Transformation in Chaucer’s the ‘Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387), the Wife of Bath appears “as a woman of very strong opinions who believes firmly in marriage” and as well “in the need to manage husbands strictly” (Thornley & Gwyneth 1993, p.16), and hence her story is about an Arthurian knight who rapes a maiden and has to face the consequences of his deed. The pilgrims of Chaucer’s masterpiece undergo transformations, which are chronicled in this literary text. These transformations occur in a variety of forms and take different shapes. The Wife of Bath is one of these travellers. In the following discussion, I'll look at how the ‘Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale’ handles metamorphosis. By reading this article, readers will realize that transformation is not limited to the one of the hag that occurs at the end of the tale.

Form and Foreskin

Why did Saint Augustine ask God to “circumcise [his] lips”? Why does Sir Gawain cut off the Green Knight’s head on the Feast of the Circumcision? Is Chaucer’s Wife of Bath actually—as an early glossator figures her—a foreskin? And why did Ezra Pound claim that he had incubated The Waste Land inside of his uncut member? In this book, A. W. Strouse excavates a poetics of the foreskin, uncovering how Patristic theologies of circumcision came to structure medieval European literary aesthetics. Following the writings of Saint Paul, “circumcision” and “uncircumcision” become key terms for theorizing language—especially the dichotomies between the mere text and its extended exegesis, between brevity and longwindedness, between wisdom and folly. Form and Foreskin looks to three works: a peculiar story by Saint Augustine about a boy with the long foreskin; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. By examining literary scenes of cutting and stretching, Strouse exposes how Patristic treatments of circumcision queerly govern medieval poetics.

“A Verray Jangleresse”

This chapter examines Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales as a study in voice that is structured by what David Lawton calls an unprecedented display of multiple tellers. It explains how “The Wife of Bath” is among the loudest of the voices in multiple senses of the word. It also analyses the multivalent loudness, which shows how Chaucer adapts the trope from antimarriage authors like Walter Map and uses it to govern two of the Wife's most fundamental characteristics: her deafness and her “jangling” voice. The chapter looks at deafness as the first defining characteristic of the Wife of Bath in the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. It elaborates how the Wife's deafness is closely related to her relationship to texts.

The Wife of Bath – Early Feminist?

The Tale of the Wyf of Bathe – written in 14th century England – remains to be one of the most widely known tales from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer gives voice to this pilgrim woman at a time when Richard II’s England was wrought with imbalance of power in the male dominated society. The purpose of this essay is to discern whether the Wife of Bath was an early feminist or not. She is commonly referred to as “the wife” and not her name - this is precisely the notion that she sets out to defy - that a woman, in a society, can only be identified by relation to a man, be it as a wife, mother, sister or a daughter.