The Wife of Bath is a character that plays to and simultaneously questions our 21st century feminist sensibilities. While the Wife does undermine some patriarchal traditions and values with one hand, she is constantly helping to reaffirm them with her other. As a result, it is difficult to discern whether she is supposed to be a heroic figure of liberation or merely a hyperbolic caricature of over sexualized women.
In her prelude, the Wife of Bath tells the story of a knight who came across a beautiful young maid, and he was so stricken that he just had to rape her. This detail of the story indicates that our dear Wife believes men are primarily driven by their sexual urges, and cannot control them.
King Arthur, who rules Britain at the time of the story, sentences the knight to death. However, the queen and her ladies decide to save the knight, if he can return to the court with the answer to a difficult question: what do women want most in the world? Because the queen takes authority over the king, the Wife is demonstrating the power of women can have over their husbands.
This theme recurs when the knight arrives again with a hideous old hag, who promised the knight that, in return for his devotion, she will give him the answer. He agrees, and tells the court that what women want most in the world is to control their husbands. The queen and her ladies accept the answer, sparing the knight's life, However, when the old, ugly women strong-arms the knight to marry her, he is distraught. In their wedding bed, the women proposes that she could be beautiful and unfaithful, or loyal and hideous. In the end, he lets her decide, which is all that she wanted, and thus becomes gorgeous and true, and they live happily ever after.
While the Wife demonstrates the power of women, this power is still only qualified by marriage, which is a patriarchal construct. Furthermore, I just want to point out that the knight who lived happily ever after is still a rapist, which I wish was a thing that only happened in King Arthur's day.
The first thing I noticed about this story is the fact that it has similar ideas to that of our current feminist movement. That being said, I also noticed the weird contradictions that uphold the ideas of the patriarchy, so like you, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. I think it's just one of those things we have to accept because of the time it was written in. Of course our ideas about feminism and patriarchies are going to be a bit different from theirs because ideas evolve over time.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with what Meagan said, our ideas on feminism would be different because of our two different time periods. Meaning that what we were able to pull from the text in terms of a feminist reading; compared to what people during the original time period would read the text as would be quite different. However, there is a good amount of longitivtiy to the Wife of Bath’s tale. All we would need to do is change the horse to a car and the queen to a judge. For us to read it today, it does not really matter so much how it has been read in the past. What matters is what we can pull form the text to correlate to our own lives.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you when you say that the theme of feminism and male domination resounds throughout the story, and I have to say that I also agree when you say that the entirety of the Wife of Bath's tale relies on the construct of marriage, which is in fact a patriarchal institution. It's also very hard for me to get over the fact that the knight is a rapist and he ends up with a beautiful and faithful wife in the end. I don't really know what kind of message that sends, and as Megan and Metha said before me, we do need to understand that this was written in a much different time period, but I think this is still strange and unfair regardless of what time it was written in.
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