??t Wyf…
I really do enjoy Chaucer, I’ve found.? We did the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale today in class, and I discovered that the Wyf (a holdover from the Old English neuter noun for woman–a lesson in the difference between grammatical gender and conceptual gender that I didn’t let pass) is, almost as much as Milton’s Satan, a character who invites ranges of interpretation that render authorial intent useless for conversation even if valid as a concept.? Some of my students were cheering for old Mrs. Bath (I know that’s not her name) from the start, and who can blame them?? Others were sore irked by the way that Chaucer treats women as characters.? Can’t really blame them either.
I think that all of us had a good time with the Biblical exegesis that really doesn’t exist many other places that I know of.? She cites Solomon’s much-publicized 1000-woman harem and wishes that she could have that many men handy.? She notes and emphasizes that Paul does not forbid marriage and notes that she wants to have men like Jacob had women.? In a bit of allegory she notes that while virgins are bread made with wheat flour, women like her are like barley loaves.
Those of you who know your New Testament know how many men enjoy just a couple barley loaves.
As a small display of Chaucer’s erudition, Alys (the woman’s name) then proceeds to tell the group about her husband’s Book of Wicked Wyves and rattles off stories of–you guessed it–women who ruined things from all sorts of classical and biblical texts.? The best bit of that story, though, is the fact that, having gotten tired of hearing her husband Jankyn read these stories to her, she starts to rip pages out.
The tale itself, half the length of the prologue, is different from the Knight’s Tale in some fun ways, most notably the 50-line digression that overtakes Alys when she hears herself mention men’s flattery.? It’s not until she’s commented on the fun of being flattered and told a tangential story about King Midas that she gets back to her main story, which is a fairly straightforward fairy tale whose moral is that men just need to let women decide things.
Those of you who know this text see full well that I didn’t add much value to the text itself, but the text itself, as it turns out, is quite fun enough on its own.
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