1—
CHAUCER'S SUBJECT

1—
The Pardoner as Disenchanted Consciousness and Despairing Self

To my mind the Canterbury tale that responds best to patristic or Augustinian forms of analysis is the Pardoner's. Such studies as that of Robert P. Miller, showing the relevance to the tale of the tradition of the scriptural eunuch and the sin of presumption, or those of Bernard F. Huppé and Lee W. Patterson, demonstrating the even greater importance of the complementary sin of despair, are genuinely helpful in elucidating a narrative so patently, though often so puzzlingly, allegorical.^[1] At the same time the tale is one of the most fully dramatized, the most fitted to its teller, of any in the Canterbury collection. It has appealed to dramatically inclined critics since Kittredge as an example of what is freshest and most untraditional in Chaucer's art. It would be disingenuous of me to attempt to conceal my own bias in favor of the latter kind of criticism, but I think there is something to be gained from attending carefully to the typological elements of the tale because they are instructive about the place of the institution of exegetical interpretation in the Canterbury Tales and more generally about what it might mean to say that the poem "represents" the time in which it was written.

Though no one can really deny, since Robertson's studies, that Chaucer uses typological methods—at least sometimes—many critics have been reluctant to allow the implications that patristically influenced commentators draw from this fact. I take E. T. Donaldson's comment, first published in 1958, seven years after the appearance of Robertson's "Doctrine of Charity in Medieval Literary Gardens" and four years before his Preface to Chaucer , as typical of a dissatisfaction that has continued unabated despite the increasing number of detailed

[1] R. Miller, "Chaucer's Pardoner"; Huppé, Reading of the Canterbury Tales. 209–20; Patterson, "Chaucerian Confession."

and often attractive demonstrations of the presence of typological elements in the poet's work:

In my criticism I have been reluctant to invoke historical data from outside the poem to explain what is in it. . . . I have therefore eschewed the historical approach used both by the great Chaucerians of the earlier part of this century and by those scholars who have recently been reading Chaucer primarily as an exponent of medieval Christianity. The fact that the difference between what these two historical approaches have attained is absolute—if Chaucer means what the older Chaucerians thought he meant he cannot possibly mean what these newer Chaucerians think he means—has encouraged me to rely on the poems as the principal source of their meaning.^[2]

Perhaps one reason for critical hesitation has been the rather illiberal tone of much patristic criticism, which insists that most really interesting human activities are, from a medieval perspective, no more or less than sins. To object to that tone is to risk dismissal as a historically conditioned sentimentalist, but I think what really lies behind the objection is the feeling that if the exegetical critics are right, our ancestors were, in their well-documented distrust of poetry, an impossibly reductive lot who were unable to distinguish clearly between a daisy of the field and the Virgin Mary and who preferred (perhaps rightly) to see the latter whenever they encountered the former.

Still, in the Pardoner's Tale these so-called historical elements are stubbornly present. It helps a lot to know something about a tradition of interpretation based on the idea that whereas men make words stand for things, God can make things themselves stand for other things,^[3] in dealing with what is being communicated by a passage like the following from the Pardoner's Prologue:

Thanne have I in latoun a sholder-boon
Which that was of an hooly Jewes sheep.
"Goode men," I seye, "taak of my wordes keep;
If that this boon be wasshe in any welle,
If cow, or calf, or sheep, or oxe swelle

[2] Donaldson, Chaucer's Poetry, vi. See Robertson, "Doctrine of Charity," and Preface to Chaucer. Robertson's articles on exegetical criticism and related matters have been collected in his Essays in Medieval Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

[3] The locus classicus for this idea is Augustine's De doctrina christiana, book 1. My formulation here follows Aquinas's elegant summary in Summa theologia 1.1, 10, resp.

That any worm hath ete, or worm ystonge,
Taak water of that welle and wassh his tonge,
And it is hool anon; and forthermoore,
Of pokkes and of scabbe, and every soore
Shal every sheep be hool that of this welle
Drynketh a draughte. Taak kep eek what I telle:
If that the good-man that the beestes oweth
Wol every wyke, er that the cok hym croweth,
Fastynge, drynken of this welle a draughte,
As thilke hooly Jew oure eldres taughte,
His beestes and his stoor shal multiplie.
        (VI, 350–65)

At the literal level this specimen of the Pardoner's "gaude" is a blatant appeal to the cupidity, or at any rate to the decidedly secular interests, of his "lewed" audience. The bone is a kind of snake oil. Yet the imagery the Pardoner uses about and around the supposed relic—sheep, holy Jews, devouring worms, life-giving wells—seems insistently to imply much more. I do not think it is forcing the passage at all to see in it a persistent typological edge characteristic of his style. The fundamental link the passage takes advantage of is the equation between sheep and Christian souls, the helpless beasts endangered by the worm that dieth not, whom the Good Shepherd has in care. Accordingly, the ancient holy Jew takes on associations perhaps with Jacob (via the well) and almost certainly with the promise made to Abraham echoed in line 365 (Gen. 22.16–18). These associations in turn imply a complex and sophisticated series of interpretations of that promise, originally applied literally to and by the children of Israel under the old law but since figurally fulfilled at a spiritual level under the new law in the care of Christ for his flock. This fulfillment, the outcome of a complex series of, precisely, historical circumstances, is presently embodied in the Pardoner's own profession and act, which is itself a thoroughly historical thing. The Pardoner performs the Holy Spirit's work of the salvation of souls by the mercy of Christ, a divine mission that is mediated through the plenitudo potestatis of the papacy as that power came to be understood in the thirteenth century as well as by the delegation of papal authority to the agency of the man before us, who daily completes, or rather debases and frustrates, the divine project begun so long ago.

I am being deliberately impressionistic rather than "textueel" here

because what I want to establish is not a particular exegesis but that a spiritual level of meaning is being deliberately and consciously put in play by the speaker behind and around the literal offer of worldly "heele" and enrichment. It seems to me that the passage is overloaded in the direction of this kind of spiritual significance. There is something gratuitous not about the reading itself but about the Pardoner's insistence on packing it in in the very act of mocking and debasing it with his pitch. It is one thing to announce that you are a fraud and that though unrepentant you intend to expose your own fraudulent arts; it is another thing to load those arts themselves with a set of undermeanings that exhibit so complex an awareness of the truth you are abusing. The Pardoner seems to be saying not only, Look how I deceive the ignorant, but also, Look at what an important matter I deceive them about. Whatever his motives, it is at least clear that the effect is achieved by a deliberate forcing of mundane and particular matters into a general and spiritual framework while refusing to let go of the literal level, so that we see both significances at the same time and are unsure to which one to assign priority. Much of the power of the Pardoner's Tale derives from a consistent application of this method to the materials of the story. A good deal of the eeriness of the Pardoner's central exemplum comes from the fact that it reverses the invariable order of causes found in all of its analogues, from The Arabian Nights to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In those stories the gold always comes first, and the point is to show that in looking for gold men find death. But in the Pardoner's Tale we begin with a search for death and find the gold later. The Pardoner's version thrusts the spiritual implications of the quest into the situation at the outset and juxtaposes them sharply to the extreme, childlike literal-mindedness of the three rioters, who treat death like a bully from the next town.

I intend to argue that such a failure or refusal to distinguish carefully and consistently between literal and spiritual levels of meaning and discourse is at the center of the Pardoner's Tale. I will maintain with the patristic critics that the allegorical relation of letter and spirit is the single most important determinant of the tale's meaning. I also want, however, to return to the Pardoner the agency that patristic readings generally deny him and to maintain that he himself is the source of this effect. What exegetical criticism detects in the tale and makes an external doctrinal structure that contains and explains a Pardoner unaware of it is in fact the Pardoner's interpretation of

himself, consciously undertaken and offered by him to the pilgrims. The Pardoner is the first exegetical critic of his own tale, obsessed with the spiritual meanings he sees beneath the surface of everyday life. He feels the burden of these meanings himself and attempts, as we shall see, to impose them on others. The Pardoner has long been recognized as the most self-conscious of the Canterbury pilgrims. Part of that self-consciousness involves an awareness of his own condition, and I do not mean simply that he attempts to hide his physical eunuchry—I am not at all sure that he does. The Pardoner's conduct of his tale indicates that among the things he knows about himself and is concerned to make others see are the things Robert P. Miller knows about him: that he is the eunuchus non dei , the embodiment of the vetus homo, the Old Man whose body is the body of this death and who is guilty of sinning against the Holy Ghost.

From the beginning there is something conspicuous and aggressive about the Pardoner's failure to conceal his various evils and deficiencies, well before he "confesses" some of them in his tale. The general narrator, the Host, and the "gentils" all see through him at once, and it seems likely that they can do so because the Pardoner makes it easy for them. A. C. Spearing has pointed to the obvious fakery of his authorizing bulls from popes and cardinals, and Kellogg and Haselmeyer report that the abuse of carrying false relics is "so rare that no contemporary manual even discusses it."^[4] Since the relics themselves—pillowcases and pigs' bones—convince no one, it seems fair to say that both the Canterbury frame and the historical background of the tale contribute to the impression the performance also creates that this particular Pardoner goes out of his way to stage his abuses and make them even more blatant than those of most of his historically attested compeers. The same is true of his physical and sexual peculiarities. I take it that such things as his immediate echoing of the Host's "manly" oath "by Seint Ronyan" and his announced preference for jolly wenches in every town though babies starve for it (449–53) have in common the tactic of calling attention to the sexual oddity the General Prologue notes so emphatically by deliberately shamming exaggerated virility. This is a form of camp in which the hypermasculinity is as much a put-on as the mock demonism of what

[4] Spearing, Pardoner's Prologue and Tale , 7; Kellogg and Haselmeyer, "Chaucer's Satire of the Pardoner," 228.

Patterson calls his "gross and deliberate parody of sinfulness" ("Chaucerian Confession," 162). The Pardoner's manner courts an interpretation that his confession simply confirms and heightens: what interests me most is that the consistent drift of the interpretation he suggests is theological in character. His prologue continually circles back to typologically charged images like the dove sitting on a barn of line 397 or more direct comparisons such as "I wol noon of the apostles countrefete" (447). Although the performance here may be interpreted as a joke, the humor derives from the disproportion between the ultimate issues that are constantly being raised and the cheap faker who raises them—and it is the Pardoner himself who keeps pointing up the discrepancy.

Nor is it clear, even at this early stage, that the Pardoner is only joking. He seems obscurely troubled that his performances can "'maken oother folk to twynne/From avarice and soore to repente'" (430–31), and, as Patterson has pointed out ("Chaucerian Confession," 164), he insists somewhat too strongly that he does it only for the money. His oddly serious warning about the dangers of false preaching (407–22) reveals how the act has a complexity for him that belies his insistence that he himself preaches only for gain and "al by rote." These more serious aspects of the Pardoner's self-presentation—what he seems to be saying about himself and the world— become clearer in the sermon section of the tale (463–660).

The sermon provides an intense, almost hallucinatory vision of a world dominated and consumed by sin, in which gluttony "Maketh that est and west and north and south,/In erthe, in eir, in water, men to swynke/To gete a glotoun deyntee mete and drynke!" (518–20). The presentation of sin as everywhere, and everywhere having its effect on the world, is heightened by the tendency to assimilate the effects of all sins to each individual sin and to combine sins:

Hasard is verray mooder of lesynges,
And of deceite, and cursed forswerynges,
Blaspheme of Crist, manslaughtre, and wast also
Of catel and of tyme.
        (591–94)

Such passages in isolation might simply be considered exaggeration appropriate to any preacher striving to move his hearers to repentance.

But the Pardoner's way of exaggerating is more complicated. It is one thing to say, as both the Parson (Parson's Tale X, 818) and the Pardoner do, that the world was corrupted by gluttony, or to say that original sin contained all other sins in itself potentially; it is another thing to say that the original sin was gluttony (Pardoner's Tale VI, 508–11). A standard theological point is turned around here by deliberately overliteralizing the spiritual interrelation of all sins to one another, in keeping with the general tendency of the sermon to treat matter rather than spirit as the root of all evil: "O wombe! O bely! O stynkyng cod,/Fulfilled of dong and of corrupcioun!" (534–35).

The Pardoner consistently and gratuitously forces details that invite disgust at the corruption of the physical, from his description of his reliquaries "Ycrammed ful of cloutes and of bones" (348) to the sheep that need healing "Of pokkes and of scabbe, and every soore" (358) to the brilliant way we are brought too close to the drunkard: "Sour is thy breeth, foul artow to embrace" (552, emphasis added). Especially in the description of gluttony, but also elsewhere in the sermon, the Pardoner moves well beyond mere asceticism to an obsessive insistence on the brutal and ugly condition of the flesh, especially of its burden, the sheer labor of keeping this death-bound and filthy bag alive: "How greet labour and cost is thee to fynde!" (537). This kind of thing gives a peculiarly literal (and powerful) emphasis to the frequent and quite orthodox refrain that sin is a living death and that the sinner "Is deed, whil that he lyveth in tho vices" (548, cf. 533, 558).

Though there is evidence here that the Pardoner hates the flesh in general, and no doubt his own body in particular, I do not think that this sense of actual physical corruption, weakness, and impotence is at the root of the Pardoner's character and problem any more than I think that he wishes to conceal his own physical impotence. It should be noted that the ascription of the Fall to gluttony is funny, and deliberately so. It gets its effect from taking the stock rant "Corrupt was al this world for glotonye" (504) and treating it as if it were literally true, and the Pardoner's qualifying asides ("it is no drede," "as I rede") show that he knows this, that he is parodying a certain sort of preaching at the same time as he is preaching. Such parodying of sermon styles is satirical, a mocking condemnation of the inadequacy of literal forms and institutions to contain or even define the reality of sin, and the Pardoner does it throughout his sermon:

Bihoold and se that in the firste table
Of heighe Goddes heestes honurable,
Hou that the seconde heeste of hym is this:
"Take nat my name in ydel or amys."
Lo, rather he forbedeth swich sweryng
Than homycide or many a cursed thyng;
I seye that, as by ordre, thus it stondeth;
This knoweth, that his heestes understondeth,
How that the seconde heeste of God is that.
       (639–47)

This passage makes fun of a style of thinking and moralizing whose literalness renders it preposterous. It pursues classification, labeling, and external order at the expense of dear ethical priorities and gives us an image of the preacher as a demented scholastic. A complementary figure is Stilboun, the "wys embassadour," who is himself a moralist and a preacher but also a Johnny-one-note who can only nag over and over that his principals "Shul nat allyen yow with hasardours" (618, cf. 613, 616). I think the Pardoner means these various examples, and the entire sermon, as comments on the kind of preaching, theology, and pastoral care that goes on in the church he represents. Even the snakeoil pitch to the "lewed peple" uses its typological elements to juxtapose and contrast what pardoning ought to be doing with what it actually does. We are perhaps so used to thinking, with the older historical critics, of the Pardoner as an embodiment of the notorious abuses of the fourteenth-century church that we tend not to consider that he has attitudes toward them—as well he might, for who should know them better?

Patristic criticism, the newer historicism, has been so successful in showing that the Pardoner fits into various typological patterns of sinfulness that it does not consider that he has attitudes toward these as well. But the two historical views need not lead to the contradiction Donaldson deplored if we see that they are both features of the Pardoner's own enterprise in the tale rather than conflicting views from outside it. To put his expert typological practice together with his experienced awareness of the degenerate times in which he lives and works is to uncover the Pardoner's disenchantment. His parodic presentation of doctrinal classification, moral exhortation, and religious institutions like the cult of relics and pardoning itself consistently enforces his contempt for the available instruments of salvation as they are used in the real life of the all-too-corporeal corpus mysticum around him. It does so, moreover, by measuring these things against

the spiritual standards of typological meaning, the allegorical truths that they should, but do not, embody. In every case what ought to be a manifestation of divine power, mercy, care, and love is shown to be cheapened and undone by human stupidity or malice, unthinking literalism or calculating self-interest. What the Pardoner is making fun of is the way the putative transcendence of the institutions of the church is continually reduced to a set of merely human practices. His disenchantment thus makes him a proponent of the older historical view of the tale as a satire on the corruption of the clergy. The satire is the Pardoner's, and his own best example is himself.

This last point is important. Though part of what drives the Pardoner's mockery is his outrage that the things of God should be so cheap, so easily subverted by the merely human, he does not mock—or preach—as a defense of the divine. One of the unusual rhetorical features of the sermon is the way it keeps associating the sins it describes with the Pardoner, showing that he is guilty of them. The most striking instances of this tendency are the passages where the Pardoner demonstrates his experienced familiarity with the sins he purports to condemn, as in the description of the drunken dice game (651–55) that Donaldson calls "so knowingly graphic as to exceed the limits of art" (Chaucer's Poetry, 1093) or the discussion of abuses of the wine trade and the difficulty of getting an honest drink (562–72). There is nothing concealed or private about the Pardoner's complicity in these vices; rather, he brings himself forward as an instance of them, and this reflexive element gives a particular bite and appropriateness to the concentration in the sermon on the increased sinfulness and consequentiality of sin in high places. "A capitayn sholde lyve in sobrenesse" (582), but this one does not, as he shows. Given the context, who else can the Pardoner be talking about here but himself, and why else is that remark in the sermon? Similar references to himself lurk in "Redeth the Bible, and fynde it expresly/Of wyn-yevyng to hem that han justise" (587), or:

It is repreeve and contrarie of honour
For to ben holde a commune hasardour.
And ever the hyer he is of estaat,
The moore is he yholden desolaat.
      (595–98)

All these images are in effect types and figures of the Pardoner himself, and he in turn is a type and figure of everything about the church—its

institutions, its preaching, its corrupt ministers—that fails to come to grips with the reality of sin in the world. That reality is, as I have already suggested, very real to the Pardoner. He portrays the wretchedness and misery of the human condition with immediacy and insight. He demonstrates how traditional patterns of classification, description, and exhortation fail to catch or contain the more intimate and existential presence of sin, death, and the burden of the flesh, which he sees in others and feels in himself. He has nothing but contempt, a deeper sense of contempt than we have yet examined, for the consolations of religion, but he takes very seriously the things they are intended to console. "For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life" (2 Cor. 3.6). On the one hand there is the horror of existence; on the other there is the church that fails to address or ameliorate that horror—the church that has become a dead letter, and one that kills. Caught between them and embodying them both is the Pardoner:

"Ther walken manye of whiche yow toold have I—
I seye it now wepyng, with pitous voys—
They been enemys of Cristes croys,
Of whiche the ende is deeth"
        (530–33)

The emphasis in the sermon section of the tale divides fairly evenly between these two perspectives (though both are always present), falling on either side of our most immediate and least hyperrhetorical view of him, the passage on the wine of Fish Street and Cheapside. Before that section he primarily develops his heightened view of life's ugliness and the universality of sin. After it he concentrates on the self-condemning mockery of the forms of religious ministry. This division points to and helps explain the development of the Pardoner's consciousness in the tale, the way something happens to him here. What happens is that as he manipulates the conventional materials of the sermon to reflect his own obsessions, he becomes more conscious of himself and more aware of both his power and his powerlessness. The power derives from the way he makes himself into a symbol, generalizing his own sinful and death-bound condition to the world around him. He makes the extent and the seriousness of what he stands for (what he makes himself stand for) more explicit as he dramatizes the evil God cannot or will not eliminate. His own presumption, for that is what it is, has the power of making a wasteland of the world. His powerlessness derives from the fact that what he symbolizes (what

he makes himself symbolize) is emptiness and privation. His despair, for that is what it is, makes his inability to save others or himself the most salient fact of existence.

Cupiditas, of course, means far more than avarice. In the deep Christian and Augustinian sense in which it is the root of evils and the contrary of caritas it refers to a consuming desire for that which one is lacking—it means wanting in both senses, or rather, in a particular way. Medieval Christianity understands privation itself as a fundamental fact of the human condition. Saint Augustine images it as the state of a pilgrim far from the blessedness of his home (De doctrina 1.4.4). Given this basic lack, two responses are possible. To use (utor) the things of this world as a way to get beyond them to God is, paradoxically, to grant them their independence, to open up the possibility of using them in charity, of cherishing them (De doctrina 1.33.37). The enjoyment (fruor ) of the world and others that is cupiditas only looks like enjoying them for their own sakes—it really means wanting to enjoy them for oneself, wanting to engulf them and make them the instruments of one's own will. In traditional terms despair is presumption: to say that God cannot forgive you, deliberately and consciously to refuse His forgiveness, is to place limits on His power and mercy, to usurp a judgment that belongs to Him. In its largest sense cupiditas is this desire to replace one's lack and one's dependency on the divine with a willed, self-sufficient refusal of them, and the inevitable frustration of this willing produces the heightened, outraged consciousness of dependence and insufficiency and the consequent hatred of God, self, and others that the Pardoner displays. This is the condition that the Pardoner suffers and wills; it is the condition that he half conceals or avoids in the prologue and that he embodies in the sermon. The extent to which his despair breaks loose in the sermon is indicated by the notorious fact that he forgets at the end of it that he has not yet told us how many rioters there were. I interpret this lapse as a sign of the extent to which he has become caught up in the sermon and lost control of the form of his tale in the act of dramatizing his condition, the universality of that condition, and its effects in the world. It is this heightened consciousness that he carries into the exemplum he is at last ready to tell.

The Pardoner's conduct of the exemplum itself demonstrates that it is not well fitted to express his disenchanted sensibility. It is hard to

imagine that any exemplum would be since the form itself is an example of the institutionalized literalism he despises. The traditional form of the Pardoner's exemplum argues the proposition, If you are avaricious you will die, in the most literal, and therefore unbelievable, way. It presents a clarified picture of the operations of divine justice that both the Pardoner's experience and his very existence—his continuing success as a fraud, "yeer by yeer"—utterly deny. The exemplum is precisely one of those worthless forms of spiritual teaching, too far removed from the reality of life and sin, that the Pardoner mocks in his sermon. That is one reason he modifies the early parts of the exemplum in an attempt to get the letter of the story to express something about spirit, and the well-attested oddness of the resulting effect shows the inaptness of the form to the purpose.

The peculiarities of the Pardoner's telling are gathered around, and focus on, the Old Man. The first part of the tale is in fact designed to prepare a context for him, and that is why it brings death into the foreground. It has become fairly commonplace by now to see the three rioters and the Old Man as aspects of the Pardoner, and I agree with this notion in general.^[5] The problem remains, however, of situating this division in the activity of the Pardoner himself and seeing how he uses it and what he uses it to say. The feeling of miasma in the opening scene arises, as I have previously suggested, from the semiallegorical treatment of an ordinary tavern scene so as to stress its spiritual overtones:

"Sire," quod this boy, "it nedeth never-a-deel;
It was me toold er ye cam heer two houres.
He was, pardee,  an old felawe of youres ,
And sodeynly he was yslayn to-nyght,
Fordronke, as he sat on his bench upright.
Ther cam a privee theef men clepeth Deeth,
That in this contree  al the peple sleeth,
And with his spere he smoot his herte atwo,
And wente his wey withouten wordes mo.
He hath a thousand slayn this pestilence.
And, maister,  er ye come in his presence,

[5] See, for example, Howard, Idea of the Canterbury Tales, 357–58; Condren, "Pardoner's Bid for Existence," 200.

Me thynketh that it were necessarie
For to be war of swich an adversarie.
Beth redy for to meete him everemoore;
Thus taughte me my dame; I sey namoore."
    (670–84, emphasis added)

The italicized phrases outline points at which the Pardoner's sophisticated typological perspective imposes on the innocent one of the youth. Because of what is at issue, "felawe" points to the fellowship of all men in sin and before death, "this contree" moves toward "this world," and the final warning urges the need for a different kind of readiness and preparation from what the boy seems to have in mind. And who is "my dame"? Nature? The church? The child speaks more than he knows.

At one level these characters are an image of the Pardoner's audience, of the "lewed peple" who live in ignorant literal-mindedness in a world that is more charged with spiritual significance and consequence than they can imagine. They treat reality as if it were an exemplum and respond to the offense against human integrity, self-sufficiency, and community that death is ("Er that he dide a man a dishonour," 691) as to an external threat, an isolated event, something merely physical. It has also become common to point out that the rioters' quest is a blasphemous parody of Christ's sacrifice, which slew spiritual death for the faithful once and for all.^[6] That is true, and it is another instance of the typological processing that the Pardoner goes out of his way to give the tale. But it also seems to me that he regards this aspect of the rioters with a certain ambivalence, even sympathy. There is something attractive in the youthful idealism that so confidently forms a band of brothers to slay death. The rioters do not seem really evil in the early parts of the tale; they are too innocent for that. A student of mine once compared them to fraternity boys, as much for their trivial dissipation as for their idealism, and the Pardoner's earliest characterization of them is not that they were sinful but that they "haunteden folye" (464). The Pardoner seems momentarily attracted to their quest because it does correspond to something in him. A literalized version of a desire to do "Cristes hooly werk," to slay death and save souls by offering

[6] For example, Stockton, "Deadliest Sin," 47; Adelman, "'Som wit,'" 97.

them Christ's pardon, is nostalgically revived in the rioters' quest (that is, revived as something lost but still desired) and at the same time is placed as naive and overconfident folly. The rioters, unlike the Pardoner, have no idea what they are up against.

What they are up against is the Old Man, who is, as his name suggests, the truth of the experience of the vetus homo as that experience is embodied in the consciousness of the Pardoner. He is what their quest leads to and what they might become if they did not live in an exemplum. The best explication of the psychology behind this figure is Kierkegaard's, who provides, in The Sickness unto Death, a phenomenology of despairing consciousness that in its play with the categories of literal and spiritual applies directly to Chaucer's text:

Literally speaking, there is not the slightest possibility that anyone will die from this sickness or that it will end in physical death. On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely this inability to die. . . . If a person were to die of despair as one dies of a sickness, then the eternal in him, the self, must be able to die in the same sense as the body dies of sickness. But this is impossible; the dying of despair continually converts itself into a living. The person in despair cannot die; "no more than the dagger can slaughter thoughts" can despair consume the eternal, the self at the root of despair, whose worm does not die and whose fire is not quenched. . . . The inability of despair to consume him is so remote from being any kind of comfort to the person in despair that it is the very opposite. This comfort is precisely the torment, is precisely what keeps the gnawing alive and keeps life in the gnawing . . . : that he cannot consume himself, cannot get rid of himself, cannot reduce himself to nothing.
            (Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 17–19)

The proudeste of thise riotoures three
Answerde agayn, "What, carl, with sory grace!
Why artow al forwrapped save thy face?
Why lyvestow so longe in so greet age?"

This olde man gan looke in his visage,
And seyde thus: "For I ne kan nat fynde
A man, though that I walked into Ynde,
Neither in citee ne in no village,
That wolde chaunge his youthe for myn age;
And therfore moot I han myn age stille,
As longe tyme as it is Goddes wille.
Ne Deeth, allas, ne wol nat han my lyf.
Thus walke I, lyk a restelees kaityf,
And on the ground, which is my moodres gate,

I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late,
And seye 'Leeve mooder, leet me in!
Lo how I vanysshe, flessh, and blood, and skyn!
Allas, whan shul my bones been at reste?
Mooder, with yow wolde I chaunge my cheste
That in my chambre longe tyme hath be,
Ye, for an heyre clowt to wrappe me!'
But yet to me she wol nat do that grace,
For which ful pale and welked is my face."
       (716–38)

The Pardoner uses the Old Man as a spokesman for this sophisticated despair. The Old Man's desire to exchange age for youth (720–26) points to the Pardoner's envy of the innocence of the rioters and of his "lewed" congregation and suggests that what he wants to be rid of is not physical decay but consciousness. Although he sounds suicidal (727–33), the Old Man is not so in the ordinary sense. Because he feels himself eternal, physical death is beside the point. What he wants is to be swallowed up—"Leeve mooder, leet me in!" (731)—to become nothing, to escape from the restless consciousness of his privation, his cupiditas. This is that sickness unto death of which Kierkegaard speaks: "perpetually to be dying, to die and yet not to die, to die death" (Sickness unto Death, 18).

To wish to exchange a chest of worldly goods for a hair shirt (734–38) is, in effect and typologically, to wish to be able to pay money for the gift of repentance, to wish that the literal version of pardoning were the true one. Besides demonstrating decisively that avarice is not at issue here, this wish indicates that the Pardoner understands that his situation is willed. He would have to repent to get any relief, and he will not, though he knows this intransigence is the source of his wretchedness. He also knows what his obdurate willing makes him:

"But, sires, to yow it is no curtcisye
To speken to an old man vileynye,
But he trespasse in word or elles in dede.
In Hooly Writ ye may yourself wel rede:
'Agayns an oold man, hoor upon his heed,
Ye sholde arise;' wherfore I yeve yow reed,
Ne dooth unto an oold man noon harm now,
Namoore than that ye wolde men did to yow
In age, if that ye so longe abyde."
      (739–47)

If the sermon is the place in the tale where the Pardoner most clearly expresses his anger, this passage, like the rest of the Old Man's speech, is the place where he most clearly gives vent to his self-pity. But his language also shows that he understands his condition spiritually and exegetically, that he interprets himself in traditional terms as the vetus homo, and that he uses the identification to express the self-hatred that is complement to the self-pity. The Pardoner's voicing of the unambiguous passage from Leviticus makes it move toward self-condemnation—from "Respect your elders" to "Rise up against the Old Man."^[7] This typological meaning is especially clear if the speech is understood and applied where it belongs, outside the tale and in relation to the Pardoner, who goes so far out of his way to show how he trespasses in word and deed.

The encounter with the Old Man is the place in the tale where the Pardoner most openly discloses his own condition and where his voice is least detached from the surface of the story, least qualified by irony and manipulation. It is the point at which he completes the process of putting himself into his tale, and the apparent result is that he has nowhere to go. The Old Man can point the way to death, but as soon as he does so, he vanishes from the story "thider as I have to go" (749). The rioters cannot hear what the Old Man has to tell them, that physical death is only a figure for the spiritual, for something that is eternally within them and in which they live without knowing it. They can only enact the literal and mechanical poetic justice of an exemplum about avarice—or so it seems. Although there is some truth to the idea that the tale becomes more narrow and limited and loses much of its atmosphere of mystery after the departure of the Old Man, it seems to me that his pointing finger remains to haunt the tale in the "signes and

[7] Leviticus 19:32. "Coram cano capite consurge, honora personam senis: et time Dominum Deum tuum. Ego sum Dominus" (Vulg.). "You shall rise up before the hoary head, and honor the face of an old man, and you shall fear your God: I am the Lord" (RSV). What allows the play of meaning is the Pardoner's peculiar translation of coram as "agayns." The word literally means something like "in the presence of." The older senses of against can have such meaning (see OED, s.v. against 1–5), but coram is translated "before" in both versions of the Lollard Bible, which is roughly contemporary with the Canterbury Tales: "Before the hoor heed arys and onour the persone of the oolde, and drede the Lord thi God; Y am a Lord" (early version, before 1382); "Rise thou bifor an hoor heed, and onoure thou the persoone of an eld man, and drede thou thi Lord God; Y am the Lord" (later version) (emphasis added). Forshall and Madden, eds., Holy Bible, 1:339–40. Cf. Lindberg, ed., MS. Bodley 959 , 2: 57–58 ad loc.

othere circumstances" the Pardoner imposes on the simple exemplum plot.

On the one hand the Pardoner traces the psychological progress of the rioters. Their idealism quickly turns into its contrary and generates a world of cynicism and suspicion in which "Men wolde seyn that we were theves stronge,/And for oure owene tresor doon us honge" (789–90) and every man's hand is against every other's. Such an image suggests the basic sense of the world that generated the idealism in them, the impulse to kill death, in the first place and thereby identifies the underlying protodespair of the rioters. This sense is most evident in the youngest, whose decision to murder his fellows is presented as an accession of self-consciousness. Like his companions he begins with a heightened awareness of the beauty of the world ("thise floryns newe and bryghte" [839, cf. 773–74]) that distracts him from brotherhood and the quest for death. This unself-conscious pleasure quickly shades into cupiditas, the desire to possess the object beheld, in order to complete an existence he suddenly perceives as lacking without it:

"O Lord!" quod he, "if so were that I myghte
Have al this tresor to myself allone,
Ther is no man that lyveth under the trone
Of God that sholde lyve so murye as I!"
       (840–43)

The account of how the fiend suggested to him that he should buy poison is theologically careful, not for the sake of the theological point but to mark a shift from external temptation to an inner motion of the will that discovers the preexisting depravity of the soul: "For-why the feend foond hym in swich lyvynge/That he hadde leve him to sorwe brynge" (847–48). By the time the youngest rioter gets to the apothecary, his imagery has begun to resonate with that despairing sense of wasting away that is the Pardoner's own: "And fayn he wolde wreke hym, if he myghte,/On vermyn that destroyed hym by nyghte" (857–58). The Pardoner seems to try to bring the rioters up to the point at which they might begin to discover the vetus homo or outcast old Adam in themselves and so begin to share the consciousness of the Old Man.

On the other hand the Pardoner plays with the imagery and structure of the tale so as to suggest in a different way what is "really" going on. His typological imagination seizes on certain details of the story to

allude to the spiritual plot of the tale that its literal unfolding obscures. The "breed and wyn" (797) that ultimately kill the rioters, whatever the precise interpretation put on them, are surely an example of a deliberate introduction of sacramental imagery. Similarly, the apothecary's description of the poison has the by-now familiar overloaded quality of physical details forced onto a spiritual plane:

The pothecarie answerde, "And thou shalt have
A thyng that, also God my soule save,
In al this world ther is no creature
That eten or dronken hath of this confiture
Noght but the momance of a corn of whete,
That he ne shal his lif anon forlete."
        (859–64)

The reference, I take it, is to John 12.24: "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life." The standard commentaries identify the grain as the eucharist by which the faithful soul ought to live and spiritual fruit arise. Similarly, the "large botelles thre" (871, cf. 877) that the youngest rioter fills with his poisoned wine refer to the saying of Jesus: "And no one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but new wine is for fresh skins (Mark 2.22; cf. Matt. 9.17, Luke 5.37). Jerome takes this verse as referring to the transition from the old law to the new. Until a man is reborn and puts aside the vetus homo, he cannot contain the new wine of the gospel precepts. The Glossa ordinaria, following Bede, reads the wine as the Holy Spirit that transformed the apostles from old to new men but whose spiritual precepts destroy the scribes and the Pharisees of the old law and the proud generally. Since in the story it is evident that the rioters must be the old bottles that are burst, the pattern of typological action in the tale seems clear and consistent: the new law of salvation, the eucharist as the sacrifice of Christ, is poison to these veteres homines. This reading, or something like it, is the Pardoner's exegesis of the tale. The peculiarity of this exegesis—it is hardly usual to present the instruments of Christ's mercy as poison—reflects the Pardoner's own experience of the promise of salvation and his more spiritual sense of himself as the Old Man. What is at stake here can be

described in terms of the Kierkegaardian analysis of offense, which traces the willed, despairing refusal of divine grace and forgiveness to the insult such free pardon offers to the independence and autonomy of the self. "It takes a singularly high degree of spiritlessness," Kierkegaard points out, "not to be offended at someone's claim to forgive sins. And . . . an equally singular spiritlessness not to be offended at the very idea that sins can be forgiven" (Sickness unto Death, 116).^[8] Thus the typological action of the tale, like all its other details, must be read on two levels. At the literal level, as it applies to the rioters, the justice of the tale has a certain Old Testament savagery, and what offends the rioters—literal death—is linked to physical punishment meted out by a vengeful God for palpable transgressions. But how much more offensive it is to be offered salvation despite one's worst efforts, and how much worse to alienate oneself from a loving and merciful God whose power is such that He lays down His own life for man's sins. It is this offense that makes what literally poisons the rioters a spiritual poison to the Pardoner: it heightens his sense of what he has cut himself off from.^[9]

All this psychological and theological sophistication finally has little effect, however, on the exemplum. If in the course of his tale the Pardoner has embodied his sense of himself and the world and put his "venym under hewe of hoolynesse" (421–22) into literal bottles of poisoned wine—spirituality under hue of venom, as it were—that embodiment remains eccentric, sporadic, and largely veiled, more deeply felt by the Pardoner than argued in the story. The large-scale patterns of spiritual reference that critics have detected in the tale are all there, more or less, and they are there because the Pardoner puts them there; but they remain largely implicit and structural, carried by typological allusions to be caught only by the learned.^[10] Indeed, the very fact that the Pardoner makes the tale more typological as he proceeds shows his increasing sense that he cannot get it to say what he

[8] For the bread and wine and other eucharistic symbolism in the tale, see Nichols, "Pardoner's Ale and Cake." For John 12:24–25, see Glossa ordinaria, PL 114, col. 402, and Aquinas, Catena aurea, ad loc. For the synoptic passages, see Glossa ordinaria, col. 188; Bede, In Marci Evangelium Expositio, PL 92, col. 152; Jerome, Commentaria in Evangelium S. Matthaei, PL 26, cols. 57–58.

[9] See also Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 70–71, 83–87.

[10] That is, by the literate: interpreting readers, not listeners.

wants more directly. He seems to be trying to make the story bear more weight than it comfortably can, to push its symbolic significance too far.

It seems likely that the Pardoner feels the futility of this forcing, for when he comes to what should be the rhetorical high point of the exemplum, the description of the death agonies of the rioters, he tosses it away with a "What nedeth it to sermone of it moore?" (879) and a reference to a medical textbook (889–95), which, however lurid its account of the symptoms may be, is not reproduced in the tale.^[11] I take the feeling of anticlimax here as an indication of the Pardoner's impatience with the conventional poetic justice of the ending. As it stands, the exemplum does not solve or settle anything he feels to be important. The rioters are gone, but sin, death, and the Pardoner remain:

O cursed synne of alle cursednesse!
O traytours homycide, O wikkednesse!
O glotonye, luxurie, and hasardrye!
Thou blasphemour of Crist with vileynye
And othes grete, of usage and of pride!
Allas, mankynde, how may it bitide
That to thy creatour, which that the wroghte
And with his precious herte-blood thee boghte,
Thou art so fals and so unkynde, allas?
        (895–903)

It is notable that this moralization of the exemplum, for all its appropriately heightened rhetorical tone, does not arise directly from the events of the tale and only arrives at the "right" moral ("ware yow fro the synne of avarice!" [905]) after several lines of impassioned condemnation of "mankynde" for the same old tavern vices. These vices are generally appropriate to the occasion in the sense that the rioters are guilty of them, but their introduction here breaks the continuity and focus of the conclusion of the tale, and it is difficult to know what to make of the intensity with which they are denounced after the flat tone of the account of the rioters' demise. It is as if the Pardoner

[11] Compare the cool dispatch of the account of the murder of the poisoner, "Right so they han hym slayn, and that anon" (881). The oddity is noted by Margaret Hallisy: "Chaucer's cool reference to Avicenna at a crucial point in the Pardoner's Tale seems odd: why this understated allusion rather than a detailed description of the poisoned wretches' sufferings?" ("Poison Lore," 54). She provides a sample of the density of Avicenna's thirty-three-page list of the symptoms of poisoning (55–56).

were looking for something on which to vent strong feelings and casting about for a pretext. What the passage does accomplish is a return of the image of a world pervaded by sin generated in the sermon section of the tale. Juxtaposed to this image, more directly and immediately than before, is the Pardoner's self-presentation, which bitterly and cynically compares his mercenary activity (on which he harps) with what it is supposed to pardon (904–15).

Throughout the tale it has been the Pardoner's explicit project to make an example of himself, to unmask and explain his practices. In the course of the telling, as I have tried to show, his attitude toward himself and his profession, his self-hatred and self-condemnation coupled as always with his hatred and contempt of others, has emerged with increasing clarity and intensity, at least for him. His self-presentation throughout the tale constantly stresses his culpability, and as the tale proceeds he seems to take this culpability with increasing seriousness, to regard himself as truly exemplary and symbolic of the evil, corruption, and sinfulness of the world—finally, perhaps, as a type of the Antichrist. When the action of the tale is understood as such a development, as a psychological progression within the narrating consciousness of a self with a certain structure of character, the epilogue begins to make sense as part of a psychological narrative.

By the end of the story the Pardoner seems dominated by his tale: he rejects it at a literal level but remains racked by the heightened and frustrated consciousness of himself that the experience of telling it generates in him. This frustration leads him to force the issue of sin and spirit—the issue of himself—beyond the tale into the real world of the pilgrimage. The real moral the Pardoner has come to draw from the real exemplum of the tale, himself, emerges as he completes that exemplum:

And lo, sires, thus I preche.
And Jhesu Crist, that is oure soules leche,
So graunte yow his pardoun to receyve,
For that is best; I wol yow nat deceyve.
       (915–18)

These famous lines represent not a "paroxysm of agonized sincerity"^[12] suddenly arrived at but a simple and direct statement of half of what

[12] The phrase is Kittredge's, Chaucer and His Poetry, 117 . See also his "Chaucer's Pardoner," esp. 122–23.

the Pardoner has been saying all along. They gain their full energy only after the presentation of the other half that immediately follows, in which he seems to say, What you need is Christ's pardon—what you get is mine:

But, sires, o word forgat I in my tale:
I have relikes and pardoun in my male,
As faire as any man in Engelond,
Whiche were me yeven by the popes hond.
If any of yow wole, of devocion,
Offren and han myn absolution,
Com forth anon, and kneleth heere adoun,
And mekely receyveth my pardoun;
Or elles taketh pardoun as ye wende,
Al newe and fressh at every miles ende,
So that ye offren, alwey newe and newe,
Nobles or pens, whiche that be goode and trewe.
It is an honour to everich that is heer
That ye mowe have a suffisant pardoneer
T'assoile yow in contree as ye ryde,
For aventures whiche that may bityde.
Paraventure ther may fallen oon or two
Doun of his hors and breke his nekke atwo.
Looke which a seuretee is it to yow alle
That I am in youre felaweshipe yfalle,
That may assoille yow, bothe moore and lasse,
Whan that the soule shal fro the body passe.
I rede that oure Hoost heere shal bigynne,
For he is moost envoluped in synne.
Com forth, sire Hoost, and offre first anon,
And thou shah kisse the relikes everychon,
Ye, for a grote! Unbokele anon thy purs.
        (919–45)

When these lines are read in context, it is hard to match them anywhere in Chaucer for sheer venom. There is direct venom against the pilgrims, to be sure—"Paraventure ther may fallen oon or two" sounds like a wish—but most of the Pardoner's contempt for them arises from their failure to see and respond to what he here says he is. The passage recapitulates in concentrated form all the aggressive methods of dramatized self-condemnation the Pardoner has used throughout the tale—his conspicuous avarice, his ridiculous bulls, his rag-and-bone relics, even the hints of perverse sexuality in the obscene

invitation "Unbokele anon thy purs"—and tries to ram them down the pilgrims' throats. In doing so, moreover, it gives greatest stress to the symbolic significance of these offered insults. Over and over the speech says, I am what the pope licenses, what the church supplies for your spiritual needs; I am the instrument of Christ's mercy, the representative of the Holy Ghost among you; I am what you kneel to, whose relics you kiss; I am that cupiditas that is the root of evils, the Old Adam, the obscenity of the eunuchus non dei that invites to fruitless generation; See what I make of the instruments of salvation—what do you make of a church that licenses me, of a world in which I am possible, of a God that allows me to exist?

This message is also what the Pardoner has been expounding all along. As an instance of what Kierkegaard calls the demonic form of despair, the Pardoner posits himself as a malignant objection to God and his creation.^[13] He presents himself as a proof against the goodness of existence and wills his own misery and evil as a protest against God; he forces into the open what was before only implicit in his self-dramatization, trying to make the pilgrims see it. This message, finally, is what lies behind the Pardoner's typologizing of himself. His consistent practice is to convert the literal, the everyday, the phenomenal, to a sign for spirit. It is his idealism, in the technical sense, and it accounts for the feeling his tale notoriously gives of a world in which the power of the word over reality is nearly total. Having made these transformations, he then insists that the spiritual meaning of an old man, a bottle, or a pardoner is what these things are and how they must be treated. This insistence is, in another sense, his literalism and his delusion. But it is also an expression of his own spiritual state, of his presumption and despair. The Pardoner's greatest self-condemnation is his moment of greatest pride, the moment when he attempts to force on the pil-

[13] "Rebelling against all existence, [demonic despair] feels that it has obtained evidence against it, against its goodness. The person in despair believes that he himself is the evidence, and that is what he wants to be, and therefore he wants to be himself, himself in his torment, in order to protest against all existence with this torment. . . . Figuratively speaking, it is as if an error slipped into an author's writing and the error became conscious of itself as an error—perhaps it actually was not a mistake but in a much higher sense an essential part of the whole production—and now this error wants to mutiny against the author, out of hatred toward him, forbidding him to correct it and in maniacal defiance saying to him: No, I refuse to be erased; I will stand as a witness against you, a witness that you are a second-rate author" (Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 73–74).

grims his own symbolic, typological vision of himself. What he wants here is to get them to take that vision for reality.

What he gets, however, is a set of responses that measures his excess and places it in a world at once more real and more ordinary than the one he has constructed in the course of telling his tale. The Host's answer to the Pardoner's final speech contains touches that seem to recognize the latter's spiritual perspective and perhaps testify to its immediate rhetorical and emotional power: "'Nay, nay!' quod he, 'thanne have I Cristes curs!'" (946). But I think that what makes the already angry Pardoner even angrier—and silences him—is not that the Host reveals a sexual defect the Pardoner has been at pains to suggest and exploit but that he responds to a spiritual attack with a merely literal one. The Host's answer is not directed to the eunuchus non dei, only to a gelding. This response shows that he has missed the point of the Pardoner's self-presentation. His brutal literalism cuts through the tissue of spiritual allusion and moral self-dramatization in the Pardoner's final speech, reducing the Pardoner, his relics, and his "coillons," if he has them, to mere matter, and matter that is not even blasphemous, only insulting. The Host's explosion begins to restore a perspective that has been largely lost in the course of the tale's development when the Pardoner's voice is the only one before us—the perspective of the ordinary world.

There is a mood that sometimes comes on interpreters of the Pardoner's Tale in which the histrionics, pervasive irony, and symbolic pretension of the tale, the way it reaches for deep and ultimate meanings, seem open to the skeptical response, Isn't this tale, after all, just a piece of entertainment? Isn't the end just a joke, isn't the Pardoner just a fund-raiser?^[14] This way of viewing the tale is valuable because it pinpoints the distinction the tale as a whole makes between the Pardoner's idea of himself—the way he presents himself—and a more detached view taken by the end of the poem and associated with the community of the pilgrims, namely, society. The Host may not know exactly what the Pardoner is doing, but he can tell that it is more than a joke. At first he responds in kind to its aggressive violence, what he rightly calls its anger: he can feel that the Pardoner is imposing some-

[14] See John Halverson's levelheaded and persuasive summary of this strand in the criticism, "Chaucer's Pardoner," 191.

thing on him. After his initial outburst, however, the Host begins to put the situation in perspective. Perhaps he is a little shaken by his own reaction and the extent to which he has been drawn into the Pardoner's mood. At any rate he begins to back off: "I wol no lenger pleye/With thee, ne with noon oother angry man" (958–59). At this point other social forces intervene to break the mood further and contain it, as the Knight, observing that "al the peple lough" (961), urges a reconciliation: "'And, as we diden, lat us laughe and pleye.'/Anon they kiste, and ryden forth hir weye" (967–68).

The conclusion of the tale frames the Pardoner's performance as a social gaffe, a joke in bad taste that has gotten out of hand. It does so by showing how society closes ranks to repair the breach in decorum, the violation of the tale-telling contract the Pardoner has committed. The kiss of peace at the end is, of course, hollow, a mere social form that lets things move forward smoothly. It allows the group to pretend that nothing seriously untoward has happened and leaves the Pardoner in frustrated possession of his unhappy consciousness. This ending may well increase our sympathy for him, but the group is nonetheless correct in its assessment of the situation, for the most effective criticism of the Pardoner's presumption is precisely that it is presumptuous in an ordinary sense. It is preposterous that any man should carry the symbolic weight the Pardoner gives himself. If he takes all our sins on his shoulders by committing them and scapegoats himself like Christ to dramatize the pervasive presence of spirit in ordinary life, his behavior is likely to make us reflect that Christ did not sacrifice himself out of self-hatred and that not everyone who climbs up on a cross is a Christ or a type of Christ, or even a type of the Antichrist. Even the New Testament seems to indicate that two out of three such people are likely to be common thieves.

The way the end of the tale is framed so as to bring the Pardoner's typological consciousness into contact with an actuality that contains him and reveals his limitations suggests that, far from being an example of Chaucer's belief in, and commitment to, typological methods, the tale represents a critique of typology as a way of thinking about the world. We need to make a distinction between typological methods, which in the poem are simply one set of rhetorical techniques among many, open to anyone who has a use for them, and a typological imagination. Chaucer uses the former occasionally (in fact rather

rarely in his own voice in the Canterbury Tales ), and he has various pilgrims use them for particular purposes in their tales. Unlike Dante, however, he does not seem to have the latter. The Pardoner is the one pilgrim who really does seem to have a typological imagination, a mind that habitually views the smallest details of life in the world sub specie aeternitatis, and the text's presentation identifies the violence this cast of mind does to experience. Because the Pardoner demands that the world must be more "perfect" in his own terms than it is, he is constrained to see and suffer it "out of alle charitee" as worse than it is, simpler, blacker, and less flexible. From this perspective what a historically comextualized voice-oriented reading actually finds in the Pardoner's Tale is a representation of the temptation to pride and the illusion of power that typological thinking encourages. The tale shows how such thinking may all too easily neglect that it is only God who makes things into signs for other things at the level of eternal truth. The critique that the text conducts identifies typology as a potentially defective form of metaphor or image making that can be led to collapse the necessary distinctions between symbol and referent, literal and spiritual, mind and world. Less abstractly put, the text's framing shows that as a tale the Pardoner's Tale is bad because the Pardoner fails to see and sustain the crucial difference between fiction and reality, between a tale and the world in which it is told, and tries to force something he has made onto the world. The end of the tale shows that the typological imagination, by taking a God's-eye view, can all too easily deceive itself into playing God—a form of presumption that does not require divine intervention to discover its limitations.

The Pardoner is, as I have already suggested, the first exegetical critic of his own tale. He distorts his own sermon and exemplum by allegorizing and literalizing them beyond what they will bear. There is in this distortion, perhaps, a lesson for much subsequent exegetical criticism, which, like the Pardoner himself, is too frequently docetist in tendency. That is, this kind of criticism often implies that doctrine is more important than people, that the living temporal-historical experience of real souls has nothing to say for itself, or, typologically and symbolically put, that Christ could not really have deigned to sully his spirit, his divinity, by incarnating it in a real human person. This view is ultimately as unfair to Saint Augustine and the Middle Ages as it is to Chaucer. It can become a form of historical and critical pride, and

it seems to me to be no accident that in its purest form exegetical criticism is associated with an attempt to cut off medieval consciousness from our common humanity, to say, as does Robertson, for example, that medieval man (the generic gender reference is telling in this context) had no personality because "he" talked about it differently from the way we do.^[15] By neglecting, as it often does, the agency of the historical actors who used the institutionalized historical discourse of typology and by making them its unreflective agents, such a view runs the risk of historical irresponsibility: it makes our ancestors simpler and purer, and therefore less human, than we are—and than they were. But I am beginning to sound like the Pardoner myself, and since I do not plan to burn Professor Robertson at the stake, let me say rather that exegetical criticism, if it loses its sense of proportion, can, like the Pardoner, get a little rude.

I have meant this preliminary interpretation of the Pardoner's Tale to exemplify a certain way of reading the text, and now that it is completed, it can perhaps be summarized so as to differentiate more clearly between the kind of voice-oriented methods I propose and a more traditional Kittredgean dramatic reading. So far my interpretation of the Pardoner is based on taking the things he states or implies about himself in the course of his performance as elements in a deliberate self-presentation rather than as things he inadvertently gives away about himself while concentrating on telling a story. In the tradition of dramatic criticism of the tale it has been common to ascribe various "natural" or psychological motives to the Pardoner, such as a desire for recognition of his intellectual superiority, for acceptance in the community from which his physical lack appears to exclude him, for pity, for revenge, and even for death.^[16] All these and many other simple or complex combinations of motive that have been suggested seem to me to be functional equivalents or particular expressions of the fundamental dialectical relation between presumption and despair. There has been a problem for a long time about integrating psychological explanations of the Pardoner's character and performance with exegetical interpretation and the theology of the tale. Where the theol-

[15] Robertson, Chaucer's London, I-II. For a less temperate comment on this position, see Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, 131.

[16] See especially the excellent treatment in Howard, Idea, 357–80.

ogy has seemed relatively clear (only two explanations of the Pardoner's spiritual state have been brought forward, and both of them, presumption and despair, are right), the Pardoner's motives have received a broad range of interpretations, most of which, as characterizations of the sort of person who might be imagined to tell this tale, seem attractive and plausible even when they appear to contradict one another. What ails the Pardoner spiritually has been a lot clearer than what he is trying to do in his tale. I think one reason for this problem is that the Pardoner's psychology is theological and is presented and enacted as such by him in the tale.

Halverson and Howard have argued convincingly that the Pardoner's sexuality is his secret, that we do not know that he is a homosexual or even a eunuch, only that some features of his appearance and performance suggest those possibilities.^[17] It is precisely such ambiguous features that the Pardoner manipulates for effect; we only get to know them as part of his deliberate self-presentation and self-interpretation. I think the same is true of his "real" motives. Though it is tempting, suggestive, and often valuable to speculate about such things as his feelings of alienation or intellectual superiority, his deformity, or his self-deception, it is unproductive and misleading to treat them, individually or in combination, as if they were causes of his performance. He himself does not treat them thus, and we have no access in the text to privileged information (such as, in a different way, exegetical criticism attempts to provide) that is somehow apart from what he actually does and says, for which our only evidence is predsely the text. Such naturalistic explanations, psychological or psychosomatic, are really only typologies of behavior based on different systems of classification from the one the Pardoner uses, and at best they suggest what the human consequences of the psychology of despair might be outside the poem. Inside the poem, however, the details of self-presentation are controlled by a prior structure, an interpretation that is the Pardoner's own. His categories are something like literal and allegorical, or carnal and spiritual, and they take precedence. Other kinds of motivation may be present somewhere in the Pardoner, but if they are, they too remain his secret. Whatever they may be, he transposes them to, and presents them as, spiritual types. His attitude

[17] Halverson, "Chaucer's Pardoner," 195–96; Howard, Idea, pp. 343–45.

toward "ordinary" human motives, including his own, is the same as his attitude toward metaphor, and toward fiction generally: all such things are the chaff whose phenomenality both conceals and can be made to reveal the poisonous kernel of spiritual truth that is at the center of his world.^[18]

Even if the patterns of presumption and despair do control what happens in the unfolding of the tale insofar as they give an accurate description of it, and even if those patterns are in some sense the self the Pardoner enacts, they do not necessarily constitute an essence. What we have in the tale is the representation not of an entity but of an activity, whose agent retires behind his own self-representation and keeps his secrets. The psychological speculations of dramatic criticism are responses to this sense of motive withheld behind the Pardoner's self-presentation. There is always an excess, something left over that establishes a gap between the subject, conceived as the position from which the activity emerges, and the self, which is, so to speak, its content. In this sense the analysis conducted here is preliminary. Though I have tried to give an accurate account of the self the Pardoner presents and the terms in which he presents it, I have not yet attempted to characterize the Pardoner's subjectivity, the structure of the space within which his self-representation occurs and of which it is a subset. Eventually I will argue that that subjectivity is best described as a form of disenchantment, which I will try to explain as the general structure one of whose historical contents, in the era from Saint Augustine to Kierkegaard, is sometimes called despair. But before we reach that point in Part II, we must first examine the self-subject split in the Wife of Bath's Tale, in part because features of that text make the topic more accessible there, but in part as well because the issue of gender difference has an important bearing on the development of the argument. For the time being it will suffice to have established the importance and relevance of disenchantment in the limited sense I have given it so far as the perspective that allows the Pardoner as agent to emerge from behind the more general institutional and historical framework of exegetical interpretation. It is, I have argued, his disenchanted deployment of that framework that makes him stand out as the teller of

[18] In this he is oddly like Kierkegaard, who in The Sickness unto Death exhibits a similar programmatic tendency to interpret the psychological as an epiphenomenal and particular case of the spiritual. I will have more to say about this in Part II.

his tale. His insistence that there is no such thing as disinterested language and that even—or especially—doctrine, as it is encountered in concrete life, did not fall from the sky but is always being used by someone, mostly for ends like his, is what brings him forward in all his pride and despair, questioning and mocking in a voice of his own that disquiets us yet.

2—
Self-Presentation and Disenchantment in the Wife of Bath's Prologue :
A Prospective View

If the pilgrimage is dated April, 1387, then the Squire, who was twenty years old, was conceived in July, 1366. At that time the Knight was in the Middle East. I once drew the consequences of these facts and submitted my parody to a learned journal. The editors returned it, not because it wasn't funny, as perhaps it wasn't, but because it was, they said, "too speculative." I would have called it an illegitimate inference.
James Sledd, "The Clerk's Tale: The Monsters and the Critics"

Supposing truth is a woman—what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all the philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? That the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman's heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

The Pardoner is one of two pilgrims whose tales have been almost universally recognized as being "about" their tellers, as inviting and necessitating some form of dramatic interpretation, whatever that term is taken to mean. The other is the Wife of Bath, and in her case as well even iconographically inclined critics have recognized that it is the teller of the tale rather than, say, its characters, whose iconography needs to be explained. It seems to me that this conviction of the appropriateness of dramatic explanation arises from the obvious fact that these are the only two fictional performances in the Canterbury Tales in which self-presentation is the announced and primary aim of the fictional speaker. The Pardoner and the Wife both say that they intend to talk about themselves and then proceed to do so. These two pilgrims explicitly connect their tales proper with their own careers and projects: the Pardoner's is an example of how he preaches, and the

Wife's is an illustration of her thesis, also illustrated in her life, about female sovereignty in marriage. These tales are dramatic because their narrators say they are; and these are pilgrims whose theme is the self.

But this fact poses a problem, touched on at the end of Chapter I, about the nature of dramatic interpretation and the status of its results. Dramatically oriented critics frequently assume a distinction between what might be called self-presentation, the offering of an interpretation of the self and its significance, and self-revelation —the manifestation, conscious or not, of some truth about the self:

We shall find that the Wife's outstanding traits are aggressiveness and amorousness, and that the two combine to produce her militant feminism, which leads her to argue strongly for female sovereignty. Obviously, the tale she tells is aimed at illustrating this tenet; and her tale fits into the context of her antagonism toward antifeminist clerics, such as the Nun's Priest, who has just completed his tale, and towards recalcitrant husbands, such as Harry Bailly. But we shall also see that in the course of her performance Chaucer causes her to make dear certain unfavorable aspects of her character which she does not intend to reveal; she no doubt would look upon such revelation as a source of embarrassment.
           (Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk, 119)

The statement is fairly representative of critical practice in the dramatic mode, both in its confident distinctions between conscious and unconscious material and in its assigning of the former to the Wife and the latter to "Chaucer." But how can Lumiansky be so sure which is which? The Wife of Bath's performance, even more obviously than the Pardoner's, invites an attempt to construct a career for her that will explain who she is by explaining how she became what we see before us; but as with the Pardoner, what most invites such a proceeding is also what most puts it in question, the circumstance that the Wife herself announces this project in her prologue, beating the critics to it. It is tempting, no doubt, to treat perceived contradictions in the text as revelations about the Wife that she is unaware of or wishes to conceal, and to use such "slips" as a way of constructing her character from the "facts" thus arrived at. The trouble is that the text does not—in principle cannot—offer any certainty about what has the revelatory status of fact in the Wife's performance precisely because the text is explicitly framed as self-presentation. The speaker may therefore al-

ways be construed as having her own opinions, attitudes, and intentions concerning what she reports and her own strategic or tactical reasons even for contradicting herself.

This objection is more than an epistemological quibble. The way we decide to make the distinction between presentation and revelation in effect constructs or creates the Wife of Bath for us, and it has done so in the past with distressingly varied results. Consider, for instance, as relatively uncontroversial a matter as the Wife's horoscope, which not only the scholars who have studied it but also the Wife herself agree is a significant fact about her:

For certes, I am al Venerien
In feelynge, and myn herte is Marcien.
Venus me yaf my lust, my likerousnesse,
And Mars yaf me my sturdy hardynesse;
Myn ascendent was Taur, and Mars therinne.
Allas, allas! That evere love was synne!
      (III, 609–14)

Leaving aside for the moment what the Wife makes of this horoscope, we can identify Walter Clyde Curry's reading in Chaucer and the Medieval Sciences (91–118) as essentially iconographic. Since he knows that astrology is a fact for the culture and the poet he is studying, he views the Wife as a deliberately created instantiation of medieval belief and ascribes her behavior to her stars. She is a type of her horoscope in much the way a Robertsonian might see her as a type of the Samaritan woman, and Curry's treatment amounts to an explanation of how such a constellation might produce such a life. But Curry also sees that in this reading the Wife's horoscope is a fate of which she is conscious, and this circumstance, for him, makes her moving, a woman tragically driven by her stars. By contrast Chauncey Wood, in Chaucer and the Country of the Stars (172–80), sees the Wife less iconographically and more dramatically. That is, he presents her as a free individual, a person who misunderstands and misuses her horoscope by ignoring her own freedom in playing the hand the stars have dealt her: "[She says] that she followed her 'constellation' and did not refrain from lechery. . . . this suggests that some value judgment should be made about the Wife: no one had to follow the inclination set forth by the stars, but she seems not to take note of this" (173). The

Wife comes out differently depending on whether a tension or contradiction—here between fate and will—is conceived as consciously undergone and presented (Curry's tragic figure) or unconsciously revealed (Wood's woman in bad faith). When we turn to the criticism at large, not only tensions and contradictions but also actual uncertainties about the Wife multiply. For example, we do not know for certain whether she has had children, whether Janekyn is dead, and whether she committed adultery in her fourth marriage or before it.^[1] All this makes constructing a career and character for the Wife a distinctly risky business, as the range of those characters and careers in the critical literature—from sociopathic murderess to tragic heroine to comic embodiment of the life force—testifies.^[2]

Since they contradict one another, at least some of these inferences must be illegitimate; but I am going to argue that there is a sense in which they all are. What they all have in common, it seems to me, is a drive to the reification of the Wife's character. Interpreters try to stand apart from the Wife and above her, to assume a position of analytical superiority that is in possession of the "facts" about her, whatever those facts are held to be. In practice, for example, Wood's analysis is not so different from Curry's: it gives the Wife her freedom only to take it away again in the same gesture. It ends, as character-oriented, dramatic approaches often seem to, by positing a Wife who is fixed, understood, and dismissable.^[3] Each of these competing interpretations seeks to establish its decoding of the Wife as the discovery of what I have been calling a self: an essence, however complex, that is the key to her permanent and prior real nature, who she is, whether that identityis seen as the result of her iconographic meaning or her past. The Wife sometimes appears to be surrounded by critics who are trying to get her to fit a definitive shape, or, as we say, to put her in a

[1] See, for example, Biggins, "O Jankyn, Be Ye There?"; Sands, "Non-Comic Wife"; Carruthers, "Painting of Lions."

[2] For the murderess and sociopath, see Rowland, "Wife of Bath's Fourth Husband"; Palomo, "'Bad Husbands'"; Sands, "Non-Comic Wife." For intimations of tragedy, see, among others, Salter, "Tragic Figure of the Wife of Bath." For the life force, see the fine article by Rose A. Zimbardo, "Unity and Duality in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale."

[3] Wood's tone is in fact rather less attractive than Curry's. The latter at least sympathizes with the hard fate the Wife's horoscope imposes, whereas Wood, oddly, seems more certain what to think of her and more certain of his right to judge her.

box. She might well respond, as she does to a husband (which one is not certain), "I trowe thou woldest loke me in thy chiste!" (317). I would like to begin instead by concentrating on the way the Wife herself tries to deal with this constraining impulse in others and with what is not contained or resolved at the beginning of her performance.

One of the first things the text leaves unspecified about the Wife of Bath is why she begins to tell her tale when she does—in fact we do not even know when that is. The Wife of Bath's Prologue is a text that begins in indeterminacy, because its context is underdetermined. The fragment that starts with the Wife of Bath's Prologue occurs in a number of different positions in the order of the tales in different manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales. In no case, however, is there a headlink for it. If we put aside all speculations about what Chaucer might have done had he finished the poem or how the Wife's performance might be viewed as a response to the Man of Law or the Pardoner (in the Ellesmere and Chaucer Society orders respectively)^[4] or to fragment I (Hengwrt)—all tales and fragments that break off inconclusively—what we have in all the extant versions is a text that springs from a gap in the poem and a blank on the page, a voicethat begins to speak out of nowhere,^[5] apparently without antecedents in the immediate situation and as if in the middle of a continuing argument:

Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynogh for me
To speke of wo that is in mariage;
For, lordynges, sith I twelve yeer was of age,
Thonked be God that is eterne on lyve,
Housbondes at chirche dore I have had fyve—
If I so ofte myghte have ywedded bee—
And alle were worthy men in hir degree.
But me was toold, certeyn, nat longe agoon is,
That sith that Crist ne wente nevere but onis
To weddyng, in the Cane of Galilee,
That by the same ensample taughte he me

[4] It is interesting that Lumiansky sees the Wife as responding to the Nun's Priest. He apparently follows the Bradshaw Shift but assumes that the Wife ignores the tales of fragment C to hark back to the end of B (Of Sondry Folk, 116–17). One wonders what this assumption makes of Pertelote's speech at VII, 2908–17, that is, what if anything does it mean (or the Wife to quote the chicken rather than the other way around?

[5] See Muscatine's discussion, Chaucer and the French Tradition, 207: "It begins in a vacuum".

That I ne sholde wedded be but ones.
Herkne eek, lo, which a sharp word for the nones . . .
         (1–14)

It is precisely the lack of context here, the fact that the Wife appears to be speaking to no one in particular on the pilgrimage and in response to no spedfic stimulus from the group, that stresses how much the situation and the speaker are dominated by a larger and more threatening context that has preempted her possibilities of expression. If the Wife wishes to assert the claims of experience, she finds herself doing so in a world in which the experiential immediacy of the moment of speaking appears to be always already conditioned and dominated by the past and a hostile masculine authority. It is perhaps not entirely fortuitous that as the prologue opens, the Wife is confronted by a situation in the fiction very like the one I have described outside it. She might be said to be a victim of textual harassment, in Robert Hanning's splendid phrase,^[6] facing an array of critics who have decided notions of what a woman is and how she ought to behave.

If the first of these harassers is the oddly carnal literalist who recently tried to force the Wife to fit the measure of his preposterous application of the story of the Samaritan woman,^[7] the others are more formidable and even harder to talk to because they are both absent and present in an even more absolute way. The preexisting structure of institutional antifeminism that presses on the Wife is experienced and responded to by her here in its most abstract, impersonal, and relatively unmediated form as the patriarchal law and the words of Christ, Saint Paul, and Saint Jerome in all their authoritative and authoritarian rigor. These voices are as unsituated here as the Wife's own, and they are treated precisely as texts, at least in the understanding of text that makes of it a permanent record of an unalterable decision. Since it is the Wife herself who cites these voices and brings these issues up, since there is no one else speaking and no one she is speaking to, it seems that she is somehow impelled or forced to situate herself in the world constituted by authority—the world of doctrine, official texts, and the patriarchal law. Surely one of the tones at work in the opening lines is something like, We all know I am a problem before anyone says a word; here is my reply to what I know you are thinking, to what men

[6] See Hanning, "Textual Harassment in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales ."

[7] See Howard, Idea, 248–51.

always think. The Wife's method of arguing submits to the law in the very act of combating it and thereby constitutes it all the more as an unsituated absolute, the way things are, an authoritative framework that is everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. She seems to feel that her only recourse is to appropriate the techniques of scriptural gloss and the manipulation of sacred texts that are used against her, and she does so in a voice that is often nervous, hostile, and hairsplitting. She is given to niggling formalities of evidence and citation, and the literalistic quoting of texts and countertexts that conspicuously and ungenerously ignores the spirit (none too generous itself) of her opponents:

Whan myn housbonde is fro the world ygon,
Som Cristen man shal wedde me anon,
For thanne th'apostle seith that I am free
To wedde, a Goddes half, where it liketh me.
He seith that to be wedded is no synne;
Bet is to be wedded than to brynne.
       (47–52)

Wher kan ye seye, in any manere age,
That hye God defended mariage
By expres word? I pray yow, telleth me.
Or where comanded he virginitee?
      (59–62)

Where does it say I can't? is scarcely a strong defense, and the Wife seems similarly ill served by many of the other texts and images she tries to invoke in her own behalf in the first part of the prologue. The best she can find is "leve/Of indulgence" (83–84) to marry again, and there seems to be no available version of wifehood that does not end up making her a second-class citizen, a vessel of "tree" rather than of gold, or barley bread in contrast to bread of "pured whete-seed" (99–101; 139–140). The Wife is consistently rendered marginal by the authorities she tries to appropriate, cut off by her "freletee" from the rigorous perfection they hold up.

One way to read the Wife's performance, and one way she herself presents it, is to see the prologue and tale as parts of a process that is intended to counter the situation I have just described by turning the Wife herself into an authority. Not liking the exempla (such as that of the Samaritan woman) offered to her by the male world, the Wife sets out, like the Pardoner, to make an example of herself. In this reading,

her experience in marriage leads to a thesis and a demonstration about marriage in general. The necessity of feminine 'maistrye' or sovereignty in marriage, the Wife seems to be saying, is what my life proves, and so does the story I am about to tell. That is, her life adds up to a final meaning that the tale then confirms. Publicly and explicitly the Wife sets out to anticipate her later critics by providing an interpretation of her life. Insofar as that interpretation requires that she constitute her past as past, as something that is over and done with and can therefore be generalized from, the Wife herself sets out with the intention to reify herself, to turn herself into a counterexemplum in opposition to those in Janekyn's book of wicked wives and the male misogynist tradition.

As I have already suggested, the form the Wife's conduct of this project takes is that of the appropriation of the instruments and institutions of masculine authority. Throughout her performance the Wife may be said to womanhandle the traditional instruments of male domination in the interests of her feminist message. The entire second section of the Wife of Bath's Prologue, for example (235–378), in which she details how she chided her old husbands "spitously" (223), is presented as a set of slanders that the Wife accused her old husbands of directing at her. The passage is a tissue of clichés drawn from antifeminist sources and put into the mouths of the old husbands: "Thou seist to me it is a greet mischief/To wedde a povre womman, for costage" (248–49). But, the Wife tells us, "al was fals" (382): the old men never said these things, and her accusations were made to intimidate and control them. The compendia of antifeminist lore, like the Miroir de Mariage and the other sources of Janekyn's book of wicked wives from which this material is in fact drawn, are meant to provide men with ammunition against women. But there is a sense in which by characterizing women in these ways, men give them license and permission to make what they can of the image for their own purposes; and by citing them here in a context that produces a reversal of their ordinary use, the Wife is pointing to her ability to appropriate even antifeminist characterization and turn it back on men to gain the mastery.^[8] A more general example of the same technique is the sover-

[8] The strategy is exemplified and illuminated in the "Hers" column of the New York Times, July 18, 1985, C2, where Susan Schnur relates the history of her responses to the rabbi of her childhood yeshiva in Trenton, N.J., who "wrapped an enormousbandage up one wrist so that he would not, God forbid, ever have to shake a woman's hand. Our rabbi did not touch women":

At first, as a child, I regarded the rabbi's hand as a simple cootie fetish, like my brother Danny's. My girlfriend and I used to chase Danny through the house— him shrieking like a figure out of Edvard Munch—while we ran after him with a hobbyhorse upon whose head swung a pair of girl's underpants. My guess was the rabbi, if we'd ever touched his hand, would have reacted about the same as Danny, who was then six years old. . . . In college, the implications of being the object of a cootie fetish tickled me. It meant that I had power: I was the Great Unscatheable Cootie. I could walk between two men ("the devitalizing estrous promenade") while menstruating, and cause death. Being a cootie was strong ammunition against that Armageddonish day of feminist rout.

As an early example of the Great Unscatheable Cootie, the Wife of Bath derives power from similarly flaunting the signs of her impropriety. I am grateful to Professor Sandra Pierson Prior for pointing out both this reference and its relevance to the Wife of Bath. See also Giddens, Central Problems , 72, and the section entitled "Power, Control, Subordination," 145–50.

eignty argument itself, which is obviously a reversal of ordinary male-female power relations and an aggressively polemical appropriation of all those dreary (and nervous?) arguments about the proper hierarchical subordination of women to men in medieval discussions of the subject.

Other aspects and implications of this appropriative stance come out more clearly in the tone of particular passages, as when the Wife cites the libertine Solomon ostensibly as an example of Old Testament sanction for multiple marriages;

Lo, heere the wise kyng, daun Salomon;
I trowe he hadde wyves mo than oon.
As wolde God it leveful were unto me
To be refresshed half so ofte as he!
Which yifte of God hadde he for alle his wyvys!
No man hath swich that in this world alyve is.
God woot, this noble kyng, as to my wit,
The firste nyght had many a myrie fit
With ech of hem, so wel was hym on lyve.
Yblessed be God that I have wedded fyve!
[Of whiche I have pyked out the beste,
Bothe of here nether purs and of here cheste.]
        (35–44b)

If only the justification of "bigamye" were at stake, the example could have been as economically cited as the immediately following ones of

Abraham and Jacob (55–58). Here the Wife's voicing suggests that she identifies with Solomon and envies the license for promiscuity granted to him, and her concentration on "the firste nyght," as if the individual wives were used up and discarded in one merry fit apiece, creates a somewhat edgy and exploitative image of sexuality, which is further reinforced by "nether purs." The implication is that men are to be similarly used up, sexually rifled, as it were, in the same way that they are to be exploited economically.

This exploitative and frequently disparaging attitude toward masculine sexuality is reinforced at various points in the prologue, at times in contemptuous characterizations of male equipment ("thynges smale," "sely instrument," 121, 132) or the performance of her old husbands (198–202, 410–419), perhaps most chillingly just before the Pardoner's interruption:

In swich estaat as God hath cleped us
I wol persevere; I nam nat precius.
In wyfhod I wol use myn instrument
as frely as my Makere hath it sent.
If I be daungerous, God yeve me sorwe!
My housbonde shal it have bothe eve and morwe,
Whan that hym list come forth and paye his dette.
An housbonde I wol have—I wol nat lette—
Which shal be bothe my dettour and my thral,
And have his tribulacion withal
Upon his flessh, whil that I am his wyf.
I have the power durynge al my lyf
Upon his propre body, and noght he.
Right thus the Apostel tolde it unto me,
And bad oure housbondes for to love us weel.
Al this sentence me liketh every deel—
        (147–62)

The Wife's appropriation of the doctrines of the debitum and the relative perfection of the married state here shifts from using the authority of the sacred text as an excuse for sexual indulgence—"as frely as my Makere hath it sent"—to invoking the same authority to justify the use of sexuality as a pretext for aggression in a way that brings out more clearly the implications of the earlier passage about Solomon: I'll use it more freely than you might like, she says; I'll wear you out. Though it is certainly true that all this manipulation and

threat is scarcely a proper use of authority, one cannot help noticing that it does not present a very satisfying or attractive image of experience either.^[9]

An appropriative stance of the sort the Wife adopts, as David Aers has seen with particular clarity, is necessarily reactive, a form of counterpunching, and therefore it can only recapitulate and perpetuate in reverse, like a mirror image, the structure and logic of the institutional order it attempts to refute.^[10] Because the Wife's public position in her prologue and tale is founded in the masculine-controlled and economically dominated idea of marriage that pervades the society in which she lives, she is driven by the logic of opposition to adopt a stance that competes with, and therefore reproduces, the exploitation, both economic and sexual, to which women are ordinarily subjected by the masculine world.^[11] If marriage in the Wife's society is an institution that reduces women to commodities and subordinates feminine sexuality and individuality to the requirements of economic exchange, a woman who wants to defend herself has only the option of using the assets she possesses to play the game herself, as the Wife makes clear in the theory of marriage she enunciates early in the prologue:

They had me yeven hir lond and hir tresoor;
Me neded nat do lenger diligence
To wynne hir love, or doon hem reverence.
They loved me so wel, by God above,
That I ne tolde no deyntee of hir love!
A wys womman wol bisye hire evere in oon
To gete hire love, ye, ther as she hath noon.
But sith I hadde hem hooly in myn hond,
And sith they hadde me yeven al hir lond,
What sholde I taken keep hem for to plese,
But it were for my profit and myn ese?
       (204–14)

[9] On marriage and the debitum , see Cotter, "Conjugal Debt," and Mogen, "Bona Matrimonii ." On justifying sexuality as aggression, see Kernan, "Archwife and the Eunuch," I-2.

[10] Aers, Creative Imagination, 147–48. See also David, Strumpet Muse, 143–47, 153, and Gottfried, "Conflict and Relationship," 203–4.

[11] Excellent accounts of the institutional structure and support of this exploitation in the late fourteenth century are given in Aers, Creative Imagination, chaps. 5 and 6, 117–173, and Carruthers, "Painting of Lions." See also Bourdieu, Theory of Practice , 92 and 164–65.

Aers notes that the Wife rejects "the role of the passive and devotedly servile wife (her rebellion), but only to take on the traditional and culturally celebrated role of the domineering, egotistic husband (her affirmation of the culture)." In doing so, she accepts "the reduction of self and body to the status of a commodity to be bought by males, by accepting the reduction of female sexuality to an instrument of manipulation, control, and punishment" (Creative Imagination , 148).

Indeed she does, and the explicitness with which the Wife identifies the economic and power functions of sexual attractiveness sometimes shocks my students when they identify this version of marriage—correctly—as a form of prostitution. It is perhaps worth insisting that the Wife sees marriage in that way here, and that she does not appear at all fazed by it, nor does she consider any alternative model of potential relations between the sexes. She demystifies affection as a weakness to be exploited in economic transactions, something that gives a woman an edge over the man who lets himself be affected. That is to say that her understanding of marriage as a functioning institution, and of the place of affection in it, is as thoroughly disenchanted as the Pardoner's view of preaching. The Wife's very marginality puts her in a position to understand the official cultural account of the "nature" of women and marriage as a human construction because she continually experiences it practically as something done to her by men. Therefore she can identify traditional masculine characterizations of women, negative or positive, as ideological weapons in a struggle for dominance. One advantage of this disenchanted point of view lies precisely in the way it identifies authority as something that is subject to ideological use. It is a lot easier to deal with a man who appropriates scripture—"And yet—with sorwe!—thou most enforce thee,/And seye thise wordes in the Apostles name" (340–41)—than it is to confront the apostle directly. One can more easily say to the husband, "After thy text, ne after thy rubriche,/I wol nat wirche as muchel as a gnat" (346–47, emphasis added).^[12]

We can trace this disenchanted economic view of sexuality and society—"Wynne whoso may, for al is for to selle" (414)—throughout the poem as something the Wife uses to make sense of both the world at large and her own life. Consider, for example, the moment at which

[12] The point has been seen by Haller, "Three Estates," 51.

she reports with some puzzlement an apparent contradiction in her relationship with Janekyn:

And yet was he to me the mooste shrewe;
That feele I on my ribbes al by rewe,
And evere shal unto myn endyng day.
But in oure bed he was so fressh and gay,
And therwithal so wel koude he me glose,
Whan that he wolde han my  bele chose;
That thogh he hadde me bete on every bon,
He koude wynne agayn my love anon.
I trowe I loved hym best, for that he
Was of his love daungerous to me.
We wommen han, if that I shal nat lye,
In this matere a queynte fantasye;
Wayte what thyng we may nat lightly have,
Therafter wol we crie al day and crave.
Forbede us thyng, and that desiren we;
Preesse on us faste, and thanne wol we fle.
With daunger oute we al oure chaffare;
Greet prees at market maketh deere ware,
And to greet cheep is holde at litel prys:
This knoweth every womman that is wys.
      (505–24)

What is striking here is how the working through of the contradiction (he beat her but could always sweet-talk her back into bed when he wanted to) moves simultaneously in the course of the passage toward the highest degree of generalization—this is what all women are like, and the wise ones know it—and the most thoroughly economic form of explanation: all affection including the Wife's own is subject to the law of supply and demand. As Max Weber remarks, there are no mysterious processes that come into play; one can in principle master all things by calculation. The economic account is presented as a kind of key that makes sense of the details of the Wife's biography and at the same time renders her exemplary. The particulars are finally subordinated to, and transcended by, the general truth. This passage is characteristic of the way the disenchanted economic, appropriative, and competitive perspective functions throughout the poem, even in the tale's concluding curse on "olde and angry nygardes of dispence" (1263). In effect the Wife deliberately reduces herself and the meaning of her experience to these terms in order to give that experience au-

thority and the status of a counterexemplum that challenges the masculine mystifications of conventional authority. After all, if a woman ìs going to have this sort of thing done to her anyway, it is better for her to have something to say about the terms in which it is done.

This project has its effect on—that is, it can be used to explain— certain large-scale features of style and structure in the Wife of Bath's Prologue. The entire account of how the Wife dealt with her first three husbands, for example (193–451), can be read as another instance of the tendency, already exemplified above, to employ memory primarily in the service of generalization. The three men and the marriages they were involved in are reduced to a single long speech to a nameless "thou," who is accused of various misdeeds to show "wise wyves" how to maintain control over their husbands.^[13] No distinction is made among husbands or times—the account is in effect, like the gospels and Saint Paul, out of time—and as a result the specificity of the passage seems merely rhetorical, a kind of allusion to concreteness for the sake of effect rather than actual memories of specific occasions. Because so much of the speech is made up of lists of antifeminist proverbs attributed to the generalized "thou" ("Thou seyst that droppyng houses, and eek smoke,/And chidyng wyves maken men to flee/Out of hir owene houses;" [278–80]), the more specific characterizations ("Thus seistow, lorel, whan thou goost to bedde" [273, cf. 235, 242, 253, 276–77, 302]) seem tacked on to produce a kind of general fiction of experiential detail in a context that remains primarily exemplary and typical. When read as elements in the argument the Wife is constructing—"hou I baar me proprely"—exhibited to show wise wives "Thus shulde ye speke, and bere hem wrong on honde" (224–26), the various particular elements do not seem important for their specific content, and even less so for the particular occasions in the Wife's past when she used them. The Wife's project here is to make herself into a textbook, a miroir de mariage.

To read the Wife of Bath's Prologue in this way is precisely to read it as an argument, that is, to read it for its conclusions. Such a reading is fundamentally linear and goal-oriented, or what might be called prospective in the sense that it looks forward to a conclusion. It is aimed at producing a narrative of the Wife's life in chronological

[13] See Pratt, "Development of the Wife of Bath," 57.

order, husband by husband, that adds up to something. It generates a set of insights about feminine nature (for example, "we wommen konne no thyng hele" [950]), and ends with a general conclusion that subsumes what has gone before, such as "Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee/As wel over hir housbond as hir love" (1038–39). Read thus, the consistent direction of the poem, in its parts and as a whole, is from experience to authority, albeit a disenchanted authority. So the text presents itself, and so the Wife intends her performance to be taken.

Almost everything I have said thus far about the poem, however, I regard as preliminary. This reading, as I have been careful to call it, of the Wife's disenchanted perspective is not so much wrong as incomplete, a place to start in thinking about the tale rather than the last word. Indeed, as I have just argued, a form of this reading is the Wife's own public project (her word is apert ) in the tale. It is the place from which she starts in the sense that it is her plan for the performance, and I have sketched some of the ways in which she carries it out. But this project, with its doctrinaire feminism and oppositional stance, has something a little too static and structural about it, something other critics besides me have found uncomfortable. My point is that the Wife finds it uncomfortable too. Her public project does not really do justice to the complex and dynamic character of the now of speaking and remembering, the sense of ongoing life and discovery that cannot be totally reduced to an order or an argument, shut up in forms, or completely subjected to authority, even the Wife's own. There is at least one other way to read the Wife's performance, or rather, to reread it.

The kinds of meaning, such as the sovereignty argument, that the Wife proposes publicly are not intrinsic properties of her life. Rather they are an attempt to constitute that life so that only certain sorts of meaning are possible: meaning that is general, stable, authoritative, competitive, countermasculine, economic, and so on. I might note that this sort of public meaning is appropriate to the fictional situation on the pilgrimage because it is precisely the sort of meaning that can be grasped on a single hearing in a face-to-face situation where the audience experiences the performance once only and in order.^[14] This is in

[14] Roland Barthes has enunciated with particular clarity the way the conditions of speech, as opposed to writing, range it on the side of the law to make it an instrument ofauthority and the dominant ideology. See Barthes, "Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers," esp. 191.

fact the impression of the Wife's meaning that the Clerk and Merchant seem to have gotten, since it is essentially this version of her that eventually surfaces in their tales. For actual readers rather than listeners, this kind of reading is prospective or forward-looking in the sense that however many times we actually read the text in this mode, we always do so as if it had a dramatic order of beginning, middle, and end, which we establish to get through the text, that is, to find out what it all adds up to, how it comes out, its so-called final meaning. In this mode we assume that there is a correct reading, even if we have to read repeatedly to discover it, or indeed never discover it. Such a reading in effect doubles the Wife's public project even when it does not agree with her conclusions because it does agree that the meaning of the narration is a proposition of the order, if not the content, of "Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee." In other words, it agrees that the speaker is a self, an entity whose preexistent being can be defined in principle by some such proposition or propositions, however complex they might turn out to be in practice, and therefore that her performance delivers that essence in principle even if we have not yet completely discovered it.

For the Wife, however, such a reading of her life is only possible because she has already lived through it. The reason she can edit her account so as to offer an interpretation that preempts and forestalls other such readings, especially masculine ones, is that, for her, her experience is no longer, as it is for the pilgrim listeners, a prospective unfolding that necessarily occurs in narrative order; it is more like a text that she has already "read" at least once, and her performance on the pilgrimage is a retrospective rereading of that text.^[15] She can, to be sure, attempt to naturalize the account and conceal its interpretive bias by presenting her interpretation as an immanent meaning, and so she does in her public self-presentation. But she can also rework and reexamine the events of her life for herself—in effect rearrange the text by altering the stress given to its elements. She can disregard or play

[15] The distinction between prospective and retrospective reading is taken from Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics , 90. See my "Dialectic of Romantic Historiography."

down mere sequence and one-way cause and effect in favor of more textual principles of organization and meaning, such as patterns of imagery that emerge from points widely scattered in time, and she can allocate significance to past events in terms of their importance to her now, whatever she may have thought they meant when they occurred—and so can we.^[16]

Because we are readers and have the Wife as absence and as text, we can follow the traces of her rereadings in a way that the pilgrims, who had her only as a speaking presence, could not: we can reread too. To do so is to attend to certain forms of displacement in the text that lead away from narrative sequence and deductive argument. If the Wife does have a public feminist agenda in the performance, she may also, like the Pardoner, have attitudes about the role she plays to carry out that agenda, and those attitudes can be elicited from her voicing of the message, from the ways she comments on, revises, ignores, or otherwise deploys the events of her life and the elements of her tale. Such a reading allows another text to emerge that is in dialectical tension with the public one. If the Wife's public use of experience is intended to convert it into authority, the private text (her word is privy ) stands this model on its head, though it is equally disenchanted in the importance it attaches to human agency. It attends, as we will see, to the primacy of individual action over institutional coercion and to the variety of institutionally unintended uses—not just oppositional ones—that experience can make of authority. As its associations with textuality and indeterminacy may suggest, this way of reading is much better suited to evoking the Wife as subject because it continually undoes and reconstitutes, for her as for us, the very self whose stability and permanence she continually puts in question even as she constructs it.

[16] Compare Barthes's brief remarks at the beginning of S/Z , 15–16. It is perhaps worth stressing from the beginning that the Wife's Prologue is a patently digressive text that gets out of order from time to time—that is, it bears the traces of the destructuring force of the Wife's own rereading.

3—
Retrospective Revision and the Emergence of the Subject in the Wife of Bath's Prologue

The Wife of Bath's project to make use of her life as an example emerges in the text out of her response to the Pardoner's interruption. It is not dear until that point that an autobiography is really what she has in mind, but I find it significant that her reminiscence gets started as a result of talking to someone who responds to her:

"Now, dame," quod he, "by God and by Seint John!
Ye been a noble prechour in this cas.
I was aboute to wedde a wyf; allas!
What sholde I bye it on my flessh so deere?
Yet hadde I levere wedde no wif to-yeere!"
        (III, 164–68)

Whatever one makes of the Pardoner's tone here—since it is unlikely that he is really planning to marry, some sort of irony is presumably intended^[1] —it is at least clear that he does not sound much like Saint Jerome or Saint Paul; he does not take up an overtly oppositional and authoritarian stance. Nor does the Wife respond to this interruption and to the Pardoner's "teche us yonge men of youre praktike" (187) as hostile or mocking comments. Rather she appears to take them as an opportunity to moderate her earlier tone and even, perhaps, to apologize for it:

"Gladly," quod she, "sith it may yow like;
But yet I praye to al this compaignye,
If that I speke after my fantasye,
As taketh not agrief of that I seye,
For myn entente nys but for to pleye."
       (188–92)

[1] See below, chap. 6.

It looks as if the Pardoner's interruption helps the Wife to extricate herself from the abstract and unsituated debate with authority into which she falls at the beginning of the prologue. He makes her aware of the actual situation of the pilgrimage and shifts her attention somewhat away from the confrontational mode that has dominated her performance thus far. She shows more sensitivity to the everyday social implications of her tirade and to the feelings of the audience and identifies her earlier projection of a Solomon-like vengeful exploitation of men for her own pleasure and anger as what it is, a "fantasye." She seems to become more conscious of herself as a performer and realize that she does not have to take on the whole antifeminist tradition issue by issue. She has only to speak of the woe that is in marriage, and for that task she has a role ready to hand: "This is to seyn, myself have been the whippe" (175). In adopting the role of marital whip for the edification of the audience, the Wife moves explictly into the mode of deliberate self-presentation, a move that gives her, so to speak, a certain distance on herself and that allows the possibility of a somewhat different relationship with the audience to emerge.

This shift in tone in reaction to an external stimulus allows us to see the possibility of speaking about the Wife of Bath's Prologue less as a preplanned theoretical argument that has to move through a certain number of points to a conclusion and more as something practical that happens and alters as it goes along in response to a set of more immediate and unstructured contingencies. The most important of these contingencies is not, of course, the response of the audience, though the Wife's sensitivity to them may indeed have something to do with the number of times she is interrupted. Rather, the most important practical determinant of the poem's unfolding is the vagaries of memory as it doubles and redoubles on itself. We, like the Wife, must concern ourselves less with the plot she remembers than with the plot of her remembering in the now of narration.^[2]

This distinction between the event as it was and as it is remembered emerges as a possibility in the prologue (though admittedly unclearly), perhaps as early as the fifth line, in what could be interpreted as a response in the now of speaking to the memory of five husbands' worth

[2] The distinction is that posited by Russian formalism between fabula and siuzhet and by Benveniste and the French narratologists between histoire and discours or récit. There is a clear, brief account with basic bibliography in Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 12–14.

of marital woe: "Thonked be God that is eterne on lyve" (5). It emerges much more clearly as the Wife begins to tell of how she dealt with her three rich old husbands, "As help me God, I laughe whan I thynke/How pitously a-nyght I made hem swynke!" (201–2), because these lines catch the way something that was unpleasant or uncomfortable to live through may not be so to recall. But the first really striking example of the distinction emerges at the end—or what seems meant to be the end—of that same account of her chiding:

0 Lord! the peyne I dide hem and the wo,
Ful giltelees, by Goddes sweete pyne!
For as an hors I koude byte and whyne.
I koude pleyne, and yit was in the gilt,
Or elles often tyme hadde I been spilt.
Whoso that first to mille comth, first grynt;
I pleyned first, so was oure werre ystynt.
They were ful glade to excuse hem blyve
Of thyng of which they nevere agilte hire lyve.
Of wenches wolde I beren hem on honde,
Whan that for syk unnethes myghte they stonde.

Yet tikled I his herte, for that he
Wende that I hadde of hym so greet chiertee!
I swoor that al my walkynge out by nyghte
Was for t'espye wenches that he dighte;
Under that colour hadde I many a myrthe.
For al swich wit is yeven us in oure byrthe;
Deceite, wepyng, spynning God hath yive
To wommen kyndely, whil that they may lyve.
       (384–402)

On the surface this passage is yet another instance of the pattern of working experience into general examples that I have already discussed. The Wife's behavior toward her old husbands is summed up in the proverbs about coming first to the mill and God's gifts to women. The most striking stylistic feature of the passage, however, is the shift from plural to singular pronouns at line 395, "Yet tikled I his herte, for that he /Wende . . ." (emphasis added), because it suggests a counterattraction to the particular at the very moment when the conclusion is being drawn. "He" marks a shift from the generalized "thou" and the generalizing "they" of the preceding one hundred fifty lines because it seems to single out an individual and implies that this memory, if no other, is of a particular husband, perhaps even of a particular occasion.

This apparent sharpening of memory would mean little in isolation, but the second time it occurs, in the lines immediately following, the shift in pronoun number takes on increased particularity of reference. The Wife is concluding her summary of how she always bested her old husbands "Atte ende I hadde the bettre in ech degree,/By sleighte, or force, or by som maner thyng" (404–5), when she suddenly, and a little awkwardly, decides to give one more example:

Namely abedde hadden they meschaunce:
Ther wolde I chide and do hem no plesaunce;
I wolde no lenger in the bed abyde,
If that I felte his  arm over my syde,
Til he had maad his raunson unto me;
Thanne wolde I suffre hym do his nycetee.
And therfore every man this tale I telle,
Wynne whoso may, for al is for to selle;
With empty hand men may none haukes lure.
For wynnyng wolde I al his lust endure,
And make me a feyned appetit;
And yet in bacon hadde I nevere delit.
That made me that evere I wolde hem chide.
           (407–19, emphasis added)

The shift to a memory of a single individual signaled by the pronoun shift in line 410 is accompanied by a number of negative features of the experience being remembered. "Thanne wolde I suffre hym do his nycetee" does not make the Wife sound impressed with the act or me actor, and neither do her remarks about enduring his pleasure and making a "feyned appetit."

What is really extraordinary about this memory is the way it mediates a complete reversal in the Wife's explanation of her own behavior in the course of thirteen lines. The passage begins by characterizing her chiding as a deliberate tactic for gaining an advantage ("raunson"), but it ends by making it a response to the unsatisfactory nature of the sexual act when she did let him do it; and it seems clearly to be the increasingly specific recollection of just how unpleasant the act was that leads to the change. I take this passage to be a response to the general presentation of the uses of sexuality in the prologue previously, and especially to the Wife's earlier account of her sexual dealings with her first three husbands. Those three, as we know, were good and rich and old (197), and what was good about them was that they gave in to

her: she could dominate them and get their riches, and she did not need to care about them. In this context the old men's sexuality, such as it was, was part of the Wife's spoils and a source of amusement to her ("As help me God, I laughe whan I thynke/How pitously a-nyght I made hem swynke!"):

I sette hem so a-werke, by my fey,
That many a nyght they songen "Weilawey!"
The bacon was nat fet for hem, I trowe,
That som men han in Essex at Dunmowe.
            (215–18)

In its original form this attitude is connected to the Solomon fantasy of men as mere "sely instruments" to be exploited for one's own pleasure and discarded at will, but in the passage under consideration that fantasy is reworked into something more complex.

What clinches the connection between the two moments is bacon. The first time around the reference is to the Dunmow flitch, awarded in that village "to any married couple who lived a year [and a day] without quarreling or repenting of their union," as Robinson says (Riverside Chaucer , 867). The reference is thus a humorous and hyperbolic way of stressing her power over her husbands, how successfully, as she goes on to add, she governed them whether they liked it or not (219–23). The second time it occurs, however, bacon means old meat, and it is once again used in an image that juxtaposes sexuality and marital disharmony: "And yet in bacon hadde I nevere delit./That made me that were I wolde hem chide" (418–19, emphasis added). What the Wife does to the word bacon , extending and altering its significance, may be taken as a model for what she does to the meaning of her sexual relations with her first three husbands generally. The development of the image registers the Wife's underlying dissatisfaction with a situation that was, from another point of view, thoroughly satisfactory. Successful as her manipulation of sex was as economics, it was not much fun as sex. That gave an extra edge to her chiding and helps to explain in retrospect why "They were ful glad whan I spak to hem faire,/For, God it woot, I chidde hem spitously" (222–23). The passage embodies the Wife's awareness of another motive coming to the fore, and that awareness of the inadequacy and incompleteness of

the first explanation is owing to the more precise memory, indicated by the pronoun shifts, of what those sexual relations were like. The memory develops in the course of the telling, in the now of narration, according to the model of practical consciousness. That is, the treatment of the image of bacon is not discursively singled out for explicit reformulation (as in, When I say bacon I really mean . . .), but neither is it the focus of a feeling about sex or men that is clearly unconscious, unavailable to the Wife because it is repressed by her. Rather it is a practical response within the ongoing stream of conduct to a memory that arises from mysterious, and no doubt unconscious, sources, but a response that is itself a practical judgment. It makes use of the bacon image to clarify the meaning of the memory within the framework of already established and ongoing discourse. This phenomenon of retrospective revision , the way a later moment in the text simultaneously extends, alters, and undoes an earlier one, is characteristic of the Wife's performance and pervasive in it. Over and over, as we shall see, she reworks something she tells in the act of telling it, rereading the text of her life as she goes along in a way that transforms the meaning of the past in the light of the present.

The section of the prologue in which the Wife's narrative of her life moves from her first three husbands through her fourth shows memory increasingly disrupting the chronological surface of the narrative. Her assertion that she is even with the three old men, "Though I right now sholde make my testament,/I ne owe hem nat a word that it nys quit" (424–25), leads to yet a third specific memory, marked again by a shift in pronouns, of how she dealt with a moment of husbandly anger:

I broghte it so aboute by my wit
That they  moste yeve it up, as for the beste,
Or elles hadde we nevere been in reste;
For thogh he  looked as a wood leon,
Yet sholde he faille of his conclusion.
         (426—30, emphasis added)

This time the remembered moment is fleshed out by a vivid, complexly toned speech that contains, among other matter, the Wife's brilliant appropriation of the stock theological analogy that takes man as the equivalent of the rational element in the soul and in marriage, and woman as some lower element, will, body, or the like:

 Thanne wolde I seye, "Goode lief, taak keep
How mekely looketh Wilkyn, oure sheep!
Com neer, my spouse, lat me ba thy cheke!
Ye sholde been al pacient and meke,
And han a sweete spiced conscience,
Sith ye so preche of Jobes pacience.
Suffreth alwey, syn ye so wel kan preche;
And but ye do, certein we shal yow teche
That it is fair to have a wyf in pees.
Oon of us two moste bowen, doutelees;
And sith a man is moore resonable
Than womman is, ye moste been suffrable."
            (431–42)

The Wife's voice is fully engaged in this speech. The mock sweetness, the sudden threat ("And but ye do . . ."), and the final bland and infuriating appeal to the logic of masculine hierarchies make this performance strikingly different from her earlier rehearsal of what she said to her old husbands. Whatever else it may be, it is no list of proverbs. It has the complexity and coherence of a particular, though richly obscure, occasion, and I can understand why the man on the other end of it might have felt like a "wood leon."

In the next moment of the Wife's performance this vividness of memory escapes altogether from her organizing chronological framework. The instances we have been examining so far might be regarded as covert digressions from a relatively straightforward narrative, but what happens next is an open break. The Wife announces that she will speak of her fourth husband and proceeds to inform us, in one brief couplet, that he was a "revelour" and had a mistress (453–54)—and then she drops him:

And I was yong and ful of ragerye,
Stibourn and strong, and joly as a pye.
How koude I daunce to an harpe smale,
And synge, ywis, as any nyghtyngale,
Whan I had dronke a draughte of sweete wyn!
            (455–59)

As this breakaway digression continues, the mention of wine reminds her, apparently by a logic of simple association, of an anecdote in Valerius about Metellius, who beat his wife to death for drinking wine, which the Wife of Bath reports with indignant defiance: "He sholde

nat han daunted me fro drynke!" (463). She observes that "after wyn on Venus moste I thynke" (464), something that is apparently still true of her; at any rate it is reported in the present tense. She concludes, as usual, with a generalization, here about the effects of wine on the feminine libido (460–69).

This time, however, the generalization conspicuously fails to contain or account for the experience, and the Wife seems impelled to try again, in what are perhaps the most famous lines in the prologue:

 But—Lord Crist!—whan that it remembreth me
Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote.
Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote
That I have had my world as in my tyme.
             (469–73)

It is important to see that what is being described here is the direct result of the immediately preceding experience of telling, as "unto this day" suggests. The memory of her youthful energy, stubbornness, and "jolitee" has tickled the Wife in the now of speaking into the expression of feelings more personal and more intense than "In wommen vinolent is no defence" (467) will do justice to. She not only remembers but also feels the surge of energy she describes here as what the memory has just done for her. Only after a moment of darker reflection on her present age in comparison to her remembered youth (474– 79) does the Wife at last return to the story from which she has moved so far. The fact of digression is underlined by her nearly verbatim repetition of the line with which she began, as if it were necessary to go back and start over: "Now wol I tellen of my fourthe housbonde" (480).

What we are seeing here is a kind of struggle or tension in the Wife between the project of self-presentation, with its need to control, limit, and chronologize experience, to put it behind as something over and done with, and a counterimpulse to acknowledge the increasingly rich and vivid pressure of detailed memories that amounts to a kind of reliving in the present of scattered events and emotions from the past whose connectedness is not temporally organized or discursively unified. It is therefore not surprising that her account of her fourth husband, when at last it does come, partakes of both tendencies. To begin with, it is couched in terms that distinctly recall earlier situations in the

prologue and hence revise them in ways that clarify the practical logic of the poem's unfolding:

I seye, I hadde in herte greet despit
That he of any oother had delit.
But he was quit, by God and by Seint Joce!
I made hym of the same wode a croce;
Nat of my body, in no foul manere,
But certeinly, I made folk swich cheere
That in his owene grece I made hym frye
For angre, and for verray jalousye.
By God, in erthe I was his purgatorie,
For which I hope his soule be in glorie.
For, God it woot, he sat ful ofte and song,
Whan that his shoo ful bitterly hym wrong.
Ther was no wight, save God and he, that wiste,
In many wise, how soore I hym twiste.
             (481–94)

The first thing I want to call attention to here is the stress the passage lays on figures of balance and redress. The husband was repaid, "quit," for the injury he did the Wife by his infidelity; he was made to fry in his own grease to the extent that the Wife was his purgatory. Therefore, as she tells it here, there need remain no hard feelings on either side, and she hopes he is in heaven. This emphasis recalls her remark about the three old husbands earlier: "As helpe me verray God omnipotent,/Though I right now sholde make my testament,/I ne owe hem nat a word that it nys quit" (423–25). That remark, however, immediately precedes the shift of pronouns that carries us into the address to the angry husband (431–450; see above, pp. 87–88), which contains a passage I did not cite before:

What eyleth yow to grucche thus and grone?
Is it for ye wolde have my queynte allone?
Wy, taak it al! Lo, have it every deel!
Peter! I shrewe yow, but ye love it weel;
For if I wolde selle my  bele chose,
I koude walke as fressh as is a rose;
But I wol kepe it for youre owene tooth.
Ye be to blame, by God! I sey yow sooth.
       (443–50)

This sounds to me like a bit of making him fry in his own grease, playing as it does with a threat of infidelity that, we may reflect, does not fit the situation with the first three old husbands very well. Those old men are consistently described as cowed and worn down by the Wife's predatory sexuality, as having to endure more of it than they literally can stand. Here, however, we are presented with a speech to a husband who is already looking like a "wood leon" and is being sorely twisted about his desire to possess the Wife exclusively—in short, a man who is being made to fry "for angre and for verray jalousye." What I mean to suggest, of course, is that it is no accident that this speech is immediately followed by "Now wol I speken of my fourthe housbonde" (452) because the Wife has already been speaking of—and to—him before she announces the transition. This interpretation of the passage does not mean that it cannot also be read as addressed to one or all of the first three husbands. In that reading, the apparently affectionate strain sounded by phrases like "Wy, taak it al" or "I wol kepe it for youre owene tooth" is covert aggression of a different sort: it announces the impossibility of escape from the Wife's sexual depredations. Indeed, the passage can also be read as addressed to Janekyn since the threat of infidelity here is allied to the Wife's insistence on her independence, which is more a theme of her fifth than of her fourth marriage, and "Peter! I shrewe yow, but ye love it weel" sounds more probable as addressed to Janekyn than to the unfaithful fourth husband. The point I want to make is not that one of these readings is "right" but that the addressee of the speech is genuinely both multiple and undecidable, equally appropriate or inappropriate to each of three distinct situations. Following the kind of textualized retrospective re-membering the Wife practices here allows and encourages us, like her, to explore the multiplicity of other voices and times that emerge from behind the linear project of self-presentation. Once again the surface of narration and example conceals a subtext of memory and experience that emerges only in retrospective rereading.

It is also clear, however, that if the Wife's fourth husband is on her mind before he enters her chronological narrative, and if she covertly relives certain of her dealings with him, her explicit relation of her fourth marriage is quick and dismissive. Having described how she made herself even with him, she moves on at once:

He deyde whan I cam fro Jerusalem,
And lith ygrave under the roode beem,
Al is his tombe noght so curyus
As was the sepulcre of hym Daryus,
Which that Appelles wroghte subtilly;
It nys but wast to burye hym preciously.
Lat hym fare wel; God yeve his soule reste!
He is now in his grave and in his cheste.
Now of my fifthe housbonde wol I telle.
           (495–503)

This is the second half of a passage, only twenty-one lines long in all, that the Wife devotes to her fourth marriage, and we might suppose that the brevity of her treatment indicates a lack of interest in it, a desire to get on to the next man and the issue of sovereignty, especially since what we hear about the marriage is inconclusive on that central topic. In terms of "maistrye" it sounds like a rather unsatisfactory draw at best. But from a retrospective vantage the sense of a lack of resolution is the most important thing about the account. 1 have just suggested that the concerns of the fourth marriage are at work in the text at various points where the surface does not explicitly refer to them; this in turn suggests that the Wife is more concerned with these matters than she lets on publicly.

The fourth was a troubled marriage, and the style of the Wife's avoidance of it suggests how much it still troubles her, even though her presentation does not fully clarify what the trouble was. When she first announces that she will talk about the fourth marriage, the Wife proceeds immediately to digress, as I have already noted. When she comes back to it, in the passage under examination, she tells us something she left out before, something that does not seem to have been the case with her first three marriages—that she cared about what her fourth husband did: "I seye, I hadde in herte greet despit/That he of any oother had delit" (481–82). As Doris Palomo notes, the image the Wife chooses to describe her revenge, "I made him of the same wode a croce" (484), "itself suggests a sorrow that talionic justice could not completely alleviate" ("'Bad Husbands,'" 308). Moreover, the Wife is concerned to assert her physical fidelity—"Nat of my body, in no foul manere" (485)—in a way she has not previously felt necessary. In her account of the first three marriages she appears content to allow the imputation of infidelity to pass without comment, as in "A wys

wyf, if that she kan hir good,/Shall beren hym on honde the cow is wood" (231–32, cf. 399), but here she goes out of her way to deny it. It appears that she not only was but also is more involved, in some sense more committed to the fourth marriage, since even now she does not like to think of herself as open to the charge of having betrayed it. More of what might be called her self-project, more of what the Wife feels and wants herself to be, is here somehow bound up with this bad husband than with the three good old rich ones.

It thus seems likely that the relatively abrupt dismissal of the fourth husband arises as much from a reluctance or disinclination to deal with the issues he raises for the Wife as from anything else, and we may suppose that the businesslike way she moves forward into the account of her fifth marriage is connected with her desire to have done with the fourth. Certainly it is notable that she rounds off her initial description of her life with number five with a return to the public project and its economic framework. Her explanation of why she loved this husband best, with its supply-and-demand account of desire and its concluding proverbial generalization (503–24) comes, after so much vivid remembering, as a real check. It points up by contrast how the fourth marriage has not been integrated into the larger argument.

Yet the Wife's economic interpretation of her sexual experiences with her fifth husband is reductive, and there are signs that she herself is aware of that. Her initial characterization of him, "God lete his soule nevere come in helle!" (504) seems warmer than the subsequent analysis will entirely account for, as does her reaction after the analysis is completed:

Greet prees at market maketh deere ware,
And to greet cheep is holde at litel prys:
This knoweth every womman that is wys.
 My fifthe housbonde—God his soule blesse!—
Which that I took for love, and no richesse . . .
               (522–26)

Indeed, the last line quoted here sounds like a pointed denial, at least in emotional terms, of the economic analysis, Nevertheless, I took him for love. The sense this response gives of the Wife's dissatisfaction with the economic explanation, her feeling that at the least it is not enough to explain her relationship with her fifth husband, is of course confirmed by the extensive account of it that she goes on to give in the rest

of the prologue. But it also appears that she cannot adequately assess the relationship without considering its beginnings, and that need carries her back to the end of her fourth marriage.^[3] The tension that is suppressed in the Wife's attempt to dismiss her fourth husband and get on to her fifth resurfaces in her interest in reexamining the transition: there is something there that is still unresolved.

This sense of unresolved complexity increases as the Wife's narration continues. Though her account of her fifth marriage and the circumstances leading up to it is as full of sweeping generalizations as any part of the poem, it is also rich with reexperiencing and the enjoyment of recollection. There are vivid memories of persons ("God have hir soule! Hir name was Alisoun" [530]), of places ("To vigilies and to processiouns,/To prechyng eek, and to thise pilgrimages,/To pleyes of myracles, and to mariages" [556–58]), and even of things. Muscatine long ago noted how full it was of what he thought of as her particular, concrete, "bourgeois" style:

And wered upon my gaye scarlet gytes.
Thise wormes, ne thise motthes, ne thise mytes,
Upon my peril, frete hem never a deel;
And wostow why? For they were used weel.
               (559–62)^[4]

Within this context of renewed memory, however, the Wife's account of her dealings with her fifth husband before the death of her fourth is conspicuously and deliberately pitched as an exemplary tale of feminine calculation, manipulation, and deceit. Her initial approach was made "of my purveiance"—just in case, we might say—and the follow-up was engineered by means of a piece of "wifelore" (to adapt an idea of Donald Howard's),^[5] a bit of instruction passed down from mother to daughter about how to get men to think and feel what you want them to:

 I bar hym on honde he hadde enchanted me—
My dame taughte me that soutiltee—
And eek I seyde I mette of hym al nyght,

[3] This point is noted by Rowland, "Untimely Death," 276.

[4] Muscatine, French Tradition, 205 and 269 n. 57, citing Lowes on the force of "thise."

[5] See Howard's discussion of "knightlore," Idea of the Canterbury Tales, 228–29.

He wolde han slayn me as I lay upright,
And al my bed was ful of verray blood;
"But yet I hope that ye shal do me good,
For blood bitokeneth gold, as me was taught."
And al was fals; I dremed of it right naught,
But as I folwed ay my dames loore,
As wel of this as of othere thynges moore.
             (575–84)

But what are we to do with the carefully vague and uninformative way we are told that the Wife's sense of "purveiance" was awakened when "in the feeldes walked we,/Til trewely we hadde swich daliance,/This clerk and I" (564–66) and that she began to think about the need for another mousehole? Just what did happen out there?^[6] What are we to make, in the light of the apparent coolness with which this account is framed, of her reaction at her fourth husband's funeral, a moment when we might expect (as Deschamps does) that calculation and purveyance would especially prevail?

And Jankyn, oure clerk, was oon of tho.
As help me God, whan that I saugh hym go
After the beere, me thoughte he hadde a paire
Of legges and of feet so clene and faire
That al myn herte I yaf unto his hoold.
            (595–99)^[7]

[6] What became, for instance, of the disappearing chaperone, Alys, whose presence, announced at line 548, does not affect subsequent events as much as might be expected?

[7] It is a measure of the extent to which the contextualization of her remembering has enabled the Wife to appropriate and revalue the antifeminist topoi on which her self-presentation as the Great Unscatheable Cootie is based that the effect of this passage is utterly unlike that of its source in Deschamps, where the third-person narration and the lack of any extraneous affect stress only the callous calculation attributed to the generic wife:

Du service, obseque et les lays
Oir vouldra parler jamais,
Excepté d'une courte messe;
Et regardera, en la presse
A porter le deffunct en terre,
Quel mari elle pourra querre
Et avoir aprés cesti cy.

She'll never want to hear anything about a funeral service, obsequies and songs, except for a short mass, and she'll be looking out in the crowd that carries the dead man to burial for whatever husband she can find to take after this one.

Eustace Deschamps, Le Miroir de mariage , lines 1971–77, quoted in Whiting, "Wife of Bath's Prologue," 220

What, above all, are we to do with the attention-getting fact that the Wife's narration of the dream she did not dream makes her for once lose her place? "But now, sire, lat me se, what shal I seyn./A ha! By God, I have my tale ageyn" (585–86).

The critics who detect between the lines of this account a conspiracy of the Wife and Janekyn to murder the fourth husband, followed in some versions by Janekyn's execution for the crime (a scenario that cleans up a number of otherwise uncertain matters in the text), are at least right that something is somehow being displaced here and that there are features of the text that are suspiciously, because conspicuously, unclear, though I am by no means as sure as they are of what the secret is.^[8] I begin, however, by noting along with Palomo ("'Bad Husbands,'" 309) that the Wife's enthusiasm for Janekyn's feet and legs looks like a feint to distract attention from whatever "daliance" went on in the field. Unlike Palomo, however, I go on to note that one of the things this ploy accomplishes is to defer any hint of actual emotional attachment on the Wife's part until after the fourth husband's death and make it sound as if only then she actually fell in love.^[9] I connect this deferral in turn with the observations I have already made about the Wife's concern to deny that her "twisting" of her unfaithful husband extended to actual physical infidelity on her part (483–88) and perhaps as well to a certain tone of affection that creeps into her account of husband number four at points. The most telling circumstance in the Wife's account, however, is her casual revelation of her fifth husband's name at the point in the prologue where she tells how they went "into the feeldes" (548–49).

Janekyn is the only one of the Wife's husbands who is named by her, a fact that is itself interesting, and she announces his name at an appropriate point in her chronological account, when he enters on the scene as a potential husband. But of course that is not the first time the name itself occurs in the prologue. A Janekyn is mentioned as a (false)

[8] Palomo, "'Bad Husbands,'" is the best of these. If, as I think, she goes astray, she does so in response to real and important features of the text. She and Rowland, "Timely Death," share a certain cheerful bloodthirstiness and an attractive refusal to subject the Wife's actions to solemn moralizing. This is less true of Sands, "Non-comic Wife." For a sympathetic and sensible criticism of this view, see Hamel, "Contemporary Murder."

[9] D. S. Silva takes the bait here: "Only on the day of the funeral did love become real" ("Wife of Bath's Marital State," 9).

witness, along with the Wife's niece, to the things the three old husbands are supposed to have "seyden in hir dronkenesse" (381–83), and this niece is mentioned again later as one of the people to whom the Wife was in the habit of betraying her fourth husband's most embarrassing secrets (534–42). This second mention creates a chronological problem, of course, if we try to fit the Janekyn also mentioned earlier as "oure apprentice" in the three-old-husbands period into a marital career that begins when the Wife is twelve and ends twenty-eight years later by delivering the same Janekyn at the age of twenty into the arms of the forty-year-old widow.^[10] For all I know (and the text refuses to decide) there were in actual fact two or even three Janekyns in the Wife's past at different times. But I am too enamored of the variant of Leicester's razor that runs Joanniculi non sunt multiplicandi sine necessitate to rest in mere chronological probability, and I wantto insist that in the virtual now of the Wife's telling there is only one Janekyn because the first occasion when the name is mentioned speaks, in retrospect, with utter precision to the issues and tensions that presently concern us:

And yet of oure apprentice Janekyn,
For his crispe heer, shynyng as gold so fyn,
And for he squiereth me bothe up and doun,
Yet hastow caught a fals suspecioun.
I wol hym noght, thogh thou were deed tomorwe!
             (303–7, emphasis added)

Once again what comes later reinterprets what went before. What for the pilgrim listeners can at most be a matter of vague puzzlement (Didn't she say something about. . . ?) is for us as (re)readers an opportunity to trace another strand of the Wife's private reworking of the text of herself. We can see that this earliest mention of Janekyn, which first functions as part of an exemplary tirade in the interests of feminine mastery, is also an address to the fourth husband and another voice in the Wife's continuing conversation with herself about the meaning of the end of her fourth marriage.

The Wife remains uneasy about her feelings at this period and unsure how to interpret them. In the circumstances one cannot give

[10] Palomo, "'Bad Husbands,'" 311, notes the connection but takes it as real, referring to a subteenage Janekyn who grew up with the Wife.

much weight to the possibility that she is concerned about having her career appear to the pilgrim audience like that of "a respectable woman"—it is a bit late for that—but I do think she wants to respect herself. As Gayatri Spivak remarks, "The will to explain [is] a symptom of the desire to have a self and a world" ("Explanation and Culture," 105), an observation that is true of the Wife of Bath's Prologue in numerous ways but here prompts the reflection that so can be the will not to explain. The pattern of the Wife's reticences suggests that she would like to feel that her actions and emotions developed according to a scenario that kept her in control of herself and others: she is trying to minimize the overlaps and ambivalences of disappointment and desire, commitment and self-protection, and thought, word, and deed that arose in the transition from one marriage to another and still arise in telling about it. Like a dramatic-theory critic, the Wife wants to construct an objective and coherent history and personality for herself: she would like to be more of a self and less of a subject than she feels she is. Being somewhat closer to the textual evidence, she finds it harder than other such critics to ride over contradictory evidence in making her interpretation.

The murder theory seems to me to represent a misplaced concretion that strives to find definite events to resolve an uncomfortable emotional tension in the text. This tension is uncomfortable for the Wife first, and her inability or unwillingness to resolve it passes the discomfort along to the critics, who would like to be rid of what she cannot or will not shake: the ambivalence and uncertainty of the relation of events and feelings in her past, the tension between her desire to be quit and her uncertainty about who wronged whom. No one I have read has come up with a fully satisfying interpretation of the Wife's allusion to the Alexandreis and the tomb of Darius in relation to the burial of her fourth husband (495–502). I do not understand the full weight of the reference either, but I can offer the following observation. To stop remembering and talking about the fourth husband is, in the present of narrating, a version of what the murder-theory critics are also talking about: it is to put him back in his grave and his chest. From this point of view the allusion briefly delays the very dismissal it is part of to consider how a tomb might be decorated and what is appropriate in a memorial. To raise and dismiss the tomb of Darius is, in this context, to raise a possibility in the present before letting it go; there is perhaps a tinge of regret in "It nys but wast to burye hym preciously" for

something that did not work out, that does not deserve, but might have deserved, a better memorial, or that the Wife momentarily wishes might have.

What emerges, then, from behind the explicit, chronological, public project of the prologue is a set of alternative accounts of the Wife's career that she seems to construct privately for herself in the mode of practical consciousness, hovering undecidably between the unconscious and discursive self-consciousness according to an associational, spontaneous, and detemporalized logic.^[11] In these accounts chronology and causality are continually being bypassed, subverted, and reinterpreted and questions like, Why did I chide? or, How did (do) I feel about my fourth marriage? are entertained in a mode of genuine uncertainty and exploration. They are thus also accounts in which the Wife's subjectivity emerges because they do not produce a single, "true" private self revealed behind the facade of the public performance. Rather, these readings develop an image of her as a self fragmented, ambivalent, pulled in different directions by different contending forces which the self as such does not originate or entirely control. The voicing of her performance makes the Wife a site of multiple voices, or multiple voicings of the same text, that speak the different roles, projects, desires, and constraints of the divided subject. Both the style of reading/remembering that obtains here and the image of the subject it produces proceed according to the logic of the rhizome as developed by Deleuze and Guattari.^[12]

A rhizome is botanically a subterranean stem system, as in tubers, mint, and crabgrass, that performs some of the functions of a root but without the division into central and subordinate units of a branching taproot so that absolute hierarchies of function or importance do not

[11] Compare Lee Patterson's description of lines 452–80: "A structural image of dilation, an opening into the subject that is framed by a delayed narrative movement, . . . stands as a paradigm for the rest of the Prologue, which consists of small narrative movements intercalated and retarded with increasingly detailed self-revelations. These digressions are not, as Geoffrey de Vinsauf would say, leaps off to the side of the road, but motivations for the very narrative they retard. Not only, in other words, does the interleaving of digressive meditations within the narrative provide an image of dilation, but the narrative itself is both an opening up and a standing still, a deepening explication of that which is already known" ("'For the Wyves Love of Bathe,'" 678–79).

[12] Deleuze and Guattari, "Introduction: Rhizome," in Mille plateaux, 9–37. Quotations in the next paragraph are from John Johnstone's translation in On the Line , 1–65.

exist:"Any point on a rhizome can be connected with any other, and must be" (11). "There are no points or positions in a rhizome, as one finds in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines" (17). Deleuze and Guattari generalize the properties of rhizomes to a vast array of other systems, including the brain, language, and social organizations, and give the following summary of those properties:

Unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point with any other point, and none of its features necessarily refers to features of the same kind. . . . It has neither beginning nor end, but always a middle, through which it pushes and overflows. It constitutes linear multiplicities in n dimensions, without subject or object. . . . In opposition to centered systems (even multicentered), with hierarchical communication and pre-established connections, the rhizome is an a-centered system, non-hierarchical and non-signifying, without a General, without an organizing memory or central autonomy, uniquely defined by a circulation of states.
         (47–49)

What comes into focus in the Wife's account is an image of her life as a manifold of this sort, where any point can be connected to any other point in any order according to immediate local (practical) needs and conditions without any privileged center or dominant path.^[13] As Deleuze and Guattari point out, the notion of a rhizome is opposed to that of a life or a book "constituted by the inferiority of a substance or a subject" (17), by which they mean an author in the traditional romantic sense or what I have been calling a self. Indeed, from this perspective it makes no more sense to speak of a life or a book than it does to speak of a rhizome, as if such a radical heterogeneity were one thing: "They are designated by . . . partitives (some crab grass, some rhizome . . .) " (17). But if this is an image of the Wife's reading and of

[13] Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of long-term and short-term memory is relevant here:

Neurologists and psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term and shortterm memory (on the order of a minute). So the difference is not only quantitative: short-term memory is diagrammatic, a kind of rhizome, whereas long-term memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, trace or photo). Short-term memory is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy in relation to its object; it can exist at a distance, coming back or returning much later, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity. Furthermore, the two types of memory are not distinguishable as two temporal modes of apprehension of the same thing: what is grasped by the two is not the same, neither the same memory, nor even the same idea.
                    ( On the Line ,33–35)

her history, it is also an image of the memory that contains and enables them: therefore it is an image of her subjectivity, of the kind of thing she must be to do what she does. I want to conclude this section by examining two other important examples of this subjectivity in action. They form two rhizomes that map, respectively, the subject's internal experience of its own self-undoing and the deconstruction of an external, institutional identity: the Wife's dream and her horoscope. Since there is no such thing, if the analysis is followed far enough, as an independent or separate rhizome, the two ultimately turn out to be interconnected.

Let us begin with the false dream that the Wife used to beguile Janekyn before her fourth husband's death (575–84). We have already noted how her narration of this dream leads her to lose the thread of her discourse, and a plausible interpretation of the stumble is that she becomes caught up in remembering a dream more important to her than she wants to admit—that is, that she really did dream it after all. It may well be so, but since I am less interested in constructing yet another history for the Wife than in following the ways she does it herself, I want to put the situation a little differently. Strictly speaking, the fundamental undecidability between self-presentation and self-revelation that informs the Wife's discourse applies as much to the so-called historical facts as to anything else. Since all we have in the text is the Wife's performance in the virtual now of the pilgrimage, no item of her reminiscence can be taken unproblematically as fact. She may always be falsifying, asIfear she is doing here, and the question of falsification itself is by no means a simple one. What we can say is that whatever may have happened as experience in the past, in the now of speaking the prologue the dream takes on importance as a focus of certain fundamental themes of the text. When the Wife says of the dream that "al was fals," we perhaps do not entirely believe her, but we do not thereby simply convict her of lying, especially when we see that the public assertion that the dream was a deception is not canceled by the suspected private one that it was evidence of uncontrollable passion. Nor in fact was either of these two possibilities canceled by the other in the past when Janekyn got them with the signs reversed. We do not, after all, suppose the Wife to have been unaware of the likely effect of telling the dream to Janekyn even if she did dream it, nor can we assume that she is not inviting the present audience's more or

less conscious complicity in a pretense that she did not^[14] She did not and does not necessarily tell all she knows to Janekyn or the pilgrims, which only shows that authentic experience, if there is such a thing, can be manipulated for effect too. The question of the dream's truth or falsity is genuinely undecidable at a different level: it is the question posed by the Wife's stance to the audience as well as to Janekyn of the relation of desire to deception, of the place of sincerity in the struggle for advantage and, of the advantages that accrue to sincerity. The generalized form of this question is precisely what the dream, true or false, is about.

The subtext of the dream is first of all a counterstatement to the commodity view of sexuality that informs both the public argument of the prologue, in general, and the framing of the dream itself as a deception aimed at gaining an advantage, in particular. The pivotal statement in the Wife's account is "blood bitokeneth gold," which can be, and has been, read as a reminder to Janekyn of what he stands to gain by marrying her.^[15] The connection of this juncture to other themes of the poem arises through the implications of the dream itself: "He wolde han slayn me as I lay upright,/And al my bed was ful of verray blood" (578–79). Palomo and others have noted how this image takes on meaning in the light of the Wife's career as an evocation of loss of virginity and inflects her mother's lore in the direction of the commodification of sexuality:

Her mother promoted [the Wife's first] marriage. Years later, the Wife invents a dream for Jankyn's benefit in which she imagines herself slain at night, her bed full of blood. She interprets this dream according to her mother's precepts: "blood bitokeneth gold." Such words to a young girl on the verge of marriage inform her that in exchange for the bloody rupture of the hymen the girl will acquire wealth—exactly the reason comely young virgins like Alisoun and May were married off to fumbling Januaries.^[16]

[14] We ought not in general to ignore the element of this kind of complicity throughout the prologue, present in such things as the more or less open invitation the Wife offers us to laugh sympathetically with her at the unmerited sufferings of her old husbands—poor things—and the other complicity effects that derive from the basic move she shares with the Pardoner of letting us look behind the scenes.

[15] See, for example, Oberembt, "Chaucer's Anti-misogynist Wife of Bath," 293. Here, as elsewhere, this sort of perception sometimes leads to the imputation that Janekyn only married the Wife for her money, as seems to be implied by David, Strumpet Muse, 151, and even (oddly, though as usual complexly) by Owen, Pilgrimage and Storytelling, 152.

[16] Palomo, "'Bad Husbands,'" 305. See also Shapiro, "Dame Alice."

The other implication of blood, however, is violence—an implication fully registered in the dream—and this dual meaning completes a circuit. Like any other commodity in a relation of exchange, the value of sexuality is fully convertible; that is, gold also betokens blood, and in the dream blood betokens not only loss of virginity but also death. This convergence of gold, sex, and death in the dream is a powerful image in itself, but it becomes still more powerful as it twists and shifts rhizomatically backward and forward through the Wife's text and her life.

One strand of this system winds back into the past and generates a revisionary perspective on the Wife's understanding of the relation between sexuality and economics as forces in play in the institution of marriage. When gold is not being used to trade for blood, it has to be kept somewhere, and the Wife's word for where it is kept, cheste or chiste, builds up associations with death via her fourth husband:

It nys but wast to burye hym preciously.
Lat hym fare wel; God yeve his soule reste!
He is now in his grave and in his cheste.
               (500–502)

 But tel me this: why hydestow,  with sorwe,
The keyes of thy cheste awey fro me?
It is my good as wel as thyn, pardee!
What, wenestow make an ydiot of oure dame?
Now by that lord that called is Seint Jame,
Thou shall nat bothe, thogh that thou were wood,
Be maister of my body and of my good;
That oon thou shalt forgo, maugree thyne yen.
What helpith it of me to enquere or spyen?
I trowe thou woldest loke me in thy chiste!
             (308–17, emphasis added)^[17]

The chance to read textually—to read backward and forward, rhizomatically—lets us see what else the Wife's practical consciousness registers about the commodification of sex in the institution of marriage, counter to her apparent ready acceptance of a disenchanted and competitive view. The sacrifice of pleasure, spontaneity, independence, and affection that the conversion of blood and gold entails is a

[17] The connection is first made at line 44b: "Bothe of here nether pars and of here cheste." Besides the lines cited in the text, account should be taken of the request made by the knight in the tale: "Taak al my good and lat my body go" (1061).

bad bargain, not least because it encourages a woman to accept the valuation the system places on her—"to greet chepe is holde at litel prys"—and thus acquiesce in her own dehumanization. The Wife's text embodies her insight that this aspect of the system of marriage, represented in the men who have enacted it, has, like one aspect of Janekyn in the dream, been trying all her life to kill her.

There is still another set of implications to be read out of the knot of tokenings in the dream,^[18] a strand that runs forward into the Wife's fifth marriage and the rest of the prologue. This reading of the dream takes a more positive stance toward sexuality and its possibilities and allows us to recuperate those aspects of the Wife's sexual experience that make it more to her than an instrument of exploitation, dehumanization, and murder. We can begin to follow this strand by asking how the dream might function as a projection of the Wife's attitudes toward a potential relationship with Janekyn. As I have already suggested, the dream portrays him as a violent attacker and therefore may be thought to embody a fear that he will turn out to be like all the other men in her life, the agent of a murderous system. Those aspects of the dream that present it as a scene of defloration, however, can have a more positive side if the dream is understood not only as an expression of anxietybut also as a wish. The thought here is something like a desire to start over, to become a virgin again for this man and give one-self "for love, and no richesse," without the taint of commodification that has hitherto marked sexuality for the Wife. It is at least suggestive that shortly after her account of the dream the Wife expresses the warmest feelings about her sexuality in general that she has achieved in the prologue thus far, and she does so in terms that present a more mutual and less exploitative view of it than previously. Part of her pleasure in sex here derives from the fact that others enjoyed it too:

As help me God, I was a lusty oon,
And faire, and riche, and yong, and wel bigon,

[18] We might think of the dream as the navel of the prologue, somewhat in the way Freud, in a passage that anticipates Deleuze and Guattari's idea of the rhizome, speaks of "the dream's navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown. The dreamthoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium" (Interpretation of Dreams, 564).

And trewely, as myne housbondes tolde me,
I hadde the beste quoniam  myghte be.
            (605–608)^[19]

What makes a reading of this sort most convincing to me, however, is that the Wife presents herself as having acted on the wish, so to speak, at the beginning of her marriage to Janekyn:

What sholde I seye but, at the monthes ende,
This joly clerk, Jankyn, that was so hende,
Hath wedded me with greet solempnytee,
And to hym yaf I al the lond and fee
That evere was me yeven therbifoore.
              (627–31)

The logic of this action is the convertibility of blood and gold: if the appearance of affection is a commodity in the marriage market, then commodities—land and fee—can function in the right circumstances as evidence of affection. After all, that was the way in which the Wife's old husbands sought to manifest their desire for her, and she may well have taken it as an appropriate way to demonstrate love when she came to feel it—especially since there is nothing inherently implausible about the idea. To give what one owns to another need not be a calculated act of exploitation or an attempt to buy the love one can obtain in no other way: it can be a way of giving oneself.

If this logic is what motivated the Wife, however, it quickly emerged in the marriage, and does so even more quickly in the telling, that she made a mistake: "But afterward repented me ful soore" (633). She lost the instruments of control she was accustomed to have over her husbands—"He nolde suffre nothyng of my list" (634)—and she had to put up with his chiding. But what is really interesting about this changed situation is the insight it provided, and provides, for the Wife into her own character:

Stibourn I was as is a leonesse,
And of my tonge a verray jangleresse,
And walke I wolde, as I had doon biforn,
From hous to hous, although he hadde it sworn;
For which he often tymes wolde preche,
And me of olde Romayn geestes teche.
                (637–42)

[19] This passage itself arises from the memory of Janekyn's feet and legs, 596ff.

It should be remembered that even with the fourth husband the Wife's jangling and walking out are understood and presented primarily as a response to something that was done to her first. Certainly her earlier accounts, such as the one that prefaces her dalliance with Janekyn in the field (543–62), register her enjoyment: "For evere yet I loved to be gay" (545). But these pleasures are contaminated by the need to control her husband by gossiping about his intimate secrets and wandering to give the appearance of frying him in his own grease. To put it in a historical frame for a moment, it could be said that what the Wife learned was that marrying Janekyn for love did not change her love of independence, her enthusiasm for gossip, or her interest in gathering new experiences. When those characteristics no longer had to function instrumentally in the system of competition and dominance, they became valuable for their own sakes. When she no longer needed them to make her way in a man's world, the Wife discovered that she also liked them for other reasons.

What is mapped by following out the dream rhizome is a set of undecidable oppositions that are enacted in the events of the Wife's life and embodied in her subjectivity as she tells it. These oppositions manifest themselves at every level, from the generalized relation to the old husbands and the abstract authority of the beginning of the prologue to the complex intimacy with Janekyn and the uncertainties of her relation to the audience. The dream presents in condensed, imaginal form what is opened up by the various moments and events that are connected to it by associative links: the subjective contradictions involved in desiring someone one also deceives and taking advantage of someone for whom one also feels affection, which at the same time engage the wider institutional contradictions inherent both in the economic and affective components of marriage and ultimately, as we shall see, in the social construction of gender. These contradictions are enacted in the Wife's narrated history in a way that suggests increasing self-consciousness about them and even a degree of mastery, but the fact that they continue to be represented in the present of telling stresses that they are not resolved or transcended, only more expertly deployed and better practiced.

Still, it seems accurate to say that a shift in the balance of forces and interpretations takes place as the prologue unfolds. From one point of view the narrative continues to be one in which the Wife follows a line

through the rhizome of the "matere" of memory that moves from experience to authority. She presents marriage as competition and strife and picks that thread out of the varied weave of five marriages to arrive at the final and most general moral of "maistrye." It is apparent by now, however, that the unfolding of the narrative is increasingly interrupted by pockets of vivid remembering and feeling engaged in for a variety of reasons that are marginal to the public project. As these pockets accumulate, they decenter the project and create a countermovement from authority to experience. As this movement comes to dominate the last third of the prologue, it begins to affect the Wife's generalizations themselves more directly. The alternating rhythm of the poem between memory and summary continues, but now the memories more openly question and correct the summaries, and the act of generalizing becomes a more open, ongoing, and explicitly revisionary process. A crucial example of this process is the Wife's dealings with astrology, beginning with her account of her own horoscope (609–14).

I used the astrology passage earlier as an instance of the way critics of various persuasions about the Wife make use of the same textual evidence to create different but equally reifying versions of her (see above, pp. 67–68). I want now to examine what I put to one side before, the Wife's own interpretation of her horoscope, a matter she is in less of a hurry than the critics to decide. We may conveniently begin with the famous couplet that summarizes her natal constellation, "Myn ascendent was Taur, and Mars therinne./Allas, allas! That evere love was synne!" (613–14). Its tone is by no means clear. Curry thinks it is a tragic utterance, voiced in repentant bitterness at the life that has been forced on the Wife by an unholy constellation (Medieval Sciences, 113), and Wood sees it as something more like a boast, "not an expression of repentance but a comment on an inconvenience" (Country of the Stars, 180). But surely what makes the couplet so striking is the way itcalls attention to a discrepancy between the fact of a certain horoscope and its emotional meaning for the speaker. The effect arises precisely from the gap, the failure of connection, between the two perspectives, the descriptive ("Myn ascendent was Taur") and the emotional ("Allas, allas!"). The critics hasten to fill the gap and thereby in their differing readings they enact, rather than describe, the tension the gap creates. But inscribed in that gap is the Wife's discovery

of her own uncertainty, her subjecthood. She is using the horoscope to classify and explain herself, just as Curry and Wood are. Classification and explanation are, after all, the most respectably scientific function of astrology in medieval culture, the function that naturalizes it and makes it look ideologically neutral—that is, makes it an institution. In the case of the Wife, however, the intrusive line in the couplet betrays her inability or unwillingness to rest in the definition the horoscope offers. She seems to feel a need to comment further:

I folwed ay myn inclinacioun
By vertu of my constellacioun;
That made me I koude noght withdrawe
My chambre of Venus from a good felawe.
            (615–18)

The Wife does seem to argue as an astrological determinist in this passage. She declares that she followed her "inclinacioun" (here, I take it, a technical term meaning the disposition given by the stars) because of the power ("vertu") of her natal constellation, which made her unable to withhold her planet-dominated "chambre of Venus" from good fellows—"I koude noght" sounds a certain note of helplessness.

Having disposed of the influence of Venus on her life, the Wife turns to that of Mars, or so it appears: "Yet have I Martes mark upon my face,/And also in another privee place" (619–20). The structure of the speech implies some sort of division and distinction—Venus made me do this, and Mars made me do that —and the influence of the red planet does appear to be similarly conceived as a stamp of character, a mark impressed from outside, like the "prente of seinte Venus seel" earlier (604). The difficulty with this reading is that by the end of the speech the apparent distinction between this and that breaks down as it becomes evident that Venus and Mars are being invoked to explain not different kinds of behavior but the same phenomenon, namely, the Wife's lack of discretion:

Yet have I Martes mark upon my face,
And also in another privee place.
For God so wys be my savacioun,
I ne loved nevere by no discrecioun,
But evere folwede myn appetit,
Al were he short, or long, or blak, or whit;

I took no kep, so that he liked me,
How poore he was, ne eek of what degree.
             (619–26)

This conclusion is a return to the Wife's indiscretions in a more independent and martian spirit. She followed, she says, not a relatively passive "inclinacioun" but the more active "appetit," and she did so not helplessly with anyone at all but with anyone she liked "so that he liked me." The end of the passage gives us a different image of the Wife as someone who made conditions and exercised choices, who only gave in to her astrologically conditioned character when she found someone who appreciated her.^[20] As it proceeds, the passage looks less and less like a single, worked-out explanation of the influence of various astrological forces on different aspects of the Wife's character and more like a reworking, a set of alternative explanations of the same behavior.

Here the astrology rhizome and the dream rhizome begin to connect because what is at issue in the conflicting claims of Mars and Venus is a version of the same undecidability manifested in the dream, a question about the conflicting roles of desire and aggression in sexuality linked to a question about autonomy and involuntary action. It is not as if the Wife (or Chaucer for that matter) did not believe at all in astrological influences, and she is surely not wrong to feel that Venus and Mars have crucially influenced her life. Those names refer to forces at work in the individual and society, to desire and aggression, affection and conflict. They exist at the social level in institutions like marriage and antifeminism that organize and constrain individuals, and if we moderns are more prone to see them in the psyche as components of the unconscious rather than as astral impulses beaming in on us from the heavens, we experience them no less than our medieval ancestors as other, as something that is both part of us and beyond our conscious originating.

The critics can differ about determinism and freedom in this passage because the Wife herself sets the critical agenda: she entertains both

[20] Since the passage also contains some of the warmth of "trewely, as myn housbondes tolde me,/I hadde the beste quoniam myghte be," which immediately precedes it, and since it expressly excludes poverty as a factor in the choice of a lover, it rejects economic as well as astrological determinism.

positions in the course of the speech. In shifting from a deterministic position to a more active and independent one, she revises the relative importance of various aspects of her horoscope as well as her own relation to her stars as a cause of her actions, but without simply discarding the element of deterministic constraint in favor of a wholly untrammeled freedom and self-determination. What we have here is not an assertion of a fact about the Wife but an unfolding act of interpretation in which she tries out astrological explanation to see how well it fits her case. The horoscope is less a definition of her character than a means she herself uses to explore the meaning of her life, and by the end of the passage she herself seems to find that means—and that meaning—unsatisfactory. She drops the subject of the stars and proceeds with her story. The horoscope shifts in the Wife's own practice from something general and objective about her to a medium for encountering and articulating the tensions of her subjectivity—something more like a proposition about herself she makes, revises, and then discards. What happens to astrological explanation of human nature in the Wife's text is that both astrology and human nature are called into question. The text portrays an encounter between a subject and an institution whose first outcome here is to render the subject problematic in ways the institution cannot coherently register.

The full implications of this process emerge only later, when the Wife returns to astrology at the end of her first account of Janekyn's book, to explain how the book and Janekyn's horrid delight in its use exemplify the immemorial enmity, decreed by the stars, between women and clerks, the children of Venus and of Mercury:

He knew of hem mo legendes and lyves
Than been of goode wyves in the Bible.
For trusteth wel, it is an impossible
That any clerk wol speke good of wyves,
But if it be of hooly seintes lyves,
Ne of noon oother womman never the mo.
Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?
By God, if wommen hadde writen stories,
As clerkes han withinne hire oratories,
They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse
Than al the mark of Adam may redresse.

The children of Mercurie and of Venus
Been in hir wirkyng ful contrarius;
Mercurie loveth wysdam and science,
And Venus loveth ryot and dispence.
And, for hire diverse disposicioun,
Ech falleth in otheres exaltacioun.
And thus, God woot, Mercurie is desolat
In Pisces, wher Venus is exaltat,
And Venus falleth ther Mercurie is reysed.
Therfore no womman of no clerk is preysed.
                (686–706)

Once again the Wife presents a deterministic image, one that places the causes of clerical disapproval of women above and beyond human tampering or amelioration. As Wood is at pains to point out, this is not an intellectually respectable astrological explanation. He calls it "hilarious" [Country of the Stars, 174), and I expect the Wife would agree with him if it did not make her so angry. It seems clear, however, that she is parodying the kind of pretentious explanation we might expect a clerk, like Janekyn, to produce, for once again the Wife goes on to revise the inadequate initial account. She has a better explanation, and he delivers it immediately:

The clerk, whan he is oold, and may nought do
Of Venus werkes worth his olde sho,
Thanne sit he doun, and writ in his dotage
That wommen kan nat kepe hir mariage!
              (707–10)

This is a likely enough image of the crabbed astrologer, and part of what gives it its punch and conviction is that it makes the influence of Venus an integral part of the character and experience of the children of Mercury, putting back together what the original distinction had torn asunder. Even more telling is the way this account locates clerkly antifeminism itself in the history of men's frustrations with their own bodies and with women. The Wife suggests that the antifeminist tradition is humanly produced in a way that has little to do with the stars or even with women^[21] and identifies astrological explanation itself as a discourse not of matters of fact but of power (or knowledge-power, in

[21] See Aers, Creative Imagination, 84.

the Foucaultian sense), a use men make of the stars to keep women down.

To follow the somewhat scattered and apparently rather unrelated instances of the Wife's dealings with astrology is to discover an intermittent but ongoing encounter, dropped only to be resumed again, whereby the Wife eventually achieves a certain mastery over the institution by coming to understand it more adequately in her own terms. The Wife continues to work on and with astrological explanation until she arrives at a fully disenchanted and demystified understanding of what it is—in other words, how it is used. What enables her to reach this point, and what gives her working out its consistency, is the way she continually subjects abstract astrological formulations to a kind of experiential critique. She puts them in everyday circumstances, presses them to see whether they accord with her own feelings and memories, inquires into the circumstances in which they are used, and imagines (or remembers) the sort of persons who make use of them and their motives. The Wife is as tempted as anyone by the stability and clarity of these explanations; she begins by entertaining them as genuine possibilities for understanding her own behavior and that of others. It is precisely her own experience of doing so and her ongoing dissatisfaction with that experience that leads her to resist the temptation and revise the explanations as she proceeds.

The continuity of the Wife's dealings with astrological explanation shows how her experience of herself as a subject and her disenchantment, her sense of herself and her view of institutions, are interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Out of her practical dissatisfaction with the fit between her experience and her horoscope the Wife in the prologue generates the skeptical tendency of mind that enables her disenchanted deconstruction of astrology as an institution. At the same time the disenchanted point of view itself cannot be said to arise first from her consideration of the horoscope: it was already in operation before it was ever brought to bear on astrology. Neither perspective is founding, neither is prior. Both are, as deconstructionists say, always already in play. The text represents an encounter between a subject and an institution, between the Wife and astrology, an encounter whose outcome is to render both the subject and the institution problematic. In this encounter the Wife progressively becomes more aware that what she and others had taken for a set of facts about her is

actually a complex set of interpretations representing and concealing a complex set of social and personal interests. Hence the self posited by the Wife's horoscope, and the self-understanding based on it, was also an interpretation, the product of a complex and largely unwitting collusion or complicity between the Wife and society: she was, becomes, and is a construction, a subject.

4—
Janekyn's Book:
The Subject as Text

Despite the qualifications made in Chapter 3, it is evident that talking about the Wife's fifth marriage has the effect of making her more self-conscious. As she proceeds, she displays a more complex and assured self-understanding, which is also in certain ways more self-critical and discriminating. Her response to Janekyn's "olde Romayn geestes" (III, 642) and monorhymed proverbs (644–58), for example, is something a bit more complicated than an outright rejection:

But al for noght, I sette noght an hawe
Of his proverbes n'of his olde sawe,
Ne I wolde nat of hym corrected be.
I hate hym that my vices telleth me,
And so doo mo, God woot, of us than I.
             (659–63, emphasis added)

What is new here is the Wife's willingness to admit that these things are vices, that is, to admit that she felt the pressure and, to a degree, the legitimacy of Janekyn's disapproval—and still feels it since the generalization is in the present tense. The scene of Janekyn preaching to her about her vices is from one point of view a repetition and reversal of the Wife's relation to her first three husbands—the antifeminist lore she used against them he now turns on her—and his book is the embodiment of everything she has been fighting all her life. Yet the differences in the Wife's description of the two situations are far more telling than the similarities, and they generate a significant revision of the earlier instances by the later ones.

What immediately distinguishes the Wife's account of Janekyn's book from her earlier citations of antifeminist lore is the time and detail she spends on contextualizing it as a particular book of a certain determinate makeup, one that was used in specific ways and under

specific conditions. The citations from scripture and the church fathers in the opening of the prologue are presented as timeless, and often nameless, authority. Whiting notes that "ten of the fifteen quotations from Jerome are paralleled in the first one hundred and fifty lines of the Wife's Prologue ,"^[1] yet neither the saint nor the name of his book is mentioned there. The slanderous lore slanderously ascribed to the three old husbands is similarly presented more or less as if it had fallen from the sky, as an instance of the sort of things men say about women. Here, however, we are given a full and even annotated table of contents that identifies the occupations and other circumstances of some of the authors:

And eek ther was somtyme a clerk at Rome,
A cardinal, that highte Seint Jerome,
That made a book agayn Jovinian;
In which book eek ther was Tertulan,
Crisippus, Trotula, and Helowys,
That was abbesse nat fer fro Parys.
            (673–78)

Not only does this material have sources in particular authors from particular places and times; it is also used by Janekyn in specific situations and, so to speak, in a certain tone. The crucial encounter that led to the Wife's deafness took place "Upon a nyght" when "Jankyn, that was oure sire,/Redde on his book, as he sat by the fire" (713–14). The feeling of domestic comfort these lines suggest is supported elsewhere. It is true that Janekyn read often to the Wife, "every nyght and day" (682), but only "Whan he hadde leyser and vacacioun/From oother worldly occupacioun" (683–84). It is a leisure activity, a kind of hobby, not an obsession. What is more, it is conducted in a mood rather different from, say, the puritanical carping of the nameless interpreter of the Samaritan woman:

 He hadde a book that gladly,  nyght and day,
For his desport  he wolde rede alway;
He cleped it Valerie and Theofraste,
At which book he lough alwey ful faste.
             (669–72, emphasis added)

[1] That is, before the Pardoner's interruption, which occurs at line 163, Whiting, "Wife of Bath's Prologue," 208.

What comes through in this description is not only the Wife's continued annoyance but also the fun Janekyn had baiting her. There is something self-conscious and theatrical about him laughing over his book in the Wife's presence, as if he read with an eye cocked to observe the effect he was having; his aim seems at least as much to get a rise out of her (in which he still succeeds) as to administer serious correction for her horrid transgressions.

What allows this more nuanced reading to emerge is the accumulation of contextual details that give the account the particularity and density of experience rather than the abstraction and exemplarity of authority. Who, how, and when matter here because they matter to the Wife and press into her memory. This appeal to experience, to contexts and sources, memories and uses, is one thing the Wife's account of Janekyn's book and his use of it has in common with her account of astrology. Identifying the aged, sexually frustrated child of Mercury as the painter of lions is similar in important ways to identifying the backgrounds of Saint Jerome and Héloïse, and even more so to identifying and describing Janekyn as the owner and user of the book. As with astrology, the Wife's relation to the antifeminist tradition has become more personalized, to the point where she can understand how she looks to others—"I hate hym that my vices telleth me"—just as with the impotent clerk she can put herself in a man's place and understand his predicament.

One thing the disenchanted understanding of astrology and antifeminism does not do, however, is account for the Wife's relationship to Janekyn and the function of the book in that relationship. The nature of the relationship itself is something the Wife has also been working on, at least since the early and inadequate attempt to sum it up in terms of the economics of desire that led her to begin again with the end of her fourth marriage (503–24). As she continues to remember, reexamine and redefine her fifth marriage, the meaning of her relationship with Janekyn becomes for her more and more bound up in the book of wicked wives. How "I was beten for a book, pardee!" (712, cf. 634–36, 666–68) is the thread to which she keeps returning as she moves through the digressive labyrinth of the end of the prologue, and each time she does so her account of the book is more circumstantial, complex, and impassioned. What the couple made of Janekyn's book—how it became not only his but also theirs, the symbol and

medium of their mutuality—is the subject of the Wife's final reading of it, to which I now turn.

There are a few brief exempla in the opening sermon section of the Wife of Bath's Prologue, none at all in the reported address to the first three husbands, and one (Metellius) set into a digression from the story of the fourth marriage (460–63). Two briefly cited "olde Romayn geestes" (642–49) might also be taken as exemplary, that is, as anecdotes about well-known or important persons that can be used to point up a moral. In the passage before us, however (711–70), there are nine exempla in a row, all on the same theme. No doubt these lives all add up to "Valerie"'s moral, which is also, more briefly, Janekyn's:

Exemplum harum experimentum cape, quod audax est ad omnia quecunque amat vel odit femina, et artificiosa nocere cum vult, quod est semper; et frequenter cum iuuare parat obest, unde fit ut noceat ut nolens.^[2]

And thus algates housbondes han sorwe.
                (756)

Unlike a proverb, however, which has no life of its own beyond its particular applications except as part of the general backdrop of folk wisdom, an exemplum embodies the tension between experience and authority. Exempla can be thought of as selections from individual lives rather than distillations from collective life. Indeed, it is important that an exemplum have some claim to historicity because its authority is in fact empirical: the lives of actual persons prove that the general moral is true. Therefore, even when these lives are being used in an exemplary way, that is, when they are being put to official or collective ideological use, they hold something in reserve.^[3] For moralizing purposes this fact about exempla represents something of a danger since the proof-text may not always collapse smoothly into the moral it is supposed to prove. In the case of the first example the Wife cites, this potential danger becomes explicit:

[2] Walter Map, Dissuasio Valerii , iv, iii, 153f., in whiting, "Wife of Bath's Prologue," 213. "Take example from these experiences how rash is every woman whatsoever to love or hate, both when she wishes by her cunning to do harm (which is always), or when, undertaking to aid, she hinders, so that she does harm without meaning to."

[3] See the discussions in my articles "'No Vileyns Word,'" 24 and passim, and "Oure Tonges Différance ."

Of Eva first, that for hir wikkednesse
Was al mankynde broght to wrecchednesse,
For which that Jhesu Crist hymself was slayn,
That boghte us with his herte blood agayn.
Lo, heere expres of womman may ye fynde
That womman was the los of al mankynde.
              (715–20)

Even without invoking notions like felix culpa it is possible to feel that the final couplet of this passage does not exhaust the meaning of Eve; the central couplet, especially "That boghte us with his herte blood agayn," presses a set of consequences of Eve's action that makes the simple antifeminist moral seem more negative and less complex than the universal history to which it supposedly refers. Too much of the story is told to hold the antifeminist line, and this excess of narrative may remind us that there is still more. Though Mary is not explicitly mentioned here or among the daughters of Eve whose stories follow, her absence (like that of Adam, who is similarly suppressed) is conspicuous.

The general point I am arguing here is that the kind of citation involved in using an exemplum sets up with particular clarity the problems of extratextual reference, intertextuality, and the boundlessness of the text that have come to concern modern critical theory. These problems can be focused fairly simply and directly in the following question: Once we have allowed that the text we are reading is crossed by another text, that it has an allusion inserted in it, how do we decide when to stop reading that second text?^[4] And what if the second text is itself a member of a body of texts, as is certainly the case with the preponderantly classical legends that make up Janekyn's list? There may not be much to say in favor of Delilah, who betrayed her husband for eleven hundred shekels of silver (Judg. 16), "Thurgh which treson loste he bothe his yen" (723),^[5] but Janekyn's account of Dejanira begs a gloss:

[4] See, for example, J. Hillis Miller, "Critic as Host." The systems of interpretation founded by Saint Augustine in De doctrina Christiana and resurrected, more or less, by modern exegetical critics are of course addressed to these questions. The Pardoner's Tale suggests, however, that they should be seen as increasingly unsuccessful attempts on the part of official culture to set limits to an increasingly unstoppable textual productivity.

[5] A longer view of the story of Samson, however, raises some question. If we take into account the explanation in Judg. 4 of Samson's preference for one inappropriatePhilistine woman—"parentes autem ejus [scil. Samson] nesciebant quod res a Domino fieret, et quaereret occasionem contra Philisthiim" (14:5)—we may wonder about Samson's second choice as well, especially in the light of the outcome, though it is perhaps only an Old Testament perspective that could take what happened to the temple of Dagon as a fortunate fall : "multoque plures [Samson] interfecit moriens, quam ante vivus occiderat" (Judg.16:30).

Tho redde he me, if that I shal nat lyen,
Of Hercules and of his Dianyre,
That caused hym to sette hymself afyre.
              (724–26)

Jean de Meun (or rather li Gilos), in whose part of the Roman de la Rose Delilah and Dejanira are juxtaposed like this, is hard on the latter lady. He calls her the thirteenth monster, which Hercules, who "vainqui doze orribles montres," could not overcome, and in this he follows that version of the story that makes her gift of the shirt of Nessus to her husband a witting, jealous, vengeful act.^[6] There is, however, another version, of which Ovid's telling in the Metamorphoses is a particularly full example. He makes it dear that Dejanira was misinformed by Fama, "quae veris addere falsa gaudet" (Met . 9.138–39), that Hercules was besotted with Iole. Dejanira unknowingly ("nescia," 9.155) sent her husband the poisoned shirt of Nessus because that treacherous centaur had told her it had the power to revive a waning love ("munus raptae velut inritamen amoris," 9.133). Similarly, Jerome dismisses Clytemnestra as "[dicitur] occidisse virum ob amorem adulteri"^[7] — "for hire lecherye,/That falsly made hire husband for to dye" (737–38). Though she is scarcely an ideal wife, her reasons are not all negligible, including as they do Agamemnon's sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia (Met. 12.28ff) at Aulis to ensure a favorable wind to carry him to his ten-year absence at Troy. Despite Walter Map and Janekyn, motives make a difference: it matters how and why Dejanira "caused" Hercules's immolation, whether lust was Clytemnestra's only passion, and even what God's intentions had to do with Samson's fate. The multiplication of texts of these stories does not make the questions any easier to answer.

[6] Roman de la Rose, 9191–9206, in Whiting, "Wife of Bath's Prologue," 214. The line quoted in the text is 9192.

[7] Adversus Jovinianum, i 48, col. 280, in Whiting, "Wife of Bath's Prologue," 212.

The next example the Wife cites is that of Eriphyle:

that for an ouche of gold
Hath prively unto the Grekes told
Wher that hir housbonde hidde hym in a place,
For which he hadde at Thebes sory grace.
            (743–46)

Though I am not satisfied that Chaucer's immediate source for the story has been found, Statius's Thebaid will suffice to begin to decenter the example and complicate the text. The problem is not so much the wicked wife, on whose perfidy, whatever it is, both Statius and her husband Amphiaraus agree, as the "ouche of gold," which is, whether she knows it or not, no bargain. This is the famous brooch of Thebes, whose possession by Eriphyle is but an episode in a larger career. The "dirum monile Harmoniae" (Theb. 2.266–67) was originally made for the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia by Vulcan at the height of his disillusionment with his own marriage, when he had discovered that even trapping Venus and Mars flagrante delicto in bed together did not put a stop to their affair nor gain him the support of the gods: "capto postquam nil obstat amori/poena nec ultrices castigavere catenis" (Theb. 2.270–71, cf. Met. 4.170ff). Reflecting the mood of its maker, the necklace (as it is in the original and Jerome) is a thoroughly poisonous piece of work. Luctus, Ira, Dolor, and Discordia all aid in its making, and its curse is explicitly blamed (Theb. 2.289–305) for the misfortunes of all the women of the house of Thebes: for Harmonia's transformation into a serpent, which in Ovid's account is a result of her love for her husband Cadmus when she sees him transformed before her and asks the gods to join him (Met. 4.563–603); for Semele, blasted when Juno tricked her into forcing her lover, Jove, to manifest himself in his full divinity (Met. 3.259–309; cf. Theb. 2.293, "et fallax intravit limina Iuno"); for Jocasta's marital career with Laius and Oedipus, including the unwittingly incestuous bearing of Eteocles and Polynices, whose quarrel is the story of the Thebaid itself (The b. 2.294–96); and for the outcome of the marriage of Argia of Argos to Polynices of Thebes, in part brought about by Eriphyle, who sent Amphiaraus to the war in return for the bauble. Argia gave Eriphyle the brooch willingly because she wanted the expedition to take place for her husband's sake—an interesting example of similar results from

apparently different motives, as Polynices and Amphiaraus might testify (Theb. 2.297–305, 4.187–213).^[8]

Chaucer himself presents us with a bemused reader of the brooch's history in the Complaint of Mars:

The broche of Thebes was of such a kynde,
So ful of rubies and of stones of Ynde
That every wight, that sette on hit an ye,
He wende anon to worthe out of his mynde;
So sore the beaute wolde his herte bynde.
Til he hit had, him thoghte he moste dye;
And whan that hit was his, then shulde he drye
Such woo for drede, ay while that he hit hadde,
That wel nygh for the fere he shulde madde.
And whan hit was fro his possessioun,
Than had he double wo and passioun
For he so feir a tresor had forgo;
But yet this broche as in conclusioun
Was not the cause of his confusioun,
But he that wroghte hit enfortuned hit so
That every wight that had hit shulde have wo;
And therfore in the worcher was the vice,
And in the covetour that was so nyce.
            ( Mars,  245–62)

Mars's growing uncertainty in this passage about where to lay the blame for the melancholy and terrible events associated with the brooch seems to me an entirely appropriate reaction to the tangle of complicities, complexities, and causalities it knots together, for who could ascribe them all to a single cause? What does it mean for Eri-

[8] In Troilus and Criseyde Criseyde calls upon her mother "that cleped were Argyve" (4.762). Robinson's note to this passage (Riverside Chaucer, 830) points out that the name, which does not occur in Boccaccio, turns up again in the Latin summary of the Thebaid that is found in the manuscripts of Troilus and Criseyde at 5.1494, where it clearly intends Argia, the wife of Polynices (and is translated by Chaucer at 5.1509–10: "Argivam flentem narrat duodenus et ignem"; "And of Argyves wepynge and hire wo;/And how the town was brent"). In Book 3 Criseyde gives Troilus a brooch "gold and azure/In which a rubye set was lyk an herte" (3.1370–71). I would not go so far as to say that Chaucer presents Criseyde as the daughter of Theban Argia and an inheritor of the brooch—there is the problem of a second marriage to Calkas, unattested anywhere, for one thing—but the details are teasing and seem meant to associate Criseyde's experiences in love with the Theban chain of erotic and marital disasters. Should we read the whole of Troilus and Criseyde into the list I give in the text?

phyle to possess this brooch? Does it not rather possess her? To see her as one of its owners is to make her a member of an alternate, and indefinitely large, array of women and texts that undoes the consistency and coherence of the list in Janekyn's book and replaces it with an unstoppable play of motives, circumstances, and writings. The brooch of Thebes functions in the Wife's citation of Janekyn's exempla as what Derrida, with weird appropriateness to the Wife's case, calls a hymen that fronts an invagination, that is, the equivocal boundary/entrance to a pocket in the text that is far larger than the text it is a pocket in.^[9] If we pursue our reading of it far enough (in fact, it need not be very far) we arrive at a set of events in a multiplicity of texts—remember that Janekyn's book is itself an anthology from which the Wife is making further excerpts—that not only questions the antifeminist moralizing of the Amphiaraus-Eriphyle exemplum and the list of exempla as a whole but renders any other principle of unification and explanation impossible and undecidable as well. It is as preposterous to say that everything here is the fault of men, or fate, or a cursed ornament, as it is to blame it all on women.

The point is that once the monolithic antifeminist perspective that purports to bind the list of exempla in Janekyn's book is bypassed, the list opens itself to a rhizomatics of intertextuality that can lead in any number of other directions. The brooch of Thebes is a condensation of the list (as the list is a condensation of Janekyn's book, and the book a condensation of the ideology of male domination), much as the dream of gold and blood is a condensation of a whole institutional and personal complex of affective and economic motives. Indeed the two images are linked insofar as the story of Eriphyle is about gold and telling secrets and the connection of both of these to the death of a husband.^[10] Pursued far enough, each of these images is part of the same system, which can be traced through the Wife's life, tale, and culture from point to point in a web of implacably relevant connections. If the Wife herself does not make all of these connections equally explicit here (who could?), she certainly does read the list against the grain of its "official" meaning. She seems, for instance, consistently to

[9] These notions are discussed in Derrida, "The Double Session," in Dissemination , 173–286; idem, "FORS"; idem, "Living On/Border Lines."

[10] The Midas exemplum in the tale continues the same themes.

focus on the problem about motives that provides the lever for prying the passage apart, a problem not only at work in the example of Eve at the beginning of the list but also made fully explicit by the paired examples of Livia and Lucy that conclude it—"They bothe made hir housbondes for to dye,/That oon for love, the oother was for hate" (748–49)—in a way that recalls such previous pairs as Delilah and Dejanira and therefore makes them more problematic in retrospect. A close analysis reveals that most of the Wife's attention is directed to a network of intensive and personal meanings, rather than general and exemplary ones, that she constructs from the manifold of Janekyn's text. Though the general points they make about women and marriage may be the reason these stories found their way into the book in the first place, the context of the Wife of Bath's Prologue inevitably raises the question of their application to this particular marriage. The materials for an answer are contained in the Wife's manner of telling them, which constitutes precisely such an application. She not only presents these stories, she responds to them, not as instances of authoritative doctrine, but case by case, as if they were reports of individual experiences. She thereby recreates an image of herself in the marriage, an image of her personality as defined in relation to Janekyn and his book.

We might begin this analysis by taking note of the Wife's ability to differentiate herself from certain of these stories, to pick and choose the ways they apply to her and especially the ways they do not. In the case of Pasiphae, for example, she seems genuinely shocked at a kind of sexuality that has no appeal for her:

Of Pasipha, that was the queene of Crete,
For shrewednesse, hym thoughte the tale swete;
Fy! speke namoore—it is a grisly thyng—
Of hire horrible lust and hir likyng.
            (733–36)^[11]

Here the Wife reports not only the story but also Janekyn's way of reading it, and she does the same with Clytemnestra: "He redde it with ful good devocioun" (739). These comments can be taken to indicate that Janekyn liked these particular tales because they were particularly good for getting a rise out of the Wife, but if so it was not because they

[11] Compare the Wife's response to Metellius (460–64) and to Solomon (35–43) and the general reaction at 662, "I hate hym that my vices telleth) me."

applied to her but because they did not. They seemed particularly unfair and still do. As in the case of "At which book he lough alwey ful faste" (672), this presentation conveys a sense of the energy that both parties commit to these exchanges and the intensity of their personal involvement in them.

Something else about the quality and character of this involvement emerges in the story of Xanthippe, which evokes an equally decided response from the Wife:

No thyng forgat he the care and the wo
That Socrates hadde with his wyves two,
How Xantippa caste pisse upon his heed.
This sely man sat stille as he were deed;
He wiped his heed, namoore dorste he seyn,
But "Er that thonder stynte, comth a reyn!"
            (727–32)

The Wife's care in setting up the punch line here suggests that she finds this story funny and enjoys retelling it herself, but it is also clear that its point for her is not Xanthippe's shrewishness but Socrates's lack of gumption. As the phrases "stille as he were deed," "dorste," and perhaps "sely man"^[12] convey here, she feels that any man who cannot defend himself better than that deserves what he gets. This feeling has implications beyond the immediate context, for it provides an occasion to reflect that disagreement is not necessarily a negative thing in a marriage and that if anyone is well positioned to see this, it is the Wife. Her earlier remark, "And yet in bacon hadde I nevere delit," refers not only to her dislike of old meat in the sexual sense but also to the fact that she is not much interested in conventional marital harmony of the sort for which the Dunmow flitch was awarded.^[13] There is a good deal of evidence—the whole of the prologue, from one point of view—that the Wife likes a certain amount of resistance from life in general; it

[12] Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. "seely," cf. "silly") will not admit that the degeneration of Old English (ge) saelig from "blessed, therefore innocent" to "innocent, therefore silly" had completed the last stage of its course before the sixteenth century, though it does allow "insignificant, trifling" as early as 1297. Passages like this one and the disparagement of masculine pride in "Now wherwith sholde he make his paiement,/If he ne used his sely instrument?" (131–32.) suggest to me that all three stages of the word are present and active in the Middle English of Chaucer's time. In support, see Cooper, "'Sely John.'"

[13] See Hoffman, "Dunmow Bacon."

gives her something to push back at, and something against which to define herself, whether it comes from a horoscope, a book, or a husband. Fighting can be evidence of commitment to a relationship (that is what seems to have been lacking with the fourth husband), and we might view the Wife's marital career as in part a quest for a worthy opponent. It is perhaps this taste for the kind of independence in men that she also values in herself that leads the Wife to try to improve the image of the knight in her tale when, humbled and utterly dependent on the knowledge and judgment of women, he returns to the queen's court to announce what he has discovered about what women most desire: "This knyght ne stood nat stille as doth a best ,/But to his questioun anon answerde/With manly voys, that al the court it herde" (1034–36, emphasis added). At least he is no Socrates.^[14]

The Wife of Bath's treatment of these exempla is, as always, an appropriation or womanhandling of them, but in a rather different sense and style from earlier in the prologue. Her more varied, complex, and nuanced response to the stories is evidence of her appreciation of them and of Janekyn's book, which is not simply a symbol of oppression and opposition (though it is that too) but also a real source, of which she can make her own uses. On the one hand, these uses may be relatively personal and private, and relatively recessive or even unconscious, as in the case of the story of Eriphyle, which touches on the themes that surround the Wife's continuing ambivalence about her fourth husband. Such "privy" themes especially stress the active character of the Wife's remembering, the way her choice of these stories to remember rather than others (of which there must have been many in Janekyn's book) may be dictated more by her present and continuing concerns than by the mere fact that they used to be read to her. On the other hand, the Wife's active remembering may be directed more toward an affirmation of the relationship with Janekyn, as in the case of the story of Latumius, the tenth and last item on the list of exempla. Latumius tells Arrius that he has a tree in his garden on which his three wives have hanged themselves, and Arrius replies, "O leeve brother, . . ./Yif me a plante of thilke blissed tree,/And in my gardyn planted

[14] Evidence of the sort considered here has occasionally led critics to posit a masochistic streak in the Wife. See Magee, "Problem of Mastery," and Burton, "Ideal Sixth." Once again this seems to me to arise from a desire to convert a tension into a trait.

shal it bee." (762–64). As with Xanthippe, I think the Wife tells this story in part because she too thinks it is funny—she has shown herself ready to appreciate a certain rueful tone in dominated husbands before—and in doing so she affirms her appreciation of Janekyn and his book by affirming the sense of humor they have in common. Once we see the instrumental character of the book, its function as a medium of complex and passionate communication between husband and wife, it becomes clear that Janekyn and Alison are in fact a remarkably compatible couple: they both like to talk, they both like to make love, and they both like to fight.

The passage I have been analyzing forms an introduction to the Wife's narrative of the final battle with Janekyn over the book, but it is itself already a repetition or revival, in the present of telling, of their fights. As it proceeds, the account moves faster and faster, piling up the outrageous things Janekyn said until its energy spills over into the Wife's outraged response, which follows on a list of Janekyn's antifeminist proverbs, as if she had just heard them all from him again:

And whan I saugh he wolde nevere fyne
To reden on this cursed book al nyght,
Al sodeynly thre leves have I plyght
Out of his book, right as he radde, and eke
I with my fest so took hym on the cheke
That in oure fyr he fil bakward adoun.
              (788–93)

The vividness and speed of this passage, conveyed in its rapid piling up of actions and reactions and the breathless enjambment that drives the verse, confirm that in recounting her quarrels with Janekyn, the Wife gets angry all over again. Her telling is not a distanced and composed narrative but a passionate reliving. As such, it provides an intensive image of the way they conducted their relationship. Though it is shaped to give a sense of climax and finality to the prologue and prepares for the clinching summation of the Wife's marital philosophy of "maistrye" at the end, it is also continuous with the increasingly vivid memories that precede it, as an image of the ongoing character of the couple's way of being together.

What comes across most vividly about the fight when thus considered is the fun of it. Whatever it was like to have this quarrel, it is

clearly a joy to relate now. Its stages, the give-and-take, are much more interesting than the outcome for both the Wife and the reader:

And he up stirte as dooth a wood leoun,
And with his fest he smoot me on the heed
That in the floor I lay as I were deed.
And whan he saugh how stille that I lay,
He was agast and wolde han fled his way,
Til atte laste out of my swogh I breyde.
"O! hastow slayn me, false theef?" I seyde,
"And for my land thus hastow mordred me?
Er I be deed, yet wol I kisse thee."
           (794–802)

Notice how little interest the Wife has in the fact of having been hit except as she can use it to prolong the exchange and score points. Her eye remains on Janekyn, and despite her attempt to present the seriousness of her injury ("Til atte laste out of my swogh 1 breyde"), the timing of her outcry is keyed to the exact instant when Janekyn, obviously shocked by the violence of his own reaction, is about to flee. Our sense of her distance and calculation affects as well the function and effect of "And for my land thus hastow mordred me?" Though it might be used as evidence for the theory sometimes rather casually put forward that Janekyn only married the Wife for her money,^[15] the theatricality of the situation makes the line seem more like a ploy. It is so offhandedly and assumptively dropped here that it sounds like something the couple have argued about before rather than a new accusation, which suggests that this version of their marriage is one the couple are aware of. They both know how it might look to an outsider—the besotted, rich older woman and the cynical young opportunist—and they use this parody, as the Wife does here, as a pretext. The Wife is playing a role —"Er I be deed, yet wol I kisse thee"—to get Janekyn where she can lay her hands on him (ought we to read line 433, "Com neer, my spouse, lat me ba thy cheke!" in its context, as a gloss here? it would give this moment an appropriately more aggressive edge), and it is clear that she knows she can trust him to play up. As the man who has been put in the wrong for the moment, he is more

[15] See, for example, Oberembt, "Chaucer's Anti-misogynist Wife of Bath," and David, Strumpet Muse, 151.

or less obliged to apologize and offer himself for the return blow. That the Wife knows this and can make use of it is evidence that their affection for one another is dependable enough to allow this sort of maneuvering.

Janekyn apologizes, but not abjectly:

And neer he cam, and kneled faire adoun,
And seyde, "Deere suster Alisoun,
As help me God, I shal thee nevere smyte!
That I have doon, it is thyself to wyte.
Foryeve it me, and that I thee biseke!"
            (803–7)

His mixed feelings come across here as very nuanced. He is sorry, of course, and he apologizes (as he knows he has to, which is not quite the same thing as being sorry). He also knows from the Wife's exaggerated tone that she is not badly hurt (one function of that tone on her part is to reassure him when he is on the point of running away), and that allows him room to keep his own end of the fight up. "It is thyself to wyte" is both an expression of continued annoyance and an attempt to minimize the seriousness of the situation, which may also function as an offer of truce. Of course the Wife will have none of this, and takes her revenge—"And yet eftsoones I hitte hym on the cheke,/And seyde, Theef, thus muchel am I wreke'" (808–9)—but she is also careful to keep the situation open. Her final line, "Now wol I dye, I may no lenger speke" (810), has a certain exasperating brilliance since it both forestalls retaliation for her blow and demands further apology and concern, but it also keeps the exchange going because it does demand a response, that is, it gives Janekyn a turn. What that response was we do not know since the Wife here breaks off her account and summarizes the outcome not only of this fight but of the marriage as well. Yet it seems fully appropriate that her remembering, as opposed to her generalizing, does not reach a conclusion but is suspended in a gesture of self-assertion that invites a reply.

The argument that is halted in mid-career at the end of the Wife of Bath's Prologue is so intensely presented that it creates something of a problem about its alleged resolution. My colleague Priscilla Shaw pointed out to me that the description of the fight expresses and releases the tension that has been building throughout the prologue in

a quasi-sexual way. This feeling of release and completion may have something to do with the warm feelings toward Janekyn the Wife expresses as she concludes:

God helpe me so, ICH: 160>was to hym as kynde
As any wyf from Denmark unto Ynde,
And also trewe, and so was he to me.
I prey to God, that sit in magestee,
So blesse his soule for his mercy deere.
             (823–27)

Nonetheless, it is not altogether easy to see how we, or the couple, got from the suspended moment of "Now wol I dye, I may no lenger speke" to this:

But atte laste, with muchel care and wo,
We fille acorded by us selven two.
He yaf me al the bridel in myn hond,
To han the governance of hous and lond,
And of his tonge, and of his hond also;
And made hym brenne his book anon right tho.
And whan that I hadde geten unto me,
By maistrie, al the soveraynetee,
And that he seyde, "Myn owene trewe wyf,
Do as thee lust the terme of al thy lyf;
Keep thyn honour, and keep eek myn estaat"—
After that day we hadden never debaat.
             (811–22)

"Muchel care and wo" is too vague and summary a characterization of what must have gone on between them to provide a satisfactory—or satisfying—explanation of the suspiciously complete victory the Wife details here. Though "After that day" does not really refer to the day of the argument and in fact covers a thoroughly indefinite amount of time, the closest day in the text we have to refer it to is that of the battle we have just witnessed, and the energy of that description seems somehow to cast doubt on the later assertion. I think it is possible to account for this effect more precisely and show in detail why we should not entirely believe what the Wife says here.

Let us return to the end of the Wife's summary of the contents of Janekyn's book and her description of the way he read it to her:

He spak moore harm than herte may bithynke,
And therwithal he knew of mo proverbes
Than in this world ther growen gras or herbes.
"Bet is," quod he, "thyn habitacioun
Be with a leon or a foul dragoun,
Than with a womman usynge for to chyde.
Bet is," quod he, "hye in the roof abyde,
Than with an angry wyf doun in the hous;
They been so wikked and contrarious,
They haten that hir housbondes loven ay."
He seyde, "A womman cast hir shame away,
Whan she cast of hir smok"; and forthermo,
"A fair womman, but she be chaast also,
Is lyk a gold ryng in a sowes nose."
Who wolde wene, or who wolde suppose,
The wo that in myn herte was, and pyne?
            (772–87)

The reader may feel that he or she has seen something like this somewhere before, and the source of that impression is not far to seek. On rereading the prologue in the context of a knowledge of the Wife's dealings with her fifth husband and the issues of that marriage, the relevant passage jumps off the page:

Thou seydest this, that I was lyk a cat;
For whoso wolde senge a cattes skyn,
Thanne wolde the cat wel dwellen in his in;
And if the cattes skyn be slyk and gay,
She wol nat dwelle in house half a day,
But forth she wole, er any day be dawed,
To shewe hir skyn and goon a-caterwawed.
This is to seye, if I be gay, sire shrewe,
I wol renne out my borel for to shewe.

Sire olde fool, what helpeth thee to spyen?
Thogh thou preye Argus with his hundred yen
To be my warde-cors, as he kan best,
In feith, he shal nat kepe me but me lest;
Yet koude I make his berd, so moot I thee!

Thou seydest eek that ther been thynges thre,
The whiche thynges troublen al this erthe,
And that no wight may endure the ferthe.
O leeve sire shrewe, Jhesu shorte thy lyf!
Yet prechestow and seyst an hateful wyf
Yrekened is for oon of thise meschances.
Been ther none othere maner resemblances

That ye may likne youre parables to,
But if a sely wyf be oon of tho?
Thou liknest eek wommenes love to helle,
To bareyne lond, ther water may nat dwelle.

Thou liknest it also to wilde fyr;
The moore it brenneth, the moore it hath desir
To consume every thyng that brent wole be.
Thou seyest, right as wormes shende a tree,
Right so a wyf destroyeth hire housbonde;
This knowe they that been to wyves bonde.

Lordynges, right thus, as ye have understonde,
Baar I stifly myne olde housbondes on honde
That thus they seyden in hir dronkenesse;
And al was fals, but that I took witnesse
On Janekyn, and on my nece also.
            (348–83)

Two of the central concerns of this passage, the question of stepping out (cf. 637–41) and the complaint about incessant citing of antifeminist lore, bring the passage home to Janekyn and the book. When the Wife originally says "al was fals," she is telling the truth about her first three husbands, who did not say these things. But Janekyn did, and once we know about him and his bad habits, this passage takes on a vividness and precision of reference in retrospect that it did not have prospectively, because now we know who "thou" is.

The Wife of Bath's Prologue, perhaps uniquely in the Canterbury Tales, offers an explanation for the learning of its narrator. The bookishness of almost all of the stories in the collection has been felt to be an argument against dramatic verisimilitude and individual voicing.^[16] I think the question needs to be addressed case by case, and I would not deny that sometimes the scholarly surface of the text reminds us that we are getting the stories of the pilgrims as mediated by the retelling of a scholarly poet, nor need it cease to do so here. In the case of the Wife of Bath's Prologue, however, historical scholarship has established beyond question that the sources of the poem are almost entirely the works mentioned in it.^[17] The crucial step here is less often taken: the

[16] See, for example, Howard, Idea of the Canterbury Tales. 230–31, and Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction, 165.

[17] See the selections set out in Whiting, "Wife of Bath's Prologue," and especially Pratt, "Development of the Wife of Bath." Pratt argues convincingly (51, 54–55) that Chaucer must have used a version of Janekyn's book rather than assembling the materi-als of the tale directly from the various sources listed in it. The one exception to the rule that a major source of the tale is also mentioned in it by the Wife is the La Vielle section of the Roman de la Rose . I am not convinced, however, that that text was not in Janekyn's book: just because the Wife does not list it does not mean it was not there.

interpretive meaning in the fiction of this extrafictional and historical fact is that a major source of the Wife of Bath's learning is Janekyn's book of wicked wives.^[18] She appears virtually to have memorized it in the course of her encounters with him, and it now forms a kind of basis or medium for much of her discourse on a variety of topics.

The implications are considerable. To begin with, by the time we get to the Wife's account of her fifth marriage in a first reading, we have a richer and more intensive sense of the taste and feel of that marriage than we are probably aware of since not just the passage cited but virtually the whole of the prologue is covertly drawn from materials and experiences that come from it. A retrospective reading gives new meaning to the idea of taking a leaf from someone's book. Furthermore, the problem of the end of the prologue is resolved—or perhaps I should say rendered properly problematic. As the Wife's narrative shows, Janekyn's book was originally experienced by her as an instrument of aggression, a kind of summary of everything men had been trying to do to her all her life, and its mutilation and burning thus represent, from one point of view, the final triumph of feminine "maistrye" and the precondition for a happy marriage. The Wife's performance of the narrative, however, demonstrates how the book became the medium through which she and Janekyn carry on their relationship. The Wife's use of Janekyn's book throughout the prologue in the now of speaking constitutes the entire performance as a continuation of their debate and of their struggle over that book in the present, long after the supposedly decisive events narrated at the end of the prologue. The Wife, though, is still conducting the debate: what does that say about who has the "maistrye"? Moreover, if we assume for the sake of argument that Janekyn is dead now, the assumption points up with particular poignancy what is clear enough even without it: now, in the present of speaking, without ever losing or denying the component of conflict that is essential to the relationship, the Wife's engagement with Janekyn's book perpetuates Janekyn's memory through the

[18] Though many critics mention it in a relatively unfocused way, such as Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry , 188.

reexperiencing and the fighting anew of their combats. Now that recollection is also a way of keeping the man alive, it is an act of love.

This convergence of Janekyn's book and the text of the Wife of Bath's Prologue as a whole establishes the inextricable interinvolvement of the Wife and the book, the fact of the subject as text, as glossed by Roland Barthes:

I read the text. This statement, consonant with the "genius" of the language (subject, verb, complement), is not always true. The more plural the text, the less it is written before I read it; I do not make it undergo a predicative operation, consequent upon its being, an operation known as reading, and I is not an innocent subject, anterior to the text, one which will subsequently deal with the text as it would an object to dismantle or a site to occupy. This "I" which appears in the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost).
             ( S/Z, 10)

If there was (as of course there was) a Wife of Bath prior to her fifth marriage,^[19] we have her only as mediated and affected, indeed constituted, by the book of that marriage, which now turns out to be prior in the order of narration, the récit , to everything prior to it in the order of the narrative, the histoire. If both the Wife and Janekyn's anthology, which is itself a textual plurality drawn from countless other texts, are rhizomatic multiplicities, then what I am now describing is the point at which they connect to form a still larger rhizome, the subject-text without an origin, which, it turns out, we and the Wife have always already been reading. I want to conclude this section by reviewing the manifestations of that subject-text as we have encountered them, by way of summing up.

In the first place, because of the unfolding or dramatized character of the Wife's performance, it is particularly evident from the beginning that she encounters herself in her telling and that this encounter is more than a compte rendu of a preexistent self. In the present of speaking the Wife's ego is an object for consciousness, not conscious-

[19] And as of course there wasn't, since she is a fictional character. What is interesting here is precisely the way what we must assume to have been Chaucer's actual practice, the deployment of a preexisting text something like Janekyn's book so as to produce an impersonation, is doubled and represented in the text as the activity of the Wife.

ness itself. This facticity comes out most clearly in her experience of herself as memory because her memories present themselves to her phenomenologically as spontaneous events in the present, which she does not always control and often does not expect (note that this spontaneous emergence is not, or not necessarily, the same as the manifestation of unconscious symptoms).^[20] Moreover, these presentations do not manifest themselves to her as determinate meanings that are recovered from the past. In the case of the Wife's sexual relations with her old husbands, for example (discussed above, pp. 85–87), whatever the specific events may have been, their meaning is caught up in the present in a complex knot of antithetical feelings and reversible cause-effect relations whose signifier, perhaps, is "bacon." This word is, so to speak, a multiple signifier (the term of art is aporia or undecidable). which oscillates between systems of signification (successful domination/sexual dissatisfaction; "old meat"/"Dunmow flitch," aggression/desire) without ceasing or coming to rest.

The events of the transition between the Wife's fourth and fifth marriages are similarly invested with both uncertainty and ambivalence, centering perhaps in the question of what happened in the field between the Wife and Janekyn before her fourth husband's death. The question is not really whether they did or did not make love. Though this question presumably has an answer, the Wife does not supply enough information to determine it. What matters is how the character of her feelings (for Janekyn, for the fourth husband, for her own identity as a "married woman") relates to—that is, constitutes—the meaning of what happened (for herself at the time and later, for her past and future husbands, for the audience): here the point is that the Wife appears not to have been sure at the time and at any rate is not sure now. Clearly what she did has a bearing for her on who she was, and that in turn has a bearing on who she is, but her uncertainties about the two latter questions keep the determination of the former one in suspension, even for her.

Though moments of this sort, when questions like, Why did I chide? or, How did (do) I feel about my fourth marriage? are instances of genuine uncertainty, when the Wife becomes genuinely problematic to

[20] See Sartre's commentary on Rimbaud's famous remark, "je est un autre" in Transcendence of the Ego, 93–106.

herself, they might perhaps be taken as moments of ambivalence, that is, of conflicting feelings within the same psyche, and so as no necessary threat to fundamental psychic unity: they are moments when one self feels two ways at once. This interpretation is harder to maintain in the case of the dream of blood and gold (see above, pp. 101–6). Again we are faced with an "event" whose historical truth remains problematic, though again the question presumably has an answer that the Wife knows. But the dream functions as an event in the text independently of its historicity, and it does so as another multiple signifier. The aporia here revolves around the nature of sexuality, an enigma that underlies both of the previous examples as well. In context the dream becomes a condensed representation of the multiple and simultaneous systems of positive and negative, affectional and economic, physical and emotional qualities and meanings that sexuality partakes of and participates in.^[21] As a fundamental part of her "nature," the Wife's sex is inextricably both personal and social, both a commodity and a source of affectual energy; her sexuality is both a part of herself and alienated from her, a node (like the dream) at which her apparent independence, self-presence and individuality (what is mine if not my sexuality?) cross her inextricable entanglement in a coercive and defining social network of gender roles and institutional practices. Sexuality has no intrinsic meaning in these terms, only the meaning that is made of it. In the context of her own life and experience the Wife's most common euphemism for her own sexuality—"bele chose," or beautiful thing— is as compact a multiple signifier and as trenchant an expression of this aporia as one could wish.

An equally illuminating example is the Wife's treatment of astrology in the prologue (see above, pp. 107–13), especially because here we have a situation in which the speaker herself is actively attempting to give a description and explanation of her character in relatively formal and abstract terms. She tries not only to tell her experience but also to fit it into a theoretical framework. What happens to astrological explanation of human nature in the Wife's text is that both astrology and human nature are called into question for the speaker herself. As I have suggested, the text portrays an encounter between a subject and an institution, between the Wife and astrology, that undoes both. It is not

[21] These sets of paired terms are not meant to be parallel.

a question of suddenly discovering or asserting a "real" self as distinguished from a "false" one, as if one version of the self were truer than the other in some absolute sense, any more than it would be accurate to say that the Wife's exploitative and aggressive persona (Mars) is less truly "her" than the more responsive and affectionate one (Venus). Astral influences and their application become a matter of choices, interpretations, and arguments. Who the Wife is in these terms becomes in a strict sense undecidable, and therefore a matter about which to make decisions.

In dealing with these forces the Wife of Bath's Prologue most fully displays the essential indeterminacy of the subject and the fundamental role of interpretation in its construction. It is a text that consistently works to undermine and render undecidable the distinction between Venus and Mars, eros and aggression, in the Wife's life and consciousness. In my analysis of the prologue I have found numerous instances of the Wife's awareness of the ways Venus can become the servant of Mars, of how, for example, sexuality can become a weapon, an instrument of aggression. But as the poem proceeds, those aspects of it multiply that suggest how Mars may be an agent of Venus and aggression a form of loving, and in the case of the Wife's fifth marriage, at least, the same incidents and behavior exemplify both meanings. The question is indeed about the role of Mercury in the Wife's life, understood less as the planet (though that sense cannot be entirely dismissed) than as learning and overwhelmingly represented in the prologue not as abstract lore but concretely as Janekyn's book. If the book once belonged to Janekyn, it now belongs equally to the Wife, and she uses it to affirm and sustain their relationship. What looked like aggression in the past looks like affection in the present. But was it ever, or is it, simply either one? If an argument in the past was a covert way of expressing commitment, and if that dimension of its meaning emerges more clearly when it is remembered in the present, that does not mean it ceases to register protest and contradiction.

In considering a passage like the one that concludes the sermon to the three old husbands and the retrospective revelation of its source in Janekyn's book (348–83), it does not seem correct merely to say that what we learn in retrospect is the "whole truth" about the passage, in other words, that it is really only a covert remembering and continuation of the Wife's engagement with Janekyn. Not only does the text

present itself as an account of her dealings with her first three husbands; the details that frame it at the end, where she cites both Janekyn and her niece as evidence "That thus they seyden in hir dronkenesse" (381–83), locate the passage as having been spoken at some point in her fourth marriage and therefore as being addressed to her fourth husband. This flickering among three separate but simultaneous addressees for the same text so as to create chronological impossibilities is absolutely characteristic of the entire chiding section of the prologue and a number of other parts of the text as well. There is no way to settle on a single reference or addressee for such passages. What one can say, however, is that the establishment of Janekyn's book as the fundamental medium of this multitemporal discourse also establishes the causal priority (though not of course the exclusive causality) of the now of performance for everything that is narrated in the prologue. Though there is no particular reason to doubt, for example, that the Wife had some such encounters as she describes with her three old husbands, there is every reason to suppose that she did not do so in the exact terms she sets forth in the prologue. Her internalization of Janekyn's book gives the Wife a language and a framework for making sense of her past, and this process is what the entire prologue records. What appears prospectively to be a sequential narrative in which the lines of causality run from past to present turns out in retrospect to be equally, undecidably, a situation where history and its meaning are constructed from the present backward in terms of the current concerns and projects, public and private, unconscious, practical and discursive, of the speaker. However the Wife got to be as she is, in the text it is not only, or perhaps not at all, the past that forms and controls the present but also the present that conditions what is remembered and how it is interpreted. Only by rereading from the end of the prologue can we see how completely this is the case in the Wife's performance.

The temporal indeterminacy of the prologue creates a situation in which the meanings the Wife gives to her experience at any point are always exceeded by that experience, as the text always exceeds the readings that are made of it. For example, the entire chiding sermon has one kind of voice and generates one kind of speaker when it is considered as "ensample," as a set of instances of a method. It gets this tone from its place in a certain sort of structure, as what philosophers

of language call a second-order utterance, that is, a citation. This tone has nothing to do with any particularities of utterance—one can easily conceive of a passionate and dramatic oral delivery with the clear understanding that the passion was part of the act. The same text, again regardless of the details of its oral voicing, takes on a completely different kind of "voice of the text" when its addressee is understood as Janekyn, or husband number four, or both. The address, the meaning, the place, the temporality, and the speaker of the text all become multiple in ways that are at once mutually exclusive and simultaneous.

What we call the Wife of Bath exists in the text as a set of unresolvable tensions between self-revelation and self-presentation, repentance and rebellion, determinism and freedom, the individual and the institution, Venus and Mars, past and present. In each of these cases the opposition is both necessary and unsustainable, and the terms ceaselessly turn into one another. Of course the Wife is a construction, an interpretation. In fact, she is a whole history of interpretations, my own among them. But any text is that, as is any person or any subject. The crux of my argument is that first of all the Wife of Bath is an interpretation for herself, or rather a continuous and ongoing set of interpretations and reinterpretations whose indeterminacies she embodies and hands on to us. And that is what Chaucer's text not only demonstrates but also proposes about her.

Quha wait if all that Chaucer wrait was trew? Who knows if the unconscious is structured like a language, as Lacan maintained, or if the self is like a text? The point I have been making throughout this discussion is that whatever the truth of the matter may be, in Chaucer's poem everything happens as if the modern idea of the self as subject were correct. The metaphor of the self as text that I have been using is an image proposed by the poem, at least in the sense that Janekyn's book becomes the model and the medium for the Wife's self-explication. Like that book the Wife's experience, her subjectivity, is constituted in the poem as a manifold or rhizome that lends itself to, or admits of, a multiplicity of articulations, of which the ones analyzed here are simply particular possibilities. The self or selves manifested in the Wife's performance, the voices of that text, might be thought of as like Janekyn's book in being selections from an anthology. This image is intended to recall the quotation from Barthes, which, whether or not it accurately describes the act of reading, does correctly describe what

is represented in Chaucer. The Wife of Bath is in effect the first of many readers of her own life, which she gives a voice-oriented reading, like a tale, for the traces of its narrator. Her reading of the text of her life is not the activity or even the discovery of a prior essence but the construction in the present of a posterior and provisional subject under specific conditions of encounter with that text. The Wife does not "know" who she "is"—she has a set of interpretations, for herself and for others, of who she has been, and those interpretations are clearly influenced by the context within which they are made (her sense of her audience, her sense of the task at hand, her intention to propound a theory of marriage, and so on). Those interpretations are also subject to change and open to it; in fact they actually do change in the course of the prologue at various points, and, as I will suggest in analyzing her tale, they can be expected to change in the future. This shifting activity of self-construction is what the Wife's narration and Chaucer's poem are about, both in the sense that they have it as their topic and in the sense that it is what they are doing. At least in this tale Chaucer's subject is the subject, as that term is currently understood.

5—
Subjectivity and Disenchantment:
The Wife of Bath's Tale as Institutional Critique

The Friar's brief comment "so have I joye or blis,/This is a long preamble of a tale!" (830–31) and the quarrel between him and the Summoner that develops out of it (832–49) mark the transition from the Wife's prologue to her tale by recalling to us and her the pilgrim audience and the immediate occasion of the telling. The Friar's remark is a reminder of what the Wife herself knows, that her contract with her companions is not satisfied by an account of her life. For both the Wife and the audience, though perhaps in different ways, it is important that her experience engage with, and fulfill itself in, the public sphere. The tale of the loathly lady is traditional; that is to say, it is public property in a way no autobiography can be, and to tell it is to go public, to move beyond a local and idiosyncratic personal history and take one's place in a larger arena. At the same time the interruption reminds us how little of the activity of the Wife's text has been—or could be—available to those who have it only as a live performance and brings back into the foreground the inattention and disinterest in intimacy of the masculine masters of the public world.

The Wife is fully equal to the challenge. However intensely she may have become involved in memory and personal experience in the course of her prologue, she has never really lost sight of the public project of her performance, and she has her tale in readiness as the clinching proof of the position on marriage she has been developing. Indeed, the tale itself is often taken by critics as a mere appendage of the more brilliant prologue, an appendage that restates the main argument about the value of feminine sovereignty or "maistrye" in marriage in a relatively mechanical form. In this view a simple and functional tale is marred (or enlivened, depending on the critic's taste) by some characteristic though irrelevant touches from the Wife, like the

Midas exemplum, and complicated by a windy and dull (or moving and serious) pillow lecture but concludes straightforwardly enough with the QED of the knight's submission and the magical transformation at the end.^[1]

There is a lot to be said for this reading. An understanding of the polemical feminist project that underlies the Wife's telling explains much about the form the story takes in her hands, especially in relation to its analogues and its genre. In the case of the Wife's tale the genre is romance, and the fully conscious character of her engagement with romance assumptions and conventions comes out in her deliberate and consistent subversion of them. In its original form the tale the Wife tells is an instrument of the dominant masculine ideology and its values, such as (male) loyalty and courtesy, that demonstrate male superiority. Donaldson's succinct summary of the analogues brings out clearly this ideological bias—and the Wife's subversion of it:

In the analogues the story is handled in a different style, its real point being to demonstrate the courtesy of the hero, who weds the hag uncomplainingly and treats her as if she were the fairest lady in the land; in two version' the knight is Sir Gawain, the most courteous of Arthur's followers, who promises to marry her not in order to save his own life but his king's. The lady's transformation is thus a reward of virtue. In Chaucer the polite knight becomes a convicted rapist who keeps his vow only under duress and in the sulkiest possible manner.^[2]

As in the case of Janekyn's book in the prologue, I take the differences in detail and structure between Chaucer's version of the tale and its analogues as evidence of the speaker's agency, evidence that the Wife knows the traditional version, recognizes its male bias, and deliberately alters it to make her own feminist message more pointed and polemical. The pattern of these alterations is her advance plan for the tale. The fact that only in her version is the knight a rapist means that only in her version is the quest for what women most desire linked specifically and logically to the knight's character and the question of male-female relations. Clearly this particular knight, as a surrogate for

[1] See, for example, Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, 191; Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk, 117–29; Huppé, Reading of the Canterbury Tales, 107–35 (Huppé actually uses the phrase QED , 134); and Whittock, Reading of the Canterbury Tales, 118–68.

[2] Donaldson, Chaucer's Poetry, 1077. On the Wife's changes in the traditional story, see also Cary, "Sovereignty and the Old Wife."

men in general, needs to learn more about women, and the plot becomes a device for forcing him to do so. The tale puts him in a position more familiar to women, who ordinarily have to cater to male desires, and gives power to women from the beginning. This is one example of how the Wife's womanhandling appropriation functions in the tale, co-opting traditionally masculine forms for specifically feminine ends. Another example is the "gentilesse" speech, a form of argument that aims at breaking down external hierarchies of power constituted by birth and possessions—"temporel thyng, that man may hurte and mayme" (1132)—in favor of equality before God and individual responsibility for establishing worth and achieving salvation. This argument is traditionally egalitarian but scarcely feminist. It may sometimes be used to urge the right of lowborn men to love and woo noble ladies,^[3] but I do not recall it being used before the Wife of Bath's Tale to argue that ugly old women are good enough not only to go to the same heaven as knights but even to marry them. Since in no other version of the tale does anything like this speech occur, its function as additional feminist propaganda in the altered tale is clear, and the same is true of the sovereignty argument, with its reversal of the usual male-female hierarchies, which gives the tale its punch line and point.

This summary might be thought of as the straw-man version of the tale. The Wife makes a straw man of the traditional story and its hero, setting up the knight and the old story as images of masculine pretension to knock them over, and obviously she carries out this project.^[4] Along the way, as readers have often noticed, she takes advantage of her temporary position as narrator or straw stuffer to enjoy her work. She enjoys the satisfaction in fiction and fantasy of dominating the ill-bred knight and all his kind by making them dependent on feminine wisdom, and she gives herself, in the form of her surrogate the hag, the pleasure of imagining herself magically young and beautiful again,

[3] The opportunities the argument affords for aggressive bad faith are already apparent in Andreas Capellanus's fourth dialogue, where a nobleman uses it to try to force his attentions on a woman of a lower class (Art of Courtly Love, 62–68).

[4] This point has not been altogether lost on critics, though they seldom seem to give the Wife much credit for seeing it too. McCall, Chaucer Among the Gods, uses the phrase "straw men" (139) of the Wife's exempla. Schauber and Spolsky, "Consolation of Alison," have shown that the basis of all four of what they identify as the Wife's most common speech acts is the setting up of a proposition that is subsequently denied.

though these pleasures are clearly marginal and incidental to the main message.

The matter of what else the Wife gets out of telling the story, whether fantasies of power or of rejuvenation, begins to touch on a set of effects that arise less from the preconceived manipulation of structure and content in a generic framework than from more properly textual phenomena, the particular stylistic deployment or voicing of the tale as it proceeds. As in the prologue, these effects are often most apparent in digressions from the narrative line and the logic of the argument, and it is here that most of the controversy about the tale arises. Again as in the prologue, it is common among critics to see such features, especially the "gentilesse" speech, as revealing things about the Wife of which she herself is unaware and to use them as a way of establishing her character—that is, her limitations.^[5] As before, however, the Wife is not satisfied with the simple appropriation of the instruments of masculine power, an appropriation that can only reproduce the oppression it seeks to combat. In fact, her voicing of her tale subjects it to the same kind of revisionary experiential questioning we saw earlier and enables her to move beyond issues solely of power or mastery to a more searching and wide-ranging critique of the tale's generic assumptions and a more intensive and personal use of its possibilities. The first indication of these concerns in the tale is probably the Wife's relative lack of interest in polemical closure. Having set up the straw knight and sent him on his quest, she is oddly dilatory in knocking him over and getting on with the demonstration. She spends the first one hundred twenty lines, a good quarter of the tale, not telling it. Instead, she pursues what we might call her private interests.

Of the two major digressions in the tale the most assertive is the Midas exemplum, in which the story of the loathly lady vanishes utterly for thirty lines—more if you count the introductory matter— and we find ourselves in the middle of a completely different story about Midas's ass's ears and his wife's inability to keep them secret. The occasion of this digression is the knight's quest to discover what women most desire, and as the Wife lists the variety of opinions he

[5] See, for example, Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk, 126–19, whose consistent misogyny is one of the less attractive features of his argument.

encounters on his search, we can see her losing interest in the quest, whose outcome is a foregone conclusion, and getting interested in the question. The old story and its Arthurian world are dropped in favor of matters of more immediate interest. Just as it is more fun for the Wife to take a shot at the Friar's virility in retaliation for his comment on her prologue than to linger over the romantic world of "fayerie," here it is more interesting to her to consider the variety of possible answers to the question than to give the "right" one. Her voice moves into the present tense; she includes herself among the women whose opinions are being solicited and indicates that she finds some of those opinions better than others: "Somme seyde that oure hertes been moost esed/Whan that we been yflatered and yplesed./He gooth ful ny the sothe, I wol nat lye" (929–31).

The Midas exemplum itself, though superficially unflattering to women and apparently totally unconnected to the story, is actually a reflection of the Wife's impatience with certain forms of male foolishness, and it has a certain relevance to the development of the romance. It is, after all, not just any secret that the wife of Midas finds herself unable to contain, but one that a great many women, including the Wife or Bath, have had occasion to notice: "Myn housbonde hath longe asses erys two!" (976).^[6] Pope, who borrowed the Wife's revision of Ovid for his Epistle to Arbuthnot, saw the message clearly:

Out with it Dunciad!  let the secret pass,
That secret to each fool that he's an ass;
The truth once told (and wherefore should we lie?)
The queen of Midas slept, and so may I.
              (79–82)

This is a secret women have to conceal all the time, especially about their nearest and dearest. The exemplum focuses closely on the genuine anguish of Midas's queen. She is a woman bound by ties of trust and affection—ties she herself acknowledges—to a man who loves her and with whom her own reputation is involved. But he is still a fool:

[6] I am indebted to Professor Katherine King, formerly a student in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for opening up this line of analysis for me.

He loved hire moost, and trusted hire also;
He preyede hire that to no creature
She sholde tellen of his disfigure.

She swoor him, "Nay"; for al this world to wynne,
She nolde do that vileynye or synne,
To make hir housbonde han so foul a name.
She nolde nat telle it for hir owene shame.
But nathelees, hir thoughte that she dyde
That she so longe sholde a conseil hyde,
               (958–66)

As we have seen in the prologue, this is not the sort of secret the Wife of Bath is used to concealing. We have only to replace Midas's wife with Alison, and Midas himself with the fourth husband or with Janekyn at a moment when he is grinning at her over the top of his book of wicked wives, to see what the experiential sources of the exemplum are and how graphically it records a realistic frustration that the Wife knows well as a daily component of real marriages, even (or especially) good ones. But it is equally interesting to replace Midas's queen with Arthur's, who has to proceed tactfully to rescue the young rapist from vengeful masculine justice so she can set him on the right track. The Wife of Bath puts great stress on the careful courtesy, a style appropriate to a chivalric setting, with which the queen works to get her way. The line "The queene thanketh the kyng with al hir myght" (899) in particular seems deliberately to overstress her courtesy in order to call attention to it. The Midas exemplum is a gloss on this scene, in which the Wife evokes the real strains involved in feminine submission to, and manipulation of, masculine egos that the original scene omits—while reminding us that she herself is considerably less patient than either queen. She reacts critically to something she feels is missing in her original and supplies it, though she does so in a way that does not—at least not yet—directly challenge romance decorum.

Something similar happens with the issue of the quest itself. That the Wife gets involved in the question of what women most desire and drops the history in order to pursue it suggests that the question is hardly settled for her except for polemical purposes; even when the quest has been completed, the "right" answer is always hedged. The hag remarks that there is no woman, however proud, "That dar seye

nay of that I shal thee teche" (1019, emphasis added), and when the knight announces the answer in court, the ladies who judge him are similarly cagey. They do not say he is right, they just do not say he is wrong: "In al the court ne was ther wyf, ne mayde,/Ne wydwe that contraried that he sayde,/But seyden he was worthy han his lyf " (1043–45, emphasis added). In fact, the queen gets exactly what she asks for, "An answere suffisant in this mateere" (910), that is, an answer that suffices, one that will do rather than one that is definitive.^[7] The reason for all this hedging is, as the Wife knows and demonstrates by her digressive interest in the "wrong" answers, that the question is an impossible one and the quest for a single answer is a fool's errand anywhere outside a romance. In reality—in experience—different women want different things, and the same woman, like the Wife herself, may want different things at different times. What we are seeing here are the various expressions of a consistent tension between the Wife's disenchanted practical sensibility and the generic characteristics of a tale that is, as she is well aware, not her style. Though at first her reservations are expressed in a relatively covert way and outside the story itself in digressions and asides,^[8] as the tale proceeds the Wife confronts what she sees as its deficiencies more directly by introducing a surrogate for herself into the plot in the figure of the hag.

The description that accompanies the entrance of the hag into the tale is a compact portrayal of the Wife's sense of her own career as she has developed it in the prologue and makes most sense when it is read in reference to that development:

And in his wey it happed hym to ryde,
In at this care, under a forest syde,
Wher as he saugh upon a daunce go
Of ladyes foure and twenty, and yet mo;
Toward the whiche daunce he drow ful yerne,
In hope that som wysdom sholde he lerne.
But certeinly, er he cam fully there,
Vanysshed was this daunce, he nyste where.
No creature saugh he that bar lyf,
Save on the grene he saugh sittynge a wyf—
A fouler wight ther may no man devyse.
                (989–99)

[7] See Kaske, "Chaucer's Marriage Group," 52.

[8] Note, for instance, her comment on the penalty for rape in Arthurian times,"Paraventure swich was the statut tho" (893). Whatever it means, it makes us aware of the Wife commenting outside the story.

As I have already suggested, to constitute herself as an authority the Wife has had to give her experience a definitive shape and meaning from which she can generalize; hence she must regard her past as behind her and done with. When she is in this mood, the past disappears as experience, and she feels that her life is finished. Her famous lines on her youth, "But—Lord Crist!—whan that it remembreth me," leading to the reflection "That I have had my world as in my tyme" (469–73), are followed immediately by a meditation that conveys her sharp awareness of the sad difference between now and then:

But age, allas, that al wole envenyme,
Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith.
Lat go. Farewel! The devel go therwith!
The flour is goon; ther is namoore to telle;
The bren, as I best kan, now moste I selle.
             (474–78)

This pattern, this set of feelings, is recapitulated in the description of the hag. The Wife is sometimes drawn to the symbolist suggestiveness of romance imagery, usually in a mood of nostalgia, even when she is critical of it. The four-and-twenry dancing ladies partake of this mood in their connection with the dance of feminine freedom from the "limitacioun" of friars and other masculine trammels, a freedom associated with the elf queen and her "joly compaignye" at the dawn of time and the beginning of the tale. What gives these associations their power is their connection with the Wife's experience—with her youth ("How koude I daunce to an harpe smale" [457])—and her richly variegated knowledge of life and love, the "olde daunce." Her memory swirls and dances with all the women she has been until they vanish, she knows not where, and leave her all alone as she has become, as she is now. The analogues of the tale often spend time having fun with the comically grotesque ugliness of the hag: "Then there as shold haue stood her mouth,/then there was sett her eye," and so forth.^[9] The Wife's more reserved refusal to describe her is also more inward, suggesting not what can be seen but what is felt. I think her words here will bear the inflection: "A fouler wight ther may no man devyse," that

[9] The Marriage of Sir Gawaine, quoted in Whiting, "Wife of Bath's Tale," 237.

is, If you, the men who look at me as I speak, think I am decayed, what must I feel, who know what I was? no mere description will do justice to that. No wonder the hag tells the knight, "Sire knyght, heer forth ne lith no wey" (1001).^[10]

This is a range of experience with which courtly romance does not deal, and the only answer the form has to the problems of the passing of the "flour," especially in a woman, is magic, that is, fantasy, like the transformation at the end of the Wife of Bath's Tale. Those problems are relegated to what happens after stories like this one are over, when, as we all know, they lived happily ever after. Though she may sometimes be attracted to it as a form of recreation and momentary escape, the Wife does not believe in magic of this sort any more than she believes that real men deal with the prospect of marrying old and ugly women with the courtesy and equanimity of a Sir Gawain, and her conduct of the story dramatizes that disbelief. Once the knight has won his release, the hag, who obviously does not trust him, pushes forward to remind him publicly of his promise to marry her (1046–57), a promise he acknowledges reluctantly and with a bad grace: "For Goddes love, as chees a newe requeste!/Taak al my good and lat my body go" (1060–61). When the wedding takes place, the Wife delivers herself of an occupatio that calls attention to the way her story frustrates ordinary romance expectations:

Now wolden som men seye, paraventure,
That for my necligence I do no cure
To tellen yow the joye and al th'array
That at the feeste was that ilke day.
To which thyng shortly answeren I shal:
I seye ther nas no joye ne feeste at al;
Ther nas but hevynesse and muche sorwe.
For prively he wedded hire on morwe,
And al day after hidde hym as an owle,
So wo was hym, his wyf looked so foule.
          (1073–82)

Part of what the Wife is doing in her description of the wedding and the wedding night is to confront a genre that has no room for her and other women in her situation with the fact of herself. We can feel the glee

[10] See Verdonk, "'Sire Knyght.'"

with which in the person of the hag she appropriates the rhetoric of courtesy, "smylynge everemo" (1086), and baits the knight (and the self-gratulatory masculine conventions he stands for so shakily) with a blank-eyed rehearsal of official ideals:

Is this the lawe of kyng Arthures hous?
Is every knyght of his so dangerous?
I am youre owene love and youre wyf;
I am she which that saved hath youre lyf,
And, certes, yet ne dide I yow nevere unright;
Why fare ye thus with me this firste nyght?
Ye faren lyk a man had lost his wit.
What is my gilt? For Goddes love, tel it,
And it shal been amended, if I may.
             (1089–97)

The knight's heartfelt response shows how much the Wife thinks such chivalric courtesy is worth in the face of real-life decay:"'Amended?' quod this knyght, 'Allas, nay, nay!/ . . ./Thou art so loothly, and so oold also'" (1098–1100).

The hag replies that she could amend all this (and in the story she can) since she has magical powers. On the one hand, if all the Wife were interested in was the public and authoritative function of the story as polemical propaganda, the tale might now proceed to its conclusion in the proof of the necessity of mastery. But it seems clear that though the doctrinaire feminist argument of the tale is acceptable as a position for women in general, and the Wife certainly does not disagree with it, it is not responsive to the nuance and detail of her own situation and therefore does not interest her. For one thing, it has little to do directly with the issues of romance style and convention and their ideological implications, which have increasingly occupied her as she narrates. On the other hand, if the Wife were only interested in the pleasures of fantasy, we would also expect her to get to the end of the tale since the transformation of the hag as a reward for the knight's relinquishment of mastery also affords the only opportunity in the story for such pleasurable imagining. Instead of exercising these options, however, the Wife digresses again. Because she has no urgent need for argumentative closure and because she does not believe in magic, she refuses the opportunities to assert mastery and enjoy fantasy that the tale offers, puts them off to a brief moment at the very

end, and proceeds to redirect the tale, to take it over and turn it forcibly toward a more tough-minded and realistic examination of her own situation and its potentialities.

The long speech on "gentilesse," "poverte," and "elde" that forms the second major digression in the tale is notable for the consistency with which it presents a diminished image of human possibility and for the constant stress it puts on the inadequacy of earthly hopes and the weakness of earthly power:

"Ful selde up riseth by his branches smale
Prowesse of man, for God, of his goodnesse,
Wole that of hym we clayme oure gentillesse";
For of oure eldres may we no thyng clayme
But temporel thyng, that man may hurte and mayme.
             (1128–32)

In the face of all this human weakness the speech urges a stoic position. Boethius and Seneca are prominent in it. The burden especially of the account of poverty is, Stop striving for impossible goals and the fulfillment of petty human desires: "He that coveiteth is a povre wight,/For he wolde han that is nat in his myght" (1187–88). Instead, it says, embrace your weakness, understand it, and make of it an occasion of virtue. True "gentilesse" lies not in human glory but in gentle deeds, and the hateful good of poverty leads a man to know his God. The Wife of Bath uses the mask of the hag as an image of her own diminished powers and vanished "flour" to try out this rhetoric, to see what the bran is worth. As a version of the Wife, the hag functions here as a kind of worst-case scenario for her: Suppose I never get married again, suppose I am old and ugly and my life is essentially over; suppose that the energy of my youth is gone forever and that there is nothing left from now on but the downward slope to death. What resources of self-respect and dignity remain to me, and what ways of living are appropriate to my condition? If all the Wife has left is the wisdom she has gained from her experience, she can at least use it to guide herself into old age, where it may be necessary to adopt a more conventional style of life and attend to the needs of her soul.

If it feels like there is something a little disingenuous about this position, and if a less respectful paraphrase of it might be, Well, I can always get religion, that is probably because we know the Wife too

well by now to be entirely convinced by the more pious version. My point is that the Wife feels the same way and that the inadequacies for her of this passive, static, and renunciatory position, this surrender to the values of the patriarchal law, are part of what she discovers in the act of trying it out. The best evidence of this resistance is the emergence of a countermessage in the "gentilesse" digression itself, a "privy" subtext that affirms something different from its "apert" argument and in fact subverts it. This subtext first appears in what I call the torchbearer simile, the rhetorical treatment of a philosophical argument that is in itself clear and easy to make. Boethius does it in a brief sentence: If "gentilesse" were a gift of nature it would always be the same everywhere, "sicut ignis ubique terrarum numquam tamen calere desistit," as fire is always and everywhere hot.^[11] Here is the Wife of Bath's version:

If gentillesse were planted natureely
Unto a certeyn lynage doun the lyne,
Pryvee and apert thanne wolde they nevere fyne
To doon of gentillesse the faire office;
They myghte do no vileynye or vice.

Taak fyr and ber it in the derkeste hous
Betwix this and the mount of Kaukasous,
And lat men shette the dores and go thenne;
Yet wole the fyr as faire lye and brenne
As twenty thousand men myghte it biholde;
His office natureel ay wol it holde,
Up peril of my lyf, til that it dye.

Heere may ye se wel how that genterye
Is nat annexed to possessioun,
Sith folk ne doon her operacioun
Alwey, as dooth the fyr, lo, in his kynde.
           (1134–49)

Notice how the image of the fire is detached from the argument, slightly displaced from logical sequence and foregrounded in a way that makes the argument itself hard to follow because the image is so detailed and compelling, so much more developed than what surrounds it (or, I might add, than it is in any of its sources). This foregrounding makes the image of the fire flaming out in isolation and

[11] Consolatio Philosophiae, in Boethius, Theological Tractates, III pr. 4.

darkness take on a force independent of the place and function of the image in the argument. The bright energy of the fire is affirmed against all the conventional rhetoric of human weakness that surrounds it, and this affirmation is one key to its source and meaning.

Another key is the associations that fire has taken on in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and elsewhere in the tale. As in the prologue, the effacement of logical and temporal sequence that textuality and rereading make possible allows the construction of a system or rhizome of fire imagery that bears on this final instance and decenters it: "For peril is bothe fyr and tow t'assemble;/Ye knowe what this ensample may resemble" (89–90). If fire is initially and fundamentally associated with sexuality for the Wife, it also acquires the aggressive dimension, the intimation of sexual threat, that her free use of her sex sometimes takes on:

He is to greet a nygard that wolde werne
A man to lighte a candle at his lanterne;
He shal have never the lasse light, pardee.
Have thou ynogh, thee thar nat pleyne thee.
             (333–36)

Thou liknest [women's love] also to wilde fyr;
The moore it brenneth, the more it hath desir
To consume every thyng that brent wole be.
            (373–75)

As the second of these examples suggests, fire comes to be associated with what is uncontrollable, especially by masculine limits and standards. It is something that breaks through and consumes the oppressions of male decorum, as in the case of Midas's wife:

Hir thoughte it swal so soore aboute hir herte
That nedely som word hire moste asterte;
And sith she dorste telle it to no man,
Doun to a mareys faste by she ran—
Til she cam there hir herte was afyre—
            (967–71)

Fire has, then, for the Wife far more than conventional connotations of inexhaustible energy, linked not only with sexuality but also with her self-assertion and sense of independence, with everything that makes her most aware of her own vitality. If that vitality is presented

in negative and destructive terms earlier in the poem, more as men see it when they cry to smother it, here in its more inward and private manifestations it takes on a positive sense as an image of the Wife's freedom even in the midst of constraint. Her private attraction to the image of the torch is an index of her resistance to the darkness and to the message of human weakness and decay that surrounds the fire and the woman. Like the instances in the prologue of surges of energy associated with remembering, with which it is connected, this upsurge of inner fire happens spontaneously and happens now, in the act of speaking.^[12] The Wife rediscovers as she speaks what the whole experience of performing the prologue and tale have affirmed: that her resistance, her energy, and her fire are not gone at all, and that they have outlasted the decay of her youth and beauty. This awareness lies behind the reservations she expresses when, in the guise of the hag, she comes to draw the moral consequences of the "gentilesse" argument:

Yet may the hye God, and so hope I,
Grante me grace to lyven vertuously.
Thanne am I gentil, whan that I bigynne
To lyven vertuously, and weyve synne.
           (1173–76)

The conditional mood in which this statement is cast calls attention to the fact that the speaker refrains from identifying herself completely with the position expressed: her hope that God will grant her the grace to live virtuously when she decides to begin carries the implication that that time has not yet arrived.^[13]

Thus there is little point to the sort of critical objection that notes how the Wife of Bath cannot qualify as "gentil" under her own definition in the speech and takes this circumstance as an irony of which she is unaware, since this is precisely the point she is affirming triumphantly in her handling of the speech itself.^[14] The content or doctrine here is neither out of character nor in it for the Wife. Rather it is something that culture (masculine culture at that) makes available and that the Wife is using for her own purposes—here perhaps as a kind of poten-

[12] This phenomenon will be considered in a more theoretical framework in Part II under the heading of jouissance.

[13] See Colmer, "Character and Class," 335.

[14] For example, Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk; Ropollo, "Converted Knight," 263– 69; Albrecht, "Sermon on 'Gentilesse,'" 459; Slade, "Irony in the Wife of Bath's Tale," 241–47.

tial remedia amoris or "remedye of love" (I, 45). What the Wife reaps in this section of the tale are the real fruits of her experience. External youth and beauty are and were, she discovers, just as deceptive as the traditional wisdom has always maintained because they worked to conceal from her the real inner sources of her vitality, the capacity for the enjoyment of life and the indomitable spirit that are still with her now that their conventional physical signs have passed. The external deprivation, the "poverte," is the condition that makes possible the discovery of inner fire and inner richness. It is indeed a bringer out of busyness and an amender of sapience precisely because it "Maketh [a man] his God and eek hymself to knowe" (1202, emphasis added).

By the time she gets to the matter of "elde," the hag is speaking out clearly for the Wife in words we have heard before:

 Now, sire, of elde ye repreve me;
And certes, sire,  thogh noon auctoritee
Were in no book,  ye gentils of honour
Seyn that men sholde an oold wight doon favour
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And auctors shal I fynden, as I gesse.
            (1207–12, emphasis added)

Elde is essentially dismissed, left for the future, because it is not yet time in the Wife's life—and that time may never come—for her to lapse into decorum, piety, and silence. No more than Janekyn with his book can those church fathers and stoic philosophers—men every jack of them—tame her. The Wife asserts her vitality and her resistance to the deadening pressure of conventional proprieties in her treatment of the conclusion of the story—for instance, in the riddle, whose form in the analogues is a choice between having the hag fair by day and foul by night or vice versa. The Wife of Bath's version—foul and obedient or fair and take your chances—reaffirms the sense of her own energy, independence, and impenitence that has been growing in her during the latter part of the tale: I'd do it all again, she seems to say, and I will if I get the chance:

Or elles ye wol han me yong and fair,
And take youre aventure of the repair
That shal be to youre house by cause of me,
Or in som oother place, may wel be.
         (1223–26)

The extent to which the concerns and the mood that dominate the subtext of the "gentilesse" speech take precedence over the more conventional aspects of the romance is further pointed up by the wife's handling of the final lines of the tale, in which she drops the expected happy ending in the middle of a line and goes out swinging:

And thus they lyve unto hir lyves ende
In parfit joye; and Jhesu Crist us sende
Housbondes meeke, yonge, and fressh abedde,
And grace t'overabyde hem that we wedde;
And eek I praye Jhesu shorte hir lyves
That nought wol be governed by hir wyves;
And olde and angry nygardes of dispence,
God sende hem soone verray pestilence!
            (1257–64)

This concluding speech reflects both the mood of independence that sustains the Wife and the critique of romance conventions that she has been conducting: the persons of the story may have lived happily ever after, but the Wife doubts the relevance of this ending to real marriages, and she is making no promises about herself. The speech is also a return to the public occasion of the tale in the sense that it presents the Wife in the polemical and oppositional role that is appropriate to the general feminist message and her original battle plan for the story. But that public role and even that message are qualified for us by the private subtext of the telling. The shrew of the end of the tale is a straw woman, a role the Wife plays for tactical reasons that have to do precisely with the inadequacies of the public situation in which she speaks with respect to the complexities of experience. It is clear from both the prologue and the tale that for the Wife "maistrye" is not really a simple mechanical reversal of male domination. In both cases once the woman has been granted sovereignty she refrains from exercising it, and this restraint suggests, on the model of the Wife's fifth marriage, that sovereignty is primarily a tool for achieving feminine independence within marriage so that more satisfactory relations between the sexes can have a chance to develop.^[15]

[15] Once again a number of commentators have recognized the provisional and preliminary—what I would call the public—character of the idea of "maistrye," though once again the Wife herself has not been given much credit for understanding it. Charles A. Owen, in his pioneering and still fundamental study "The Crucial Passages in Five ofthe Canterbury Tales," was the first to note the importance of the hag's refusal to exercise domination. Of the several critics who have developed this perception and seen that what the Wife wants—what women want—is some form of mutuality in relationships, particularly fine accounts are given by Howard, Idea of the Canterbury Tales, 254–55, and Burton, "Wife of Bath's Fourth and Fifth Husbands," esp. 46–47.

"Maistrye" is a way of making room for the possibility of love in the patriarchal world by giving women space to be responsible partners in a relationship. As only an "answere suffisant," it is where everything that is important about marriage begins, not where it ends. If anyone knows that they lived happily ever after is no way to talk about the experience of marriage, it is the Wife of Bath. Marriage is where things get harder, though potentially richer and more satisfying. But this aspect of marriage, the opportunity it offers for private fulfillment, is not really appropriate to the situation in which the Wife is performing. In the first place, the experience of real relationships cannot easily be conveyed in a story like this, as the Wife's critique of romance assumptions has made clear. At the end of the tale, consistent with her practice throughout, the Wife makes no real attempt to present the knight as someone who learns something or changes his mind; he is simply coerced and manipulated, as he has been throughout the tale. Those critics who have tried to insist that he is converted by the "gentilesse" speech seem to me to be trying to supply a minimal version of what would be needed to make a conventional happy ending convincing.^[16] The conspicuous absence of any such personalization of the knight is part of the Wife's assessment of what the tale, the genre, and the occasion allow. For, in the second place and especially, the experience of real relationships is not something that can be or need be conveyed to a casually assembled group of strangers encountered on a pilgrimage, most of them males, with whom there is little likelihood of, and little reason for, intimacy. As the Friar's interruption may remind us, one reason the personal inflection of the Wife's performance is relatively covert is that there is no one on the pilgrimage as worth talking to as Janekyn.

The unfolding of the prologue and tale in one sense subverts their programmatic statement in that it questions and undermines the Wife's presentation of herself as a definitive, exemplary character who

[16] The earliest statement of this case is Roppolo, "Converted Knight." See also Cary, "Sovereignty and the Old Wife"; Levy, "Loathly Lady and Dante's Siren"; and Shapiro, "Dame Alice as Deceptive Narrator."

is the completed product of her history. Instead, we come to see that this character is a role that she can choose to play or not, depending on the circumstances. The end of the tale shows something of the usefulness of this role. The man-eating monster who appears here and elsewhere may be a caricature of the real Wife of Bath, or at least a partial representation, but as a role it is also a way of making sure that no one will try to take advantage of her: it asserts her independence and keeps it firmly in view. In this sense "maistrye" and the polemical feminism associated with it are practically necessary in the world as a woman finds it, as a defense and a precondition for the mutuality she might prefer. The conditions of the male-dominated public world may be said to have forced this position on the Wife, and its necessity shows just how unsatisfactory the public situation of women is in human terms. That women can find ways to take advantage of the institutional structure that constrains them cannot be construed as an apology or justification for the system. To make the male world into a straw man—to be forced to do so to fight its ubiquitous and dehumanizing public pressures—is still to accept a logic of opposition and appropriation that can only drive someone to constitute herself as a straw woman.^[17]

"But lordynges, by youre leve, that am nat I" (112). Beyond and behind the public, necessarily caricatured feminism of the "apert" narration there is a set of "privy" experiences that construct a deeper and more existentially responsible feminism and a more searching critique of male domination. What the Wife responds to intuitively about her tale is less what it includes than what it leaves out. One of the most sexist things about this story and the romance genre it exemplifies is the assumption that women have no consequential interests beyond courtship and marriage. Men may do battle and have adventures, but the stories of women in romance are all love stories. As we have seen, such a story has no way of handling an ugly old woman as heroine—or even an attractive but not classically beautiful middle-aged one—except by magic and no place at all for issues like a

[17] This is not to say, however, that there is anything fake about the feminism of the Wife's public position or her commitment to it, even if it does not always express everything she thinks about gender, power, personal relations, and the like. Her position on "maistrye" in marriage is a proposal for real institutional reform in the going system. Her financial dealings, at least what we know of them, are generally consistent with this position and cannot have been easy to sustain.

woman's experience of age and the prospect of death. The Wife's most telling criticism of the tale is that such stories have no room for a Wife of Bath.

The issues of romance—gender and sexual relations, love and marriage—are important to the Wife herself; they have dominated much of her life, and they are fully represented in her prologue and tale. But for us to hold her exclusively to them, or for her to do so herself, does not allow her all the other things in her life and experience, including her humanity before age and death. In fact, in her tale we see the speaker as a woman exercising her "purveyaunce," considering her options in line with her own philosophy: "I holde a mouses herte nat worth a leek/That hath but oon hole for to sterte to" (572–73). She may find her way back into marriage and the dance of relationship that has occupied and engaged her for so long, but she may not. In this open situation the Wife herself remains open. By the end of her tale she has evoked her own energies in the face of what those energies have to contend with and enacted a variety of possible responses to her unknown future. She seems, in part for reasons that will occupy us in Part II, at ease with her subjectivity, which manifests itself to her here as a source of freedom and spontaneity. She finds that her experience has provided her with extensive resources for continuing her Frauenhandlung with the authorities—with God the Father, with the masculine world, and with Old Man Death—and that she need not commit or confine herself to any particular role or position except as a tactical move in whatever game she may have occasion to play. The Wife of Bath does not need to define herself once and for all.