“By God, if women had but written stories…”
— The Wife of Bath’s Prologue
(translated from Middle English by Nevill Coghill)
Bumping Into Chaucer
I have been wanting to reread The Wife of Bath (Prologue and Tale1) — it’s one of the books in my Penguin Little Black Classics collection2, and I am on a quest to read them all. But ever since the idea to read this ahead-of-its-time tale by the Middle English poet Geoffrey Chaucer — part of his longer, unfinished, and celebrated opus, The Canterbury Tales (1387 to 1400)3 — entered my brain, I seem to be bumping into Chaucer everywhere.
The result is that I have — almost unwillingly and against my usual anti-dead-white-men diatribe: “why are people still researching and writing academic theses on Chaucer, for fuck’s sake” — collected material and thoughts on the writer.
What you are about to read is my surprise and some delight at finding Chaucer alive and kicking in the humanities, though the author is very much dead (as Roland Barthes would have it) and his tales are the readers’ own.
B for Bawdy, C for Chaucer
When you want to talk about a great poet like Chaucer, you must turn to an expert. My veteran-of-choice is Professor Joan Hambling (Holland Taylor) from Netflix’s 2021 limited series The Chair — a show about the issues that plague (no Chaucerian pun intended) the critical humanities at the university level.
Hambling’s on a list — her classes at the (fictional) Pembroke University have consistently low enrolment, her office has been moved to the basement, and she is failing to connect with students.
When a forced perusal of her students’ evaluations turns into a chase for the origins of a nasty comment on her teaching, Hambling presents her brilliant assessment of Chaucer (or rather shouts it at the student who wrote the comment) —
“Now you listen to me. I may not be your cup of tea, but The Canterbury Tales is a work of genius. Philandering husbands, horny housewives, farting, shitting, pubic hair. Some poor schmuck asked a woman for a kiss and ends up making out with her butthole... You don't have to like me. But Chaucer has survived more than 600 years of literary criticism. And if you can't figure out that he's a badass, then just stay the fuck out of my classroom.”
It prompts a student to remark, “Dope City!”, and another to ask, "What are you teaching next semester?" to which Joan scoffs and says, "Chaucer!"
The dope and bawdy badass lives with Hambling telling his (modern) tale, though we never really find out if this outburst improves enrollment.
Chaucer’s Carnivalesque
David Daiches, in A Critical History of English Literature (2010)4, tells us more (formally) about Chaucer, who was a courtier, a man of affairs, and a civil servant —
“[F]or Chaucer was a bourgeois with courtly connections and thus had the freedom of at least two social worlds…”
Expanding on John Dryden’s assessment of The Canterbury Tales — “Here is God’s plenty” — Daiches proposes,
Chaucer “used the intellectual and imaginative resources of the Middle Ages… to bring alive, with vividness and cunning, the psychological and social world of his time, which turns out to be also the world of our own and every other time (emphasis added).”
In a perfect wedding of authority and experience — championed by Alison, the wife of Bath — the tales collect the habits of thinking, prejudices, professional biases, and personal idiosyncrasies of the intermingling true-to-life pilgrims, drawn from different classes of the English society at the time. But because they are on holiday, Daiches writes, “they are more relaxed and self-revealing than they would otherwise be.”
Think of an English Middle Ages season of The White Lotus (2021-), or think of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin’s “carnival sense of the world” (also known as his theory of the ‘carnivalesque’).
“The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during carnival: what is suspended first of all is hierarchical structure and all the forms of terror, reverence, piety, and etiquette connected with it… All distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people.
[…]
The behavior, gesture, and discourse of a person are freed from the authority of all hierarchical positions… and thus from the vantage point of noncarnival life become eccentric and inappropriate.
[…]
Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid (original emphasis).”5
Arguably, not all power structures are completely suspended — neither in The White Lotus nor in The Canterbury Tales — but the freed discourse does allow for noncarnival/real-world hierarchies to be questioned and debated. That (too) is the purpose/power of the carnivalesque.
Alison, the (house)wife of Bath, for instance, employs mercenary language used by men in revealing the transactional nature of matrimony, but inverts the logic to support her argument on why husbands must be subservient to their wives (especially in bed). She asks in the Prologue to her tale,
“Why else the proverb written down and set
In books: “A man must yield his wife her debt”?
What means of paying her can he invent
Unless he use his silly instrument?”
Alive White Men
Here’s the interesting thing about Alison’s tale — besides, as mentioned, the combination of authority and experience that she champions — men explain things to her — about Roman history, the Bible, Ovid, the Greeks, and more — till, being stubborn as a lioness and in rage, she tears out three pages from her Oxford-bred husband number five’s “book of wicked wives.”
Men explain things to Rebecca Solnit, too, whose essay ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ (2008) is said to have inspired the term ‘mansplaining’. Solnit casually refers to Chaucer in her essay —
“Here, let me just say that my life is well-sprinkled with lovely men… with splendid friends of whom it could be said–like the Clerk in The Canterbury Tales I still remember from Mr. Pelen’s class on Chaucer–“gladly would he learn and gladly teach.” Still, there are these other men, too.”
I am surprised Solnit isn’t more interested in The Wife of Bath (she may be, elsewhere), as Alison explains mansplaining many centuries before the modern-day feminist —
“And he would take the Bible up and search
For proverbs in Ecclesiasticus,
Particularly one that has it thus:
“Suffer no wicked woman to gad about.”
[…]
But all for naught. I didn’t give a hen
For all his proverbs and his wise old men.”
But Solnit does perceptively connect silencing and violence, which is central to Alison’s story —
“I surprised myself when I wrote the essay, which began with an amusing incident and ended with rape and murder. That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social misery to violent silencing and violent death (and I think we would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic violence separately from rape and murder and harrassment and intimidation, online and at home and in the workplace and in the streets; seen together, the pattern is clear).”
At this point, we must broach the subject of whether we should be reading dead-white-men like Chaucer — even if we do so with a modern, critical lens — who have long dominated (600 years!) the literary canon. Let’s not forget that these authors became a part of the literary and academic psyche — consider Solnit’s ease of reference — and spoken English — Hambling talks about how many images and idioms (like ‘love is blind’) come to us directly from the 14th century — with the colonisation of the larger, non-white world.
I am conflicted about it, though I appreciate what The Canterbury Tales offers in terms of showing how social hierarchies operate, but dissent is always already in the works; how a comparatively modern theory like that of the carnivalesque or approach like that of feminism may be applied to its reading; how its language and ideas continue to permeate and have currency in our world; and so on.
But, do you have to read Chaucer to better engage with the world? No.
But, if you do read the tales (in the classroom or casually), contextualise and question their persistence as classics — why and how has Chaucer survived 600 years of literary criticism? Do what comparative literature asks us to do: study cultural expression relationally, employ interdisciplinarity and interconnectedness, and… well, embrace the carnival.
In the Prologue to her tale, Alison, the wife of Bath, narrates the story of her five husbands and describes her relationship with each of them. In the Tale, she tells the story of a knight who rapes a woman and is asked to find out, within a year, what women desire. His ‘punishment’ is contingent on the answer.
The Penguin Little Black Classics edition of The Wife of Bath is in modern English (translated by Nevill Coghill), simplified for the present-day, non-academic reader. But I do recommend the Middle English version — it’s fun!
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of about 24 verse tales. A storytelling competition is held among the pilgrims travelling together from London to Canterbury. Each pilgrim — about 30 of them are introduced in the General Prologue — is to tell two stories on the outward journey and two stories on the way back. Chaucer died before he could write them all.
It annoys me that David Daiches’ literary histories — which are recommended as required reading to ace the competitive exam for becoming a university-level teacher in India — don’t have any footnotes, endnotes, or references.
From the Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1984) by Mikhail Bakhtin, edited and translated by Caryl Emerson.