For Monday: Chaucer, "The Wife of Bath's Prologue"

No questions for Monday, but please read "The Wife of Bath's Prologue" (not the Tale) for class. We'll have an in-class writing when you get there, and here are some ideas to think about as you read (including a few excerpts from the kind of Medieval literature that was common at the time): 

(you don't have to answer these--they're just ideas to think about)

* How does Chaucer expand his portrait of the Wife of Bath from the General Prologue in her own Prologue? What does he add or embellish? Is he more satirical here? Or more reverent? How are we supposed to respond to her characterization?

* Do you think his audience would find her interpretation of Scripture shocking or even blasphemous? What about the church figures in the Canterbury pilgrimage?

* What are the Wife’s views about marriage, considering she’s been married five times (and is looking for a sixth)? Does she believe in love or wedded bliss? Or is she ruthlessly cynical like the Miller?

* Do you feel the Wife is a forward-looking depiction of a Medieval woman,  even somewhat proto-feminist? Or is she ultimately another caricature of an over-sexed harpy that likes to beat her husbands into submission? In other words, is she just a middle-aged Alison from “The Miller’s Tale”?

ALSO, if you have time, read the following short texts that are contemporary with Chaucer and are critical of women. These are the kinds of works that The Wife of Bath is responding to in her own Prologue and Tale.

TWO MEDIEVAL TEXTS AGAINST WOMEN/MARRIAGE 

* All excerpts from Women Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts, ed. Alcuin Blamries. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1992.

Anonymous, Against Marrying (c.1222-50)

A married man’s a slave for sure,

His flesh and spirit pain endure—

Like ox from market homeward led

To work the plough until he’s dead.

 

Who take a wife accepts a yoke:

Not knowing pain, with pain he’ll choke.

Who takes a wife, himself is caught

And to eternal serfdom bought...

 

A woman will receive all males:

No prick against her lust prevails.

For who could fill his spouse’s spout?

Alone she wears the district out.

 

Her lustful loins are never stilled:

By just one man she’s unfulfilled.

She’ll spread her legs to all the men

But, ever hungry, won’t say “When.”

Jehan Le Fèvre, The Lamentations of Mathelous (c. 1371-2)

“Many a war is begun by women and many a murder committed throughout the world; castles are burned and ransacked and the poor made destitute. As every man and woman knows, there isn’t one war in a thousand that isn’t started by a woman and her sowing of discord. She is the mother of all calamities; all evil and all madness stem from her. Her sting is more venomous than a snake’s; there isn’t anyone who has anything to do with her that doesn’t live to regret it...

Now you can see how foolhardy it is to take a wife...What is the point of your studying the matter? Don’t get married, have mistresses. If you are weak by nature, it will be safer for you to have a hundred of them rather than devote yourself to one; treat them as if they were no more important than a straw...Woman is a monstrous hermaphrodite, proving to be a chimera with horns and a tail bigger than a peacock or a pheasant’s. Thus she bears the marks of a monster, as this treatise informs you...their sex in no way prepares them to be virtuous or to do good, indeed they are predisposed to do the very opposite.”