Book Review Chaucer The Canterbury Tales - The Wife Of Baths Prologue

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Unusually, the Wife Of Bath’s Prologue is much longer than her story itself, and therefore it gets full page to itself here. The Wife, Alyson (or Alis), is one of Chaucer’s most likeable characters, and her Prologue and the subsequent tale are sometimes seen as early works in support of the emancipation of women. This tory and the Prologue get more academic study than any other Canterbury Tale. Alis proposes to tell a story about married life. She feels as if she is quite an authority in this as she has been married five times herself. She married most of her husbands for security and material comfort. For much of her life she has been a gold-digger, seeking husbands who could shower her with gifts rather than affection. She is totally unapologetic for having strong sexual appetites herself. She asks what a man’s testicles are for if not to please a woman who comes into contact with them. Alis seems to advocate sex before and outside of marriage. She argues that women should get to try men out for a time before agreeing to marriage. She shows that men get to try out dogs, horses, and work-tools before committing to purchase of them, but that married couples don’t get to see what they have ended up with until the wedding night itself, which she regards as grossly unfair. She objects to men having secret rooms, and locked away papers, and rarely account for their activity. Alis complains that women are expected to have no such secrets and should have full-unlimited access to their husbands’ business and activity. She objects to husbands who get jealous of a wife who some man flirts with, even when the wife has no desire to return the affections offered by the third party. She objects to men expecting their wives to dress down in public, and not look too beautiful for fear of attracting tempting offers from other men. Alis sees attack as the best form of defence. She often withholds sexual favours from men who do not offer her some gift in return. Her first three husbands were much older men, and they may have died off from exhaustion in keeping up with Alis’s sexual appetites. Her fourth husband was a womaniser, so Alis flirted openly with other men under his nose to make hypocrisy of his jealousy. There are hints that she may eventually have murdered him. The wife is highly critical of the Catholic clergy’s tendency to denounce women as the bane of men, and to hold all women who are not saints as in some way corrupt and fallen. Alis’s 5th and last husband (to the time of her narration) is the one man she fell for from love, rather than from material needs, but he was a brute who beat her up badly, despite which she still loved him. One fight in particular arose when he spent some time reciting from a book about evil, promiscuous women, like Eve, Delilah, Judith, etc… Distressed by the incessant attack on her gender, Alis snatched the book from her husband’s hand and ripped it up on him. He beat her up for it, so severely that she was rendered deaf in one ear. Shocked by his own brutality, the husband calmed down and seems to have shown genuine affection to his wife thereafter. It is not clear whether the marriage still endures or if Alis is now a widow again. The Prologue is an astonishingly honest and forthright read, as relevant to women today as ever, and all the more remarkable for being written by a man. Her Prologue completed, The Wife Of Bath now tells her story itself, which maintains the themes she has touched on here. I’ll review the story in my next Chaucer article. Arthur Chappell