The Wife of Bath's Tale by Chaucer

The Soul of English lurks behind literature. Can you find it?

TRB /NET / SLET Study Guide
Subject: English, Date: 21st, March 2018

This sixth tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales has a prologue (that's longer than the tale itself) as well as the Tale by Wife of Bath. 

The Wife of Bath's Prologue
The Wife reserves her long prologue to argue and justify that three is nothing wrong in having five husbands as in her case. She asks, what about the wise king Solomon? Did he not have more wives than the number of my husbands? What about Abraham and Jacob? Didn't they have more than two? According to her, just as diverse schools make a scholar perfect and diverse practice makes the workman perfect, she is made perfect by her diverse experience with five husbands. It's said in the bible
“That a man will pay his wife her debt.” She asks,
“Now wherewith should he make his payment,
If he did not use his blessed instrument?”
Didn’t St.Paul say that it is better to marry than to burn.  She challenges all to show where God commanded virginity in the bible.

Now she proceeds to talk about her five husbands of whom three were good and rich but old and two were bad.  She had no need to please or show reverence to them since they had given her all their lands.  She had full sovereignty over them.  She makes an advice to all wives that they should ever keep their husband in fault or out of hand, ask for decent clothes that the neighbour’s wife has. If he goes to neighbour’s house or talk to maid at home, wife should control him in the beginning itself by questioning him. How long men have held women under their control! She condemns male chauvinism and says that if  a woman is poor, man worries about the expense; if she is rich, man talks of her pride; if she is fair, man suspects her with all lechers. Men desire women for riches, for shapeliness and fairness, for songs and dance, for gentleness and dalliance, and for no more reasons.

Unlike traditional women who patiently undergo all tortures of their husband, the Wife of Bath is a revolutionary spirit.  Her fourth husband Mettelius kept a lover.  He was a niggard and a reveller.   He often boiled with anger and jealousy. She retaliated in her own way and found many a new way to torture him. She proudly says, “I was his purgatory.”  He had died when she returned from Jerusalem.  Her fifth husband was Jankin, once an Oxford scholar.  She came in contact with him through her friend Alison with whom he had stayed.  She proposed him and soon bracketed him with her skill.  After one month of her fourth husband’s death, she wedded Jankin.  He loved him a lot and gave him all her lands and property.

Jankin was but a bookworm and a misogynist that she understood after her marriage.   He had a big volume of bad wives and used to recite a tale from that every day and night.  He irritated her by saying how Eve brought wretchedness to whole mankind through her wickedness; how Samson lost his hair cut and betrayed by her lover; how Xantippe, the wife of Socrates poured piss over his head and yet he said, “Ere the thunder stops, comes the rain.” Thus he gave hundreds of examples of bad women and it so happened one day that she grabbed the book from him one night, tore some leaves from it and gave him a punch.  He rose and deafened her ears with a fist.  She fell flat and pretended as if dead and thus the drama continued. At last he made apology, and promised her to follow wherever she said.  Thus she gained sovereignty over him and lived happily thereafter.  Here ends the Wife of Bath's long prologue and she starts narrating her tale after a little quarrel between the Friar and the summoner.

The Wife of Bath's Tale:
There was a lustful knight in king Arthur's house who stole the virginity of a woman by force. To answer this injustice, King Arthur brought him to trial and sentenced him to death.  But Arthur's fairy wife interceded him to pass the case to her own judgement. She then promised the knight to save his life if he answers her question at once or within a year and a day.  Her question was, “what does a woman love the most?” He,smitten by whirlpool of confusions, could not answer her anon and  requested time. He went everywhere, asked every woman but no two women gave him the same answer.

“ Some said women had most love of riches:
Some said honour, some said happiness;
Some rich array, some said lust abed,
And oft times to be widowed and wed.
Some said that our heart is most eased
When we are flattered most and eased.”

Thus the answers he gained multiplied and included woman's desire for freedom to do and speaking truth.  It was also said that no woman could keep secrets in her heart though it would bring shame to her husband as in the case of King Midas who had ass's ears under his long hair and asked his wife not to reveal that to anyone but his wife could not keep her promise and revealed it to water.

Much distressed and despaired by diverse answers, the knight however was returning to the court on the stipulated time. On his way, he happened to see the dance of twenty four ladies in a forest who suddenly disappeared and there appeared an old and ugly woman who promised him to give the right answer and save his life if he agreed her demand unconditionally.  He swore and she whispered the answer to him.  He told the same in the court –

“Women desire the self-same sovereignty
Over a husband as they do a lover,
And to hold mastery, he not above her.”

The knight was set free from the death sentence but he came into the hold of the old lady who now demanded him to marry her.  The knight cried out of his damnation and fell at eternal woe. However, as vowed, he wedded her whom, at first night, he dared not to touch.  She asked the reason and he told that she was very old, ugly and poor.  She philosophised a lot about honour and the greatness of poverty and said,

“Now then you say that I am foul and old,
Well then you need not fear to be cuckold,
For poverty and old age, you must agree,
Are great guardians of chastity.”

Finally she offered him two choices – either he could marry her and she would remain humble and true though old and ugly, or she would become young and fair, but faithfulness and chastity would be at risk. He asked her to choose herself  that which would please her and bring happiness to both. Now she got sovereignty over her husband. She promised him to be faithful, became young and fair and both had a happy martial life thenceforth. The Wife of Bath thus ends her tale with a prayer to Jesus Christ to bless women with mild, young and fresh husbands and be graceful to outlive such husbands.

Both the prologue and the tale, in one way or other, condemn the male chauvinism and anti-feminism of the medieval society, especially of the authorities of the churches.  The Wife of Bath, the mouthpiece of Chaucer speaks a lot in favor of woman's sovereignty over man, by showing herself as an example and having compete control over all her five husbands.  Thus the story she narrates best suits her and also reveals Chaucer's great insight into women's nature especially when the analysis goes of what a woman desires most. Though the long preamble tests the patience of the readers, soon the tale keeps it at rest and proves itself the best.