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.