“Since I may choose”: Contested Desire in the “Wife of Bath’s Tale”

The inimitable Wife of Bath has fascinated and frustrated Chaucer, his pilgrims, and generations of their scholars perhaps more comprehensively than any other figure in the great poet’s oeuvre. Chaucer initially intended to attribute the “Shipman’s Tale” to the Wife, but later expanded her role in the text by swapping a bawdy fabliau for a romance that confronts the social problem of rape (Silverman). He also cites her in the poem “L’Envoy de Bukton,” which recommends that its recipient refer to the Wife of Bath’s words for guidance on marriage (Weever). These incidents demonstrate Chaucer’s serious interest in the Wife of Bath and the questions she raises in her prologue and tale. Suzanne Edwards describes the debate around the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” as centered on “whether Chaucer’s desire or the Wife’s desire is at work in the text” (Edwards 23). Both in the tale and in its scholarly readings, desire diverges along gendered lines. In fact, the Wife of Bath is often read as Chaucer’s answer to the “problem” of “speaking in the voice of a woman” (Mann 57). In her tale, the knight’s ongoing dialogue with women reflects a more contemporary framework for understanding the manifestation of contested desire in sexual violence: “He said, she said.” The emphasis of the tale on speech—the desire to speak and be heard—opens up to a reading of the tale in which the knight’s struggle to understand women’s desire(s) rhymes with Chaucer’s struggle to represent them in literature.

Two influential feminist scholars of Chaucer, Jill Mann and Carolyn Dinshaw, take opposite stances on how to approach the potential discrepancies between the Wife’s and Chaucer’s desires. In the case of the Wife of Bath, Mann outright separates the tale from the Wife, arguing that the tale possesses a narrative voice distinct from the Wife’s in the Prologue. She argues that the epilogue, by reintroducing the voice and tone of the prologue, “divides the Wife from the tale” (Mann 75). She also criticizes “Dinshaw’s habit of using the pilgrim-narrators to occupy the author-position” (Mann viii). If Chaucer-the-writer creates the pilgrims, then the pilgrims and Chaucer collaborate to create the characters in the tales. In considering the moral argument of a given tale, to which author do we attribute the values presented? The Wife heightens this preexisting schism between Chaucer and the speaking pilgrim due to her status both as a psychological character and as a symbolic representation of womanhood. This debate over authorial agency challenges the idea that the tales represent Chaucer’s opinions.

On a thematic level, the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” engages with the problem of contested desire as it manifests in sexual relationships. Jill Mann articulates the tale’s central question well: “In what way would men have to change for rape to cease to exist?” (Mann 70). I believe the tale’s complexity is sufficient to support an expanded question: In what way would people and society need to change for rape to cease to exist? The problem at play in interpreting the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” lies not just in what solution the tale proposes, but whether the desire for that resolution lies with Chaucer or the Wife of Bath. Is it her proposed solution to the problem of social gender difference and sexual violence—or is it his? This construction—his desire, her desire—mirrors, as suggested earlier, “he said, she said,” a common phrase used in discourses of sexual violence, and which Tison Pugh uses to frame his article on “teaching Chaucer’s rapes” (Pugh). “He said, she said” evokes how language and communication can fail along gendered lines. I reject narratives that frame the discrepancies between gendered narratives of desire as essential, but acknowledge the real, power-based disparities that manifest through sexual violence.

The desires expressed by the Wife in her prologue, however unruly, prove direct and attributable. Dialogue tags identify specific sentiments as belonging to the Wife, the narrator, or the interjecting pilgrims. The Wife speaks, with forthright clarity, of her life and her desires. The prologue’s contested nature remains in the realm of interpretation: how the listeners or readers interpret her desires, and whether they approve of them either as desires or as representations of female desire. The prologue begins with an account of the Wife berating one husband, and then describes her next husband berating her with anti-feminist abuse, drawn from a “book of wikked wyves” (Mann 41; “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” 685). The role of the book in the prologue reflects how the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue” and “Tale” deals with not just experiences of gender difference and sexual violence, but the contemporary theological and intellectual discourses surrounding these topics. Mann notes that “in [the Wife’s] final quarrel with Jankin, it is not the man she goes for, but the book” (Mann 57). Beyond representing or depicting gendered cruelty and betrayal, the prologue constitutes the Wife’s direct engagement with anti-feminist rhetoric.

Mann also analyzes the Wife’s speech in the prologue alongside popular anti-feminist texts. She finds strong correspondences between the Wife’s speech and these writers’ work, including the Wife’s reclamatory reference to Jerome’s derogatory frame of wives as “barley-bread,” stating, “Lat hem be breed [bread] of pured whete-seed [wheat-seed] / And lat us wyves hoten [be called] barly-breed.” (“The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” 143-144; Mann 59). Chaucer, for Mann, takes on the problem of “speaking in the voice of a woman” not by divorcing her character from anti-feminist stereotypes, but by placing her in a social role mired with them. She uses them to her advantage at certain turns and staggers under their weight at others.

When the Wife begins her tale, the prologue’s provocative expression of her sexual desire gives way to a depiction of rape, an act that denies or rejects the victim’s ability to desire or not desire. In the tale, a young knight rapes a maiden. As punishment, the knight receives a quest from the Queen and her court of ladies: he must, within a year, discover what women most desire, or face death. Edwards notes the opening scene’s “unusual clarity about rape,” referring to it as the tale’s “interpretive crux” (Edwards 15, 3). Chaucer emphasizes the violent force with which the knight undertakes the act: “…Of which mayde anon, maugree [despite] hir heed [her effort] / By verray force [utter force], he rafte [took away] hire maydenhed” (“Wife of Bath’s Tale” 887-888). In fact, Chaucer adds the knight’s rape of the maiden to the tale; the incident does not appear in prior versions of the story (Dinshaw 115). This decision speaks to its thematic significance in the tale. As Pugh declares: “Rape functions discursively,” both in the text and in life.

Unlike in the Canterbury Tales’ fabliaux, where rape is used merely as one of several humorous forms of social violation and transgression, it here serves a serious narrative purpose that calls attention to psychological violation. Pugh defines the genres of fabliau and romance according to their varied treatment of “transgression”: “Fabliau revels in plots of violence and sexual transgression, yet romance, as a rule, affirms a world of courtly order, with any disruptions to this state of decorum attended to by the narrative’s end” (Pugh 84). The “Wife of Bath’s Tale” is a romance. In it, rape betrays the world’s “courtly order,” and the queen’s punishment is positioned to “attend” to this “disruption” of society. The act of repair is notably psychological. The solution to the social ill of rape, per the tale, is for men to consider what women desire and thus consider them as individuals capable of desire. Rape is portrayed as a direct symptom of a gendered disregard for a fellow human being’s autonomy.

Interpretations of the Canterbury Tales’ depiction of rape often run up against the real-life Chaucer’s possible identity as a rapist. In their attempts to grapple with the presence of sexual violence in the Tales, both Pugh and Dinshaw reference his encounter(s) with Cecily Champagne, the precise nature of which remains inscrutable (Pugh 88; Dinshaw 9). In the introduction to her book Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, Dinshaw writes, “There are not only figurative rapes…there are not only fictional rapes…but there are real rapes as well” (Dinshaw 11). I do not note Chaucer’s contested identity as a rapist with the intention of discrediting outright his serious effort, via the “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” to grapple with the social reality of sexual violence. Instead, I, like Dinshaw, feel the need to frame my discussion of the metaphorical qualities of this fictional rape—what it “says” in a text—with an acknowledgement of “real rape.” Many aspects of such a horrific experience lie well outside the scope of fiction, despite a litany of writers’ best efforts. The gap between real and fictional rape is especially important in the case of those victims or potential victims, like Cecily Champagne, who lack a willingness or ability to speak for themselves.

The queen’s punishment for the knight feels appropriate, in that the crime of rape implies the perpetrator’s view of the victim as a person incapable or undeserving of assenting to or denying sexual contact. By extension, this act of violation effaces—from the perpetrator’s mind—the existence of the victim’s desire. In search of the answer to the impossible question that will save his life, the knight travels widely, asking different women about their desires: “He seketh [sought] every hous and every place / Where as he hopeth for to fynde grace / To lerne what thyng wommen loven moost…” (“Wife of Bath’s Tale” 919-921). He is distressed to find that no two women can agree, a fact that forces him to consider the disparity and accord between their varied, multifaceted, and unruly—and highly personal—desires.

The knight, unable to determine the answer to the question set to him, at last seeks the answer from an old woman, who agrees to reveal it if he will grant her one favor—which turns out to be his hand in marriage. She states that “wommen desiren to have sovereynetee / As wel over hir housbond as hir love / And for to been in maistrie hym above [mastery above him]” (“Wife of Bath’s Tale” 1038-1040). The Knight wins his freedom but is horrified by his new wife and berates her. She criticizes his attitude and presses him to choose whether he would prefer an ugly, faithful wife or a young, beautiful wife. He leaves the choice up to her. His act of submission is rewarded by the old woman becoming, quite suddenly, both young and faithful. Dinshaw, Mann, and Edwards all take the view that the tale is more optimistic than pessimistic about the possibility of this social reconciliation of gender difference (specifically, via marriage). Yes, but we should also ask whether Geoffrey Chaucer and the Wife of Bath—insofar as we can disentangle them in the first place—share that optimism and, if so, to what extent.

Mann views the knight’s reformation as something of a fantasy: “The transformation of the rapist into an obedient husband is something that can only be told as a fairy-tale” (Mann 70). The parallel between the knight’s moral transformation and the actually magical transformation of the “loathly lady” into a beautiful woman might suggest a certain flippancy about the possibility of the former transformation. Read through this lens, the whole tale feels like something of a joke; the very idea that men’s and women’s desires could coincide is a kind of fairy tale. However, Chaucer is invested and concerned enough about gender relations to make this conclusion unsatisfactory at least in part. The Wife’s fluent discourse and sharp, extensive familiarity with proto-feminist and misogynistic literature reflect her and her author’s mutual interest in the contemporary debates around gender and gender roles.

Further, the knight’s quest contains enough of a serious struggle—wrought with setbacks and difficulty—that it appears Chaucer took to heart the difficulty of making an “obedient husband” out of an even fictional rapist (Mann 70). For example, merely relinquishing the violent means of subjugating another’s will to one’s own proves insufficient. In his analysis of the “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Pugh takes violent speech as a form of phallus; the knight, even after winning his life, exchanges physical violence for verbal attacks on his wife (Pugh 85). This framing of language as a tool for exerting “mastery” over another person suggests literature’s complicity in sexual violence. Similarly, in the prologue, Jankin uses a book as the primary source for his anti-feminist abuse. The knight’s victory entails not only letting go of one means or another of maintaining “maistrie” over his wife but abandoning the task altogether. As Mann writes, the resultant relationship is “not sameness, but a doubling of roles: their constant alternation shows that each partner is simultaneously both dominant and subservient in the relationship” (Mann 90). The tale thus portrays a happy marriage as a kind of mutual submission.

Despite her attention to the tale’s moments of pure fantasy, Mann takes the knight’s transformation as symbolic of the type of change that would need to occur in society for men, in general, to think about and acknowledge women’s desire and autonomy. She views the queen’s punishment as the “feminization” of the knight, arguing that the tale considers it a positive and necessary change. For her, the work “legitimizes the female desire for ‘maistrye’ which the antifeminist writers view with such fear and hostility, by making it the just response to male ‘oppressioun’” (Mann 73). This reading dovetails with the broader project of Mann’s book Feminizing Chaucer. Mann attempts to “feminize” Chaucer’s legacy by highlighting his attention to and reverence for “feminine” values throughout his oeuvre. She views the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” as evidence of Chaucer’s—not the Wife’s—desire for accord between the sexes (via marriage) and the eradication of sexual violence.

Mann reads the tale as embodying the spirit of Chaucer’s proposed approach for addressing sexual violence. Edwards, by contrast, uses two different frames to situate her analysis of the text. First, she takes a metaphorical approach, like Mann, where rape symbolizes the social problem of gender difference. Second, she analyzes the tale in relation to legal definitions and cases of rape in Chaucer’s day. In her reading of the tale’s argument, Edwards foregrounds the “interdependence and equivalence between” so-characterized “masculine” and “feminine” forms of desire (Edwards 23). For Edwards, not only men need to acknowledge the existence of female desire, but all people need to acknowledge the instability of desire and the impossibility of static desire.

Edwards acknowledges the necessary moral urgency activated by binary understandings of rape. Still, she argues that these simplistic views of gender and desire can cause harm if borne out. They risk reinscribing gender differences as inherent, thus presuming women’s experience of social subjugation to imply a biological or permanent lack of agency (Edwards 19). She makes note of the section of the tale devoted to a litany of different women’s statements of desire, treating them in conjunction with the Wife’s declarations in the prologue: “It is hard to imagine that there is a stable hierarchy that might definitively capture what the Wife (or anyone) ‘moost’ desires” (Edwards 17).

I argue that Edwards treats the Wife as a subject or an example of the Tale’s analysis rather than its originator. Mann’s analysis of the prologue supports this characterization, as she describes how the Wife sees herself through gender difference via her critical engagement with anti-feminist thought. For her, this move is Chaucer’s provocative answer to the “problem” of “speaking in the voice of a woman” in general (Mann 57). For her part, Edwards writes:

For the Wife of Bath, the logic of enduring gender difference has important benefits; for example, it provides an interpretive framework through which to make sense of the violence she has suffered (and inflicted) in marriage. At the same time, there is also a benefit to seeing that difference, like the body that suffers raptus, as a material effect that can be transformed by desire. (Edwards 19)

Here, her analysis extends beyond a mere reading of the tale, and develops into her own approach to the question posed and addressed by Chaucer-cum-the-Wife.

Edwards grounds this argument in the legal definitions of rape contemporaneous with Chaucer. She notes the high-profile case of Eleanor Post, which led to a change in the legal definition of raptus (rape) that conflated it with abduction (Edwards 8-9). This alteration blurred the line between forced sex and consensual but deviant sex. For example, families could employ the legal language of raptus to prevent their daughters from entering consensual marriages of which they did not approve. In characterizing the “body that suffers raptus” as a “material effect” of a social phenomenon, she uses the unstable legal definition of raptus as a springboard to articulate a view of rape that acknowledges the violence of the act without reinscribing it as a symbol of an inherent gendered gulf between desires.

This framework of gender difference colors the drama of the entire tale. In the desire of the queen’s women to hear their desire spoken by a man, we see a blurring between the Wife of Bath’s desire and Chaucer’s desire. The dynamic of the act of speaking desire aloud flips again in the Wife’s narration of the tale to the male pilgrims. This mirrored structure reflects Mann’s illustration of the “doubling” of “maistyre” in the tale. If the tale’s position within the storytelling contest makes it a speech, it nonetheless appears in printed text. Dinshaw expands this question of communication to include writing and reading desire. In Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, she takes the tale as an “allegorical representation of reading” centered on the “glose” or gloss, a motif invoked first by the Wife in her prologue.

Dinshaw formulates “reading,” as evoked in Chaucer’s text, as the male subject’s struggle to understand a (literalized) female body of text, foregrounding the Wife of Bath’s status as a fictional character created by Chaucer. Their desires accord because of this particular relationship. Dinshaw writes: “The Wife is a source of delight for this male author precisely because through her he is able to reform and still to participate in patriarchal discourse” (Dinshaw 116). If the reader “glosses” the text, the author creates it; Chaucer, via the Wife, doubles this process by creating a female body within the symbolically-coded “female” body (of text). Chaucer thus weighs in on the debates around gender and marriage through the voice of the Wife. The posture of mutual submission proposed by Mann reflects a confluence of desire nonetheless controlled—meta-narrated—by the male author. His fantasy of matrimonial harmony is “dreamed through her” (Dinshaw 130). Mann criticizes Dinshaw’s tendency to attribute authorial agency to the pilgrims, but in her analysis of the Wife of Bath, the schism she creates between them blurs the potential for the Wife of Bath to embody or exercise Chaucer’s desire. Dinshaw considers how Chaucer’s creation of the figure of the Wife itself expresses a desire to know what women “loven best” (1033). The tale, despite its attention to the thorniness of desire, reinforces the stereotype of feminine desire as a mysterious force to which men need to submit.

In considering the Wife’s “feminine” desire as a working of Chaucer’s desire to understand and play out the debates on gender relations within the institution of marriage, Dinshaw makes manifest the multifaceted nature of desire. The Canterbury Tales’ pluri-vocal narration constitutes a doubling, not a splitting, of authorial agency. Still, she describes the conclusion of the tale as a situation where “men’s desire is still in control… but feminine desire must continue to be acknowledged” (Dinshaw 129). She reads the knight’s surrender of maistrye as an incorporation of “feminine desire” that nonetheless rewards the knight’s desire for a beautiful and loyal wife. Her analysis, like Mann’s, focuses on the tale as an expression of Chaucer’s views and desires. However, Mann views the tale’s “acknowledgment” of “feminine desire” not as incidental, but as a fundamental and widespread aspect of Chaucer’s literary project. The tale argues for the necessity of acknowledging women’s desire, but the Wife’s status as an allegorical representation of “womanhood” complicates her ability to be read as a person with her own voice.

I will conclude by posing another reading, which draws from Mann’s analysis of the Wife of Bath’s responses to gender discourses and Dinshaw’s formulation of the tale as related to the act of the “glose.” One could read the knight’s quest in the “Wife of Bath’s Tale” as related to Chaucer’s struggle to represent women’s desire(s) through literature. The process begins by mirroring acts of rape or disloyalty enacted onto women by men, as featured in the Legend of Good Women and parodied in the “Man of Law’s Tale.” In the “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” then, the brazen act of rape by the knight both is and signifies a straightforward, literary depiction of an unjust act of violence. However, Chaucer moves beyond condemning violence, beginning to consider the reasons for its existence. Women’s desire to hear their desires expressed by Chaucer issues him a challenge through the figure of the knight. His ensuing struggle to determine what women “loven best” reveals the unruly, multifaceted nature of all human desire. The Wife of Bath becomes his proposed answer to the question, being neither quite a Good Woman nor a Wicked Wife. Her foremost desire reflects the answer the knight ultimately gives the court. The Wife is not portrayed as tyrannical, either. Her “joly body” is “permanently injured” by male violence; she is deaf in one ear due to a blow from Jankyn (“Man of Law’s Tale” 1185; Dinshaw 130).

This reading, if incomplete, demonstrates the seriousness with which Chaucer approached the task he set for himself in creating the Wife of Bath, as well as the outcome’s natural limits. The knight’s litany of failures to understand women’s desire reflects Chaucer’s genuine investment in the complexity of addressing the issue of gender difference through literature. The Knight’s answer, like Chaucer’s, nonetheless exposes the limits of the question. A certain amount of simplification necessarily occurs in appointing a single character, however multifaceted, as a representation of all women’s desire. This interpretation of the tale also suggests a broader difficulty of comprehending Chaucer’s treatment of gender: the question of rape, not as a societal ill but as a feature of his work, handled with varying levels of earnestness according to the dictates of genre.

The “Wife of Bath’s Tale” proves notable and urgent in its portrayal of rape as a product of a social state that devalues the agency and desire of its victims. It expresses, also, a hope for the transformation of society that begins with an individual’s genuine effort to release his egoistic, proprietary view of sex and desire. Still, the Tale is a metaphorical expression of a desired world. Its fairy-tale qualities suggest a certain skepticism about mapping its transformative vision onto a real, social space. Its fairy-tale qualities suggest the still-obscure nature of the difficult work to realize its transformative vision, which perhaps must necessarily occur outside of the realm of fiction.