Watermarks The Wife of Bath and the Ideal Woman by Alison Stratton

The Wife of Bath is one of Chaucer's most memorable characters. In the "General Prologue," she is described as a somewhat deaf, voluptuous, married woman. She is a clothing maker, has a gap tooth, the sign of a lust nature, and she wears brilliant red stockings. Her fantastic description alone sparks interest, a spark that is later fanned into fire when her prologue is read. The Wife's outlandish description of her marriages makes her unique and memorable among the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, most of which are identified by conventional occupation. Chaucer has deliberately made the Wife a notable character by giving her life many unconventional twists. Her marriages are contradictory, and her personality is at odds with the medieval view of women Chaucer creates her in order to show that this woman, however rare and unique she is, cannot openly struggle for equality and independence. Her prologue gives the reader the notion that, when Alison is talking about herself, "It's a bit like an anti-confession, with her saying this is what I'm like, there's no way I'm going to change (Beer 8). This is her initial portrayal, but at the end of her prologue, the Wife of Bath succumbs to the pressure of society, conforms and becomes the ideal medieval wife.

The Wife's marriages, when viewed in order, show her struggle for power and her surrender to authority. In the first few lines the reader learns that Alison was married five times. Her five husbands represent the progression of a woman from a power-hungry girl to a submissive spouse. Her five husbands can be divided into two groups, the first group consisting of the Wife's first three husbands. Of this first group she says, "The thre were goode men, and riche, and olde" (WBP 197). Robin Bott, in her essay "The Wife of Bath and the Revelour: Power Struggles and Failure in a Marriage of Peers," describes these men as indistinguishable, almost like a collective body (154).

These men are significantly older than she when they marry her. The Wife of Bath herself is only twelve when she marries her first husband (WBP 5-7). What compels this young woman to marry older men, men who may not be able to give her children? Alison explains it plainly enough in her prologue when she says, "They had me yeven hir lond and hir tresoor" (WBP 204). These men have relinquished property to the Wife of Bath, giving her a great advantage over them. The age of the men also gives her leverage because her youth will keep them at home. This grasp of power does not, however, fully transcend to the other group of husbands.

This other group includes her last two husbands, the unnamed fourth husband and the clerk Jankyn, her fifth husband. In contrast to her first three husbands, both are younger than Alison when they marry her. Jankyn is her junior by approximately twenty years. She recalls vividly her fifth husband, explaining how they met and what he was like. Jankyn is distinguished from the others because she married him for "love, and not richesse" (WBP 526). He is further differentiated because she gives him control of "al the lond and fee/ That evere was me yeven ther bifoore" (WBP 630-63). Thus, she keeps the power that she inherited from her previous husbands and uses it to her advantage. Her youth, however, has faded, giving both the fourth and fifth husband the same leverage over her that she enjoyed over her previous husbands in her youth.

While the Wife of Bath can recall most things about many of her marriages, she hardly mentions her fourth marriage. It is obvious that money and power have been the prime motivation in four of Alison's five marriages. Her silence on the matter of her fourth husband "suggests that no such [power/financial] arrangement was made" (Bott 155) with him. Textual evidence further proves that Alison's fourth husband was independently wealthy: "He deyde whan I cam fro Jerusalem/ And lith ygrave under the roode beem" (WBP 495-496). To be buried within the church itself showed his social standing, a social standing that could not come from his wife's financial or social status alone (Bott 56). With her financial and age leverage completely gone with her fourth husband, she starts looking quickly for a replacement. Then she finds Jankyn at her husband's funeral, and the cycle of the power struggle continues as if she never diverged from the path.

It is when her marriages are viewed in order that the metamorphosis of the Wife of Bath is evident. At first she is an almost greedy child-bride who is happy to be of service to her wealthy husbands as long as it serves her purposes. As she ages and matures, her perspective changes and she rewrites her part in the play that is her marriages. Alison has moved from a struggle for power with her first three husbands, to a neutral relationship with the fourth husband, to a position comparable with that of hei first three husbands with Jankyn. After the Wife marries Jankyn she retains some leverage of power, but eventually she becomes as submissive as her first four husbands were. What the Wife is striving for in these marriages is the same amount of control and freedom as the men that she married have. Instead, as each marriage gives way to the next, she becomes more like she should be according to the medieval interpretation of conventional woman.

Mark Amsler explains that the "husband had authority over his wife and property... the church had authority over the laity in matters of marriage and the spirit" (70). Although her marriages eventually end in her submission to her husband, the Wife of Bath does manage to break almost every rule set by the church before the end. As Patricia Anne Magee says, "She seems to embody just about everything that the Middle Ages traditionally held to be typically female and also everything that was opposed to the traditional, orthodox view of marriage" (WBP 40). A good example of the church's traditional view of marriage is found in the part of the Parson's tale that deals with lechery. This is where, Magee points out, the Wife of Bath is everything the Parson's tale does not want her to be: "She is shrewish and a nag (WBP 223); she is unscrupulous and wily (WBP 395-416); she is unfaithful and deceitful (WBP 225-234); she has no devotion to the four husbands she ruled (WBP 208-215); [and] she is extremely sensuous (WBP 35-38)" (Magee 40). The Wife of Bath, being all of these things, violates many orthodox rules. As mentioned earlier, the Wife of Bath has had five husbands cross the church threshold. Having more than one husband means that she has broken the "medieval notion of a 'clene wydewe' (ParsT 943)" (Magee 40). But she does not stop with breaking just one convention.

When the Wife strives to dominate her husbands, she is acting "contrary to the traditional medieval view of marriage as a reflection of the relationship between Christ (husband) and his church (wife)" (Magee 40). The implication is that the relationship between Christ and the church is reversed, so that the church is domineering and controlling instead of Christ. The Wife is further jeopardizing the traditional scheme of the medieval family and medieval woman because, in the traditional medieval family, the husband had control over his wife (Rivera 107). Religiously, women were still being held accountable for the Fall of Mankind (Rivera 107). Women were to remain pious and comply with their husband's demands, sexual and otherwise (Rivera 107). The Wife of Bath only complies with her husbands sexually when she can gain something, like money or property, in return (Rivera 107). She is, as mentioned earlier, using her marriages as business propositions. Her interest in the secular world of business, cloth making, is reflected in her flamboyant way of dressing. Her radical attire is a subject of condemnation, not by her husbands, but again by the traditions shown in the Parson's Tale:

He also says, "A wyf sholde eek be mesurable in lookynge and in berynge and in lawghyng, and discreet in alle hire wordes and hire dedes" (Pars' 935). The outspoken Wife of Bath, with her red silk stockings and gap tooth, is clearly "the opposite of the Parson's ideal wife" (Magee 41).

Finally, the Parson says, "God made men in paradys to multiplye mankynde to the service of God (ParsT 882)" (Magee 41). The Parson is espousing the doctrine of Saint Jerome, who condemns sexual relations entirely and urges abstinence except for procreation. The concept of marriage solely for procreation is not foreign to the Wife of Bath, for in her prologue she says, "But wel I woot, expres, wihtoute lye/ God bad us for to wexe and muliplye" (WBP 27-28). Again she is breaking away from the idea of the perfect medieval family. Women were not allowed to have a sexual identity; they were too busy having children to atone for the Fall of Mankind (River 107). This is exactly the opposite of what the Wife does in her life. The men she marries when she is just a girl are most likely impotent, given their age (Rivera 106). There is evidence of this in her prologue when she says for "unnethe mighte they the statut holde/ In which that they were bounden unto me" (WBP 198-199). Alison illustrates this point further, adding a bit of humor, "As help me God, I laughe when I thinke/ How pitously a night made herr swinke!" (WBP 210-202). The advice to have children is lost on the young Wife of Bath.

Throughout her prologue the Wife of Bath makes it clear that she had intended to be viewed as a rational, independent woman. She wants to be seen as a woman who is granted freedom and liberty from her husband, and not as one that has to manipulate in order to get it. It is evident that she is eager to gain freedom without manipulation when she says the following:

This, however, is not what really happens. She has to bribe and scheme her way to freedom and money, but she usually gets both in the end. When stalemates occur, as they sometimes will, she is the one to back down first. Oon of us two moste bowe doutelees,/ And sith a man is moore reasonable/ Than woman is, ye most been suffrable" (WBP 441-442). She seems eager to accept that women are by nature less knowledgeable than men are and women should indeed be watched. The Wife of Bath, however, has "undermine[d] her demand for trust and respect by asserting and demonstrating that women are untrustworthy" (Crane 25). She has used her husbands and manipulated them in order to get what she wants, and yet she wishes that her husbands would give her sovereignty. Her feigned eagerness to accept the current view of women foreshadows her actual acceptance that happens later in life.

Her manipulative nature shows through when the Wife of Bath declares that no man will have reign over her body and her money. She says, "Thou shalt nat bothe thogh that thou were wood, Be maister of my body and of my good" (WBP 313-314). She instead uses both her body and their money as a weapon against her husbands to get what she wants. Instead of letting them have one or the other, they get neither, unless the Wife of Bath gets what she wants:

This theory works to the Wife's advantage with her first three husbands. She has taken control of their finances and of her life, but she has yet for them to grant them to her. Her fourth husband and the by now infamous Jankyn signal a turning point in the Wife of Bath's attitude toward "maistrie."

The crucial moment in the Wife of Bath's quest for control comes in her marriage to Jankyn. Jankyn continually reads to Alison from a book of wicked wives. In her final act of open rebellion, she rips several pages from the book. As she says:

Janky then boxes her ear in retribution for the pages, causing Alison to lose her hearing. She retaliates by falling to the floor, pretending to be dead. Fearing the worst, Jankyn panics and gives her the "maistrie" she has so long desired saying, "Myn owene trewe wyf/ Do as thee lust the terme of al thy lyf " (WBP 819-820).

What the Wife says next is startling, considering she has just won her long-fought battle. She claims, "After that day we hadden never debaat,/ God helpe me so, was to hym as kynde/ As any wyf from Denmark unto Ynde,/ And also trewe, and so was he to me" (WBP 822-825). She has gained the "maistrie" that she has fought to acquire, but she does not utilize it. Furthermore, Jankyn does not return any of her money or property when he gives her "maistrie." Jankyn's double standard of "maistrie" without money or property is acceptable to the Wife. She becomes like all the other conventional medieval wives, who are quiet and obedient to their husbands. The Wife of Bath becomes the exact opposite of everything she has, up to now, exemplified.

The Wife of Bath's life is just as Chaucer wanted it to be. It is as captivating as it is puzzling. At the beginning of her life in society she is barely able to contain her greed and ambition. But at the time of her prologue, at least thirty years later, after her greed is satiated, she turns into a wife even the Parson could love. The society that she tried so hard to break away from in her youth is the very thing in which she rests comfortably into her maturity.

Amsler, Mark. "The Wife of Bath and Women's Power." Assays 4 (1987): 67-83.

Bott, Robin. "The Wife of Bath and the Revelour: Power Struggles and Failure in a Marriage of Peers." Medieval Perspectives 6 (1991): 154-161.

Carruthers, Mary. "The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions." PMLA 94 (1979): 209-18.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry Benson. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1987.

Crane, Susan. "Alison's Incapacity and Poetic Instability in the Wife of Bath's Tale." MLA 102 (1987): 20-27.

Leicester, Jr., H. Marshall. "Of a fire in the dark: Public and Private Feminism in the Wife of Bath's Tale." Women's Studies 11.1-2 (1985): 157-78.

Oberembt, Kenneth. "Chaucer's Anti-Misogynist Wife of Bath." The Chaucer Review 10 (1976): 287-302.

Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991.

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