The Wife of Bath
Summary
The
Wife of Bath begins the Prologue to her tale by establishing herself as an
authority on marriage, due to her extensive personal experience with the
institution. Since her first marriage at the tender age of twelve, she has had
five husbands. She says that many people have criticized her for her numerous
marriages, most of them on the basis that Christ went only once to a wedding,
at Cana in Galilee. The Wife of Bath has her own views of Scripture and God’s
plan. She says that men can only guess and interpret what Jesus meant when he
told a Samaritan woman that her fifth husband was not her husband. With or without
this bit of Scripture, no man has ever been able to give her an exact reply
when she asks to know how many husbands a woman may have in her lifetime. God
bade us to wax fruitful and multiply, she says, and that is the text that she
wholeheartedly endorses. After all, great Old Testament figures, like Abraham,
Jacob, and Solomon, enjoyed multiple wives at once. She admits that many great
Fathers of the Church have proclaimed the importance of virginity, such as the
Apostle Paul. But, she reasons, even if virginity is important, someone must be
procreating so that virgins can be created. Leave virginity to the perfect, she
says, and let the rest of us use our gifts as best we may—and her gift,
doubtless, is her sexual power. She uses this power as an “instrument” to
control her husbands.
At
this point, the Pardoner interrupts. He is planning to marry soon and worries
that his wife will control his body, as the Wife of Bath describes. The Wife of
Bath tells him to have patience and to listen to the whole tale to see if it
reveals the truth about marriage. Of her five husbands, three have been “good”
and two have been “bad.” The first three were good, she admits, mostly because
they were rich, old, and submissive. She laughs to recall the torments that she
put these men through and recounts a typical conversation that she had with her
older husbands. She would accuse her -husband of having an affair, launching
into a tirade in which she would charge him with a bewildering array of
accusations. If one of her husbands got drunk, she would claim he said that
every wife is out to destroy her husband. He would then feel guilty and give
her what she wanted. All of this, the Wife of Bath tells the rest of the
pilgrims, was a pack of lies—her husbands never held these opinions, but she
made these claims to give them grief. Worse, she would tease her husbands in
bed, refusing to give them full satisfaction until they promised her money. She
admits proudly to using her verbal and sexual power to bring her husbands to total
submission.
Analysis
In
her lengthy Prologue, the Wife of Bath recites her autobiography, announcing in
her very first word that “experience” will be her guide. Yet, despite her claim
that experience is her sole authority, the Wife of Bath apparently feels the
need to establish her authority in a more scholarly way. She imitates the ways
of churchmen and scholars by backing up her claims with quotations from
Scripture and works of antiquity. The Wife carelessly flings around references
as textual evidence to buttress her argument, most of which don’t really
correspond to her points. Her reference to Ptolemy’s Almageste, for instance,
is completely erroneous—the phrase she attributes to that book appears nowhere
in the work. Although her many errors display her lack of real scholarship,
they also convey Chaucer’s mockery of the churchmen present, who often misused
Scripture to justify their devious actions.
The
text of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue is based in the medieval genre of
allegorical “confession.” In a morality play, a personified vice such as
Gluttony or Lust “confesses” his or her sins to the audience in a life story.
The Wife is exactly what the medieval Church saw as a “wicked woman,” and she
is proud of it—from the very beginning, her speech has undertones of conflict
with her patriarchal society. Because the statements that the Wife of Bath
attributes to her husbands were taken from a number of satires published in
Chaucer’s time, which half-comically portrayed women as unfaithful,
superficial, evil creatures, always out to undermine their husbands, feminist
critics have often tried to portray the Wife as one of the first feminist
characters in literature.
This
interpretation is weakened by the fact that the Wife of Bath herself conforms
to a number of these misogynist and misogamist (antimarriage) stereotypes. For
example, she describes herself as sexually voracious but at the same time as
someone who only has sex to get money, thereby combining two contradictory
stereotypes. She also describes how she dominated her husband, playing on a
fear that was common to men, as the Pardoner’s nervous interjection reveals.
Despite their contradictions, all of these ideas about women were used by men to
support a hierarchy in which men dominated women.