The Wife of Bath: Depiction in the General Prologue

I'm Ana Coy. I'm a lecturer in old and middle English at Cable College Oxford,

and this is a course of lectures about the wife of Bath's prologue and her tail.

Now, in this very first lecture,

I'd actually like to start by going back and looking at the general prologue and

thinking about the physical description of the wife of Bath that Chaucer gives us.

When he's first introducing the pilgrims,

the narrator introduces her by saying

a good wife there was of beside Bath,

but she was some deal deaf, and that was Cather.

We're told that this woman is a successful cloth maker

of cloth making. She had such an haunt

sheep acid, them of a prayer and of gaunt

to regions that are very famous at this time in the wool trade.

We're told that her clothing is very elaborate and very colourful,

her cover chiefs full fine,

wearing of ground I dos to swear they weighed in £10 that on a Sunday,

wearing upon her head.

Her Hoesen were a fine scarlet red, full strata tied

and shoes full, moist and new.

Bold was her face and fair and read of you.

We learned that she has been frequently married.

She was a worthy woman all her life. Husband's at church door.

She had five without another company in youth,

and we learned that she is well travelled thrice. Had she been at Jerusalem,

she had pastored many a stronger stream

at Rome she had been, and at Balon, at Dallas, at Saint Jean and at Cologne.

We also learned that she possesses several

physical features that we might perceive today

as being less than physically attractive.

Gap toothed. She was smoothly for to say,

and we learned that she is wearing a foot mantle about her hip is large

and on her feet, a pair of spurs, a pair of spurs sharp.

But nevertheless she seems to be a very friendly, gregarious member of the company.

In fellowship. Well, could she laugh? And Carper

and

somebody who knows a thing or two about love and sex,

of remedies of love she knew perchance,

for she could of that art, the older dance.

Now this portrait has been perceived by some readers as a piece of comic realism

as a convincing description of what a wealthy woman of the third estate

might have looked and sounded like at the end of the 14th century.

Other people have read this as a comedic version,

seeing the wife of Bath as the possessor of a comically larger than life sexuality

contained in elements of her appearance,

such as

large hips and gap teeth.

She has been compared to other larger than life characters in English literature,

such as Shakespeare's Falstaff.

In this lecture, I'd like us to ask

to what extent is the wife of Bath presented as

a comic feature through her embodiment in the general prologue?

To what extent are we meant to find her embodiment funny?

And to what extent do we?

One interesting thing to note here is that due to language

and culture changes since the time that she also was writing,

we don't always immediately possess

the keys to reading this physical description

in quite as straightforward a manner as we might assume.

For example,

let's talk about the line her Hoesen were of fin scarlet red.

Now this is surely telling us about the colour of the wife of bath stockings.

Pretty straightforward, right?

Well, yes and no.

An extra dimension of this portrait becomes apparent when we learn

that at this stage of the development of the English language,

the word Scarlett does not necessarily refer to colour.

Instead, Scarlett can actually be a type of rich and expensive cloth,

which could come in a variety of colours.

Green, brown, white and red.

Read after a while becomes the usual colour for Scarlets,

and the two words eventually become synonymous.

In this case, it's true when we hear about the wife of bath stockings,

Scarlet Red is being specified.

But when we know that this is talking about the quality of the cloth,

the line suddenly makes a lot more sense.

Chaucer isn't doubling up and telling us that the stockings are red red.

He's in fact giving us information both about the quality of the cloth

and the colour of the fabric.

Similarly, the scholar Peter Beyeler has pointed out some problems with the line.

A foot mantle about her hip is large

now.

This is a line that has traditionally been read as adding to

the portrait of the wife as being a physically imposing person,

or maybe a comically matronly figure.

As 21st century readers.

I think we have a whole set of associations with broad or large hips

that we tend to bring to bear on our reading of this character.

As Bible notes,

Problem number one here is that it's actually quite

difficult to say what the foot mantle really is.

It's often been glossed by editors and translators as

a kind of outer skirt or a riding skirt.

It's quite a rarely used term Bible places choices,

use of it as the first recorded incidents

and apparently also the last for more than 100 years.

So what, actually, is this foot mantle?

Peter Butler suggests that rather than being any kind of skirt,

the foot mantle may instead have been a kind of

one piece garment that was pulled up from the feet

a bit like a very baggy pair of over trousers

like the waterproof trousers that you might wear cycling today.

And as evidence for this, he cites the illustration of the wife of Bath

that appears in the famous Ellesmere manuscript.

As you can see here, the blue lower part of the garment in that picture

does indeed look like a pair of loose separated leg coverings

or trousers going up over the wife of Bath's dress.

This would enable her to travel without splashing her very

expensive clothes with mud on the road to Canterbury.

It would also allow her to ride astride the horse, as you can see he's doing,

and she's doing in the manuscript picture there

rather than sitting side saddle.

So if this is what Foot Mantle is,

it actually seems to be a very practical garment,

which allows the wife of Bath to protect her clothing

and her modesty while she's travelling,

by the way,

then goes on to suggest that another way of reading the term large in that line

might be to see it as an adverb rather than an adjective.

So in modern English, we use large just as a word

to describe a thing or a person.

But in Middle English, we can read it as an adverb, meaning large lee or loosely.

So instead of translating that lioness,

she wore an over skirt around her large hips.

We could, in fact, read it as

she wore a protective riding garment

loosely around her hips.

Now as small.

The difference is this is, I think,

such a reinterpretation does change our perception of the wife of bath.

Some 20th century critics have shaped their

interpretations of her prologue and her tail

around this idea of reading her as a physically large and imposing person.

The term obesity has even been used

even more problematically.

Some readers have suggested that this is a reason why

she should be read as being unattractive and off putting,

perhaps transposing some modern day beauty standards onto 1/14 century woman.

It's important to read the description of the

wife of Bath in its historical context.

To get a sense of just how carefully Chaucer has drawn this character

and to think about how this affects our reading of her prologue and her tail.

On a similar note, we hear that she has gapped oost, gap toothed,

and although we might read this as

an unattractive physical feature in the 21st century

for Chaucer, this is actually a link to the mediaeval physiognomy.

Now the physiognomy was a type of pseudo medical text

that claimed to allow the reader to learn how to interpret the

personalities of the people around him by their facial and bodily features.

Now the Riverside Chaucer

notes that gapped teeth in the physiognomy might indicate an envious,

irreverent, luxurious, bold, faithless and suspicious nature,

while the wife of Bath's Red Face

might indicate immodesty,

talkative nous and drunkenness all potentially quite useful

shortcuts for introducing this character to us.

What we need to remember here is

that the context isn't necessarily UN attractiveness,

but boldness and sensuality.

That's what these physical features are meant to communicate to us.

We also need to look at the wife of Bath's embodiment in terms of her social class.

As we learn in the general prologue. She works in the wall trade,

and she probably comes from a cloth making family.

Technically, she would then be classed as part of the third estate,

the laboratories,

the people who work for a living

as opposed to the aristocracy

and the clergy who pray for a living.

But

as the scholar Mary Carothers has pointed out,

as a cloth maker in the west of England at this time,

the wife of Bath is engaged in one of the most lucrative trades possible.

Furthermore, her status as a female member of this trade

is not actually all that unusual.

In records of the time we know that there were women,

will merchants and women clothiers

many of them, in fact,

widows carrying on the family business after their husbands had died.

We know that some of them were very wealthy. Indeed,

this may go some way towards explaining that

£10 of kerchiefs that we hear being described

that the wife wears on her head

a display of wealth and status.

We might otherwise be tempted to read this back into the idea of

the wife of Bath as possessing

this comically exaggerated femininity and sexuality.

But perhaps instead, we should be reading those kerchiefs

as a display of wealth and of her success in business.

As I'll discuss in a later lecture,

the wife of Bath's class background is potentially very interesting

in light of the tale that she chooses to tell,

she tells a romance,

which is traditionally a genre associated with the aristocracy.

Yet she inserts into it a lecture on the ways in which gentility

should be measured by people's actions and behaviour,

not by their bloodlines and social status.

The wife of Bath's sexuality also enters into her description.

In the general prologue, we are told that husband's at church door, she had five

and the number of husbands that she has will

become highly relevant in the prologue to her tail.

To some extent, yes,

it can be treated as evidence of lecherous nous of the idea that she enjoys

the condition of being married perhaps a

little more than maybe considered entirely appropriate.

However,

it's also interesting to note that both the narrator in the general prologue

and the wife herself in her own prologue

a very careful to establish her as a legally married woman

in the first few lions of the wife of Bath's prologue.

As we can see, she repeats this idea, she says. For Lord Ing's

sit by, 12 year was of age

Thong could be God that is a turn on leaf Husband's at church door. I have had five,

so why repeat this information about the church door?

What's particularly important about that that we need to be told about it twice?

Well,

a wedding conducted at the church door

was fulfilling one of the several essential phases

that a marriage had to go through.

In order to be viewed as an official wedding,

the church door is actually the third stage in a four stage process.

The first stages are the formal betrothal ceremony and the reading of the bands,

and the fourth stage is the kneeling at the altar and the formal blessing.

while a marriage conducted outside the church without going

through all these stages could be considered legitimate.

The mention of the church door here clearly establishes

that the wife of Bath is not an adulteress and that her marriages are

not clandestine marriages but rather are official

and recognised as such by the church.

Also,

the church door is where the couple would

formally make their financial arrangements for the marriage.

Typically, the woman would bring a dowry from her family,

and the man would bring a dour to provide for his wife in the case of his death.

So a widow's ability to obtain money and land from her late husband's estate

could depend on the marriage being executed

in the church at the church door with the witnesses

and the public recognition that would come through that process.

So by validating her marriage in this way,

the wife of Bath not only emphasises herself as being legally married,

she also validates her experience of being married,

which she will go on to set up as a powerful point of opposition.

She pits her experience against authority

in her prologue, which will come on to talk about in a moment.

Finally,

I'd like to talk about the fact that the

very first thing we're told about the wife of Bath

is the fact that she was some deal deaf,

and that was sick, Arthur.

Moreover, the story of how the wife of Bath became deaf

is the concluding episode. In her prologue,

we know that she was deafened by a blow that was given to her by her husband, Jenkin,

after she became infuriated by his reading from a book of mediaeval anti feminism

and tore pages out of it in retaliation.

So deafness bookends our understanding of this character.

It's the first and almost the last thing we're told about her.

What might it mean for us to think about the wife of Bath's embodiment

in terms of a person with a disability in the Middle Ages?

It might be worth remembering here that the pilgrims are on their

way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Thomas a Becket,

who, among other miracles, was believed to grant deaf people they're hearing back.

As Tory Pearman points out, this causes us to ask ourselves the question.

Is Alison travelling to Canterbury?

And has she travelled to some of the other

places of pilgrimage that are mentioned in her introduction?

Is she doing this in search of a cure for her deafness?

Critics have frequently chosen to read the wife

of Bath's deafness in a symbolic manner.

In religious discourse,

deafness is often used to signify willful disobedience or ignorance.

So, for example, someone 15

talks about people who worship idols.

It says their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's hands.

They have mouths, but they speak, not

eyes, have they? But they see not

They have ears, but they hear not

they that make them alike unto them.

So is everyone that trust within them.

So what this is saying is that

in choosing not to hear the word of God,

people who worship these idols make themselves voluntarily deaf.

And this is an idea that has sometimes been applied to the wife of Bath,

reading her as a person whose stubbornness and sinfulness

marked her out as being

some deal deaf to the word of God.

A reading that is backed up by her sometimes inaccurate use of Scripture.

Now the critic Ed Macias, who actually is deaf herself, rejects this reading.

She chooses instead to focus on the significance of

the injury that causes the wife of Bath's deafness.

She points out that head trauma so severe as to cause permanent loss of hearing,

is very severe indeed,

and that it actually only occurs quite rarely,

even nowadays under extreme conditions such as you might

find in a motorbike accident or a car crash.

She says that it's unlikely to be the case, therefore,

that Chaucer and his intended audience would have regarded what happens to

the wife of Bath as a common or a typical incident.

So this deafening can be read as a very traumatic moment

and as a permanent reminder of a very violent encounter

as a person who's contact with reading and literacy

probably came mostly orally, came through her ears.

The fact that Jenkin makes the wife of Bath death is potentially disastrous for her.

He may have cut her off from any further opportunities

to listen to Scripture and philosophy being read aloud.

However,

sales also suggests an alternative to a purely symbolic or

purely literal reading of the wife of bath deafness.

She points out that as a person with limited hearing,

the wife of Bath now also possesses the freedom

not to hear the other pilgrims when they interrupt her or make fun of her

to insist on her own right to her own discourse,

which may explain how she is able to keep

talking for such a long time during her prologue.

Finally,

it's interesting to note that the wife of Bath also

makes a direct reference to ears in her tail.

She gives us the story of King Midas from Ovid's metamorphosis.

Now, in this story,

we learn that Midas objects to the judgement

in a musical contest between Pan and Apollo,

and Apollo punishes Midas.

For this, he decides that since mid asses ears are so foolish,

he will turn them into the ears of a donkey.

Midas attempts to keep this a secret,

but the news is eventually let out by one person who is close to him.

In Ovid's original story, that's medicines barber.

But in the wife of Bath version, the person who lets the secret out is Mitt's wife,

as sales points out,

This has been read by many critics as further evidence for the wife's pension,

for misquoting and misinterpreting texts for getting things wrong.

But this retelling of the story can also be seen as symbolic

of the failure of power to maintain its approved narrative.

The news about Midas having donkey ears gets out

no matter how hard he tries to stop it,

whatever those in charge might try to do to control, talk to control discourse,

gossip and narrative,

the truth always eventually makes its way out.

So already we've seen here that there are multiple different ways of

reading the portrait of the wife of Bath in the general prologue,

just as there are multiple ways of interpreting the story

that she will go on to tell her fellow pilgrims.