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The Marital Dilemma in the Wife of Bath's Tale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Margaret Schlauch
Margaret Schlauch*
Affiliation:
New York University
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Extract

Confronted with his fabulously ugly wife after an unwelcome marriage ceremony, Chaucer's hero in the Wife of Bath's Tale receives from her a bit of consolation as ineffective as it is irrefutable. True it is, she says, that I am foul and old, but consider that for this very reason you need never fear that I shall cuckold you:

      D 1215 “For filthe and eelde, also moot I thee
      Been gret wardeyns upon chastitee.“

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , June 1946 , pp. 416 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1946

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References

1 The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Boston, 1933 and 1937), p. 105 f. Citations are from this edition.

2 John Gower. Confessio Amantis, i, ll. 1810-13, in The Complete Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay, (Oxford, 1901), ii, 85.

3 Ed. Laura Sumner, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, v (1924), No. 4, p. 18 f. The text is found in the edition of Sir Frederick Madden for the Bannatyne Club, Syr Gawayne (London, 1839), p. 298 ff.

4 Ed. Madden, op. cit., p. 288 ff. See John Edwin Wells, A Manual of the Writings in Middle English (New Haven, 1916), p. 69 and 771 f.

5 The Marriage of Sir Gawain, preserved in the Percy Folio, was printed in Percy's Reliques; the King Henry ballad is printed in Child's Collection, Part ii, 297, no. 32.

6 Heroides, xvi, l. 288. Cited by Skeat in the note to D 255. In Loeb edition, l. 290.

7 Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum in Opera Omnia, ii (ed. Migne, Patrologia Latina, xxiii), col. 277. (Italics added.) Passage reprinted in B. J. Whiting's “The Wife of Bath's Prologue,” in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Chicago, 1941), p. 211.

8 For general discussion, see August Wulff, Die frauenfeindlichen Dichtungen in den romanischen Literaturen des Mittelalters, Romanistische Arbeiten, iv (Halle a/S., 1914).

9 Ed. Migne, Pat. Lat., cxcix; see Lib. viii, cap. 11, col. 750: “Pulchra cito adamatur, fœda facillime concupiscit,” etc.

10 Ed. Thomas Wright in The Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets and Epigrammatists of the Twelfth Century, ii (London, 1872), Chronicles and Memorials, lix, p. 188. (Italics added.) A variant of the last quoted line reads: vel soli ne sit habenda, etc.

11 Serlonis Monachi Poemata, ed. Thomas Wright, ibid., no. 2, p. 232 ff.; cf. 1. 235: “Sit speciosa? cito fiet suspecta marito.”

12 Innocent III, De Contemptu Mundi, lib. i, cap. 18, in Opera Omnia, ed. Migne, Pat. Lat., ccxvii, col. 710. (Italics added.)

13 Ed. Thomas Wright, The Latin Poems commonly attributed to Walter Mapes (London: Camden Society, 1841), pp. 77-85; also Migne, Pat. Lat., xxx, col. 262. See Dorothy M. Schullian, “Valerius Maximus and Walter Map,” Speculum xii (1937), pp. 516-519.

14 Lib. iii, Pars 9, distinctio 5; in the 1493 Lichtenstein edition, folio 238 recto.

15 Ed. Arpad Steiner (Cambridge, Mass.: The Mediaeval Academy of America, 1938), p. 198.

16 Ed. A. G. van Hamel, in Bibliothèque de l'École des Hautes Études (Sciences Philologiques et Historiques), 2 vols., xcv and xcvi (Paris, 1892 and 1905).

17 Ibid., i, p. 21.

18 Ibid., i, p. 127, especially l. 1872 ff.

19 Ed. Ernest Langlois, Société des Anciens Textes Français, iii (1921), p. 88. The disadvantages of having an ugly wife are here given a new explanation: the lady's unfortunate looks make her doubly eager to please, hence just as hard to control as a fair spouse.

20 The text is given by van Hamel, op. cit.

21 Œuvres Complètes, ix, ed. G. Raynaud, S.A.T.F. (Paris, 1894), p. 16 and 65.

22 Erich Fehse does not include the dilemma in his survey of proverbial material in “Sprichwort und Sentenz bei Eustache Deschamps und Dichtern seiner Zeit, Romanische Forschungen, xix (1905-06), 545-594; nor does B. J. Whiting in his Chaucer's Use of Proverbs (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), under the WBT. The dilemma was not, indeed (as we have seen), proverbial in origin; but it is expressed with gnomic succinctness by some of the Latin writers.

23 Opera quae extant Omnia (Basel [1581]), i, 1 ff.

24 Ibid., p. 59 f., lib. i, dial. 65. (Italics added.)

25 Ibid., p. 127; lib. ii, dial. 21.

26 [Lino] Coluccio Salutati, Epistolario, ii, edited in the Fonti per la Storia d'Italia, Istituto Storico Italianio, xvi, 365 (letter of July 23, 1392).

27 The gloomy analysis of marriage is but one pessimistic theme inherited by Italian humanists from the earlier centuries. On this subject see Charles Edward Trinkhaus, Jr., Adversity's Noblemen: The Italian Humanists on Happiness (New York, 1940).

28 Jakob Werner, Lateinische Sprichwörter und Sinnspriiche des Mittelalters, Sammlung mittellateinischer Texte (Heidelberg, 1912), p. 73, proverb P 145.

29 Wilhelm Binder, Medulla Proverbiorum Latinorum, i (Stuttgart, 1856): a collection of proverbs from Roman classical writers and their imitators, p. 155, no. 1818 (no source given).

30 Ibid., ii, Flores Aenigmatorum Latinorum (Stuttgart, 1857), p. 96, no. 16. No source or date is given. The echo of Juvenal in line 7 is noteworthy. See Juvenal, Satire vi, l. 460: intolerabilius nihil est quam femina dives. (Italics are here used to represent Sperrdruck in the original.)

31 D. Gualteri Haddon … Poemata (London, 1567), p. 70.

32 Tottel's Miscellany, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1928-29), i, 95 f., no. 131. Cf. John Donne's poem “Go and catch a falling star,” with its sentiment that “no where lives a woman true and fair.”

33 The Legend of Sir Gawain (London, 1897), chapter 6, “The Loves of Gawain.”

34 The Wife of Bath's Tale: Its Sources and Analogues (London, 1901).

35 “De Bronnen van ‘The Wife of Bath's Tale‘ en daarmede verwante Verteilingen,” Verslagen en Mededeelingen der Koniklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 4de Reeks, ix (Amsterdam, 1909), pp. 346-366. Kern uses the material collected by Maynadier, including the Irish analogues, in order to propose a mythological origin to all variants of the story. The hag, he says, represents night, which automatically changes into the fair aurora. He points to epithets of Usas (Dawn-maiden) in the Vedic hymns to explain why such a mythological personage should be later identified with Sovereignty (Heerschappij). The suggestion is tentative. No subsequent investigator has, apparently, been convinced by it; nor is this surprising.

36 The Survival of Geis in Mediaeval Romance (Halle, 1933), especially p. 346 ff.

37 The Origin of the Grail Legend (Cambridge, Mass., 1943), chapter 7, “The Hateful Fée who Represents the Sovereignty.”

38 For a general study, see Ernst Tegethoff, Studien zum Märchentypus von Amor und Psyche, Rheinische Beiträge und Hülfsbücher zur germanischen Philologie und Volkskunde, iv (1922).

39 Weston, op. cit., p. 50.

40 Maynadier, op. cit., p. 137.

41 Reinhard, op. cit., p. 356.

42 Ibid., p. 365.

43 Joseph Warren Beach, The Loathly Lady: A Study in the Popular Elements of the Wife of Bath's Tale (Harvard dissertation, 1907), manuscript copy, chapter 15, p. 41.

44 Op. cit., chapter 17, p. 14 f.

45 It is instructive to notice the possibility for an independent development of a dilemma situation which brings a quite unrelated plot fairly close to Chaucer's where there is no possibility of direct borrowing. Beach notes a story from Tibet which introduces the transformation from ugliness to beauty in connection with a dilemma. The Buddhists tell of a barren woman, the mother of the hero, who is asked by a god to choose whether she will have a son ugly but intelligent or beautiful and foolish. She chooses the former. A wife is found for the ugly youth on the understanding that she will see him only at night until she becomes pregnant. Later he is made beautiful by divine compassion. See Beeach, op. cit., chapter 11, p. 18; Thomas Steele, An Eastern Love Story (London, 1871); Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen (1872), p. 1205 (Köhler's summary).—Stith Thompson records a motif showing a more popular conception of Chaucer's dilemma, apparently reached independently: a man has the choice of staying at home with a loving wife or going to the tavern and having an unfaithful one; he chooses the latter. See Motif Index of Folk Literature, iv (1934), p. 28, item J 229.1. The story comes from Johannes Pauli, Schimpf und Ernst, ed. J. Bolte (Berlin, 1924), no. 205.

46 “Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage,” Modern Philology, ix (1911-12), pp. 435-467.

47 “Observations on the Shifting Positions of Groups G and DE in the Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales,” Three Chaucer Studies (New York, 1932).

48 Additional arguments for a comparatively early date for Group F are presented by Laurence Faulkner Hawkins, The Place of Group F in the Canterbury Chronology, N. Y. U. dissertation (New York: privately printed, 1937). Not all of the arguments used seem equally convincing to me; but a presumption is clearly established that F need not have been a planned culmination of DE.

49 The Text of the Canterbury Tales (Chicago, 1940).

50 Ibid., i, p. 25 and ii, 475 ff.

51 “Author's Revision in the Canterbury Tales,” PMLA, lvii (1942), pp. 29-50. See also Modern Language Notes, lv (1940), pp. 613-619.

52 Manly and Richert, op. cit., iii, p. 371 note: see also ii, 38.

53 Ibid, iii, 372 note.

54 Ibid., iii, 374.

55 The indications by Manly and Rickert, and Brown's arguments on the precedence of group d are entirely convincing to me. It may be pointed out, however, that in the passage here discussed there is a slight difficulty. The “revised” version in manuscripts outside of d give an antecedent for the pronoun “hem” in l. 1201, namely “men,” in l. 1197; the presumably original version in the d-group, which places l. 1197 after l. 1201, leaves the pronoun without an antecedent.

56 The themes of shrewishness and jealousy are stressed in the study by William A. Mead, “The Prologue of the Wife of Bath's Tale,” PMLA, xvi (1901), pp. 388-404. Mead cites from the Romance of the Rose the passage (ll. 9340 ff.) based on Theophrastus and implying the marital dilemma (see above), but he makes no rerference to the Tale in connection with it.

57 Brown, PMLA, loc. cit., p. 32; Manly and Rickert, op. cit., ii, 495 ff.

58 “The Evolution of the Canterbury Marriage Group,” PMLA, xlviii (1933), 1041-59.