Ekta Karkala
Ms. Sherrard
AP English Language, Period 4
December 10, 2018 WORD PICKS
History or Herstory?: Undermining Credibility in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”
In medieval Europe, customary laws emerged as authoritative devices meant to restrict or grant rights. Customary laws favored men over women in all aspects, especially those regarding property, marriage, and occupation. Throughout Europe, the legal status of a woman was centered around her marital status, and marriage itself was the most influential factor in restricting the autonomy of married and unmarried women. However, the Wife of Bath seems unbothered by these customary laws, as all the influential choices in her tale have been fully in her hands, with no male authorities to interfere. Her independence from male authorities is further reflected in her choice to join the pilgrims alone and dress and act in a flirtatious manner. However, in an attempt to enhance her tale, the Wife issues contradictory statements which cause the pilgrims to doubt the authenticity of her experience. Through the Wife of Bath’s contradictions in her storytelling, Chaucer portrays her as an unreliable narrator to establish her humanity as a character.
The Wife of Bath asserts that she has gained her knowledge through experience, not text, yet continues to legitimize her argument through textual authorities. In the prologue, the Wife states, “‘If there was no authority on earth / Except experience, mine, for what it’s worth, / And that’s enough for me, all goes to show / That marriage is a misery and a woe” (Chaucer 258). In the context of a text-oriented culture, “the Wife of Bath makes her remarkable assertion that she needs only experience, not written authority, to know what she knows about marriage” (Arnell 938). She then goes on to describe her life experience, with a focus on her relationships. However, later in the prologue, she justifies her multiple marriages by referring to Solomon, Abraham, and Jacob, who are all major polygamous figures in the Bible, the text which indisputably holds heaviest authority of the time period. Despite her assertion that she needs experience, not authority in order to speak, “she first affirms the truth of her points by quoting written texts” (Arnell 938). She then demands to be shown “a time or text where God disparages / Or sets a prohibition upon marriages / Expressly,” further emphasizing her view of text and its ability to shape her argument (Chaucer 260). In this way, “the Wife seems to recognize that to establish herself as an authority on marriage, she must in fact know and adduce the authority of written tradition” (Arnell 938). The disconnect from the Wife of Bath’s ignorance of texts and “her experience itself which turns out to be ‘written by’ textual authority” is employed by Chaucer to undermine her credibility in other aspects of the tale (Arnell 938).
Through further convoluted dialogue, Chaucer portrays the Wife as unable to claim authority through her own life experience. Similar to her exclusion but heavy use of text to support her statements, the Wife issues contradictory statements regarding her desires in her own life. When describing her fifth husband in the prologue, she candidly says, “He gave the bridle over to my hand, / Gave me the government of house and land… And I pray God that sits in majesty / To bless his soul and fill it with his glory” (Chaucer 280). Here, it seems that the Wife’s domination of her husband made her fifth marriage the most enjoyable. However, just a few stanzas prior, she states, “God never let his soul be sent to Hell! / And yet he was my worst, and many a blow / He struck me still can ache along my row / Of ribs, and will until my dying day” (Chaucer 272). This statement gives the impression that his violent domination of her made him her worst marriage experience. This passage also suggests that “her assumption of ‘maistrie’ is untrue, either that or a considerable distortion of the facts” (Parker 96). From the contradiction in her musings, “we can assume either that she didn’t win the sovereignty she claims to have done, or that she did, and found it less agreeable than she had hoped” (Parker 96). The Wife’s attempt to implement multiple situations into her story, suggesting at both her obedience and dominance, jeopardizes her authenticity. In the Wife’s contradictory method of narrating her tale, she reveals her own incompetence at claiming authority over factors that threaten to influence her lives, therefore undermining her reliability as a narrator.
In portraying the Wife of Bath as an unreliable narrator, Chaucer establishes her humanity as a character. Through the Wife of Bath, Chaucer constructs “a personality complicated to a degree at which it becomes absurd to deny individuality” (Parker 97). Her contradictions indicate that she creates fantasies about her own life to please herself and enhance her tale, “which [is] exploded by her own accidental self-revelations,” and her convoluted dialogue translates to her internal indecision (Parker 96). In the struggle between her fantasies and reality, the reader is exposed to a peek at her inner life, and “the character now in harmony but in conflict with itself” speaks to today’s society and generations past. Although many aspects of the Wife’s personality “may be unfamiliar to the modern reader, the way that they are mixed” to create a character representative of human conflicts is recognized instantly (Parker 97). Whether Chaucer anticipated the change in human consciousness or whether he was simply aware of human nature, his portrayal of the Wife of Bath as an unreliable character succeeds in defining her humanity and making her a representative of the timeless conditions of human life.
Works Cited
Arnell, Carla. “Chaucer's Wife of Bath and John Fowles's Quaker Maid: Tale-Telling and the Trial of Personal Experience and Written Authority.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 102, no. 4, 2007, pp. 933–946. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20467542.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Penguin Group, 1951. Print.
Parker, David. “Can We Trust the Wife of Bath?” The Chaucer Review, vol. 4, no. 2, 1969, pp. 90–98. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25093114.