Return to Chaucer ScriptoriumRuth Evans and Lesley Johnson, Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect.
by Mary Ellen Havens
Evans, Ruth and Lesley Johnson, eds. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect. New York: Routledge, 1994 (257 pages).
General Overview:
This volume is a collection of essays, some of which were published previously as long ago as 1979. Titles of the nine chapters, and contributors to the volume, are: The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions (Mary Carruthers, NYU); Engendering Pity in the Franklin's Tale (Felicity Riddle, University of York); Bodying Politics: Engendering Medieval Cycle Drama (Ruth Evans, University of Wales College of Cardiff); Mysticism and Hysteria: the Histories of Margery Kempe and Anna O. (Julia Long, Cambridge); The Virgin's Tale (Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, University of Liverpool); Lady Holy Church and Meed the Maid: Re-envisioning female personifications in Piers Plowman (Colette Murphy, Royal Bridewell Hospital School); 'Taking the gold out of Egypt': The Art of Reading as a Woman (Susan Schibanoff, University of New Hampshire); Sexual Economics, Chaucer's Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe (Sheila Delany, Simon Fraser University); and Reincarnations of Griselda: Contexts for the Clerk's Tale? (Lesley Johnson, University of Leeds)
Editors' Introduction to the Book:
The editors'dual interests are illuminated by the sub-headings within the introduction: The Wife of Bath and 'Al hire secte': Medieval Feminists? and The Wife of Bath and 'Al hire secte': Feminist Medievalists?. They acknowledge that feminism is not an historically portable term, yet recognize that modern critics have frequently attempted, with varying degrees of success, to impose twentieth-century political ambitions and psychological states upon The Wife of Bath character, as well as other medieval writers and literary creations. Their own theoretical underpinnings are assuredly post-structuralist, a view they concede is still often regarded by recalcitrant medievalists as incommensurate with the traditional business of medieval scholarship. However, as they point out, To historicise is both to seek for historical meanings and to recognise the limits of those meanings. A post-structuralist understanding of language acknowledges that meanings are plural, and are thus constantly open to revision (2). The introduction includes useful overviews of each chapter.
Synopsis of Chapter: The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions
Mary Carruthers' essay, first published in PMLA in 1979, drew heated response from several directions: attacks came from conservative Chaucerians who remain deeply resistant to new critical methods...including feminism, but also from Marxists and men taking a feminist position(7). This gap in time allows her to tack on an Afterward in which she reflects on both the responses and literary criticism and theory in general.
Carruthers focuses on the word Experience as indicating not just the W of B's personal marriage experience, but extrapolating outward to encompass her whole social class, the bourgeoisie engaged in trade (23). She identifies her as not a weaver but a capitalist clothier, and, as such, she could well have been a wealthy and independent women in her own right. Her main points of discussion:
Medieval deportment books (reflect more the male writers' wishful thinking than reality)
Contrast between common law and custom (custom usually prevailed)
Root of marital maistrye=economic control; love and economics have a proper relationship
(Jankyn--all aucutoritee and no experience)
Wife's Tale not a wishful alternative to her Prologue
(she understands both delights and untruths of lion painting
One of the strengths of this volume is its offering of innovative, gendered approaches to texts that have not, until recently, received these types of readings. A certain caution in steamrolling through with--for instance, psychoanalytic--readings imposed on such a distant and psychologically different period is needed.
Return to WSU Chaucer
Page.