 So the Wife of Bath, we've met a lot of interesting characters in Chaucer already that are very much unlike any other characters in literature up to that point. But the Wife of Bath is probably the most unique. Most female characters in medieval literature are one of two types. They're always young, marriageable women that are either pursued by men or they're threats to men. They're either sort of evil seductresses or they're these innocent virgins that are just waiting to be saved by a knight in shining armor. The Wife of Bath is neither of those. She's got a lot more dimension to her character. She's someone who is wealthy. She's married into this wealthy trade, the wool and textile trade, which is where a lot of money is coming into England due to this trade. She's married into this wealth, which we might say, hey, that's the only way a woman could get this wealth. She didn't really earn it or something like that. But remember, England has all these possessions in France because they married into these sort of royal alliances. Marriage is very much a way that men as well as women get more wealth, more connections, more political status. So we certainly can't accuse her of being somehow different than the men who have made their careers through marriage. She doesn't, because of the way she talks about her past marriages and her love of sex, we might say, oh, this is a very sort of crude and not a very religious woman. But notice, she's also been on a lot of pilgrimages. She's been to Rome, she's been to Santiago and Galicia. This is a place we noticed in El Cid. She's traveled around and her travels seem to all be pilgrimages of some type. She's going to see some saints trying. So we can't say that she's not a religious person. She doesn't fit our idea, just like a lot of the other religious characters or officially religious characters in Chaucer. She doesn't fit any of our stereotypes, at least none of the stereotypes that exist in the literature of this time. Now, remember, just like all of these other characters where Chaucer gives us a type and then undoes that type by making this character not really fit our expectations of that type, our normal stereotypes are being problematized by Chaucer. So in the lecture on El Cid, I introduced the concept of essentialism. And this is especially in El Cid, the way we tend to divide characters up is whether they're Christian or Muslim and assume that says something about who they are as a character. And we see that in El Cid that actually doesn't tell us that much. We have a bingo bond who's a very loyal, very chivalrous Muslim king who's an ally of El Cid. And then, of course, the Caryons and Don Garcia-Ordonez are very much underhanded backstabbing, but they're Christian nobles. So that assumption that something about the category that people belong to representing something that's internal, that's part of their internal character, that assumption is called essentialism. We saw it, the experiments back in the 70s with the Eagles and the Rattlers, these groups of young boys at the Robbers Cave State Park in Oklahoma where even though they were arbitrarily divided up into these different groups, they really quickly started to assume that they had certain internal characteristics because they were Eagles, whereas the Rattlers had completely different internal characteristics, even though those were completely arbitrary. None of their characteristics had anything to do with how they were divided up. I also mentioned that if I told you that Mouzafer Sharif, the husband in that team of psychologists, if he and his wife, Carolyn Wood Sharif, between the two of them, one of them was good at fixing things around the house and one of them was good with children, you would probably assume that good with children is a female characteristic, that something that females are naturally like, whereas men are good at fixing things, that's what they're naturally like. That's part of the essence of being a male or being a female. And those assumptions about essence are one of the things that Chaucer confronts us with. Not the actual essences, although we have a lot of discussion about what the essence is, especially of women. He doesn't go into much about what makes a man, but frequently he does sort of bring up assumptions about these categories or these social groups or these stereotypes where we assume there's some sort of internal essence, but then almost every time he does, he undermines that somehow. And because of this examining, because the wife of Bath doesn't fit the damsel in distress, the innocent maiden who's waiting for a knight in shining armor to rescue her the way so many females are represented in medieval literature, people have looked back and especially looked at what she said about the relationship between men and women and her argument for female agency, for female autonomy, and said, hey, look, she's a feminist. There are a thousand papers on the internet saying that, with the thesis saying that the wife of Bath is a medieval feminist. She has all the characteristics of modern feminists, but she's represented in this literature from 600 years ago. I don't want to scare anybody who's already thought about writing that kind of paper. I don't want to say it's impossible, but there's a big problem with that sort of argument. The first problem is remember our schema issue, remember the War of the Ghosts experiment, where we have a certain idea, a certain concept that we're familiar with in our current culture, and we read something from another culture and we start to project a lot of those schemas from our culture back into that other culture. This is exactly what we're doing if we try to read the wife of Bath as a feminist. First of all, we have to ask, what do we mean by feminist? That's not a simple question. People frequently try to oversimplify that question. We've had more than just one feminist movement. We've had at least three distinct waves of feminism, the first wave being just the demand for the right to vote, just basic equal rights for women that are equal to men. Then in the second wave of feminism, there was this recognition about how beyond just individual laws, there are things in our culture that sort of shape who we become from the time we're born. As soon as you find out you're going to have a daughter, people give you pink things, pink toys, pink clothes, and if you find out you're going to have a boy, they give you blue clothes, they give you toy trucks, whereas if it's a daughter, it's toy dolls. We start to shape people's gender identity as a culture even before they're born. Then third wave feminism sort of accepts that there are differences, but those differences might be based partly on biology, partly on genetics, but then there's also culture shaping those, and nature shapes nurture, and culture then shapes our nature. Third wave feminism is at least recognizing that things are a lot more complicated than we might realize. But let's just stay simple. Let's just look at first wave feminism, the assumption that women should be treated equally with men. Who is it that is defining that schema? These are some actual postcards from about 100 years ago when women were protesting for the right to vote. Women were trying to get just the ability to vote for themselves. They were called suffragettes. They were asking for women's suffrage, the ability to vote in general elections. These are characterizations of them on these postcards. The first one shows a woman trying to get men to vote for female suffrage quote-unquote the easiest way. She's using her sexuality. She's kissing this man and presumably to get him to vote for women's right to vote. There's an implication. It's an underhanded use of her characteristics as a female, but also that this is something that women would do that men wouldn't do. And then there's the characterization of a suffragette as sort of having her husband down on his knees and she's got him by the ear and she's lecturing him. She's maybe mansplaining. She's basically adopting the role that would seem typical for a man to adopt in this time period. And down at the bottom we read, my wife's joined the suffrage movement I've suffered ever since. In other words, it's not just that she wants equality. If she wants sort of autonomy, if she wants the same rights as men, that means that the man loses something. The guy on the right sort of crouching and hiding from his wife who's screaming at him and he's being very affirmative and saying yes, yes, two yeses and a yes. And she's still sort of being sort of belligerent. So there's this assumption in these characterizations that the sort of rights or autonomy or agency is a zero-sum game. If I get more of it, that means I must have to give up my own rights, my own sovereignty. But who is it that's making this characterization? Who is portraying these women as feminists? That is very important if we're going to decide is any of these women an actual feminist? Well, hopefully, if I asked you, is the woman in the postcard in the middle, is that a feminist? You would probably recognize no, that's not even a woman, that's a postcard and it's probably a postcard, that was made by a man. In other words, this woman isn't real, she's the creation of a man and in particular a man who's trying to discredit feminism. Even the simplest just gender equality that the people making these postcards, the men making these postcards, are trying to create a caricature that will make feminists or women in general look less appealing. So this much, hopefully, is obvious. The postcards don't represent feminists, the postcards represent a caricature created by a man in order to attack feminists. But that leads us to ask, what about the wife of Bath? Was the wife of Bath an actual person? Whether or not she was based on anyone, she at least can say that she's the creation of an author and that author is a man. This is Geoffrey Chaucer's wife of Bath. So is she a feminist? Well, first we have to ask how she's created and that's going to take a lot of interpretive argument. It's the kind of thing you can write a paper about but realize you have to back this up. You have to sort of define what makes her a feminist. Does that mean Chaucer is a feminist? Does that mean Chaucer is trying to make the same arguments that the wife of Bath is making? Well, clearly we saw that Chaucer, the narrator, can't be trusted because he was approving of the monk who was not acting like a monk and he was approving of the friar and helping anybody but himself. And if we look at the historical Chaucer, we get a lot more questions and answers, maybe. Some of his earlier works, I mentioned the romance of the Rose in the previous lecture, this was a French work that Chaucer translated into English and in it the female characters are the typical sort of damsel in distress but also this very common female character type of a fickle woman, a woman who will throw herself at the man who's the strongest but then as soon as another man that suits her fancy comes along, she'll abandon the first man and go to this next man. It was a consistent fear of cuckoldry, fear of a woman being unfaithful. The usual double standards apply, there doesn't seem to be any fear about men being unfaithful but this was a constant concern in literature about is a woman going to be faithful? That was probably the defining characteristic in a lot of medieval literature. And in the romance of the Rose, we have these sort of passive women who are just there to be won by men but then once they're won by the men, they may be unfaithful. Something similar in Troilus and Crusade, we have a woman who, if we read this today, you read Crusade's position, this is a woman who's basically being pimped out by her brother. Her brother's trying to help Troilus sleep with her and eventually, she doesn't get any say in this but Troilus is pursuing her and Crusade's brother is helping him pursue her but her brother doesn't ask if she has any feelings for Troilus and eventually Troilus is killed in war, this takes place during the Trojan War and she marries Diomedes, who we remember from the Iliad and there's a condemnation, so she's faithless because she actually fell in love with Diomedes but notice there was nothing, we just expected that because Troilus is in love with her that she's obligated to love him. And if she has her own affections for somebody else, then that's somehow being unfaithful. That's very clear in Chaucer's choice in Crusade. Crusade has no autonomy or when she shows her own autonomy, when she pursues or she marries someone and cares about, we're supposed to condemn that as being unfaithful. And then there's the even more problematic issue I brought up in the last lecture and that is, there is a court document that scholars have found that notes that Chaucer had been accused of raping a young woman named Cecily Champagne and this is an official document from May 4, 1380 where Cecily Champagne brought a deed of release, in other words, she released him from this charge but specifically this release says she releases him from the charge of rape or the term is raptus and that could mean kidnapping or it could mean rape. Either way, not a very good charge. So this document states that Cecily Champagne releases Jeffrey Chaucer from quote, all manner of actions such as they relate to my rape or any other thing or cause. So this isn't renouncing her previous accusation. It's just sort of stating that she's no longer pursuing any kind of retribution for that but does it mean this case of mistaken identity or something like that, we don't know. And as to why she's releasing him from this, does it mean because he was innocent and she knew he was innocent and she made it up or did he pay her off or did they have some sort of litigation process and work something out, we don't know. We don't have any idea if this is a valid charge. We just know that the charge was there. We don't know really what to think of it, what to make about this. So whatever happened, we have these sort of troubling or at least for their time period, conventional negative portrayals of women as both lacking agency but also being manipulative and being self-will in a woman is seen as being sort of treacherous or deceitful. And we've got this charge of rape. We don't really know what to think about Chaucer at this point but we know that he had come under some sort of criticism because he almost tells us such in a book he writes called The Legend of Good Women. In the preface or the beginning of The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer acknowledges that past works that he had written portray women in a less than favorable light and he hopes to sort of create this text that tells stories about women who were virtuous and who were abused by men, at least to sort of even the playing field. After having told stories about women who were negative, who were deceitful, who were harmful to other people, at least level the field by saying, yeah, men can do the same thing and women can be just as virtuous as men whereas men can be just as deceitful as women and that seems to be what motivates, what sort of unifies The Legend of Good Women. The Legend of Good Women tells all sorts of stories about women from classical literature who are abandoned by men or abused by men or cheated on by men, including Dido. He spends some time talking about Dido and Aeneas and he actually spends more time talking about Aeneas but he then does sort of confront Aeneas with this accusal that he was unfaithful to Dido or at least if Crusada was somehow unfaithful to Troilus then we have to say that Dido was, or that Aeneas was unfaithful to Dido. The important part here, I mean, the text itself is not his greatest work but it at least tells us that he was sort of becoming aware of how women are represented in the literature. He was aware of himself as someone who was representing women a certain way and it seems that he sort of, by becoming aware, he at least sort of acknowledged that, oh, I have represented women in a negative light and maybe somebody, possibly even Queen Anne, there's some indication because an early version of The Legend of Good Women mentioned specifically Queen Anne, give this book to Queen Anne, please. It shows up in the text and then later that's taken out and it's taken out after she died, after Queen Anne died. It's possible that Queen Anne had chided him about his representation of women but all of this happens before he writes Canterbury Tales which means whatever he learned from his past experience and it seems to be a lot, whatever he learned seems to have become material for him to adapt in his representation of the wife of Bath. And so knowing this, knowing Chaucer's, first of all, not representing characters as very clean in one type or another but also recognizing his past history of representing women in a negative light, we want to be skeptical. We don't want to rush into too easily pointing at the wife of Bath and saying, look, this shows that either the wife of Bath is feminist or the Chaucer is a feminist or that this is an enlightened view of women because the wife of Bath herself, as she's represented in The Canterbury Tales, is not entirely honest. In her prologue, she tells us a lot about herself and it's not all good. She says that her first husbands were much older than she was when she was very young that she didn't need to make an effort or pay them any respect when their love, they were so infatuated with her that she didn't have to earn it and because she didn't have to earn their love, their love was very cheap to her and so she didn't care much for it. She says, a wise woman will always attempt to win love where she has none but since I had them holy in my hand and had all their land, so when she marries them, she gets their land and when they die, she gets to keep it and then add it to whatever she gets to marry the next guy. So why should I bother to please them? I've got all I want unless it were from my profit and pleasure. So she's just like a lot of the negative character portrayals we saw with the partner and the friar. She has no problems with using her position rather than she's not a church official as a woman in which she was younger as a young woman who was attracted to these men using that identity to get things purely for herself, to be selfish. And she says, I ruled them so by my faith that and she's not ruling them by her faith but she's saying, honestly, listen, I swear, I ruled them so that many nights they sang alas. I governed them so well by my rules that each of them was blissful and glad to bring me beautiful things from the fair. They were glad when I spoke friendly to them, I chided them without mercy. So even though they wanted to hear me say nice things about them, I was abusive, I insulted them. Now listen, you wise wives, you can understand how craftily I behaved myself. So she's bragging about lying to these guys, about insulting these guys, her former husbands. And she's clearly not repenting having done this. And she says, thus shall you speak. That sounds like a so shall statement from Beowulf. Do it this way. Here's a good way. Here's a good strategy. Thus shall you speak and thus shall you put them in the wrong for there is no man who can swear and lie half so boldly as a woman. This is starting to look like one of those postcards from the anti-suffragette campaign. These men that were representing feminists, representing suffragettes as abusive, they were forcing men to submit to them. They were manipulative or controlling. It was that zero-sum game of if she has more agency then that means the man has less agency. And we very quickly become skeptical of her own testimony when she's saying, here's the things that I used to say to these men and here's the strategy. She says, talking to the other pilgrims, general people in this very way, see I would firmly swear to my old husbands that they had said this in their drunkenness and she made up things and said, last night when you were drunk you said this to make them feel guilty, to shame them, to get them to try to make amends to her even though she's lying about it. And all was false except I got janken in my niece to be witnesses. This is the first mention of this character named janken who we're going to meet again. This is actually the guy who's gonna become her fifth husband. And she's also talking about her niece who she frequently refers to as her god-sib or gossip. And this is, you've probably heard the word like a god-daughter, a god-son, or god-father, a god-mother. This is, a god-mother is someone who is chosen to take care of a child if his or her parents die prematurely. It's usually somebody that the parents know really well and trust. So your god-parents are very close relations to your biological parents and so your god-sib would be your sibling who's not your actual biological sibling but somebody who would be your brother or sister if you had to go join that other family. And it gets used as somebody who's not directly related to you, not your brother or sister but somebody who you can share your secrets with. And that is where we get the word gossip. So if you gossip with somebody about somebody else you're talking with somebody you trust telling them secrets that you wouldn't tell other people. And this niece is frequently, she calls her gossip to make matters confusing. The niece is also named Allison or Alice which is the name of the wife of Bath. So you'll see the niece referred to as Alice. Sometimes it's angle-sized to be A-L-I-C-E. In the middle English it's A-L-Y-S or A-L-I-S-O-U-N. So you have to be very careful to pay attention to who she's talking about. Is she talking about herself or is she talking about her gossip, her niece? But it's Jenkins and her niece, her gossip, are witnessing to her husband, they're agreeing with her lie, with the wife of Bath's lie. They're acting as her accomplices in this. And she says, oh Lord, the pain and the woe I did to them, my husbands, though they were innocent, by God's sweet suffering, for I could bite and whinny like a horse. The frequent references to women as nagging, a nag is a female horse. And this is, again, part of that stereotype. This is the male stereotype about how women act. I would whinny or whine or bite or be aggressive or complain. I knew how to complain even if I was guilty or else I would have often been undone. In other words, when she gets caught lying before the husband can realize that she's lying, she'll start acting as more of a victim so that he will be persuaded to capitulate. He who first comes to the middle grinds first. I complain first and thus our war was ended. So she can complain before the husband has a chance to figure out what's going on. They were very glad to excuse themselves hurriedly of things they never had done in all their lives. I would accuse my old husband of visiting prostitutes even when they were so sick they could scarcely stand. Yet I tickled his heart because he thought that I had such great fondness for him. I swore that all my walking at night was to spot winches whom he slept with. In other words, the only reason I was out all night is because I wanted to track that woman that you're seeing behind my back when actually the implication is she's out at night because she's going to see her lover. Under that pretext I had many privy jests at him. She doesn't say what she means by that but under that pretext she can go out and she makes a joke of him. For all, such wit is given to us when we were born. God has given deceit, weeping, spinning to women by nature so long as they live. So notice even in the prologue she is telling a narrative. She's already a framed narrative where the wife of Bath Allison is saying when I was young here are the things I would say. And so she says listen to the way I would speak to my former husbands. Old Sir Foggy, is this how you would have things? Why is my neighbor's wife so fine? She is honored everywhere she goes. Well I have no decent clothes and must sit at home. So why have you bought me more things? Are you in love with her? What are you doing at my neighbor's house? Is she so fair? What do you whisper with our maid? God bless, leave behind your tricks. Old Sir Letcher. And if I have a friend or a gossip, a confidant, a God-sib, a friend or a gossip completely innocent and I walk to this house or amuse myself there, you chide me like a fiend. You come home as drunk as a mouse and sit on your bench preaching with no good reason. So at this point we start to see if her complaints are actual complaints, if he's being too suspicious, if he's keeping her locked up because he's afraid that she's going to cheat on him. That would be a problem but it would be more of a problem if he was wrong. So we're still unclear as to whether or not he's justified in his suspicions because she's bragging about being able to go out all night and make him afraid to accuse her. And specifically she's talking about now Janken has gone from somebody who's just a friend of her gossip of her niece to now somebody that is a source of suspicion. She says to her husband and if I have a friend or gossip completely innocent and I walk into this house to amuse myself, you chide me like a fiend, you come home as drunk as a mouse and sit on your bench preaching with no good reason and yet you have gathered a false suspicion of our apprentice Janken. Well we know from later in the prologue that Janken is the clerk to the fourth husband. So he's somebody who's in the house who's keeping track of the affairs of the estate. It seems that if she's made her money in the textile trade and this is the farm where the sheep are or where the wolves being spun and so Janken is the main accountant. He's the sort of executive although the husband is the owner. And yet the husband seems to be suspecting Janken of fooling around with Allison, with the wife of Bath. She's telling the husband you shouldn't have gathered this false suspicion of our apprentice Janken. You're just suspicious of him because of his crisp hair shining like fine gold and he escorts me back and forth. And so she's starting to describe well he's really good looking and we do go everywhere together but you should be suspicious. I would not have him even if you should die tomorrow. This last line is very ironic because if this is the fourth husband she's talking to that's exactly what's going to happen. After she says this to her fourth husband even if you should die tomorrow I wouldn't be interested in Janken. Well then she says in the morning my husband was born to church by neighbors. Dead, this is his funeral. And our neighbors who mourned for him and our scholar Janken was also one of them. So he's also there mourning for my husband. So may God help me. When I saw him go after that beer the pallbearers carrying the casket when I saw him go after the beer I thought he had so clean and fair a pair of legs and feet that I gave him my heart to keep. The very thing she told her fourth husband she would never do even if you were dead I wouldn't be interested in Janken. And of course this makes not only the wife of Bath an unreliable narrator but now as her sort of character of herself when she was younger is clearly also an unreliable narrator. So by this time all of her first four husbands were clearly much older than she was but now we learn that she is older than Janken. They get married and she starts to think she's going to have a little bit more power it seems but then Janken gets a hold of this book and in this book we have it's frequently referred to as the book of wicked women and notice this is the sort of opposite of Chaucer's The Legend of Good Women he writes a book all about women who have been abused by men but Janken has this book that's full of stories from all over lots of different classical sources, religious sources from the Bible and elsewhere about women who abuse or cheat on men or manipulate men or lie to men and it's just sort of like part of all these different stories taken out of context and added into this one book and apparently Janken just loves this book every night and day when he had leisure and freedom from outside occupation it was his habit to read this book about wicked women of them he knew more lives and legends than are of good women in the Bible in other words he's always reading these stories about bad women so he knows more about bad women than he does about good women by God if women had written histories as scholars have in their chapels they would have written about men more evil than all the sons of Adam could address this is something remember that Chaucer has done he wrote The Legend of Good Women about these women who were abused but also this is one of those things that actually does connect the wife of Bath with feminism especially feminist literary criticism the recognition that if men have this negative view of women it's usually coming from these fictions these fictions which were written by men who seem to have a clear and they sort of take that personal bias whatever their experience is and they put it into a text and that text becomes part of the culture and that sort of spreads that negative view Allison is very much aware of this she's confronting it she's pointing at it directly and saying it's men like Jenkins who get their ideas about women not from actually interacting with women but from reading these negative stories that book is now the problem that book is the culture but as soon as we try to say that and we try to make her the sort of feminist hero again we have a problem and that is that when she's telling the story she mentions that Jenkins abused her it seems like a clear cut case of Jenkins reading this book about wicked women and then that's making him a violent husband because we find out very early on that he struck her on the ear that was because I tore a leaf out of his book and my ear grew entirely deaf so we really sympathize with her at this point he has physically attacked her and what she did was rip a page out of this book which is turning him against her so we understand her frustration with the book but then we see him react in defense of the book and physically beat his wife she says it a few lines later that I was beaten for a book but then toward the end of the prologue she gives us a more complete version of this story when she says and when I saw that he would never leave reading all night in this cursed book all of a sudden I plucked three leaves it went from one page to three not that that's a big deal but then I plucked three leaves out of his book even as he was reading and also I struck him on the cheek with my fist so that he fell down backward into our fire and he started up like a mad lion and struck me on the head with his fist so that I lay his dead on the floor so that she knocked him she hit him so hard that she knocked him into the fire that's a little bit different not that it justifies it but why was she up front with this at the beginning she's selectively telling her story so we really don't know how much we can trust her as a narrator this seems to be a really decisive event in terms of her relationship with Jenkins and with men in general but it's from the moment we first start to hear about it it comes in this sort of ambiguous narration that never really lets us put our guard down and just sort of listen and accept what we hear but because of this Jenkins hits her and knocks her down and she says she lay as dead but then he realizes what he's done it was a sort of fit of passion he hit her but then as soon as he sees her lying on the ground he was aghast and when he saw how still I was and when he fled on his way until at last I came out of my swoon and she says oh have you slain me false thief and have you murdered me thus for my land wait what? we know exactly why he just hit her she knocked him over into the fire but even as she's sort of coming to becoming conscious she then accuses him of something that he didn't do it's pretty clear that he wasn't trying to murder her and he wasn't even if he was reacting violently he wasn't thinking oh if she dies I'll get her land but she's accusing him already of something that wasn't done when it seems like she's got enough to accuse him of that he actually has done but it works she says despite the fact that she frames him she sort of accuses him of trying to kill her for her land but then says before I die I will still kiss you in other words I still love you even though you're trying to murder me so she's instantly framing herself as a persecuted victim and he came nearer and kneeled down gently and said quote you yourself are to blame for what I have done he's still saying you did hit me you know I was reacting to you but forgive me for it and I beg that of you and yet I hit him again so wait he came to apologize and says I'm sorry please forgive me of that but perhaps because he said well you know you did provoke it she's still lying on the ground and she immediately hits him again hits him on the cheek and says thief watch now I will die I can speak no more but because of this altercation at last with great pain and grief we fell into agreement between ourselves he put the full bridle into my hand to have the governance of house and estate over his tongue and hands as well in other words not just saying you could read that line a couple of different ways having control over his tongue and hands but it seems to be at least that he's not going to insult her, ridicule her anymore and also not hit her anymore that doesn't seem like you know he's having to give up really too much and I made him burn his book then and there so at least she's getting rid of the book and when I had got for myself all the sovereignty through a master stroke and when he said my own faithful wife do as you will the rest of your days be the guard of your honor and my dignity also we have never had a dispute after that now notice what he's giving up here is not control over himself she's not giving him sovereignty or he's not giving her sovereignty over him he's giving her sovereignty over herself so that she can go where she wants and he trusts her not to cheat on him she can do what she wants and he doesn't have to worry that he's going to be humiliated that's the extent so basically he's just giving her the same freedom he himself has he's not actually giving up his own freedom he's just saying I'm not going to try to control you anymore I'm not going to be so paranoid that you're going to cheat on me that I won't let you leave the house anymore and it's after that that she says God help me so I was as loving to him as any wife between Denmark and India and it's true also and so he was to me so once he gives her control over herself she's no longer motivated to go out at night the point of this part of her story seems to be that as long as he gave me the sovereignty and the respect as an individual to trust me and it's not just the control that he gives up he gives her trust then once he did that she no longer felt any reason to deceive him or she didn't have the inclination to deceive him anymore and it's after that long prologue that she starts to tell her story the wife of Bass Taylor but even when she does that she's coming back to this question about you know what is it that women want some people say we want stuff we want riches or full men and that sort of thing and she comes back to this question at the beginning of the wife of Bass Taylor she says and so she goes into her tale her story which is in the genre of Arthurian literature it's a story about a knight in King Arthur's court who rapes a woman and this makes us wonder how much of this is connected to Chaucer's actual experience or accusation or the act if he was guilty of it but a knight rapes a young woman and he sentence to death and King Arthur says the penalty for this crime is death but it's Quinevere that tries to give him another chance she tries to come up with a way that he can be save and she says you have one year to find out what it is that women want so just by this setup the wife of Bass brings us back to perhaps essential ideas about what is a woman, what does a woman really want but it's also a story about a man trying to figure out what women actually want and it's this question that this knight has to figure out and so he goes and asks other people and some said that women best love riches, some said honor some said mirth, some said fancy clothes some said pleasure in bed and some to be widowed often and rewed again the wife of Bass has been widowed often and rewed no matter how much she's describing herself but also how much she's describing how other people describe her did they assume that these women, these men that died and left her this wealth that she wanted that so again we can't assume that she's referring to herself, she could be referring to the way other people describe her some said that our hearts are most eased when we be flattered and gratified they come very near the truth a man shall best win us by flattery I will not deny it and we are caught by attentiveness and diligence both great and small and some said how we love best to be free and to do just as we wish this seems to be where she's going and that no man should reprove us for our faults but say that we are wise and never foolish at all for in truth there is nobody among us who will not kick if someone will claw us on a sore place just because he tells the truth so she's hovering around, she's dancing around this question of the essence of women, what essentially do women really want is it one of these things and she seems to be inclined toward one but notice how most of the things that she ends up with are things that aren't exclusive to women there are things that characterize men as well and in the middle English she sort of leaves behind the gender pronouns here when she says in truth there is no one among us who will not kick if someone will claw us on a sore place this is if women want to not be reprove for their own faults if they want to be called wise and never be called foolish if they want to be free and to do just as they wish these are not things that men have to ask for these are things that men can presume these are male privilege elements and she's moving from the cliche accusations about what women want into things that all people want as she's portraying and making us confront the fact that women can't expect this kind of autonomy women have to fight for this kind of autonomy so she's bringing up she's starting on what seems like an essentialist question and then working out of that essentialism and she does this not just with gender relations notice what she says about nobility when she says God knows one may often see a lord's son do vicious and shameful deeds and he chooses to be esteemed for his gentility because he was born of a noble house and had virtuous and noble ancestors and yet himself will not perform deeds of gentility nor follow after his general ancestor who was dead in other words he's a nobility because his ancestors were great conquerors or they won that title on the battlefield but that was his ancestors that's not him so was he still a noble just like in El Cid she's confronting the audience with the fact that even though they've done nothing to earn it they act in these base selfish and deceitful ways and the way that people assume commoners act the word villain literally just meant a commoner a person who was not part of the nobility because commoners can't be expected to have these sorts of virtues like chivalry and honor and trustworthiness but what she's pointing out is those characteristics are not always shared by the nobility they're not always the commoners aren't always bad either and she goes on to tell a tale which is an Arthurian romance and in this case it's an actual specific Arthurian romance a manuscript a few years after the Canterbury Tales tells almost the same story but it's not about this unnamed knight it's about the Arthurian knight Sir Gowen it's called the Wedding of Sir Gowen and Dame Ragnel for slightly different reasons Sir Gowen promises to marry this woman who is described as the Lothly Lady this is a frequent story type it's probably an old folk tale and it's usually referred to as the story of the Lothly Lady but in the Wife of Bath version the knight eventually learns that if he lets the woman decide for herself especially after he's promised to marry her and she's very old and she says I can remain old and I'll be faithful to you because that's what men want this is men are so preoccupied with the threat of being cheated on I can be faithful to you and stay old or I can make myself young and beautiful if you want but if I'm young and beautiful then a lot of men are going to want to sleep with me and you never really know what's going to happen so would you rather me be young and beautiful so that you're sexually attracted to me and have opportunities to cheat on you or would you rather me be old and ugly but faithful and he's clearly learned his lesson at this point he says my lady and my love, my wife's would be here I put myself in your wise governing you choose which may be the more pleasing and bring the most honor to you and me also I care not which it is I care not which it be of these two things for if you like it that suffices me that's enough for me I don't want you attractive or I want you faithful he says I want you to be what you want to be because he says that she says then I have got of you the mastery since I may choose and govern in earnest kiss me we'll no longer be rough, we'll no longer be angry at each other for by my truth to you I will be both that is to say I'll be good and fair I'll be loyal to you and I'll make myself attractive so we come to the same conclusion that Allison and Jenkins came to in the prologue so this becomes a pretty clear use of a narrative as a sort of justification of the present one of the things we've we talked about in the very beginning of the semester is that we never read a narrative just as it is, we try to we want to look at it in its original context but it's really hard not to see any narrative that we read in terms of our present situation and then we take that narrative and reinterpret the present situation using it, so there's this back and forth and we see this happening with the wife of Bath telling the story that sort of justifies and mirrors or parallels her own past with her fifth husband, Jenkins the words that the knight in her tale says to the local lady are very similar to those that Jenkins said to her wife go where you wish take your pleasure, I will believe no tales I will be true, I trust you and she says well now that you trust me to be free I will swear to be loyal to you as well so her prologue frames her tale but her tale is also an extension of her prologue it's a different narrative but it's carrying on that same theme it's trying to reinforce that it's trying to cause all the other pilgrims to listen to the wife of Bath and to come to an understanding of women based on these two narratives so we see how the wife of Bath is using narrative here but of course within those narratives we saw her being deceitful so we know that she exploited narratives to deceive her former husbands and we know that the wife of Bath herself in telling the story to the pilgrims has manipulated stories in order to make herself appear more innocent so we don't know if we can trust Allison the prologue story, the past Allison we don't know if we can trust the present Allison who is telling the story to the pilgrims and we can't forget that this is Allison as she is constructed by Jeffrey Chaucer there's Jeffrey Chaucer the narrator in the background and both of these are being constructed by Jeffrey Chaucer the author so while we see some characteristics of Allison that make her seem dishonest or at least as an unreliable narrator this is not itself a condemnation of women because we have to keep in mind that she is a character being used by a man to say something about women so we have the character within the story trying to say something about women and what she says intentionally is slightly different than what she ends up sort of indicating which is you can't entirely trust her even as she is telling this narrative but that doesn't mean that this is the way women are that means that this is the way Jeffrey Chaucer is representing these women so these narrative frames get pretty complicated we can read the Wife of Bath's Tale and interpret it on our own but then we can also read the Wife of Bath's Tale as the prologue sets it up as is sort of framed by the prologue but then that prologue is framed by Chaucer the narrator in his description of the Wife of Bath and her sort of quirks as a character but then all of that of course is created by Chaucer the author that means that following these frame narratives requires us to use theory of mind to an extent that is pretty arduous it's pretty difficult this is exercise it would be easy if we just sort of gave up on that if we just sort of forgot that this was Chaucer constructing this and we just said well the Wife of Bath either is or isn't a feminist or she either is or isn't honest or dishonest or you know in the the tale of the night and the lowly lady you know the lowly lady was this way or that way it would be easy to just forget the layers that are separating us the frames that surround these narratives but in this kind of class we don't want to do that we want to keep ourselves aware of what's going on because these narrative frames remove us a little bit from the ability to directly interpret each of these stories we have to be careful about them we have to recognize how each narrator's individual point of view structures are a narrative frame structures the way that particular story is refined framed the choices made about especially when it comes to intentions characters have or whether or not they're lying or something like that is that something that they're actually doing or is that something that that particular narrator wants to portray them as doing and we have to do each of these at the same time when we hear the Wife of Bath's tale we want to appreciate it directly we want to sort of examine that tale as a story by itself that's the green line here the green box, the green frame but then we can't forget that it's happening within the context of the Wife of Bath's prologue the Wife of Bath is using that tale to justify something in her own past but then again the Wife of Bath is a creation of Jeffrey Chaucer and we know that we can't directly assume that Chaucer the author thinks it exactly the way Chaucer the narrator does so we have to keep in mind not only each of these separate stories but how each of these stories connects to the one outside of it and remember that each of these narrators could be unreliable and even if they're not unreliable holding out that possibility is a lot of work, it's exasperating but again this is why good literature really develops theory of mind it really develops how well you're able to separate the way people think things are when they gossip with you when they tell you something about somebody else you want to think about what it is they're saying the way they're describing it but also remember who it is that's doing the describing what biases they might have what limited perspective they might have what ulterior motives they might have and Chaucer never lets us give that up Chaucer is our God-sib our person with whom who is sharing these things with us but always making us wonder is that the whole story in the narrative frame it's never the whole story there are always selections there are always interpretations that are being packed into that description but despite the exercise that seems to be one of the draws about Chaucer this is somebody who really understood human psychology whether or not he was a saint we don't know whether or not he was even really a good person it's so far removed from us that we can't say but we can't say that he is somebody who really understood the complexities of the way people think and maybe that's one of the reasons we're still reading him 600 years later