The Women in Chaucer's "Marriage Group"

Abstract

lison, the Wife of Bath, stands at the center of Chaucer’s “Marriage Group.” The so-called Marriage Group is a heuristic iwhich scholars have used to interpret those Canterbury tales most intimately concerned with the institution and gender politics of heterosexual union. As an idea, it indexes Chaucer’s interest in the productivity and constraints of marriage and helps account for the stories of Ellesmere fragments three, four, and five. The Clerk’s Griselda belongs in this group as do the Merchant’s May and the Franklin’s Dorigen. Over the years a number of other tales (and their female figures) have been suggested as additions. The Shipman’s fabliau (generally thought to have once been assigned to the Wife of Bath) with its unnamed wife and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale’s Pertelote have been said to belong to the Marriage Group. Prudence from Chaucer’s own Tale of Melibee, the Man of Law’s Constance, and even the Manciple’s Tale’s murdered wife of Pheobus can all lay some kind of claim to association. This essay treats yet another woman whom we should add—return, really—to Chaucer’s Marriage Group: Eleanor Prescott Hammond. If Chaucer’s fictional women debate, exemplify, and travesty the proper role of women in marriage, Hammond is even more foundational to the Marriage Group. Unbeknownst to far too many Chaucerians, Hammond appears to have invented the idea of the Marriage Group; she was certainly the first scholar to put the term into print. But for most of the century since coining the term, Hammond has been left out of the Marriage Group, excluded from this intimate Chaucerian circle. For the past ninety-two years scholars have instead credited the eminent George Lyman Kittredge, Professor of English at Harvard, with inventing the Marriage Group. Citing his seminal 1912 essay, “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,” most critics of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales regard Kittredge A