify the tale of her youth?
• Why does the Wife lose her place in her own narrative when she tells her audience about the Lenten ride into the country she took with Jankyn, her family's young clerk (literate assistant), and about the deception she practiced upon him regarding the dream?
• How do you interpret her confusion when she says, "But now, sire, lat me se what I shal seyn / A ha! By God, I have my tale ageyn"? Is it only a detail meant to increase the reader's belief in her historical reality, or is it something we are meant to take as indicative of her inner psychological state? That is, does she lose her tale, and if so, does it mean she has lost something more important?
• How would you compare her character with the self-portrait Margery Kempe delivers to us, especially regarding her debate with the Archbishop of York over her right to speak openly (and loudly) about matters of faith?  Click here to see more about that debate on the Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich web page.  Look at "issue" number 4.

        The Ellesmere Manuscript (created in the 15th century, after Chaucer's death) is the most beautiful MS of the Canterbury Tales.  It currently is held in a nitrogen-filled case at the Huntington Library, San Marino California.  To see the Huntington Library's image of the first page of the Wife of Bath's Prologue, illustrated with the scribal illustrator's version of the Wife, click here.  The library has a full-size black-and-white photographic facsimile of the entire Ellesmere MS in the Rare Books Room at OVERSIZE 826.2 C49Hca, 1997.

        Chaucer's short poem, "Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton" (Riverside Chaucer 655-6), tells its addressee (Sir Peter or Sir Robert Bukton?) that Chaucer dares write "no wikkednesse" of marriage, though he may explain "The sorwe and wo that is in mariage" (6).  However, he goes on to describe marriage as a trap which no unmarried man should risk, and advises him "The Wyf of Bathe I pray yow that ye rede / Of this matere that we have on honde" (29-30). 

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