Swindling and Swinking – The Wife of Bath and the Unbound Text by risa
By Kamal Fox
Who can control the Wife of Bath? In the portrait presented in the General Prologue, the Wife of Bath seems larger-than-life. We read of her “ten pound” kerchiefs (l. 454), her red stockings (l. 456), her five
husbands (l. 460), and her hat that is as broad as a shield (l. 470-71). The Wife laughs in the face of convention, and lives her life according to what pleases her best. She knows how to get what she wants and is not ashamed of using any method to get here desire. If you hit her over the head, she will come back for more. She is always willing to give advice, but hardly ever willing to receive it. She is an old husband’s nightmare and every lecherous man’s dream. She is entropy in a world that strives toward a divine order and balance. No doubt, she is one of Chaucer’s most indelible, unique and dynamic characters.
Her description seems to be a dense catalogue of all her excesses. And indeed it is, for in excesses we see the presence of ‘givens’. Perhaps this is why she is of so much interest to scholars. For years, they have tried to pin her down: some view the Wife and her speeches as a response to the dominant misogynist discourse of the time; others see her as a spokesperson for the new and prosperous merchant class, making a claim for a new economic reality. Yet, no matter how she is ‘glossed’, the Wife of Bath always manages to wriggle free. In fact, it seems that she breaks loose from any text that attempts to encompass her. What sort of character has Chaucer created that seems to defy text itself?
Perhaps one of the issues explored in The Canterbury Tales is the Chaucerian concern about the production and dissemination of texts. Written in a time before copyright laws and mass-production, The Canterbury Tales serves also as a record of medieval scribal practices. Such practices did not demand the ‘accuracy’ that is so prevalent in modern editions. These ‘inaccuracies’ are addressed in the poem entitled, “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn”. In this work, Geoffrey warns his scribe, Adam, not “…to wryten newe,” otherwise “under thy long lokkes thou most have the scalle” (ll. 2-3). Geoffrey urges Adam to keep his writing “trewe” (l. 4). Does Chaucer make this poetic threat because he wishes to maintain some form of authorial authority? From our own historical point of view, we can speculate that if Chaucer feared that his works would not transmit clearly to posterity, his concern was verified three centuries later when Alexander Pope wrote: “Our sons their fathers’ failing language see,/ And such as Chaucer is shall Dryden be” (214).
Likewise, Chaucer scholars today have, of late, observed that the received editions of the Chaucerian corpus should not be treated as authoritative texts. Recently, a team of Cambridge scholars “[c]oncentrating on ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’… produced a computer generated family tree showing the relationships between 58 different fifteenth-century versions of this tale. The results show that a number of manuscripts mostly neglected by Chaucer scholars are in fact likely to be close descendant of the original” (1998082601.html). This suggests that, even today, Chaucer’s anxiety about the integrity of his texts is a legitimate concern. It is interesting to note that it is the Wife of Bath’s Prologue that yields these new genealogies and variant readings. It seems that the character of the Wife of Bath is employed to express Chaucerian concerns about the instability of language. It may seem dubious to claim that Chaucer purposely planned this; however, as we have quite clearly seen, this ‘instability’ is an inherent feature of the very text itself.
September 20th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
It is extremely interesting for me to read the post. Thanks for it. I like such themes and anything that is connected to them. I definitely want to read a bit more soon.
Anete Swenson
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