2. DESTINY AND IDEAS OF ORDER
There’s a right way and a wrong way to do things, as we learned in the Knight’s Tale, to which this tale is an answer and a parallel. The earlier tale deals with destiny that men can’t change or know about; here it takes the form of everyone getting his or her just deserts. All the individual plans backfire and God’s proper order is reestablished.
Also, we’re meant to see, even in this humorous tale, that some things belong to a natural order: men should marry women their own age, young people will be attracted to each other and let their sexual instinct override their sense.
3. VOCATIONS
Everyone’s profession has an ironic meaning in this tale. Carpentry, John’s profession, is put in to annoy the Reeve, but look at it also in a larger sense. Carpentry was Christ’s profession. Also, the carpenter’s guild in Chaucer’s day put on the mystery (religious) play of Noah. Astrology is what allows Nicholas to pull one over on John. But it also was seen by some in the Middle Ages as a “wrong” science, since man’s “privetee” and providence aren’t supposed to replace God’s, and astrology is a way to try to do so. Like Arcite he is the Knight’s Tale, Nicholas is set apart from society; he is set apart by his dabbling in the occult.
4. PROMISES
As in the Knight’s Tale, vows are made and broken, but the humor here is that half the time the people who make the promises don’t intend to keep them. Alison is not the faithful wife. Nicholas promises a flood that never comes. The only promises that are kept are the wrongly intentioned ones, such as Alison and Nicholas’ vow to cuckold John, Nicholas’ promise to John that he will “save” his wife, and Alison’s promise that she’ll let Absalom kiss her.
5. THE SACRED AND PROFANE
We’ve already seen the interplay between the bawdy and the religious, but how are we to take it? Does the profanity cast doubt on the seriousness of the spiritual? Does the idea of a hidden moral mean we can’t take the tale’s raucousness at face value? You can accept either version, or make a case that Chaucer meant to fuse the two, with the lovers’ longings and the love of God represented. After all, you can argue in this tale that both sex and religion are ways to reach outside of oneself, and both come in for their fair share of ridicule.
^^^^^^^^^^CANTERBURY TALES: PLOT
Unique in the Canterbury Tales, the introduction to The Wife of Bath’s Tale is longer than the tale itself. She describes her views on marriage in great detail, starting with the grief she’s given all five of her husbands (and which she had a great time dishing out).
Her purpose in marriage has been to gain the upper hand. Her first three husbands were old, rich, and willing to do what she said. She used harangues to get them on the defensive when they got suspicious of her stepping out, accusing them of looking at other women.
Her fourth husband had a mistress, but Dame Alice (the Wife) made him fry in his own grease. She had him believe she was sleeping with another man (she wasn’t) so he’d be jealous. But even before he died Alice started making eyes at a clerk, Jankin, while Husband #4 was in London during Lent. When the fourth husband died, Alice married the good-looking Jankin, twenty years her junior: the only one she married for love and the only one who treated her like dirt.
He used to read to her from a book that told how women can’t be trusted. She got so furious that she ripped the pages out, and he hit her so hard she went partially deaf. Thinking (or at least making him think) she was about to die, she made him swear to obey her every word. After that, they had a perfect marriage.
Before the Wife begins her tale, the Friar butts in and the Summoner yells at him. (They are natural enemies because they both try to get money from people.) Because he has interrupted, the Wife starts her story with an attack on friars’ lechery.
Her tale, not surprisingly, exemplifies the same theme. A knight is sentenced to death for raping a woman, but the queen will allow him to live if he can answer one question: what do women want? He finds no two people who agree, until an old woman tells him women want mastery in marriage. Because she gives him the right answer, he must grant her request, which is that he marry her.
He’s horrified but has no choice. On their wedding night, she offers to stay ugly and faithful, or turn young and beautiful and perhaps unfaithful. Wisely, he leaves the choice up to her and promises her domination over him. So she becomes beautiful and faithful and they live happily. The Wife ends by praying God to send every woman a young, sexy, and obedient husband!
DAME ALICE, the Wife herself, is her own main character. She gives us a vivid picture of herself. Obviously she loves to talk and pauses only when she’s lost her place in her long ramble. She tells us (lines 609-616) that she was born when Venus and Mars were in conjunction with Taurus. According to this horoscope, Venus would make her beautiful, but Mars would make her heavy. The sweet voice bestowed by Venus becomes loud and raucous thanks to Mars’ planetary influence. All in all, the planets make her charming, joyous, and boisterous.
Some readers say Dame Alice is totally lifelike, others say she is larger than life. Some say she loves men, as they are obviously her life-long passion, while others contend she is carrying on a life-long war against them. You decide. Is she at fault for wanting dominion over her husbands? (Your answer should depend on what you see in the character, not on whether you’re male or female.) Notice that she not only puts men down, she also satirizes women, pointing out that they can’t keep their mouths shut and that she’s right up there with the worst of them.
Another question is how she feels about the life she’s lived. When she stops to think of her vanished youth, you can see it as a real sadness over lost time, or as a shrug of her shoulders and a joyous desire to get on with the rest of her life. Either way, Chaucer doesn’t praise or blame her, but lets her look forward to her sixth husband, whoever he may be.
The KNIGHT in the tale is not well defined, because he’s more of a receptacle for Dame Alice’s teachings than a man in his own right. Because he rapes a woman (a virgin, at that) he’s sentenced to death; but we don’t hear a peep from him. In fact, the only time we see any emotion on his part is when he’s upset: at discovering he has an impossible task to perform, at hearing that he has to marry the old hag, at having to sleep with her. The only time he is genuinely happy, in fact, is when the wife has total control over him (and has become young and faithful). This is the point Dame Alice wants to convey.
The OLD WOMAN in the tale doesn’t have a name, but she packs a powerful moral punch. When the knight complains in bed about having to sleep with a wife who is old, poor, and ugly, she delivers a strong and well-reasoned sermon about the nobility that comes from God, not from a bloodline. Finally she shows she will win his love by becoming both beautiful and faithful. Her intelligence and reasoned responses are as articulate as those of the Wife herself.
^^^^^^^^^^CANTERBURY TALES: INTRODUCTION
Dame Alice tells us straight off that experience is the only authority she needs to tell of the problems of marriage. She proceeds, however, to use plenty of other authorities to support her idea that women should have control in marriage.
NOTE: In the Middle Ages women had an exceptionally raw deal in marriage. Legally, they could do nothing without their husbands, in fact did not even exist other than as their husbands’ property. Even sex could technically be performed only for procreation, not enjoyment (that was lust). Look at the effect this attitude has, not only on the way a medieval audience would view this tale, but the Miller’s Tale as well. Women were responsible for any lust a man felt, because they were all considered temptresses.
Immediately Dame Alice gets defensive about the number of husbands she’s had, saying not even Christ himself defined how many husbands were too many.
She first lets us know that virginity is nothing worth defending, since although St. Paul advises virginity, he doesn’t command it; he leaves it up to each woman. There’s no prize for virginity, she says in her own defense; besides, she cleverly asks, if everyone were a virgin, where would we get virgins?