Everyone has a gift from God, and uses it as best he or she can. This is a defense for her own healthy sexual appetite that flies in the face of the prevailing attitude. This attitude is upside-down from an orthodox medieval viewpoint: rather than trying to understand men’s (and women’s) actions according to a divine plan, she deduces God’s plan for the world according to earthly desires and needs. But, she says, God wouldn’t have made sexual organs if not for pleasure. (You can still hear this same argument today.) At least she is willing to have sex, unlike other wives who are “daungerous” (cool and standoffish).
Given the attitude of the time, is it outrageous of her to want to have a husband who will be her debtor and slave and to have power over his body (lines 155-158)? After all, that’s the legal power a husband can hold over her. She uses authors to support her case, but adds she’s saying all this only to amuse the company.
Believing that the best defense is a good offense, she teaches how to accuse husbands of being in the wrong to make them mind. All she wants to do, she pretends, is please them. At the same time, they’re old, so why should they want her sex all to themselves when there’s plenty to go around?
NOTE: This is an ironic upset of the idea of mutual charity in marriage, and of the assumption that men and women of the same age should marry. This may be valid, as the three old husbands died trying to satisfy her.
She thumbs her nose at the medieval wisdom that says a woman’s love is like a fire–the more it burns the more it wants to burn. But without her false accusations against her former husbands, she’d be ruined–“Been spilt,” a sexual allusion as it is with Nicholas in the Miller’s Tale–if she didn’t take the initiative. She sees marriage in a cold, practical light: first come, first served; and whoever can profit should do so, for everything in life is for sale. She doesn’t have sexual feeling for the old husbands, but pretends to so she can get things from them. Is this a cruel and callous attitude or is Dame Alice getting her just deserts?
Dame Alice’s fourth husband, even though he was a lout (pulling off the very cheating tricks she accused the other husbands of), makes her think fondly of her lost youth. But the passing of time doesn’t cause her to regret the good times she’s had. Time has robbed her of her beauty, but “the devil with it” (line 476). Her resigned observation that “the flour is gone,” meaning both “flour” and “flower,” is ambiguous, showing her deep-rooted sense of the flesh and her sense of lost youth.
She loved her last two husbands because they were cool toward her. There’s no real change or growth in her more recent experience, but these husbands, especially the last, are more like her and so more successful as matches. They give her a dose of her own medicine, and even though she eventually gets control, she gets a good fight in the process.
Jankin is the only husband we get a clear picture of, as well as the circumstances surrounding their meeting and wooing. It gives us a clue as to how she may have arranged her other marriages. (Like Nicholas, he is “hende,” and she, like Alison, feels an instant sexual attraction.) We can feel Dame Alice’s frustration after hearing of the tales of evil women that Jankin reads her, of the man who wants a cutting of the “blessed tree” on which a man’s three wives hanged themselves and the proverbs that prove all wives are wicked.
The ending is a happy one for her, for although she uses trickery, pretending she’s about to die, she does get her “mastery,” which means skill as well as superiority. In this success, has she reached beyond the instinctual knowledge she’s depended on all these years? Her tale may indicate an answer.
^^^^^^^^^^CANTERBURY TALES: THE TALE
Dame Alice’s nasty reference to “limiters” (friars who beg within certain limits) to get back at the Friar’s comment on her big mouth, shows in what disrepute friars are viewed: a woman is safe, she says, since the friar will take only her honor. This is a nice lead-in to the main tale, where a knight does indeed take a young woman’s honor.
The knight sees women only as objects that he can take by force. But ironically his life then depends on the will of women.
NOTE: As in the Knight’s Tale, mercy is dependent on the goodness of women. Pity, whether between the sexes, ruler and subject, or God and man, is another form of love.
Dame Alice jokes at her own expense about women who want to be free instead of listening to their husbands, and about women who, like Midas’ wife (and like herself), can’t keep their mouths shut.
The knight learns that women want many things, but most of all they want dominion over their men, an assertion of identity just as men have. The old woman from whom he learns this is obviously enchanted, for the 24 dancing women in the forest disappear, and she knows, without being told, that he’s been sent by the queen.
The knight has more to learn after he’s forced to marry the old woman. His idea of the natural order makes it abhorrent to think of marrying someone so old and below his station, but he is to be morally reeducated, appropriately, in bed.
Her arguments–that “gentilesse” (nobility) comes from God, that poverty can be a blessing, and that ugliness keeps a woman faithful–are based on authorities like Christ and Dante. This shows a strong Christian basis for her position, a basis Jankin was missing when he quoted from his learned book. They make sense, but neither choice (faithful but ugly or beautiful and faithless) holds water against the strength of human nature. He has to choose between physical and spiritual love, and he chooses neither. Both choices involve dilemmas: possession without joy or independence with jealousy.
By resigning himself, the knight shows true repentance and spiritual growth, and he is rewarded by getting the impossible, youth and fidelity. But first he has to relinquish control, a fact that echoes Dame Alice’s own marriage to Jankin. The balance reached in the end is based on a harmony between sexuality and spiritual values, and even if Dame Alice doesn’t have quite the same balance in her marriage, she at least has put her point across in a lively and convincing way.
^^^^^^^^^^CANTERBURY TALES: SOURCES
Dame Alice’s tale is a satire put in the form of a fairy tale. She is twisting an old folk tale that shows up in an Arthurian romance about Sir Gawain, one of Arthur’s knights. In that story the choice is between a wife who is beautiful either by day or by night–a very different kind of choice from the one our knight is offered.
The tale serves as an “exemplum,” a moral tale that preachers used to show people how they should act. For similar reasons, her introduction, complete with authorities and logical arguments, is in the form of a university sermon so she can persuasively make her case for pleasurable sex that goes against medieval doctrine. Many of the antifeminist points are taken from St. Jerome, notably the image of woman’s love burning like a fire and seeking more to burn. Of course, in Dame Alice’s mouth the idea of putting sexual guilt on the woman sounds ridiculous.
The Wife herself is based loosely on the Old Woman in the French Romance of the Rose, which Chaucer translated. Like Alice, the Old Woman has used love for sensual pleasure and gain, and defends the philosophy against courtly love or Scripture. But the source is more in the Old Woman’s ideas than her person, since she’s old and decrepit and Dame Alice still has plenty of years–and husbands–left to go.
^^^^^^^^^^CANTERBURY TALES: SETTING
It’s appropriate that Dame Alice would choose the mythical, misty time of King Arthur’s Round Table for her tale. It’s a time of chivalry and enchantment. By placing her tale beyond a specific time, in a place where the woman’s love was the all-important factor in a knight’s courtly conduct, she’s making sure her audience will catch the importance of female superiority.
^^^^^^^^^^CANTERBURY TALES: THEMES
1. SEXUAL SUPERIORITY
Some read the Wife of Bath’s whole saga as one of sexual revenge, but consider the society she has to put up with. Restrictions on women were enormous in Chaucer’s day, and Dame Alice wants to gain revenge inside marriage. Her feminism was perhaps not common, but protests like hers weren’t unheard of either. She means to attack the guilt-ridden and sex-obsessed attitudes of her day by beating men at their own game.
2. CELIBACY/VIRGINITY
Although she quotes St. Paul on the sanctity of virginity, Dame Alice isn’t ashamed of the fact that she wants no part of it. Her rambunctious sexuality is in itself a kind of religious devotion, since it glorifies God by making good use of the tools He gave her.