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She is not afraid to question the standard readings of biblical texts and works to expose the motivations behind such readings. The Wife comments on the rather arbitrary and coincidental conclusion

That sith that Crist ne wente nevere but onis

To weddyng, in Cane of Galilee,

That by the same ensample taughte he me (ll. 10-12).

Likewise, she sees no reason to condemn the Samaritan well woman for having had multiple husbands (ll. 15-22). And she also observes that, among the Old Testament patriarchs, polygamy was the norm, not the exception. Yet, her most cutting criticisms are her questions:

Where can ye seye, in any manere age,

That hye God defended marriage

By expres word? I pray yow, telleth me.

Or where commanded he virginitee? (ll. 59-62).

With these questions, the Wife exposes the common medieval biblical discourse as a mere gloss and from here she appropriates the Bible as a part of her own discourse. But the clerks are not so easily disposed of. If the Wife of Bath represents the instability of text, the clerk, Jankyn, represents the force that orders, binds, and edits text. No doubt, he is truly a match for Dame Alys.

As the Wife of Bath recounts, Jankyn’s favorite pastime is reading from his “book of wikked wyves” (l. 685). As a clerk, Jankyn reads and writes texts. It is not unlikely that he complied the book of wicked wives himself and in doing so has formed a discourse of misogyny. The Wife describes this process:

That any clerk wol speke good of wyves,

But if it be of hooly seintes lyves,

Ne of noon oother womman never the mo.

Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?

Her allusion to Aesop suggests that the matter is entirely one of perception. In this type of discourse, the only woman worthy of mention is the saint. When a man paints a lion, he paints from his own point of view, his own subjectivity and dominance. The book of evil wives is, in this respect, a portrait from a clerk’s-eye-view of the world of women—a world that threatens men and must be subdued.

Yet, we know too well that the Wife of Bath will not be subdued. When Jankyn reads to her story after story of classical women who effected the demise of ‘great’ men, she grows angry and acts—

< p>And whan I saugh he wolde never fyne

Al sodenly thre leves have I plyght

Out oof his book, right as he radde (ll. 788-91).

It would be far too simple to see this action as only an expression of rage. It is also a highly profound symbolic act. The leaves of a book are bound and fixed into an order. In a similar manner, the women in the book of wicked wives are bound and fixed in discourse. By tearing the pages out of book, the Wife of Bath has ‘unbound’ these so-called ‘wicked wives’. After all, when a page is torn from a book, it looses its context and consequently it looses all the associations and presuppositions that are inherent in an ordered, bound volume. The burning of the book suggests the final victory of the Wife of Bath and her desire for textual emancipation.

With all of her excesses and unpredictable behavior, the Wife of Bath draws our attention to some of the ‘givens’ of medieval society. Her goal is to write against the norm in both the composition of her Prologue and Tale and also in the way she lives her life. The key to this adversative writing (or rewriting) is the creation of tensions by the conflicting discourses of authority and experience. These tensions create instability within the text that causes ambiguities and vagueness. If Chaucer did create the Wife of Bath as a means of giving commentary on the unstable nature of texts and discourses, we might also wonder whether he thought that this was a grave concern. Or would he agree with the assertion of the Wife—“Experience, though noon auctoritee/ Were in this world, is right ynogh for me…” (ll.1-2).

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