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.