Ful giltelees, by Goddes sweet pine!
For as an hors I koude bite and whine.
I koude pleyne, and yit was in the gilt! (384-7)
We are reminded that she is only human and in the same mortal boat as the rest of us by the pathos of the following passage, in which she confronts the unwelcome fact of ageing with a characteristically spirited attitude:
Finally, if we still feel any tendency to condemn her, we must remember that she makes it clear that, at the time of speaking, her chief aim is to entertain:
The tale told by The Wife of Bath, although it has a more serious and moral tone than her prologue, is in many ways a continuation of her prologue, the story and the way in which it is told being dominated by her personality, attitudes, and beliefs. The most obvious connecting link between the prologue and tale is the common theme - the sovereignty of women in marriage. In her prologue The Wife describes how she has devoted much of her life to living up to her unshakeable decision:
She uses her tale to extend this idea from being a personal preference, and a maxim to be followed by 'every womman that is wys' (524) to a universal truth. The knight of her tale is set the task of finding:
When he gives his answer to a supreme court of women, headed by the queen, there is no disagreement at all:
In al the court ne was ther wyf, ne maide,
Ne widwe, that contraried that he saide, (1043-4)
The fact that the knight's life is in the hands of the queen rather than the king is in itself a sign that the tale is a product of The Wife's imagination. King Arthur has condemned the knight to death, according to the law of the land, and yet in response to the pleas of the queen and other women,
Thus even The King of England is subject to his wife.
The Wife uses her tale as a vehicle for her own views, and often she leaves the tale altogether and resumes the self-centred theme and colloquial style of her prologue. She lists all the alternative answers the knight received to his question, the list including everything which, in her prologue, she has shown that she demands from a marriage as well as 'sovereinetee'.
Her inclusion of herself with 'we', and the unusual inclusion of 'oftetime to be widwe and wedde' make it clear that this is The Wife's own interpolation, beyond the requirements of the tale.
Digressions are a characteristic of both the prologue and the tale. At one point in her prologue she says,
She immediately launches into a digression about her youth, then about thirty lines later tries to return to her original subject:
She loses track of her theme again, but finally returns to it with:
The same colloquial discursive style carries through to her tale. At one point The Wife abandons the tale of the knight to tell us Ovid's tale of Midas and his asses ears. This digression is in support of her statement:
which is in itself a digression from the tale.
The fact that The Wife relates Ovid's tale inaccurately is also in keeping with the prologue, in which she makes a misleading reference to St. Paul's pronouncements on the mutual rights of partners in marriage. We know from the prologue that she has gained most of her 'learning' via her fifth husband, Jankin, a former Oxford clerk. In view of Jankin's enthusiasm for anti-feminist literature it is likely that he had distorted Ovid's tale in relating it to his wife, by making Midas's wife the traitor instead of his barber.
The Wife digresses from her tale after the first half dozen or so lines to air her views on another subject close to her heart, 'limitours and othere hooly freres' (866). Her grievances against the church are many. The church's solemn repressive attitude towards sex, and most other forms of enjoyment, conflict strongly with her robust hedonism. In the prologue she exclaims
The church was also responsible for the dissemination of anti-feminist literature and attitudes, and here The Wife, an arch-feminist, is in direct conflict.
Also, in the dramatic context The Friar has just made a rude comment about the length of her prologue, and with this comment she is rebuking him.
If we turn to the character of the Loathly Lady of The Wife's tale, we find some differences between her and The Wife, and some similarities. The main characteristic they have in common is the wish to dominate their husbands. There is also a marked similarity in their tactics for achieving this goal. Both make their husbands suffer, and both use the persuasive techniques of argument. Both also draw upon authorities in support of their arguments; The Wife from The Bible, Ovid, and many others, and The Loathly Lady from Dante and Seneca.
The plight of The Wife's first three husbands, of whom she says,
is not much better than that of the knight, who, on his wedding night,
Just as, in the prologue, The Wife puts up the husband's assumed complaints against her, putting him in the wrong, and knocking his arguments down one by one, so the Loathly Lady puts up the knight's objections.
She adds the fault of being poor, not even mentioned by the knight, and by pseudo-logic presents the faults as virtues. Both women succeed in gaining the submission of their partners for the same reason - the husbands are so frustrated and exasperated that they give in to get some peace. No amount of logical argument from the Loathly Lady could really allay the knight's feeling of revulsion for an ugly old woman.
The chief difference in the approach of the two wives is that whereas The Wife argues almost entirely on personal grounds, The Loathly Lady argues to a large extent on the more objective and moralistic grounds of living up to the claim of 'Nobility', the true source of which was a much discussed subject in the middle ages. On one level we can assume that Chaucer has introduced this theme for the edification of his audience, but it is also likely that The Wife has included this serious subject into her relatively light-hearted prologue and tale in order to comply with The Host's original request in The General Prologue for,
In her prologue The Wife demonstrates herself to be an intelligent woman, and good at dissembling. At the funeral of her fourth husband, for example, she acts the part of the grieving widow, so she would undoubtedly be able to act out the serious tone necessary for the Loathly Lady's 'Nobility' argument. Putting herself in the role of The Loathly Lady also serves The Wife's purpose of championing the cause of women, in that to subjugate a knight and prove him to be ignoble would be a greater achievement than the real life subjugation of her first three elderly, feeble, husbands, and it is achieved by a more acceptable means than her childish deceitful attack on Jankin. In this way, and in the final transformation of The Loathly Lady into a beautiful young woman, the tale can be seen as a wish-fulfilment on the part of The Wife.
Thus The Wife's tale is more than appropriate to the prologue; it is essential that we know the character of The Wife through her prologue before we can fully make sense of the tale. If we were to read the tale without having read the prologue we might ask such questions as: Why is a seemingly courtly tale starting off with rape? Why so many digressions? Why the attack on 'limitours'? Why is Arthur's court ruled by women? Especially odd would seem the sudden change of tone and strong language in the final lines:
But, knowing The Wife of Bath, these things come as no surprise at all.
* Line numbers are from these editions
Chaucer, Geoffrey. . Ed. James Winny. Cambridge University Press. 1965.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. . Ed. James Winny. Cambridge University Press. 1965.
Ian Mackean, April 2007
See also: This is a free program which you can download and run on your computer. The guide contains detailed notes with associated questions in various formats such as multi-choice, true/false/ or type the answer, plus generate quotes at random, and a series of resequencing and 'cloze' (missing word) formats.