The Host, His Wife, and Their Communities in the Canterbury Tales

Abstract

The Host, His Wife, and Their Communities in the Canterbury Tales Tara Williams By his own rules, Harry Bailly is the one pilgrim in the Canterbury Tales who is not intended to tell a tale. He moves from hosting the company of pilgrims at his inn to hosting the storytelling contest on the journey, becoming "governour" (I 813) of the pilgrims and judge of the contest rather than a participant, and an outsider rather than a member of their fellowship.1 In a series of moments within the frame, however, the Host does deliver a story about his marriage with his absent wife, Goodelief. Although not a formal tale, this narrative has significant implications for how we interpret the Host as a character and how Chaucer represents marriage—and especially wifehood—in the Canterbury Tales. This essay will explore how the story of the Host's wife, through its subject as well as its textual position, transforms our readings of wives, husbands, and the narrative frame itself. I argue that, by bringing his own wife into the frame, the Host undermines the singularity of the Wife of Bath, whom critics have identified as perhaps the most singular character in the text as the only wife, the only secular woman, and the only female narrator to speak of her personal experiences.2 The Host suggests that, far from being isolated, the Wife of Bath belongs to a community of wives that includes Goodelief and other wives from the frame and tales. I identify a counterpart for that community of wives in a community of husbands; united by their complaints against their wives, the Host and the Merchant are charter members. When we consider the Host as a husband, speaker, and member of this male community, the complexity of his character overtakes his functions as a structural element in the frame or an unsophisticated reader of the tales; indeed, he is among the most fully developed and original characters in Chaucer's text.3 There is no direct source for his role in relation to the pilgrims and the tale-telling contest, but the figure of Deduit from the Roman de la Rose may have provided inspiration for his character; in Chaucer's incomplete translation of the French text, he christens the [End Page 383] figure "Sir Myrthe."4 While Harry Bailly and Sir Myrthe have significant differences, this epithet—juxtaposing a passion for pleasure with a title of some authority—reflects the same pair of characteristics that scholars recognize in the Host. These emphases on his mirthfulness or his compromised authority as the ruler of the pilgrims, as a man and husband, or as an interpreter of the tales, have produced a stimulating but surprisingly scanty critical history.5 Nonetheless, the corresponding perceptions of the Host as an inept governor, whether of the pilgrims or of his own wife, and an inexpert reader, overemphasizing the literal meaning or the entertainment value of narratives, have become commonplaces of the critical conversation.6 At first glance, the evidence appears too slim to push beyond these accepted stereotypes: after all, the Host is not one of the acknowledged tale-tellers, has a relatively brief portrait in the General Prologue that is distanced from the other pilgrims' portraits, and otherwise appears only in the unfinished frame story. Moreover, as John David Burnley points out in his study of the characterization of the Host, "psychological development requires an established narrative sequence, and that never existed."7 This attitude toward the Host as an incomplete character is not just a modern view; the Ellesmere manuscript includes images of each of the tale-telling pilgrims (including, famously, Chaucer himself), but not one of the Host, perhaps because his speeches do not add up to a recognizable tale or he seems more functionary than character. For whatever reasons, readers and critics have mostly taken the Host for granted. The narrative space he inhabits, the frame, has also received less critical attention than it merits in recent decades; it raises vital questions about marriage, community, and representation, and it contains the story not only of the Host's wife but also of Harry Bailly himself. Wives Talking about marriage is...