Amy Steinberg
Précis
The Wife of Bath is not just a story. Her tale is actually the performance of a lifetime. The reader must be able to distinguish between the Wife's view of things and that which she refuses to acknowledge. That which the reader presupposes about the Prologue produces certain presuppositions about the Tale. There is a correlation between the Wife and her tale, just as there is a complementary relationship between the Prologue and the Tale. The Prologue is the Wife's answer to the assumptions of strangers, while the Tale takes readers into the mind of a stranger to discover his actions and motivations.
The Wife has encountered a captive audience on this journey, one audience that thinks they already know who she is. The Wife must therefore represent herself as a person other than the one that she is assumed to be. In order to do this, she must deconstruct and dispose of these assumptions. The Wife first targets the male mentality, specifically the clergy, who form this image of her. The Wife purposely mocks the image of the ignorant female that is assumed by society.
The Wife intends to be absurd in her imagery and fantasy so that her audience will not be able to make her inferior. The Wife tells of her marriages not only to unsettle her male listeners, but also to confess her true nature in front of an audience that already claims to know her. In the audience's assumptions, a husband must control both the body and possessions of his wife to reduce his wife into nonexistence.
The Wife then presents her audience with a challenge to their assumptions. The Wife knows that though women are supposed to be reduced into nothingness, there is a great deal of preoccupation with these women even though they are "nothing." The Wife challenges this image of herself by defying this image and exposing those who want to reveal the hidden female presence.
However, the Wife's own revelations only lead to more mystery. While earlier her audience was forced to submit to her aggressive persona, they must now deal with her admission that she longs for the unattainable: youth and perfection. This admission may appear to be a contradiction, but in fact it is only another medium used to expose the true nature of her sex.
Alice's story of her fifth husband is perhaps the true reason that she was given a Prologue. Her story here is a rebuttal against Jankyn and his anti-feminist book. With her previous husbands, Alice was able to respond to their own words. In the case of Jankyn, the stories in his book were stories from other sources, and she had now become the captive audience. Ultimately, Alice tricks him and the result is a happy marriage. Though earlier Alice is the dominator in her marriages, in this marriage she begins as the typical submissive, inferior woman. She was abused and then reacted out of a sense of personal honor. The damage to Jankyn's book and Alice's body commemorates this abuse and the differences between the female body and priestly perspectives.
Alice faces the male gender with both arousing female sexuality and frightening female aggression. Her point in the Prologue is to challenge the assumptions of her audience, to show that she has been viewed defectively. The Tale has a similar point but a different medium: romance. Alice exposes the problem by transporting the situation to a time when it can be discussed in the simplest form. This allows Alice to attack the reality of her current times implicitly.
In the story, the rape of the maiden by the young knight-to-be is an allegory. The man riding on the horse while the maiden walks below demonstrates female submission, a lower class both sexually and socially. The rape is a thoughtless act and the punishment is thus automatic. The capital punishment then becomes thoughtless as well. The queen and her ladies then use their power of persuasion to change the sentence of a criminal so that they can change the mind of the criminal. The queen uses her authority to save the young man so that she can change his perception.
The story then suggests that the act of rape also entails assumptions about the value of things outside of the rapist's mentality. Now that the rapist has been brought to punishment, he is forced to admit that his assumptions limit his understanding. His sentence is therefore a way to expand his understanding of things. Alice's digression into the story of Midas produces a similar perspective of failed assumptions in order to parallel the story of the young rapist. When the young man finally comes to face his punishment after a year of searching, the encounter of the old hag symbolizes his fear of a world which does not live up to his expectations nor fulfill his assumptions.
The knight makes a promise to the hag which he fulfills, assuming that his oath has led him into a marriage of sexual purposes. The hag then exposes her new husband's impotence, demonstrating that his assumptions are wrong about her just as they were wrong in the act of the rape. When she forces him to choose between beauty and fidelity, she is forcing him to comprehend what he wants by appraising and scrutinizing his previous assumptions. His choice to allow her to choose which she wants permits the knight to remove the assumption that women cannot be both beautiful and faithful, and instead frees the hag as his property. Here, he sheds two of the most prominent assumptions about women. When the hag chooses to be both beautiful and faithful, the knight raises the curtain on the bed to see his beautiful wife. She has become so in his eyes because he is understanding her, not just possessing her through his assumptions. He has learned what women want.
The Prologue and Tale are actually reflections of the desires of men and women, told both to teach and entertain. Though the Wife does present certain contradictions, like her happy marriage to Jankyn, these contradictions prevent her from becoming a character who could be assumed to fit into one or more stereotypical personas. Both the Prologue and the Tale depend on inconsistencies and irregularities to develop the idea of false assumptions. Both Alice and the hag must contradict themselves in order to reveal the audience's stereotypical assumptions and that which exists outside of those assumptions. Both women must sacrifice themselves to show the audience how love should work.