Me for Quillette: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is not a feminist role model and her Tale is not about “rape culture” or “queer and trans bodies”

From the Ellesemere Manuscript, Huntington Library

From my latest for Quillette:

This is where it is unfortunate that [Marion Turner, author of The Wife of Bath: A Biography], otherwise a perceptive and fine-grained analyst of Chaucer’s literary magic, becomes blinkered by the feminist rhetorical lens that she has chosen for reading the Wife’s Prologue and Tale. Not just the words “misogyny” and “patriarchy,” but wince-inducing 21st-century presentisms such as “rape culture,” “gender-fluid,” “queer and trans bodies.” Turner even quotes, “Nevertheless she persisted,” the Elizabeth Warren T-shirt motto. There is a perhaps obligatory reference to Thelma and Louise (although the Wife of Bath can think circles around those two ditzes), as well as potshots at Jordan Peterson and the fogey-traditionalist MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. This is material that will not age well.

For example, Turner avers that the Wife is a “victim of domestic abuse” because her fifth husband, Jankyn, slugged her on the head during the “book of wikked wyves” fight and rendered her “somdel deef [deaf].” That sounds horrifying—except that Turner neglects to mention that it was the Wife who started the fisticuffs, as the Wife herself cheerfully admits in her Prologue.

As she tells it, she spots Jankyn reading his book while sitting by the fire, rips three pages out of it, and then hits him on the cheek so hard with her fist that he falls backwards into the fireplace. The enraged Jankyn then delivers his own blow. The Wife responds by pretending to be on the verge of death, and when an appalled Jankyn kneels by her side to blubber an apology, she slams him a second time. This is more Punch-and-Judy show than saga of a battered wife. The upshot, moreover, is that the Wife finally attains the “maistrie” that she craves over the now-humbled Jankyn: “He yaf me al the bridel in myn hond.” The artist who painted the Ellesmere miniature of her must have smiled at that….

The chief problem with an exclusively feminist reading of the Wife of Bath isn’t simply that such a reading isn’t amenable to nuanced interpretations. It’s that it never gets to the question of why Chaucer the author was so interested in anti-feminist literature that he constructed his most memorable Canterbury character as a mouthpiece for hundreds of lines of engagement with it.

For the ancient Greeks and Romans, admonitions against entanglement with both marriage and women in general constituted practically a literary genre of their own. Socrates’ biographers built Xanthippe into the nagging shrew who empties a chamber pot over her husband’s head. Ovid, in his Ars Amatoria,advised men who sought success with the fair sex never to forget their birthdays or ask them their ages. Juvenal devoted one of his Satires to warning men that their wives were likely to overspend them into penury, quarrel at the drop of a hat, go gaga over actors and musicians, and present their husbands with offspring to whom they might not be biologically related. Today’s expression “black-swan event” derives from Juvenal’s likening of the exceedingly rare worthy wife to that exceedingly rare bird. Theophrastus might not have actually written The Golden Book of Marriage (which was more likely composed several centuries after his lifetime), but the cynical portrait of wives that the book painted derived ultimately from the thought of Theophrastus’ teacher, Aristotle, who asserted that women were imperfect, emotion-ruled versions of men….

But there were other reasons for the lasting popularity of antifeminist literature besides a male-dominated society’s imposition of patriarchal values. For one thing, underneath the exaggerations of the ancients and medievals, there is a grain, and often a sand-dune, of truth. The Golden Book of Marriage may be hyperbole, but there is something uncomfortably close to home about its characterization of women’s preoccupation with clothes, home furnishings, and status competition with other women, especially over the men they deem desirable. All you have to do is dip into the most perceptive chick-lit—Jane Austen, Muriel Spark, Wendy Wasserstein—to find its female authors in essential agreement with “Theophraste” (i.e., Theophrastus). Here is Aristotle, in his History of Animals:

Hence woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike. She is, furthermore, more prone to despondency and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of more retentive memory.

Well, yeah.

Read the whole thing here.

Posted by Charlotte Allen