I. Intro - Dits and Extended Monologues
Last week, I talked about Andreas Capellanus’s De Amore (c. 1186-1190) and described it as an example of a “satire” that never finds any real target and thus can’t really be called a satire. In truth, I think it was always conceived as a thought experiment without a serious intention behind it other than to write freely about love and the erotic using a rhetorically formal style. It strikes me as a perfect example of directionless irony in literature even though formally it appears otherwise. It in some sense resembles what we might call a proto-Menippean satire: it’s long and structured, it acts as a catalog of various perspectives on the art of courtship, it mixes various genres together, and it appears to be a serious treatise… but it also says essentially nothing and lacks what any scholar, living or dead, has been convincingly able to demonstrate to be a coherent point. It’s pure irony expressed in Medieval Latin.
This week, I’d like to discuss another example of a “satire” with no target, though expressed in an altogether different fashion. Here I’m talking about a kind of vernacular writing that has a semi-improvisational quality and affords the author quite a bit of freedom in composition. It also tends to imitate oral performance while itself being quite textual all the same, unlike De Amore, which is rigorously composed for the scholastic Latin language. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue is what we’ll be examining, but it’s just one example; there are others.
This kind of extended first-person vernacular writing I’m talking about doesn’t really have a name across all languages. The British literary critic A.C. Spearing has called it “autographic writing” in his book Medieval Autographies (2011), but in the medieval French language, it’s sometimes executed in the form of something we now call a dit, which, like the fabliau, is really a genre invented by modern scholars. Dit is a fuzzy concept, but it shows up in the names of various poems, like Guillaume de Machaut’s quite long Voir Dit. In the most basic sense, it’s a first-person poem that has no expectation of being sung (dit comes from the Latin dictus, “said”). It’s rather formless and often doesn’t devote itself to one specific theme, quite unlike the French courtly poetry of its time. And its heavy use of the first-person pronoun is significant, since it can go in almost any direction while the poet pretends to be speaking (even as he writes everything out, often in a stylized or tightly composed fashion). Rutebeuf, who was also a fabliau composer, is considered one of its innovators.
When it comes to vernacular literature, Geoffrey Chaucer was more familiar with French verse than anything else, and he was particularly a fan of Guillaume de Machaut. One of his dits, the Dit de la fonteinne amoureuse, formed the inspiration for Chaucer’s first dream vision, Book of the Duchess. And sure enough, the lengthy prologues in Chaucer’s other dream visions as well as those in the Canterbury Tales have elements of this writing style. A dit isn’t necessarily satirical or even ironic, but the freedom it gives the poet is essential to understanding why Chaucer’s use of it could produce a kind of ironic writing with no real satire underpinning it, despite appearances to the contrary.
There is an aspect that pervades Chaucer’s poetry in which it seems as though his intent is to satirize something at first, but as the writing goes on he winds up, whether deliberately or not, making the case for it — acting as both the target’s prosecutor and defense at once. This element features heavily in his General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, but it also occurs throughout the entire unfinished work, and the Wife of Bath’s Prologue is no exception. The attitude this approach betrays isn’t totally unique, either; it returns throughout history in various forms and iterations. For instance, the filmmaker Federico Fellini often does this sort of abortive satire as well, such as in Amarcord (1973), which he intended to be an anti-Fascist film (and his many letters on the subject confirm it), but which looks surprisingly warm and sympathetic to the era overall by the time the film ends. So I think it’s fair to say that Fellini inherits Chaucer’s basic attitude, even moreso than he does Boccaccio, a fellow Italian. And within the Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue may qualify as this sort of satire. Whatever the case may be, it’s certainly what I’d call a satire without a clear target, and its structure is partly why. It’s an extended monologue in the first-person, written in a somewhat slapdash and devil-may-care fashion, with a persistent “I” to which the narrator keeps referring back. It’s easy to forget who exactly this “I” really is.
II. Wife of Bath - The Case Against Her
For those who haven’t read the Wife of Bath’s Prologue (and shame on you, by the way), it’s essentially an extended monologue by a woman in the mode of a confession/self-justification, or apologia. She talks at length about how since the age of twelve, she’s cultivated the art of using her body to manipulate men and bilk them of everything they’re worth, and explains how her five marriages over the years, which she recounts in detail, all testify to her skills and expertise in that area (the Sparknotes summary isn’t bad, and you can read the whole thing here or here). She justifies her actions and attitude with some interpretations of the Bible and other various religious writings that range from glib (“God said to be fruitful and multiply!”) (“We’re supposed to hold virgins in such high regard, but did two people not have sex to create these virgins in the first place?”) to at least surprisingly compelling.
It’s also many people’s favorite part of the entire Canterbury Tales. I’ve spoken to several feminist (or at least feminist-presenting) young women who like it the best, even though there’s plenty of reason for them to say the opposite. Everything we know about the history of its time should tell us that it’s a satirical presentation of a vapid and self-deluded woman and a scathing indictment on female moral corruption. And there’s plenty of evidence to say this is so. First, she makes various admissions that don’t particularly reflect well on her, like most notably when she says that her fifth husband Jankyn was the most attractive to her, not despite but because he was the most violent and cold-hearted (I’ll be translating everything into modern English in this essay):
That thogh he hadde me bet on every bon He koude wynne agayn my love anon. I trowe I loved hym beste, for that he Was of his love daungerous to me. We wommen han, if that I shal nat lye, In this matere a queynte fantasye; Wayte what thyng we may nat lightly have, Therafter wol we crie al day and crave. Forbede us thyng, and that desiren we; Preesse on us faste, and thanne wol we fle;
(“Though he had beaten me on every bone, he could win my love back again soon afterwards. I think I loved him best because he was so aloof towards me with his love. We women have — if I’m to tell no lies — a curious whim: whatever we see that we can’t easily possess, we’ll cry and crave for it thereafter. Forbid us something, and we’ll desire it. But push it upon us hard, and then we’ll flee.”)
This is some real “Red Pill” literature, here, long before such a concept could ever exist. The Wife of Bath’s character belongs to an easily-identifiable “type” that started to show up in the satires of the late Classical period, and which persisted in the medieval period chiefly through French verse (like the Romance of the Rose, where Chaucer almost certainly got the idea from). This “type” I’m referring to is that of the oversexed and repugnant old woman. Her description in Chaucer’s General Prologue more or less confirms this: she’s red-faced, gap-toothed (which was associated with loose morality at the time), her head is covered in kerchiefs that Chaucer hyperbolically assumes to weigh 10 pounds, and she’s wearing flamboyant red stockings… she resembles a stock character from low burlesque pantomime theater. And beyond her caricaturized manner of self-presentation, there’s an easy moral case one could build against her by examining the spiritual attitudes of the time. This is expounded upon at length by D.W. Robertson, whom I discussed extensively last week. Here’s what he says about the Wife of Bath in his Preface to Chaucer (1962):
[S]he prefers the Old Law to the New, or the law of fallen nature to the law of grace. She drinks the pleasures of the flesh which produce a thirst similar to that which Ovid called down upon Dipsas, a lady who is without doubt one of her literary ancestors. She is dominated by the senses or the flesh rather than by the understanding or the spirit, by oldness rather than by newness. In short, the wife of Bath is a literary personification of rampant "femininity" or carnality, and her exegesis [of the Bible] is, in consequence, rigorously carnal and literal.
So without question, a medieval audience was not expected to take her preaching as reasonable in any way.
III. Wife of Bath - The Case For Her
And yet, for all her faults, people cannot help but want to rehabilitate her. One such man was Ezra Pound, who in his ABC of Reading (1934) says, “The Wife of Bath's theology is not a mere smear. Her attention to the meaning of terms is greater than we find in Lorenzo Medici's imaginary dialogue with Ficino about platonism.” And perhaps there’s something to this. One article has defended her attacks on St. Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum, a popular polemic against marriage in favor of clerical celibacy, arguing that she refutes it in order to reach a view of marriage closer to the Augustinian one. Beyond that, there have been many other readings of her that reimagine her as a kind of proto-feminist figure. Some were even written after Robertson’s time, when every medievalist should have known better.
Perhaps most importantly: her personality is just too enjoyable to dismiss altogether. If the prologue is meant to be an attack on all female sexuality, the Wife of Bath herself is just too funny for it to be effective. There’s a reason why wise-cracking old women have remained in the popular consciousness for centuries, even in a more sanitized form, like Sophia from the Golden Girls: their meek appearance serves to soften the impact of harshly delivered witticisms, and even create a striking contrast. With the Wife of Bath, there are just too many impressive moments of punning and instances of great wordplay in her repertoire for her to be altogether loathsome. To give just a taste, here’s her describing how she responded to her third husband — an old man whom she wasn’t attracted to and acted like a huge bitch towards — after he had complained of her behavior:
Ye sholde been al pacient and meke, And han a sweete spiced conscience, Sith ye so preche of Jobes pacience. Suffreth alwey, syn ye so wel kan preche, And but ye do, certein we shal yow teche That it is fair to have a wyf in pees. Oon of us two moste bowen, doutelees; And sith a man is moore resonable, Than womman is, ye moste been suffrable. What eyleth yow to grucche thus and grone? Is it for ye wolde have my queynte allone? Wy, taak it al! lo, have it every deel! Peter! I shrewe yow, but ye love it weel; For if I wolde selle my bele chose, I koude walke as fressh as is a rose But I wol kepe it for youre owene tooth. Ye be to blame, by God! I sey yow sooth.
(“You should be entirely patient and meek and have a sweet, spiced conscience, since you preach thus of Job’s patience. And since you can preach it so well, you should also endure suffering in every respect! And if you do, we shall certainly show you that it’s lovely to have a wife left in peace. Surely, one of us two must bow down in servility, and since a man is more reasonable than a woman is, you must be the one more capable of enduring it. What’s so ailing you that causes you to complain and groan as you do? Is it because you want to have my cunt all to yourself? Why, then take it! Have it in every way! By Saint Peter! I’d really curse you if you didn’t love it well! For if I one day started selling my “beautiful thing,” I’d be walking around as fresh as a rose! But I’ll save it… just for your own appetite. You’re to blame for this, by God! I’m telling the truth!”)
In this block of text, the Wife uses her husband’s own piety against him, threatens to leave him and go bang other guys, passive-aggressively offers herself to him by way of self-objectification, and then guilt-trips him about his own sexual urges. Then, after that quotation, she explains to the pilgrims that she had cleverly devised such speeches in advance to keep her men submissive and obedient. Wow, what a bitch! The word “queynte,” by the way, is often translated as “pudendum,” since that’s the less offensive way of phrasing it, but it is indeed where the modern swear word comes from, and she is flying off the handle, so I don’t see the problem with rendering it as “cunt.” She also refers to her vagina as a “bele chose,” an example of French code switching, which Chaucer deploys several times throughout the Canterbury Tales, so even as she’s being a scold, she does so with style and flair. This is just simply fun writing, and the whole Prologue matches this level of energy throughout.
But the reason it can’t be totally satirical, and why so many people wind up rooting for her by the end of it, is that the Wife of Bath’s literary voice is essentially the same as Chaucer’s. This is a somewhat controversial point, since so many literary critics have wanted it to be otherwise. One of the major feminist critics who tried to argue the case for the Wife of Bath’s essential goodness, Carolyn Dinshaw, says that she takes on her own autonomous psychological interiority. And quite a few people have bought into this idea, including (recently) some poor chap writing for Voegelin View. It’s always nice, of course, when we can see this in various characters we like, but in this case it’s nonsense.
We know it’s nonsense partly because the Wife’s somewhat high register of speech doesn’t match her education. Based on the factual clues she gives in her monologue, we can discern that she’s illiterate, and most of her learning has come from what has been orally dictated to her in her own vernacular English. For instance, she knows all about misogynist literature (such as St. Jerome and Theophrastus, whom she mentions by name) because her cruel husband Jankyn would read it all aloud to her; she didn’t read it herself. It was also pretty much unheard of for someone in her station to be literate in Latin. But she does, at one point, cite a proverb from Ptolemy’s Almagest, which at the time was only available in Latin, Arabic, and Spanish — not English. The Sparknotes page that I linked earlier analyzes it like this:
Her reference to Ptolemy’s Almageste […] is completely erroneous—the phrase she attributes to that book appears nowhere in the work. Although her many errors display her lack of real scholarship, they also convey Chaucer’s mockery of the churchmen present, who often misused Scripture to justify their devious actions.
And while that’s also a nice-sounding idea — almost certainly cribbed from some other published scholarship — this is wrong, too. The quotation may be erroneous, but it strains credulity to think that anyone in Chaucer’s immediate audience would have heard it and instantly thought to himself, “Ah, ha! That is not a proverb from Ptolemy! I memorized the entire 600+ page Almagest, and I don’t recall that proverb stated in there, not even once! This Wife of Bath is a patent fool!” The far more likely explanation is that Chaucer wasn’t thoroughly conceiving of the Wife as a self-sustained psychological entity, and thus he didn’t see any harm in throwing into his writing a Latinate proverb he mistakenly remembered as coming from Ptolemy, or perhaps something he read in a Latin florilegium that erroneously attributed the quotation to Ptolemy.
This kind of bogus analysis happens often with Chaucer. A pilgrim telling a tale says something wrong, and then some scholar comes along and says, “Well, certainly Chaucer couldn’t have made that mistake — no, no! It was the pilgrim making the mistake, and Chaucer was simply using this mistake to reveal that pilgrim’s blighted worldview to all!” But Chaucer was not a professional writer. He had a full-time job as a court bureaucrat, he was an upwardly mobile son of a wine merchant, and he was writing for a courtly audience that comprised some people more educated than he. He wasn’t omniscient, and no one during his time would have viewed him that way. But throughout the 20th century and even up to now (at least it seems), the dominant scholarly approach to Chaucer has been to view him as entirely distinct from his characters, thus implying that each pilgrim has an autonomous speaking voice, despite few if any stylistic differences between each one.
Instead of making the Wife a distinctly separate person whose every word is shot through with her own unique psychology, Chaucer was writing — almost certainly in a loose, semi-improvised manner — what he would say if he were playing this particular stock character. He’s not nullifying his personality entirely but rather transposing it onto a cliché, only making it seem as though it’s coming to life, as any skilled marionettist does a marionette.
And indeed, just about everything the Wife of Bath tells the other pilgrims is cartoonish, in the sense that even its most genuine-seeming moments don’t actually betray the feeling of real experience but instead come from some other misogynist source of writing. For instance, here she is lamenting the passing of her youth:
But, Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe and on my jolitee, It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world, as in my tyme. But age, allas, that al wole envenyme, Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith! Lat go, farewel, the devel go therwith! The flour is goon, ther is namoore to telle, The bren as I best kan, now moste I selle;
(“But — Lord Christ — whenever I remember my youth and gaiety, I’m tickled right down to the base of my heart! My heart feels such joy, right up to this day, knowing that I have had my world and my own time in it. But alas — age, which will poison everything, has bereft me my beauty and my spirit. Let it go — farewell! And the devil go there with it! The flour is gone, there’s nothing more to say. And now I must ‘sell the bran’ as best as I know how.”)
This is about as sincere as she gets, but it’s also pretty much yanked right out of Jean de Meun’s continuation of Romance of the Rose, in which the “Old Woman” character says pretty much the same thing. There’s nothing new here save the expression of the idea, including the pun on flour and bran, which Chaucer used often throughout his writing career. Again — this isn’t a self-possessed woman. It’s Chaucer in drag, doing pantomime.
IV. Excursus - Buddy Cole
One modern analog to what I’m describing might be Scott Thompson from The Kids In The Hall doing Buddy Cole, the flamboyantly gay bar patron who offers his musings on life. The character is a total stereotype, and it’s pretty much designed to be — but then again, who else but Thompson could play him? He’s simply Scott Thompson, amplifying some parts while downplaying others. And because Thompson’s voice is filtered through a stereotype, he gets away with saying things others can’t, since it’s impossible to locate the target of the satire, to the point where the term “satire” doesn’t do that kind of comedy any justice.
In the clip I hyperlinked above, Buddy Cole discusses J. Philippe Rushton’s theory on race, genital size, and intelligence. He makes fun of it, but he also doesn’t really deny it, either. So is the sketch a political denunciation of race science? A denunciation of racists who want to use it for their own purposes? A criticism of gays being overly blasé? Thompson simply making fun of himself? Again, when you’re speaking through a dislocated identity, the message you’re giving can’t be taken at face value, and thus it becomes harder to determine if a message is straightforward. At that point, people resort to using contextual information about the author. This difficulty, by the way, is why so many gay men from the 80s and 90s saw Buddy Cole as an icon who represents them, yet recently the GLAAD has been banning newer Cole monologues from appearing on Amazon Prime TV.
If we shift the point back to Chaucer, the same potential ambiguity prevails. Historicist critics assure us that during his time, no one would have mistaken Chaucer writing for some kind of feminism. Yet Gavin Douglas, just 113 years after Chaucer’s death, said of him, “He was evir (God wait) all womanis frend” (“He was always a friend to every woman [God knows]”). Maybe a century had passed when Douglas wrote it, but it’s damn sure closer to Chaucer’s time than the six centuries afterwards in which the historicists were saying their piece.
V. The Relevance of the Medieval Period
Someone at this point might be wondering, “Why the emphasis here on medieval literature? This is the second week in a row you’ve gone on about it.” And beyond the fact that I know it pretty well, the real reason is that I’m trying to show how artists have pretty much always relished the opportunity to place their creativity and their technical craft above all other considerations, including sociopolitical ones — even during times in which you’d least suspect it.
When most well-educated people think of the medieval period, they think of it as an era dominated by order and hierarchy. If they’re particularly well educated, they’ll think of the mathematically precise schematics that characterize medieval art. Think of Dante’s Divine Comedy, with its structure of 99 cantos plus one introductory canto, making a total of 100 with 33 each for the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. Or you might think of the trobar clus style of poets like Arnaut Daniel — with rhythmic meters and rhyme schemes so complex that they’re often impossible to interpret on first listen/reading. Or, if you consider music, you might think of the numerically precise isorhythms that characterized the compositions of Guillaume de Machaut. These find their best expression in his highly ambitious Messe de Nostre Dame, which has been described as an incorporeal cathedral made of pure vocal harmony (listen here). C.S. Lewis’s posthumously published book The Discarded Image (1964) makes this point about the late-medieval desire for order very well.
So we’re disinclined to think of that period as a time in which poets would care for spontaneity and/or experimentation. But man’s creative spirit, which of course has persisted across all of time in both the arts and sciences, has always relied on spontaneity and experimentation in order to find a correct purchase. Thus, I don’t consider it an insult to Chaucer when you suggest that he didn’t have a specific point he wanted to make about women, or perhaps anything at all, with the Wife of Bath. Nor is it an insult to say that he occasionally made mistakes in his writing, and that not every mistake was a deliberate “comment” on something. I agree with A.C. Spearing, whose book I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, when he says:
Within the subculture of contemporary Anglophone studies in medieval literature, and especially perhaps in Chaucer studies, the balance seems to me to have tilted too far away from a willingness to recognize and welcome the improvised and the arbitrary as means of capturing the effect of experience and thus of giving a certain kind of pleasure and a certain kind of truth. And this may be true of academic literary studies in general, in part perhaps for a reason suggested earlier — that discovering planned intricacies of structure provides an endless supply of material for books and articles, whereas questioning whether such intricacies exist and whether they were indeed planned looks like a dead end so far as the professional demand for publication is concerned.
And elsewhere:
What appealed to Chaucer about autography, as he would have encountered it in the dit and as he practiced it himself in homodiegetic forms such as prologues and dream poems (and also in improvisatory first-person commentaries on unchangeable narratives) […] may […] have been the unique opportunity it offered for compositional freedom. That may not be a desire that medievalists usually imagine being felt by medieval poets or their publics; as I have been suggesting, we tend to attribute to them the desire for a preconceived order that is part of our makeup as scholars.
And I think that same point can be redirected toward the desire for freedom to refrain from writing literature with a clear tropological, or moral sense of meaning. The use of the relatively structureless dit may have given Chaucer a sense of freedom from fixed structure, but at least in the case of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, I’d say it also afforded him a new way to write something that appears straightforwardly satirical, but which never hits upon a direct target — much like De Amore, except with an entirely different mode of expression.
VI. Conclusion
Thinking about the political usage of “media literacy” that often shows up on social media, in which some leftist will scold a conservative for “incorrectly” interpreting some movie or show with a putatively leftist message, it’s worth bearing in mind that the left wing media literacy advocate is essentially offering the historicist account of what the movie should mean. They’re basically doing what D.W. Robertson did for medieval literature in saying that no matter how chaotic or proto-feminist or anti-authority a text might seem, it’s ultimately promoting the orthodox position.
To be clear, I’m not wild about deciding arbitrarily that a text is being subversive or edgy simply because one wants it to be so. And if I’m being honest, I do find it sort of lame that for two years, the online “dissident right” decided that their new hero was The Joker because of the 2019 Todd Phillips film about him, which was quite possibly the lamest celebration of slave morality ever captured on digital video. But it’s also clear to me that there’s an abundance of texts, even in the medieval era, in which the “incorrect” reading is the more fruitful and interesting one, and for which I’m not convinced that the historically responsible “correct” position is genuinely the right one.
To be sure, if Chaucer had been interrogated by church authorities about the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, he would have used an argument in self-defense that resembles D.W. Robertson’s: she’s meant to be the personification of carnality, and her reading of the Bible is rigorously carnal and literal, and that’s why she’s bad. In such a self-defense, he would have all the evidence on his side. Yet all the same, there was still a real guy called Geoffrey Chaucer who sat down and wrote the thing. What mood was he in when he composed it? How pious was he feeling when he sat down that day? How concerned was he with the tendency of women, or anyone for that matter, to engage in bad Biblical exegesis? Because when he was writing it, I’m not convinced at all that such a concern was really on his mind.
Surely, if we can find this kind of aimless satire in the medieval period, we can think of quite a few modern media productions in which it might be better to assume sublime pointlessness rather than ham-fisted “satire” or “commentary.”
Update 03/23/2024: Made a few minor changes for clarity