ENG 309 Presentation on Chaucer and Gender

1. Chaucer and Gender: Empowering
Women in the Wife of Bath
Dana Corbett – ENG309 – Professor Bellamy

2. Introduction
Research Questions
•
Being the most widely known story in
The Canterbury Tales, why would
Chaucer give the Wife of Bath so much
character and authority?
•
What was Chaucer‟s intent when he
created the Wife of Bath‟s character?
•
Is he poking fun at her or is he
empowering her and her claim to
authority through her own experience?
•
Is Chaucer an advocate for women?
•
Does the Wife of Bath‟s Prologue and
Tale have any parallels to historical
women of the time?
Thesis
• Although a large amount of
Chaucerian scholarship is
dedicated to Chaucer and
the Wife of Bath as antifeminist and
misogynist, through his
literary use of the Wife‟s own
experience over male
authority, the insertion of the
loathly lady motif, and the
parallel to historically
notable women like Christine
de Pizan, Chaucer
experimented and
advocated for gender and
marriage equality in The
Wife of Bath‟s Prologue and
Tale.

3. Gender Restraints of
Medieval woman
• Medieval English women
were oppressed in such a
way that they were expected
and required to remain in the
private sphere whereas men
moved freely through the
private and public spheres
(Eaton 216).
• For a woman, remaining
within the private sphere
without hesitation or
resistance meant she was a
true, pure, and virtuous
woman and those who tried
to cross gender lines were
considered hazardous to
society (Eaton 217).

4. Overview of the Wife of
Bath‟s Prologue
•
The Prologue is twice as long as the Tale and is meant to be a teaching vessel. “Of
suffering in marriage, of which I am expert in all my life…Whoever will not be warned by
other men, shall be an example by which other men shall be corrected.'” (173-174, 181182).
•
The Wife of Bath married five times. She explained that “Three of them were good, and
two were bad” (196).
•
Her first three husbands were much older than her at marriage and easily manipulated and
took the Wife‟s verbal abuse. She claimed “they were very glad when I spoke to them
pleasantly, for, God knows it, I cruelly scolded them” (222-223)..
•
She described her fifth husband as “he was to me the greatest scoundrel” because he
treated her poorly and read anti-feminist biblical and classical rhetoric to her (505).
•
After their verbal and physical exchange, the fifth husband submits to his wife‟s will in a
mutual sense.
•
“After that day we never had an argument. As God may help me, I was to him as kind as
any wife from Denmark unto India, and also true, and so was he to me” (822-825).

5. The Wife of Bath Prologue
cont.
• The Wife consistently challenges the male authority regarding negative
feminine qualities such as desire, manipulation, sexuality, and multiple
marriages:
•
“Thou also compare women's love to hell, to barren land, where water may not
remain. Thou compare it also to Greek fire; the more it burns, the more it has
desire to consume every thing that will be burned. Thou sayest, just as worms
destroy a tree, right so a wife destroys her husband; this know they who are
bound to wives‟” (371-378).
• However, she admits that she is not a perfect wife by their standards and
embodies the misogynist rhetoric:
•
•
•
•
“It pleases them to be clean, body and spirit, of my state I will make no boast”
(97-98).
“He spoke to those who would live perfectly; And gentlemen, by your leave, I am
not that. I will bestow the flower of all my age in the acts and in fruit of marriage”
(111-114).
“In wifehood I will use my instrument as freely as my Maker has it sent” (149150).
“My husband shall have it both evenings and mornings, when it pleases him to
come forth and pay his debt” (152-153).

6. Overview of Wife of Bath‟s
Tale
• A young girl is raped by a knight
who is supposed to emulate
honor and chivalry, not brute
force.
• King Arthur advises Queen
Guinevere to sentence the
knight‟s punishment.
• “What thing it is that women
most desire” (905).
• Meets loathly lady in the forest.
• , "Women desire to have
sovereignty as well over her
husband as her love, and to be
in mastery above him” (10371040).

7. Overview of the Wife of
Bath‟s Tale Cont.
• The knight is forced to marry to Loathly lady.
• The knight claimed both her ugliness and ancestry would
degrade his family.
• “Wants us to claim our nobility from him, not from our ancestors
for their old riches” (1117-1118).
• “Thy nobility comes from God alone. Then our true nobility
comes from grace” and not social rank (1162-1163).
• The knight puts his faith in the loathly lady‟s hand and asked
her to choose what suits her best and gives her authority to
choose for herself. At their agreement, a metamorphosis
occurs where the loathly lady becomes both a true and virtuous
wife and a beautiful young wife.

8. Female Experience over
male authority
• Claim to authority through female experience:
• "Experience, though no written authority were in this world, is good
enough for me to speak of the woe that is in marriage; for gentleman
since I was twelve years of age… I have had five husbands at the church
door” (1-4, 6).
• Based on Greco-Roman classical literature as well as biblical scripture
about the negative characteristics of women, women were totally
oppressed by men who considered women to be inferior.
• However, as the Wife questioned, how can men possibly understand what
it meant to be a woman when they are male? Her point is to prove that
the men who portrayed women in such a derogatory fashion had little
knowledge of women‟s daily lives and activities (Surpayitno 9).
• To be fair, the Wife made a disclaimer in her argument that “It pleases
them to be clean, body and spirit, of my state I will make no boast,” “ (9798). She admitted that some men are correct in their prejudices but they
do not outweigh her experience with marriage and husbands (Suprayitno
10).

9. Female experience over
male authority
• Women were not supposed to speak or preach so the Wife
took a doubly chance by speaking against the church and it‟s
view on woman and marriage (Suprayitno 10). Speaking out
against the church based on experience and knowledge was
considered vulgar (Suprayitno 11). For example, wives were
supposed to remain chaste virgins in men‟s eyes, and the Wife
challenged the paradox by asking why “God commanded us to
grow fruitful and multiply” if “God commanded
maidenhood, then had he damned marriage along with the act”
(69-70).
• In her mind, a couple cannot multiply if virginity is required and
thought to be superior in a marriage (Suprayitno 11). Again
she demanded her experience in marriage was superior to that
of written male authority. “Of suffering in marriage, of which I
am expert in all my life…Whoever will not be warned by other
men, shall be an example by which other men shall be
corrected.'” (173-174, 181-182).

10. Female experience of male
authority
• The Wife discounted male authority altogether by alluding to the Aesop
fable about man painting himself strangling the lion. Going with her theme
of experience over authority, she claimed that men would fully understand
women‟s degradation at their hands had the tables been turned.
• She asks “Who painted the lion, tell me who? By God, if women had
written stories, as clerks have within their studies, they would have written
of men more wickedness than all the male sex could set right” (692-696).
The Wife is not portraying herself to be anything other than
herself, whereas men portray themselves to be upstanding gentleman
which is not always to case.
• If she could, she would paint men like her fifth husband. She is able to do
so in her tale to the other pilgrims who are mostly men. In a way, the Wife
is successful in painting a negative picture of abusive men like the knight
in her tale through Chaucer‟s words for the Medieval word to read

11. Female experience over male
authority in the wife‟s tale
• Female experience and authority is also seen within the Wife‟s
Tale.
• When the young girl is raped by the knight, instead of men
sentencing the knight to his punishment, King Arthur gives the
authority to his Queen, who is a woman and is better
experienced based on her own experience as a woman.
• She tells him to find out what women want. She is advocating
for women to voice their wants from men based on their own
experience as a woman in an oppressive world (Suprayitno
13).
• Again, Chaucer plays with the idea of letting all women have
an authoritative voice by airing their grievances with male
authority.

12. The loathly lady motif and gender
equality
•
Similarities between the Wife of
Bath‟s loathly lady and other
medieval loathly ladies, specifically
the Irish Sovranty Hag, show
unappealing women disband gender
boundaries and differences (Carter
330).
•
Typically, loathly lady characters are
found in forests where men were not
in control and social structure, such
as the patriarchal society in a
city, do not exist. (Carter 330).
•
It was also understood that women
embodied nature, so the Irish
Sovranty Hag and the Wife‟s loathly
lady have sovereignty in nature and
social structures are weakened
(Carter 332).

13. The loathly lady motif and gender
equality
• The earliest example of the loathly lady motif is Niall and the
Nine Hostages which tells the story of a group of brothers who
contest for the kingship in Ireland by going on a quest to prove
themselves (Carter 331).
• While hunting, the boys were approached by a loathly lady who
pursues him for a kiss in exchange for water. The Irish
Sovranty Hag, like the loathly lady in the Wife of Bath‟s Tale, is
extremely ugly and repulsive, and once Niall submits and
kisses her, much to his reluctance, the hag also shape-shifts
into a beautiful woman and rewards him with the kingship of
Ireland(Carter 331).
• In both literary cases, the king and knight have to accept and
submit to the loathly ladies in a sexual way in order to achieve
their honor and reward. The Irish Sovranty Hag
king, Niall, achieves his kingship and the knight achieves both
a beautiful and virtuous wife in the Wife of Bath‟s Tale.

14. The loathly lady motif and gender
equality
• In the context of the Wife of Bath‟s tale, the loathly lady
provided the knight with the answer to the Queen‟s
question, and saves his life. She tells him that “Women desire
to have sovereignty as well over her husband as her love, and
to be in mastery above him” (1038-1040). It is not sovereignty
in the sense that women want complete power over men and
husbands, but rather that women desire to have some control
and mutual agreement in their relationships with men.
• Men, in the Wife‟s mind, do not need to exercise total control
over women (Suprayitno 14). Once the knight understands the
loathly lady‟s lecture and submits to her knowledge, she, in
return, becomes what they both want based on her will alone.
The Wife of Bath asked for mutual agreement and gender
equality in marriage in her prologue and tale (Suprayitno 14).

15. Wife of Bath and Christine
de Pizan
•
. The Wife of Bath has been compared to fifteenth
century woman‟s advocate Christine de Pizan in their
dismissal of misogyny in medieval culture (Rigby 136).
•
The Wife of Bath‟s extensive prologue is said to
resemble Christine de Pizan‟s books defending
women such as Letter of the God of Love, The Book of
the City of Ladies, and The Book of the Three
Virtues(Rigby 136).
•
Both women argued that the men who made the
misogynist claims against women were old, bitter, and
weak (Rigby 136).
•
Like the Wife asked about Aesop‟s fable and the
painter of the lion, Christine also argued that if women
wrote similar texts about men, then women, too, would
show men in a wicked light (Rigby 137).
•
Both the Wife and Christine think that personal
experience is superior to the works of misogynist texts
(Rigby 137).

16. Conclusion
•
Being the most widely known story in
The Canterbury Tales, why would
Chaucer give the Wife of Bath so much
character and authority?
•
What was Chaucer‟s intent when he
created the Wife of Bath‟s character?
•
Is he poking fun at her or is he
empowering her and her claim to
authority through her own experience?
•
Is Chaucer an advocate for women?
•
Does the Wife of Bath‟s Prologue and
Tale have any parallels to historical
women of the time?
•
In summary, the Wife of Bath is a
memorable critical character because
of her constant disbanding and defeat
of misogynist male authorities
regarding women and marriage based
on her female experience. The Wife
admits that she is not a perfect wife, all
she wants for herself and other women
is a mutual relationship with husbands
based on equality and not oppression.
This is shown by the wife‟s experience
with her fifth husband and the loathly
lady‟s marriage to the knight. While it
is unknown what Chaucer‟s purpose
was, whether he meant to speak for
women‟s equal marital advancement or
whether he let the story tell itself, it is
certain that gender restrictions are
broken down by both the Wife, and the
loathly lady in the Wife‟s Tale through
Chaucer‟s words. Because of the
literary Wife‟s similarities to Christine
de Pizan, it makes the Wife‟s agenda
of her experience over male authority
more feasible and realistic.

17. Works Cited
•
Carter, Susan. "Coupling The Beastly Bride And The Hunter Hunted: What Lies
Behind Chaucer's Wife Of Bath's Tale." Chaucer Review 37.4 (2003): 329. Web. 20
Oct. 2013.
•
"Chaucer: The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale -- An Interlinear Translation." The
Geoffrey Chaucer Page. Trans. Larry D. Benson. Harvard College, 08 Apr. 2008.
Web. 27 Oct. 2013. <http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/teachslf/wbt-par.htm>.
•
Eaton, R. D. "Gender, Class And Conscience In Chaucer." English Studies 84.3
(2003): 205. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.
•
Lloyd, Jean. "Christine De Pizan." Christine De Pizan. King's College, Dec. 2005.
Web. 25 Oct. 2013. <http://departments.kings.edu/womens_history/chrisdp.html>.
•
Rigby, S.H. “The Wife of Bath, Christine de Pizan, and the Medieval Case for
Women.” The Chaucer Review, 35.2 (2000): 133-165. Web. 20 Oct. 2013.
•
Suprayitno, Setefanus. "Experience versus Authority: The Search for Gender
Equality in Chaucer's „The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale‟." A Biannual
Publication On The Study Of Language And Literature 1 (1999): 9. Web. 20 Oct.
2013.