Masculinity in The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale

Masculinity in The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale

The Wife of Bath, with the energy of her vernacular and the voraciousness of her sexual appetite, is one of the most vividly developed characters of 'The Canterbury Tales'. At 856 lines her prologue, or 'preambulacioun' as the Summoner calls it, is the longest of any of the pilgrims, and matches the General Prologue but for a few lines. Evidently Chaucer is infatuated with Alisoun, as he plays satirically with both gender and class issues through the Wife's robust rhetoric. Scholars and students alike have continued this obsession with her, and as a consequence Chaucer's larger than life widow has been subject to centuries of scrutiny. Indeed, she is in the vast minority amongst the Canterbury bound pilgrims; apart from the in-vogue Prioress she is the only female - though she appears in no way daunted by the apparent inequality in numbers. It seems almost a crime to examine masculinity in her prologue and tale, but as I hope to show, there is much to learn both about the Wife and about Chaucer from this male presence.

When we consider that Chaucer chose his pilgrims with careful precision to present a cross section of late-medireview society, the small number of women travellers can be seen as a clear reminder of the patriarchal culture in which the Wife existed. Nevertheless, despite Alisoun's vigorous assault on 'olde and angry nigardes' she is the first to recognise the political ascendancy of men. Her prologue is peppered with allusions to great biblical patriarchs such as Abraham and Jacob:

Lo, heere, the wise king, daun Salomon;

I trow he hadde wives mo than oon. (35-36)

Here, the Wife makes no attempt to d...

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...rue subject of the poet's irony in this piece.

Works Cited and Consulted

Amsler, Mark. "The Wife of Bath and Women's Power." Assays 4 (1987): 67-83.

Bott, Robin. "The Wife of Bath and the Revelour: Power Struggles and Failure in a Marriage of Peers." Medieval Perspectives 6 (1991): 154-161.

Carruthers, Mary. "The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions." PMLA 94 (1979): 209-18.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry Benson. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton, 1987.

Crane, Susan. "Alison's Incapacity and Poetic Instability in the Wife of Bath's Tale." MLA 102 (1987): 20-27.

Leicester, Jr., H. Marshall. "Of a fire in the dark: Public and Private Feminism in the Wife of Bath's Tale." Women's Studies 11.1-2 (1985): 157-78.

Oberembt, Kenneth. "Chaucer's Anti-Misogynist Wife of Bath." The Chaucer Review 10 (1976): 287-302.