Powerful Wives and Captive Knights: “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,”Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Czech Chivalric Romances

Abstract

Unlike the other tales we have examined so far, Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Talc” was probably written for inclusion in the larger framework of The Canterbury Tales and not as an occasional piece for the royal court. Its subject matter and implied audience indicate that it was not intended for the royal court but for a larger, diversified public of men and women from the lower ranks of society. Yet Anne’s intercessory role as mediator between the king and his restive subjects may still have inspired the tale’s premise: Queen Guinevere and her ladies beg King Arthur to spare the life of the knight condemned for rape, and Arthur defers to Guinevere’s judgment in imposing a penance on the knight: to save his own life he must discover what women most desire. Guinevere’s feminine influence over Arthur is continued in the harridan’s power over the ineffectual knight when she promises to tell him the secret of temale desire only on condition that he will marry her. The moral appears to be that in the imaginary world of the Wife of Bath women call the shots and men defer to them. As Jill Mann has pointed out. Chaucer’s genius in this tale is to give the Wife of Bath a story drawn from the anti-feminist tradition of La Vieille (the old woman) in The Romanie of the Rose. According to Mann, the Wife of Bath’s narrative transforms this antiteminist trope derived from The Romance of the Rose into an example of positive female empowerment (the civilization of a rapist).