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The Wife’s use of the word gloss sheds some light on her relationship with the text. Clerks, such as Jankyn, read and write texts. They are in a position of authority in regards to the creation and dissemination of literate ‘knowledge’. The Wife, aware of the clerics’ function, observes of Jankyn that “so wel koude he me glose” (l. 509). With this remark, the Wife presents herself as a text, to be read and interpreted. However, she is more than just that. In the General Prologue, Geoffrey observes that she is also a cloth maker, a weaver of text(iles). The significance of this is revealed by the fact that text and its cognate textile are descendant of the Latin verb texere, to construct, weave. Hence, we might think of the Wife of Bath as a producer of text (namely, her prologue and tale). However, she is not a text weaver like Jankyn and the other clerks. She reads against ‘authority’ in a manner that is perhaps not unlike Derrida’s reading “in a certain way” (885). The Wife of Bath reads misogynistic authority “in a certain way” and thereby subverts its discourse to produce her own discourse or ‘text’.

How might we characterize the Wife’s discourse? The discourses of “Experience” and “auctoritee” are those that the Wife wishes to address, and she creates a discourse of ‘experience’ to counter the discourse of ‘authority’. In the Wife’s discourse of experience, there are phrases such as “But me was told”(l. 9 [cf. “I radde”]), which she gives a position of privilege. Yet, knowledge gained through reading is condemned: “Men may glosen up and doun,/ But wel I woot…” (l. 26-7 my emphasis). Here the Wife directly contrasts literate knowledge with her own experiential knowledge. Yet, the truly subversive nature of the Wife’s argument is the construction of her discourse. She not only reads against the dominant misogynistic discourse, but she also makes it her own, when it suits her to do so. Bakhtin notes that

… people talk most of all about what others talk about—they transmit, recall, weigh, and pass judgment on other people’s words, opinions assertions, information; people are upset by others’ words, or agree with them, contest them, refer to them and so forth (530).

The Wife of Bath is no exception to this. There is no better way to strengthen an argument than to use
opponents’ words against them, something that the Wife does very well. Bahktin writes that such a practice is “a way to formulate verbally and stylistically another’s speech and a way to provide an interpretive frame” (531). Some else’s speech, when framed in another’s discourse, can never have its original context and meaning. The Wife exploits this ‘framing’ technique in her two main attacks on the discourses of ‘authority’—her discussion of economics of sexuality and her ‘debate’ on marriage with the clerics.

When it comes to economics, the Wife of Bath is a shrewd salesperson. As a cloth merchant, she knows the quirks of the buying public. She concludes that their attitudes toward the acquisition of goods is similar to their attitudes about the acquisition of wives:

Thou seist that oxen, asses, hors, and houndes,

They been assayed at diverse stoundees;

Bacyns, lavours, er that men hem bye,

Spoones and stooles and al swich housbondrye,

And so been pottes, clothes, and array;

But folk of wyves maken noon assay,

Til they be wedded… (ll. 285-291).

Aware of this type of feeling, the Wife promotes a clever market-control ploy to sell her wares. However, it is not cloth that she intends to sell:

Greet prees at market maketh deere ware,

Ans to greet cheep is holde at litel prys;

This knoweth every womman that is wys.

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[ originally posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2004 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Everything, Media, On Texts, Papers. ]