Love and Economics: Gender Roles in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’: Book Review Example

Anti-feminist thinking carried the weight of social and religious doctrine in the patriarchal society of medieval England.  In The Wife of Bath’s Tale, Chaucer sets a woman of independent means and prodigious sexual appetite (and experience) in counterpoint to social norms, the church’s dehumanizing portrayal of women and the roles of men and women in marriage.

The Wife of Bath bursts upon us in the person of “Alisoun,” an outrageously outspoken and eccentric widow with a shockingly candid take on male-female relations.  What isn’t immediately apparent to the reader is that Alisoun’s disdain for “tradition” reflects her take on gender roles that explain her behavior.

In the prologue, we learn that Alisoun is a clothier and a wealthy widow.  Her bourgeois class status, merchant standing and marital history give her a propertied status and degree of wealth that allow her to travel, which accords with her belief in going everywhere and seeing everything.  She is proud of her bright Sunday clothes and of the cloth, which she herself has woven, worn under her hat.  What Chaucer gives us is a refreshing and colorful repudiation of medieval notions of a genteel and courtly woman on pilgrimage for strictly religious reasons.

Experience and “maistrie” (mastery) are important in the prologue in terms of marriage and sexual relations.  Alisoun has, after all, “Housbondes at chirche dore she hadde five (Norton, 92), meaning she’s been married five times.  A strong-willed woman, she believes strongly in her power over men, declaring unapologetically that her body is her best weapon in her ongoing crusade to wield control over her husbands.

The relationship between love and economics was an important one for women in a traditionally patriarchal society, supported by a patriarchal church.  Wealth and property made widows desirable marriage prospects and five marriages had indeed made Alisoun a propertied woman.  But love made her a master of peasants, of husbands she knew how to manipulate:

“Men may conseile a womman to be oon, 

But conseiling nis no comandement 

He putte it in oure owene juggement” (Norton, 122).

Chaucer doesn’t pull any punches.  Alisoun boldly proclaims her genitalia to be a potent weapon in her mastery over her men.  Her “bele chose” is there to be used as God intended, and she has no use for clerical teachings to the contrary.  “For hadde God commanded maydenhede, / Thanne hadde he dampned weddyng with the dede” (Norton, 122).

Not content to defy religious convention, Alisoun seeks rather to find biblical examples (or loopholes) to justify her philosophy.  She tells us that Christ himself never taught that people should be married only once, and that Solomon had multiple wives.  The Bible exhorts the faithful to “go forth and multiply,” she reminds us, and God endowed us with the parts for sex.  “They were nat maad for noght,” she says.

Her experience and her willingness to use what God gave her as a weapon gives her economic clout she can use against her husband.  Getting money and property out of her husbands came down to a simple equation:  if they failed to pay her their marriage debt, she could exact payment in her own unique way:

“An housbonde wol I have,

I wol nat lette,

Which shal be bother my detour and thral,

And have his tribulacion withal upon his flesh,

Whil that I am his wif” (Norton, 120).   

The Wife of Bath is a man’s creation, but an expansive one that takes into account feminine desires and aspirations to a remarkable extent.  Alisoun flouts anti-feminist traditions throughout her tale in a manner that reminds us the dogma that set the boundaries for women was the creation of men.

“This is a male fantasy, of course. And when we consider that such desire for the reform — not the overturning – of patriarchy is represented as a woman’s desire, it is even more apparent that this is a masculine dream.  But Chaucer’s treatment of it is unusually on-exploitative given the conventions of his age.

It’s a bold representation indeed, and Chaucer comes at it straight and true.  She’s not engaging in simple bluster; she’s “telling it like it is.”  Even so, Alisoun is still the anti-feminist stereotype of the sinful woman, the personification of the sin of Eve, not the virtue of Mary.  But through her candor and self-confidence she faces down the righteous rectitude of the men whose preachings she denounces, the very writers she catches her fifth husband, Jankyn, reading in “wikked wyves.”

Of her five husbands, she loves Jankyn the best because he’s able to stand up to her.

After tearing the offending book out of his hands, she takes it from him, tears it and sustains a clout to the head.  Feigning death, she accuses him of trying to kill her for her land, in so doing wrenching an abject apology from him and asserting her economic and marital “maistrie” over their marriage.

Here is another weapon in her feminine arsenal, and she needs every one of her skills to hold her own against husband number five, who she admits was her greatest challenge.  Lying prone, she pretends to be helpless, causing Jankyn to feel guilty about striking her.  Moral or immoral, she clearly doesn’t care how she accomplishes her end as long as she holds the upper hand over the man in her life.

Given the length and distinctiveness of her tale, the Wife of Bath would appear to be one of Chaucer’s favorite characters.  An appropriately over-the-top personality in a bawdy age, she is his anti-heroine, a woman who wishes the clerics would write a woman’s story, then sets out to tell a woman’s tale from a uniquely authoritative and irrepressible viewpoint.

Works Cited

Abrams, M.H.  The Norton Anthology of English Literature.  New York: W.W. Norton Co. (1993).