Robert James
Précis
When examining the text of The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale one must look at it from the perspective of the author as a male courtier-poet rather than from the perspective of its fictional source. The text reveals medieval social structures and ideology in its content as well as its silences or gaps. Additionally, criticism reveals much about our modern social structures and ideology in the way we address or interpret these silences. By examining the text with the questions "Who speaks?" and "What difference does it make who is speaking?" in mind, the reader can examine the author's intent from a biographical or psychoanalytic perspective or can determine the ideological implications. Also, the text itself presents questions related to the politics of gender: specifically, the power relationships of the genders and "the desire of the excluded other and the meaning of that desire for the dominant power."
Among the strategies of silence in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale is her propensity for authoritative citation. Her scriptural glossing often distorts the meanings of passages by omission. Through this omission and substitution of traditional meanings, Chaucer has the Wife actually confirm the misogynistic stereotype of women's incontinence and untruthfulness of speech. One such citation is of Marie de France's version of the Aesopian fable of the lion (WoBP 692-696). The explicit moral of this fable is to not trust stories or paintings when we have the evidence of our experience and also that "individual character ought not to be judged by species prejudice only." The Wife of Bath uses this fable as an allegory of gender relations but the narrative and symbolic structure serves only to subvert her argument. The lion in the fable is complicit in its own subjugation through conscious awareness of its inferiority to man. As an allegory of men and women, the fable tells us that "women have not appropriated the means of cultural production because it is not in their natures or capacity to do so." A consistent interpretation of the fable suggests that a woman's best hope for social harmony is to work in accordance with a controlling male intelligence--quite opposite to the Wife's implicit reading.
The Wife's garrulousness or incontinence of speech is often pointed to as typifying her as realistic. However, her work and travel more than her recollection of sexual escapades truly marks her as a "proto-modern" woman, and her conspicuous silences on these topics does not indicate a lapse by Chaucer in his artistic choices. Empirical facts or background data are not necessary to reveal the historical viewpoint of the text. Instead, Chaucer has internalized these other historical aspects into the character's consciousness or idiom. The Wife talks about capitalism when she speaks about her sexuality as a commodity, and pilgrimage is metaphoric for her vertical movement: social ambition and financial gain. In the same way Alice co-opts authoritative citations and fails, she also has internalized aspects of societal authority but only manages to reinforce misogynistic stereotypes. Through this strategy of silence, the omission of experiential data on work and travel, Chaucer makes the Wife less real to preserve her usefulness as a literary figure or exemplum.