Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature

The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect

Dr Ruth Evans, Ruth Evans, Leslie Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415058193
• eBook ISBN: 9781134931804
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume, designed with the student reader in mind, is an indispensable blend of key essays in the field with specially commissioned new material by feminist scholars from the UK and the US. It includes a diversity of texts and feminist approaches, a substantial and very illuminating introduction by the editors, and an annotated list of Further Reading, offering preliminary guidance to the reader approaching the topic of gender and medieval literature for the first time.
Works and writers covered include:
* Chaucer
* Margery Kempe
* Christine de Pisan
* The Katherine group of Saints' Lives
* Langland's Piers Plowman
* Medieval cycle drama
Students of both medieval and feminist literature will find this an essential work for study and reference.

1 Introduction

Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson

The Wife of Bath and ‘Al Hire Secte’: Medieval Feminists?

It is perhaps no coincidence that one of the earliest anthologies of feminist criticism which included essays on medieval texts was titled The Authority of Experience (edited by Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards, published in 1977 and republished in 1988).¹ This deliberate yoking together of the terms ‘authority’ and ‘experience’ which, according to the logic of ‘patriarchal binary thought’,² are usually maintained as oppositional mimes an apparently similar gesture of feminist defiance by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, whose Prologue opens:

Experience, though noon auctoritee
Were in this world, is right ynogh for me
To speke of wo that is in mariage[.]

(Wife of Bath’s Prologue, 1–3)

The Wife of Bath has sometimes been read as the epitome of a modern feminist, insofar as she claims that experience is the ground of her authority (thus reversing the hierarchy which devalues ‘feminine’ experience and privileges ‘masculine’ authority), takes on the men at their own game of name-dropping (for she does, in fact, flesh out her argument with references to some of the most important medieval authorities), and refuses to be silenced by the patriarchal powers-that-be. Yet to commemorate the Wife as a ‘feminist’ simplifies both history and textuality. On the one hand, ‘feminism’ is not an historically portable term: during the passage of some six hundred years women’s social, legal, cultural and ideological status has shifted considerably, and with it the corresponding modes of resistance. And on the other, the Wife is a textual signifier, an effect of language, whose ‘meaning’, like that of the historically real women with whom she is sometimes compared in this volume, is therefore subject to the play of difference in language itself. The ‘Wife of Bath’ does not have a single ‘meaning’; the diversity of feminist and critical readings of her represented in some of the essays here suggest something of what Mary Carruthers refers to as her ‘power’,³ but which could alternatively be read as her signifying surplus. One purpose of this collection is to explore that surplus in various fictions and representations of the Middle Ages.

The Wife is the focal point for this volume even though she is emphatically not the whole story. Around her cluster a number of issues central to the rereading in feminist terms of the Middle Ages. One issue is how to negotiate the alterity of the medieval past and attend to the meaning of its specific historical systems of difference. Another is how to interpret the various acts of medieval ventriloquism: the female voices which proceed, for the most part, from male authors. Such voices, like the Wife’s, are equivocal. They do not wholly speak from the place of their male authors, since the meanings they embody are cultural rather than the sole property of individual authors, yet neither can they be romanticised as the repressed and marginalised voices of women from the past. Recognition of the cultural meanings that are spoken through female voices can be a starting place for the exploration of forms of power and power relations in the Middle Ages.

To think about how a voice like the Wife of Bath’s might constitute a point of resistance is to move away from naïve readings of her as either a militant feminist or as trapped in the prison-house of masculinist ideology, towards a strategic exploration of how medieval subjects, female and male, are caught up in systems of power relations. Our own practice, as editors and critics, is very much shaped by a broadly post-structuralist view of the relationship between power and knowledge, language and textuality. Such a view is still often regarded by recalcitrant medievalists as incommensurate with the traditional business of medieval scholarship, yet it necessarily involves close exploration of cultural and historical meanings. Our understanding of what it means to ‘historicise’ a text thus relies absolutely on the empirical evidence provided by scholarship, but does not treat such empirical material in an empiricist fashion, as a form of ‘hard data’ about which no further questions can be asked. 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.

One way of historicising the Wife’s performance is to ask, for example, if there was a phenomenon identifiable as ‘feminism’ in the Middle Ages. Chaucer’s Clerk appears to give support to the idea that the Wife is part of a sisterhood when he cites her as the dedicatee of his final song, offered

for the Wyves love of Bathe –

Whos lyf and al hire secte God mayntene

In heigh maistrye…

(Clerk’s Tale, 1170–2)

But who or what is the ‘secte’ referred to here? The word ‘secte’ occurs only four times in Chaucer’s work (or possibly five if the English translation of the Romaunt de la Rose is his work),⁴ but the resonances of the word in this context are difficult to pin down with any certainty. The editors of the Riverside Chaucer give their readers the following range of meanings, none of which they fore-ground as an interpretation in this instance: ‘category of persons [as applied to followers of different methodologies or schools]; sex; oath-helper; lawsuit’.⁵ Yet from the other collectivities (‘archwyves’ (1195); ‘sklendre wyves’ (1198)) singled out for address by the Clerk in the song dedicated to the Wife of Bath and company of pilgrims it seems possible that some kind of company of wives is being invoked here, but what status does this ‘secte’ have?

The Wife herself does not claim allegiance to any female ‘secte’ in her Prologue. She mentions her ‘gossib’, but does not conjure up the image of any kind of female countersphere in her mode of address. Feminism as a political practice in the twentieth century grounded itself, initially at least, in an essentialist notion of ‘sexual identity’: an identity which would allow women to organise themselves politically as a unified group to combat male oppression. The possibility of constructing a unified group on the grounds of ‘womanhood’ has been very much challenged on theoretical grounds since the late 1970s,⁶ yet it remains the case that a feminist politics must ground itself in some sort of idea of collective identity. Yet the Wife’s performance does not openly allude to any late fourteenth-century concept of a political programme committed to a struggle against all forms of female subordination, nor is there any historical evidence to suggest that any such programme existed. The rise of groups such as the beguines (lay women in Northern Europe in the thirteenth century who organised themselves in what might loosely be called religious collectives, outside the authority of the medieval Church) or the women committed to preaching and teaching in the English Lollard conventicles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries⁷ could be understood in this way, but the explicit alignment of such groups with religious causes complicates the political issues involved, and raises questions about the very different historical conceptualisation of the opposition between the individual and the group in the Middle Ages.⁸

Similarly, the efforts of Christine de Pisan in the early fifteenth century to protest, via her writings, about the virulent misogyny of the European secular literary tradition could be hailed as a feminist gesture, but again only at the risk of oversimplifying issues which make her texts very much open to plural readings: her aristocratic subject-position, the political effects of her interventions, and the act of inserting herself into a prestigious masculine textual tradition of ‘trafficking in women’, an act which is simultaneously an exceptional entrée to an élite male club and a subversion of its very credentials. The scene of women versus clerks is a powerful antagonistic dynamic in the late Middle Ages: Christine de Pisan’s opposition to the clerical monopoly of culture thus makes her outwardly one of the Wife’s party, but it is a similarity which may obscure the differences between their tactics and voices.

The Wife, after all, appears in a specific discourse: a secular narrative poem written by a man, namely Chaucer. The textual dynamics suggest that when the Clerk aligns her with a ‘secte’ the Wife is ‘named’ rather than ‘naming’ herself. A male cleric is given the last word on the Wife, however much this is ironised by the writer who takes immediate responsibility for her creation. It might be argued that both Chaucer and the Clerk are ‘trafficking in women’ here: both are making their textual mark by dealing in textual representations of women and reworking commonplaces about collectivities of womanhood: good women; bad women; wives. ‘Sectes’ make good literary currency for male authors.

Yet to hear the Wife’s voice only as the product of a chorus of male narrators is to arrive at an impasse that belongs to the early phase of feminist theory of the 1970s: that of seeing women as victims of patriarchy. More recent phases of feminist literary criticism are interested in how textual representations are the site where women can fight back. One way of doing this is to point out that phallocentric discourses and knowledges, like medieval anti-feminism, depend on images and metaphors of women to support and legitimate their speculations, something explicitly signalled in the Wife’s performance. The binary oppositions of sexual difference which such discourses try to nail in place can be shown to undo themselves continually: the ‘secte’ of dominant wives conjured up at the end of the Clerk’s Tale is itself composed of differences (‘archwyves’ and ‘sklendre wyves’), an observation which might be used to question the unity of this collective alignment, and the clerical voice itself is not anyway a single voice on the subject of women. Actually it is not altogether clear who is speaking here.⁹ To explore this area is to move from a feminist critique of man-made images, a critique which is nevertheless still indispensable to gender-conscious medievalists, to an analysis of the slipperiness of the terms involved in making such images, and thus to go some way towards undoing the fictions which have kept, and which still keep, the hierarchic oppositions of the Western (male) philosophical tradition in place.

The Wife of Bath and ‘Al Hire Secte’: Feminist Medievalists?

Feminist medievalists make use of many of the tools of contemporary feminist literary theory, and engage with similar debates: how and why women have gained access to learning and culture (and which women have done so); how they have been excluded; how male authors have represented women; the question of the difference of women’s writing; the kinds of meanings, recuperable for a feminist politics today, that can be released from medieval texts. However, these questions have to be asked rather differently by medievalists, because of the particular historical features of the period: few and imperfect documentary resources with which to construct an archaeology of the text; a preponderance of male readers and authors, albeit a fraction of the male population (though a number of volumes on medieval women writers offer a corrective to the notion that only men wielded the pen in this period); a memory culture, in which there is residual orality and restricted access to literacy; and the mysterious and omnipresent ‘anon.’, who makes the sex of the authorial ‘presence’ so much more equivocal than in later periods. On the other hand feminist medievalists are well-placed to treat literary texts as cultural phenomena and not as products of a privileged discourse, because of the well-established practice in medieval studies of analysing texts from both high and popular culture, such as conduct literature, penitential manuals, and scriptural commentaries, that fall out of the literary frame in other periods. The interdisciplinarity which is a feature of the institution of medieval ‘literature’ has facilitated certain kinds of culturally based feminist inquiry.

It is difficult to characterise the history of feminist criticism of the Middle Ages, or to give a comprehensive overview of work currently being done. Its texts are dispersed across a range of disciplines: some of the most visible, high-profile work has been in the field of history: in the work of scholars such as Susan Mosher Stuard, Martha Howell and Judith Bennett, in which feminist theory has informed vital empirical research, or in the work of the prominent social historian Caroline Walker Bynum on gendered readings of bodies, food and spirituality in the Middle Ages. It is as well to be aware that Bynum’s critical and methodological assumptions have recently received some well-aimed criticism, notably in the 1993 issue of Speculum. Such criticism is inevitable, given Bynum’s status as an almost-establishment figure and the continued need of a feminist critical practice to review its politics, yet this does not in itself invalidate the importance of her material for literary scholars, particularly those interested in medieval bodies and sexuality. The important collection Women and Power in the Middle Ages (edited by Mary Erhler and Maryanne Kowaleski in 1988) addressed readers of both history and literature. The picture is anyway one of uneven development, to borrow Mary Poovey’s formulation for another historical period.¹⁰ There has been a great deal of very sophisticated feminist work on Chaucer (Carolyn Dinshaw, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Louise Fradenburg); much less, for various institutional reasons, on other areas such as the medieval drama.¹¹

This volume deliberately does not set out to offer either a coherent narrative of that critical history from the 1970s to the present or a series of new essays on the cutting edge of high theory. In this collection we are reprinting three essays (by Mary Carruthers, Sheila Delany, and Susan Schibanoff), and printing six others for the first time. The intention is to offer a small corpus of more, and less, recent essays which illustrate some of the methods of analysis of immediate usefulness for feminist readers who might be encouraged to try them out on medieval texts other than those specifically discussed here, and to suggest something of the scenes of debate within the field of medieval literary studies which provide a context for these strategies of discussion and analysis. This introduction maps out some of these scenes, but is not itself outside them. We recognise here elements of the ‘Caxton problematic’, noticed by Susan Schibanoff:¹² that in interposing/imposing ourselves between essays and readers, we are seeking to fix our map of the field as we want it to be fixed. But our voices are not the last word: they are part of a debate.

There is, however, one thing which all the contributors here are agreed upon, more or less explicitly: that phenomena such as anti-feminism, ‘courtly love’ and mysticism (to name only some of the more problematic areas) are not just inscribed in medieval texts but are linked, though not in obvious or reflective ways, to historical practices which had (and continue to have) very real political consequences. A feminist reading is nothing if not a practice, with significant political and institutional effects.

These effects are now being felt within the context of the institution of medieval studies, which has its own history and its own paradigms of reading and interpretation. In the late 1960s and 1970s, when feminism as a political movement was beginning to have an impact on the academy, there were two dominant paradigms in the study of medieval literary texts: a Robertsonian exegetical hermeneutic, whereby all fictional narratives, no matter how secular, were read as moral allegories, ultimately revelatory of Christian Caritas; and the paradigm of empirical scholarship, in which an almost-fetishism for uncovering the ‘facts’ about a text rendered questions about the political significance of those facts irrelevant or simply not of concern to medievalists.¹³ Both the Robertsonian and the scholarship approaches are inherently conservative; together their hold on the institution of medieval literary criticism, on its learned journals, its matrix of critical studies, its textbooks and its conferences, has made it deeply resistant to new critical methods and to the intellectual challenges posed by the newer disciplines, including feminism.

In a fairly unassuming way, Mary Carruthers broke new ground when her essay, ‘The Wife of Bath and the painting of lions’, first appeared in 1979. In order to understand something of the ground-breaking nature of her essay, we can read her ‘Afterword’ (newly written for this volume...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Wife of Bath and the painting of lions
• 3. Engendering pity in the Franklin’s Tale
• 4. Sexual economics, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe
• 5. Mysticism and hysteria: the histories of Margery Kempe and Anna O.
• 6. Body politics: engendering medieval cycle drama
• 7. Lady Holy Church and Meed the Maid: re-envisioning female personifications in Piers Plowman
• 8. The Virgin’s Tale
• 9. Reincarnations of Griselda: contexts for the Clerk’s Tale?
• 10. ‘Taking the gold out of Egypt’: the art of reading as a woman
• List of further reading
• Index