The Wife of Bath’s contribution to
The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer’s only Arthurian romance, which describes how a rapist knight is set the challenge of finding out what women truly want in order for his death sentence to be commuted. He discovers the answer only with the help of a loathly lady, who demands an unspecified promise from him in return. When she announces her intention to marry him, he is reluctant, though he recognises that he must keep his word. Written in the late fourteenth century, this tale considerably postdates the romances discussed so far in this chapter, and I offer a briefer reading of this work as a point of comparison to and development of earlier romances.
1 Larry D. Benson, ‘Explanatory Notes’, in The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 795–1116 (p. 872).The Wife of Bath’s Tale both shares and develops some of the earlier uses of resistance to
mésalliance, continuing the emphasis upon social morality that is often a focus of this motif but working against the conservative pattern established so far to turn moral consideration upon the class system itself. This emphasis seems to be a deliberate focus of Chaucer’s, as once again this tale augments the focus on social status from its sources and analogues. Status is not the only reason why the knight in
The Wife of Bath’s Tale attempts to reject the loathly lady, as he also complains ‘thou art so loothly, and so oold also’ (1100). However, that she is ‘comen of so lough a kynde’ (1101), and the extent to which he will be ‘disparaged’ (1069) through this marriage, are significant factors in his reluctance. These reasons are specific to Chaucer’s version of the narrative rather than being shared by the tale’s sources and analogues, John Gower’s ‘Tale of Florent’,
The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle, and
The Marriage of Sir Gawain. The precise textual relationships between these works are uncertain, though it is likely that Chaucer knew and drew upon Gower’s version.
2 See Marc Glasser, ‘“He nedes moste hire wedde”: The Forced Marriage in the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” and Its Middle English Analogues’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 85.2 (1984), 239–41 (p. 240 n. 2); Sources and Analogues of The Canterbury Tales, ed. by Robert M. Correale with Mary Hamel, 2 vols (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), ii, 407–9. The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle and The Marriage of Sir Gawain both post-date The Wife of Bath’s Tale; while they may build on earlier sources, this is not certain, nor is it known if they use Chaucer’s tale as their source. In Gower, the lady is twice described as wearing ‘ragges’, but this is all the attention that is given to her poverty, and Florent’s main preoccupation is that
His youthe schal be cast aweie
Upon such on which as the weie
Is old and lothly overal.
3 John Gower, ‘Tale of Florent’, in Confessio Amantis, ed. by Russell A. Peck, TEAMS, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2006), i, i. 1407–1882 (lines 1723, 1745, 1711–13). Similarly,
The Wedding does not seem to indicate that Ragnelle is poor, as when she initially appears to Arthur, she is riding ‘a palfray was gay begon, / With gold besett and many a precious stone’.
4 ‘The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle’, in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. by Thomas Hahn, TEAMS (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1995), pp. 47–70 (lines 246–7). Not only the decorative equipment but the term ‘palfray’ itself indicates a level of status, as palfreys ‘would be destined for a wealthy person: a noble lady, a prelate, or as a knight’s traveling horse’.
5 Jürg Gassman, ‘Mounted Combat in Transition: The Transformation of the Eleventh Century: Early Medieval Cavalry Battlefield Tactics’, in The Horse in Premodern European Culture, ed. by Anastasija Ropa and Timothy Dawson (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), pp. 71–86 (p. 74). Likewise, in
The Marriage the lady is wearing ‘red scarlett’ when she first meets Arthur, a ‘very costly product’ and thus associated with the upper classes.
6 ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawain’, in Sir Gawain: Eleven Romances and Tales, ed. by Hahn, pp. 362–9 (line 56); Michel Pastoureau, Red: The History of a Color, trans. by Jody Gladding (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 90. More significantly,
The Wife of Bath’s Tale is unique in not revealing the lady to be of high status. In the ‘Tale of Florent’, the lady turns out to be ‘the kinges dowhter of Cizile’, who had been enchanted by her wicked stepmother.
7 Gower, ‘Tale of Florent’, i. 1841. In
The Wedding and
The Marriage, the loathly lady is implicitly of an appropriate status, since she is the sister of Arthur’s antagonist, referred to as Sir Gromer Somer Joure, ‘a knyght fulle strong and of greatt myghte’, in
The Wedding,
and as ‘the Baron’ in
The Marriage.
8 ‘Wedding’, line 52; ‘The Marriage of Sir Gawain’, line 18. She is thus established as one of the knightly class. In contrast, Chaucer occludes the lady’s social status in the tale’s ending, focusing instead on her restored beauty and youth. While the initial description of her appearance after twenty-four ladies dance and disappear hints that she may be a fairy, associated with wealth and power in medieval romance, this is not explicitly resolved. The lack of overt resolution means the relationship may be allowed to stand as at least potentially interclass, unusually for the works discussed in this chapter. This omission also supports the moral interrogation of social class in the tale, since, as Alastair Minnis notes, ‘a woman who turned out to be ostentatiously aristocratic, rich, young, and beautiful would make a highly unconvincing advocate for virtuous poverty, the advantages of ugliness, and
gentilesse by merit alone’.
9 Alastair Minnis, ‘The Wisdom of Old Women: Alisoun of Bath as Auctrice’, in Writings on Love in the English Middle Ages, ed. by Helen Cooney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 99–114 (p. 111). Leaving the lady’s social status unspecified while transforming her physical appearance may attest to the particular interest in social status and what it does and does not signify that is characteristic of
The Wife of Bath’s Tale above its sources and analogues.
The loathly lady’s climactic discussion with the knight confronts his resistance to love someone of a lower status as a moral and ethical issue, an angle none of the other works discussed in this chapter explore. While
Havelok invites sympathy with poverty and exposes abuses of power, Chaucer raises questions about the class system itself, as the lady openly queries whether ‘gentillesse / […] descended out of old richesse’ (1109–10) equates to being ‘the grettest gentil man’ (1116). She defends her lower birth using the ‘nobilitas virtus, non sanguis’ trope and argues that poverty can be a virtuous state, again features that are unparalleled in other versions of this story. Her questioning of the upper classes’ right to claim moral authority and respect is particularly provocative in view of the rape that opens the tale, which exposes the lack of
gentillesse with which a knight can act. The Queen and her ladies’ intercession on behalf of the knight may further develop this querying of
gentillesse, as it perhaps implies an element of class solidarity, courtly figures intervening to defend their own rather than watch justice be done (an implication that seems regrettably topical even today).
10 See the discussions in Alison Gulley, ‘“How do we know he really raped her?”: Using the BBC Canterbury Tales to Confront Student Skepticism towards the Wife of Bath’, in Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom, pp. 113–27 (p. 114); Carissa M. Harris, ‘Rape and Justice in the Wife of Bath’s Tale’, in The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales, ed. by Candace Barrington et al. (2015–17) <https://opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu/wobt1/> [accessed 1 February 2021]; Bernard F. Huppé, ‘Rape and Woman’s Sovereignty in the Wife of Bath’s Tale’, Modern Language Notes, 63.6 (1948), 378–81 (p. 379). The notion of class solidarity is developed in Dryden’s rewriting of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, as Christine M. Rose notes: ‘Reading Chaucer Reading Rape’, in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 21–60 (p. 38). This effect would be exacerbated if, as Bernard Huppé suggests, the survivor of the rape is a lower-class, perhaps peasant, woman.
11 Huppé, ‘Rape and Woman’s Sovereignty’, pp. 379–80. However, as Corinne Saunders notes, we are ‘told nothing of the victim except that she is a “mayde”’, meaning that far from an attempt to excuse the crime on the basis of social class (as Huppé posits), it ‘falls into the gravest category of theft of virginity’.
12 Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, p. 302. While the lady’s status may affect our understanding of the axes of oppression that make possible the knight’s rape of her and the court’s forgiving attitude to this rape, her status does not change the fact that the rape exposes the knight, and the court that defends him, as far from inevitably
gentil.
This questioning of
gentillesse in part accords with the characterisation of the Wife as the tale’s teller: the moral issue of ‘nobilitas virtus, non sanguis’ may reflect her interest in social status, evidenced in the
General Prologue’s focus on her rich clothing and her need to be first to go to the offering in church. However, the specifically moral focus upon class seems to suit the Wife’s character less well, and may reflect Chaucer’s own interests and preoccupations.
13 Alistair Minnis offers a helpful perspective on this: ‘Alisoun of Bath as Auctrice’, pp. 109–10. See also Kathryn L. McKinley, ‘The Silenced Knight: Questions of Power and Reciprocity in the Wife of Bath’s Tale’, Chaucer Review, 30.4 (1996), 359–78 (p. 361). Chaucer’s interrogation of
gentillesse does come from prior literary sources: the loathly lady’s speech draws on Dante, and Chaucer’s short poem ‘Gentilesse’, which echoes the perspective of the loathly lady, is a paraphrase of Boethius.
14 Benson, ‘Explanatory Notes’, pp. 847, 1085. But Chaucer’s decision to bring these sources to bear on this tale suggests his personal interest in the topic, and this is borne out by his engagement with the
gentillesse of deeds rather than birth elsewhere in
The Canterbury Tales, such as in
The Franklin’s Tale.
15 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 178–89 (lines 1611–12). As the son of a (wealthy) wine merchant who married a noblewoman, the daughter of a knight, Chaucer may have been keenly aware of what social class does and does not govern.
16 See Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), pp. 64–5; Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 10–13.Attending to resistance to
mésalliance in Chaucer’s tale reveals how it differs from its analogues to bring out an ethical theme, while comparison with earlier romances uncovers some of the ways in which Chaucer was building on established traditions in romance writing, even while pushing at their boundaries. Some of the preoccupations Chaucer – and/or the Wife – explores through the motif of resistance to love find comparable emphases in earlier romances. The shifting experiences of consent and coercion evident in the knight being required to keep his promise of marriage to the loathly lady, for example, recall some of the coercive practices in earlier texts.
17 On the loathly lady’s coercion of the knight, see Carissa Harris, ‘Rape and Justice’; McKinley, ‘The Silenced Knight’; Gerald Richman, ‘Rape and Desire in The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, Studia Neophilologica, 61.2 (1989), 161–5. While Chaucer takes the moral function of the motif beyond the earlier works’ more socially conservative perspectives, the seeds of this use of resistance to love to explore the privileges of the gentry and nobility were perhaps evident in
Havelok’s sympathy for the poor, as well as in the more conventional social morality of
King Horn and
Amis and Amiloun. Reading resistance to love because of social status from
King Horn to
The Wife of Bath’s Tale can thus reveal traces of earlier romances influencing Chaucer, despite his apparent ambivalence towards the genre.
18 See Corinne Saunders, ‘Chaucer’s Romances’, in A Companion to Romance from Classical to Contemporary, ed. by Corinne Saunders (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 85–103.