The Wife Of Baths

Critiquing the Critics: Reinventing the Same Idea, Again, and Again.

There is a naÐ"Їve trend festering in modern literary criticism, whereby critics feebly try to analyze and interpret ancient literature through the application of modern philosophies, concepts, and social theory in an attempt to breathe new life in the skeleton of the proverbial dead horse. Occasionally, a critic will serendipitously stumble onto an idea that sets him apart from his peers and ingeniously presents the criticized work in a new light; however, more often than not, these critiques result in a confounding quagmire of copious compound sentences with curiously, cryptic misapplications of complicated words that when spoken aloud could easily be mistaken for the drunken ramblings of a besotted Scrabble expertÐ'--such is the magic of literary criticism. This critical phenomenon can be seen in virtually every piece of antique literature, but is particularly poignant in the myriad analyses of The Prologue and Tale of the Wife of Bath, by Geoffrey Chaucer where critics tirelessly exhume the text to reexamine both the Wife and

Chaucer for any sign of modern feminism and bend and twist its text in support of their predetermined conclusions.

Although it shouldn't need to be said, the idea of Chaucer being a feminist in the traditional sense is rather absurd and is largely just the wishful thinking of ideological scholars. In fact, there is a strong and generally accepted argument to the contrary that the Wife's prologue and tale are actually anti-feminist in nature. Chaucer's political views on the other hand are a subject of much debate. One critic, Treharne, stabs close to a true analysis of the "The Wife of Bath" when she says that the Wife "is the uncontrollable voice that eludes interpretative truth. The ultimate secret she reveals is that all who think they can control, penetrate, and master such texts as she represents are deluded. All the critics can do is create interpretations that double their own desire" (3). Unfortunately, Treharne then continues in the same analytical drivel of the critics who seek to impregnate Chaucer's Wife with modern perspectives and social mores. Perhaps Chaucer was just creating the Wife of Bath for pure unadulterated humor.

Unfortunately, this poem, like all ancient texts, has been over-analyzed as generations of critics reinvent its theme by applying trendy critical approaches such as "Ð'...the psycho-analytic, the New Historicist or Cultural Materialist [or other such critical apathetic nonsense like]Ð'...deconstructive affective stylistic and reader-response theory" (Treharne 2) and in doing so add worn out ideas into an already stagnant literary bog. One such critic is Elaine Treharne, who in her essay, "The Stereotype Confirmed? Chaucer's Wife of Bath," argues that through the anthropological field of sociolinguistics

a great deal can be learned about the Wife of Bath. How she draws her conclusions from the text, however, is questionableÐ'--at best.

In this essay, Treharne attempts to couple the mechanics of language with the dynamics of social relations and hierarchy, to present an interpretation of the Wife's tale, that while full of holes, still postulates her predictable thesisÐ'--that the Wife of Bath is little more than a stereotype of an unchecked woman and that Chaucer may or may not be a feminist sympathizer.

The reason the author's analysis of the tale is so flawed is because she is attempting to use a modern pseudo-science to analyze an extinct dialect of ancient English. By analyzing this tale through this narrow lens, she is using what should be a subordinating argument to qualify her thesis. Simply put, sociolinguistics is hardly an authoritative science, and as such should never be used as a primary argument because it can't stand on its own. This is especially true when it is being used to analyze an antique dialect of English whose influence at the time of the writing of The Canterbury Tales had not yet matured.

A brief synopsis of the history of Old English's transition into Middle English would help to better illustrate the problem created by analyzing this tale through sociolinguistics. At about 1360 English finally began to firmly establish itself as the dominant language, but there were still significant portions of the country speaking a variety of the other native languages. At about 1413 King Henry V decreed that all the courts would conduct business in a standardized form of English known as the Chancery Standard. However, this standard wasn't cemented until the 1430s. Chaucer, whose

language is closely identified with the Chancery Standard, is thought to have written The Canterbury Tales between 1387 and 1400 (Middle English; Middle English Language). What can be inferred from these dates is that at the time of Chaucer's writing of this poem the English language was undergoing a radical and tumultuous change that had likely not been able to spread to circles outside of the aristocracy. The diverse coterie of pilgrims in this poem represents the full spectrum of the medieval social order, and it is highly unlikely that such characters spoke this dialect, so the reader is forced to rely on Chaucer's interpretation of the language of the time period. As a result, sociolinguistics is rendered impotent unless she is merely interpreting Chaucer's imaginary world, because the essence of sociolinguistic analysis would preclude the use of the unsubstantiated language of Chaucer's as his texts would likely be rife with his own stereotypes and prejudices. Although Chaucer's own experience living in the widely varying worlds of the aristocracy, the bourgeois, and the "down to earth atmosphere of London's vintry" (Norton's 93) obviously provided fodder for his Canterbury Tales, more likely than not his stories are a compilation of bits and pieces of the worlds he interacted in. While the spirit of these characters would ring true to the medieval reader, they probably were not meant to be definitive re-creations of medieval language patterns. It is only the modern reader that aspires to constrain Chaucer's characters with our own limitations and social boundaries. This type of analysis would be tantamount to a sociolinguistic treatise on ethnicity and power in America through an analysis of a novel written in Ebonics by a white Ivy League professor who visited Washington D.C. one

summer. Indeed, even Treharne's own definition of sociolinguistics collapses her intended thesis:

Through