I studied this story, one part of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for A level and I remember we were all surprised and more than a little uncomfortable with how bawdy the Wife of Bath was. We didn’t quite know how to deal with it!
I have just been to an event in the Oxford Literary Festival where the professor of English Literature and Language, Marion Turner, was talking about her book, which is a biography of The Wife of Bath. I really like the idea of a biography of a fictional character but what this offers the author is the wide opportunity to explore the cultural history that Chaucer wrote into his character. It also allows Marion Turner to trace what has happened since the 14th century through medieval contempt for women all the way to #MeToo in the 21st century.
Often called the first ordinary woman in English literature i.e. not a Princess or a Duchess but conversely not a peasant or a skivvy either, Alison (her name apparently) of Bath was a middling woman who ran a business, had several husbands and somehow managed a high degree of independence. Middling is the term used before the label middle class was employed in later Victorian times. Why Chaucer decided that she came from Bath is unknown but he did write her as a clothier and the city of Bath at that time was the centre of the cloth trade, so that seems to make some sort of sense.
The character of the Wife of Bath trails through the centuries after Chaucer’s time. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were great Chaucerians and she appears in the Merry Wives of Windsor in all but name. There are mentions of her in numerous European songs and epic poems, from Italy right over to the troubadours of south west France.
Reading this book, which is actually, and unsurprisingly, very scholarly, I could see the fingerprints of the publisher and probably the agent at the start of each chapter. Both these people would have been very sensitive to the market at which this book would be aimed and if literature scholars are the only people to whom it would have been of interest, then that market would be very small, too small probably in monetary terms. So, each chapter begins with a reasonably contemporary quote: ‘Women have always been poor … from the beginning of time.’ Virginia Woolf in ‘ A room of one’s own.’ This starts the chapter on working women and it struck me how apposite this was at a time when women are saying they can’t afford to return to work because of the cost of child care. We can’t change the biology! The journalist and writer Caitlin Moran, writing about Bridget Jones’s Diary, quips:
‘Jo March, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Scarlett O’Hara, Becky Sharp, Pippi Longstocking and the Wife of Bath… women and girls whom one can imagine being set into any time, or location, and being just as entertaining, companionable and prone to amusing, yet ultimately triumphant, misadventure as they were in their original centuries.’
This quote opens the chapter on the invention of character and it does so in a way that encourages the reader to think: well, I am not an Oxbridge scholar but I think there is something in this book for me. It makes it feel more accessible whilst not compromising on the historical and cultural material. There are pages and pages of references and acknowledgements which I did not read. I’m not about to write a thesis so I didn’t need to.
One fascinating aspect that I only learnt about by reading this book is the way this full on character is now resonating with modern black communities. There is the performance poem: The Wife of Bath in Brixton Market, apparently performed right there in that location and written by Jean Breeze. In Patience Agbabi’s Wife of Bafa, Alison becomes Mrs Alice Ebi Bafa, a Nigerian cloth seller. Also, the author Zadie Smith (White Teeth and the Autograph Man) borrowed Alison of Bath to become Alvita, a much married woman living in Willesden, North London with her roots in the West Indies: thence, The Wife of Willesden. I love it. Thus it appears that Alison is experiencing a very modern makeover and finding a transnational identity that stretches across multiple cultures. Also, interesting to note that she is now being written by women after centuries of male appropriation.
Readable, enjoyable, informative, thought provoking; I offer you The Wife of Bath.