Chaucer's The Wife Of Bath

Making a Couple of the Beastly Bride and the Hunter Hunted

It is a commonplace when digging into the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale to stress the anachronism of calling Chaucer a feminist. Yet it is also a commonplace to find Chaucer attractive for his play with gender in his book, nowhere better demonstrated than in the reconstitution of various misogynist diatribes into the charismatic Wife of Bath who talks back defiantly to “auctoritee”. If Chaucer is not actually endorsing the strident voice he gives to the Wife, he is certainly making play with textuality, with subjectivity, and with the construction of ideas about sexuality. Despite the fact that the Catholic Chaucer presumably is not using the Wife of Bath to present his own views, he allows her to express radical ideas on gender theory and to tell a tale that demonstrates some of what she has theorized in her Prologue. The motif central to the Wife’s tale (that a shapeshifting hag becomes beautiful once she gets her own way) makes it more feasible that the Wife’s tale is centrally about liberation from gender role restriction. Scholars have made the connection between Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s hag and other loathly ladies. Including the Irish Sovranty Hag and Dame Ragnell. Specialists in early Irish literature (the earliest extant versions) note that the motif recurs with variations. Medievalists equipped with twentieth-century theory have discussed Chaucer’s hag in relation to the Wife of Bath, noting the similarities between the two and the suitability of the tale’s motif to the Wife as tale teller. Many scholars have explicated the personal politics of the Wife and her tale, but no one to date has centrally interrogated Chaucer’s exploitation of the motif’s mechanisms. Chaucer’s foregrounding of gender exploits the shapeshifting loathly lady motif as a vehicle for examining the sphere of heterosexual power contestation.

The earliest appearance of the loathly lady motif comes in the figure of the Irish Sovranty Hag, an imbroglio of cultural ideas about political power contestation, in which gender roles are loosened, dissolved, and resolved. The loathly lady belongs in the configuration of goddesses who are transversers of stereotype, a group that includes Demeter, Hecate, and Diana. Like Diana, she is associated with water and with forests. Just as it is typical that Chaucer’s hag meets her knight “under a forest syde” (III 990), so too it is in keeping with the genre that he commits his act of hubris, the rape of a maiden, as he “cam ridynge fro ryver” (III 884). The wilderness backdrop is a reminder that tales of the loathly lady tend to offer a “hunter hunted” spin to gender destabilization. Evidence that the loathly lady is humbly related to a set of goddesses who expand the meaning of femininity is available in the settings in which she is found, in the hunting motif ubiquitous to her tales, and in her quasi-divine control.

The royal court, seat of patriarchal power, counterbalances the wilderness setting. Like the forest, the court is an intrinsic context for the hag, but whereas the wilderness space functions consistently in the various tales, the court marks the particular agenda of the individual author. In this way, Chaucer’s external spaces signal the motif’s tradition, while his court shows his craft in giving the Wife subjectivity. Even as the comedy-closure coupling of the loathly lady and the hunter she hunts down is a satisfying climax typical of the genre, the tension of conflict between the forest and the court and what they mean explodes joyfully into a radically gendered union that has learned to accept ambivalence.

In generic tales of the loathly lady, the court represents the seat of patriarchal government whereas the forest is an uncharted space where societal stricture falters. This dichotomy has a classically established discourse. Chaucer would have been aware of literary precedents such as Virgil’s Aeneid, an example used by Robert Pogue Harrison to show that “the governing institutions of the West…originally established themselves in opposition to the forests.” Harrison points out that there exists “at the deepest level, the enduring hostility between the institutional order and the forests that lie at its boundaries.” The generic loathly lady’s beastliness signals that she belongs in the wilderness; her unstable flesh is chaotic like the forest. Like the figure Natura, she is often gigantic; her superhuman power comes from nature, that traditionally feminized locus. Yet, even though the loathly lady has hr own narrative history, the Wife’s representation is perhaps an instance where Chaucer, the king’s forester, does not just follow auctoritee, but uses his own experience, the empirical method flaunted by the Wife as her Prologue opens. The real forest has an impressive presence. Conceivably, Chaucer appreciated that the hag takes her magic and her menace from this actual wilderness.

The earliest extant versions of the loathly lady motif, the Irish Sovranty Hag tales, follow the classical model as defined by Harrison by showing that a true king must leave his court to prove himself in the wild locus of the forest. Tales that recycle the motif consistently send the protagonist out hunting to get him in the right place for his test. In the Tale of Florent Gower retains the forest as locus for his loathly lady’s introduction вЂ" Florent meets her “in a forest under a tre” (line 1528) вЂ" and in the Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell the hag ensnares Gawain in the Inglewood forest (line 226). In the end the hag belongs to both worlds, being larger than both, with an immoderation and extravagance that test her male partner and tacitly measure him as less than herself.

The crux of the Irish Sovranty myths is that the hero must embrace and please the grotesque sexually rapacious Other in a test that turns him towards reward and becomes a metaphor for his own experience of kingship. In the Adventures of the Sons of Eochaid the hag spells this out to Niall as she awards him the kingdom: “I am the Sovranty…as thou hast seen me loathsome, bestial, horrible at first and beautiful at last, so is the sovranty; for it is seldom gained without battles and conflicts, but at last to anyone it is beautiful and goodly.” The hag as a personification of the land lies, however, at a level beneath the surface narrative. The primary sense,