Selling Alys: Reading (with) the Wife of Bath

Abstract

There is no real question that consensus over Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath continues to elude critics; even attempts to challenge the ongoing critical conflict directly, such as H. Marshall Leicester Jr.’s assertion that ‘‘of course there is no Wife of Bath,’’1 have not really led to any resolution. Because of the Prologue and Tale’s complex intersection of class, gender, and rhetoric, there also remains substantial critical anxiety over this material: as Lee Patterson puts it, ‘‘[T]ell me what you think of the Wife of Bath, runs the implicit formula, and I’ll tell you what I think of you.’’2 This sense of critical risk deepens when addressing the Wife’s economic identity, when one encounters the initial reaction to Mary Carruthers’ now-influential article ‘‘The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions.’’ For her trouble in sorting out a reasonable economic context for a wife in Bath involved in the cloth trade, Robert Jordan in one letter to PMLA pats her on the head and suggests that Carruthers does not understand poetics, and James Wimsatt in another suggests that she is ‘‘seeking answers to questions that are beside the point.’’3 Certainly that was the 1970s, and critical interests (and accept-