by Marites Bundoc
Let me begin this discussion with the question: Who is a liberated woman? The picture of a liberated woman seems peculiar when we look at her in the light of the medieval culture of the Arthurian Romances, where woman was supposed to be subservient to her lord, as we saw in Lady Bertilak. In The Canterbury Tales, on the other hand, the image of woman is one who is more independent and surer of herself. Thus, I will argue here that Chaucer’s woman is liberated, ahead of her time.
The characters in the story are pilgrims on their journey to Canterbury in England. On their way to their pilgrimage, they stay the night in an inn and there, they tell stories to while away the time. One of these pilgrims is a good-looking well-dressed woman. Lines 455 – 461 of The General Prologue give us a description of her:
Hir coverchiefs ful fine were of ground –
I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound
That on a Sonday weren upon hir heed. Hir hosen were of fin
scarlet reed, / Ful straite yteyd, and shoes ful moiste and newe.
Bold was hir face and fair and reed of hewe (Damrosh and Dettmar
2010 340). We also know that she is a respectable woman, married five times.
“She was a worthy woman al hir lie:/ Housebondes at chirche dore she hadde five/ Without other compaignye in youthe” – (Ins, lines 461 – 3) (340). We know, further, that she is well-travelled. And thrice had she been at Jerusalem;
She had passed many a strange streem;
At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne,
In Galice at Saint jame, and at Coloigne:
She coude muchel of wandering by the waye (lines 465 – 9).
She apparently had the means to travel, too. Her husbands must have been moneyed. And we are also told that she is a woman of the world:
Upon an ambler, easily she sat
Ywimpled wel, and on hir heed an hat/
A brood as is a bokeler or a targe
A foot-mantel about hir hipes large
And on hir feet a pair of spores sharpe.
In felawshipe wel coude she laugh and carpe; [an image of a carefree woman, not coy or demure]
Of remedies of love, she knew parchaunce,
For she coude of that art the olde daunce (lines 471 – 8) (2010 340).
In a frame story – a narrative that frames or surrounds another story or set of stories (Liberal Arts 2023) like Scheherazade’s stories in A Thousand and One Nights, this lady pilgrim tells of a woman in King Arthur’s court, where the judge at this time of the assembly is Queen Guinevere. A question is put forth before a knight: What do women love? If he cannot answer this question, the knight will be punished, possibly with banishment from the kingdom. There is this woman present in the court who is not so young but not so old either who saves the knight by teaching him the answer. The deal is she teaches him about what women want and in return, he marries her. He agrees (lines 1029 – 78) (Damrosch and Dettmar 398 – 399). And the answer is found in lines 1043 – 4:
My lige lady, generally,” quod he,
Wommen desire to have sovereinetee
As wel over hir housbonde as hir love,
In “The Problem of Defining Sovereynetee in The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Susan Sara Thomas delineates the two sovereigns in Arthur’s court as Guinevere, Arthur’s queen, and the old lady the knight meets on his quest. The label placed on the other woman character is wyf. Unlike the typical wife in medieval romances, this wyf is the one who takes mastery over her husband. She wins him by her eloquence of rhetoric and by means of persuasion. She is a double of the wealthy woman of the world who knows the ways of men in the General Prologue. When the knight spends all his time reading to her about the transgresses of women in the Bible, she pretends to faint and falls and, when her husband catches her, she hits him and he falls. This maneuver is symbolic of the triumph of woman over man in a man vs. man conflict. Thomas says that “although she appears to be an abject being [old],the wyf turns out to be a figure of extraordinary dominion and mastery” because her husband, the knight, submits to her “sovereignty (Thomas).”
What is sovereignty in matters of love and, particularly, within a romance genre?
Gabriel Marcel (qtd in Thomas) confronts these issues in the statement “I belong to you” as meaning:
“I am opening an unlimited credit account in your name; you can do what
You want with me; I give myself to you. This does not mean, at least not
In principle: I am your slave; on the contrary, I freely put myself in your hands.
The best use of my freedom is to place it in your hands; it is as though I freely
Substituted your freedom for my own; or paradoxically, it is by that very
substitution that I realize my freedom (Marcel).”
The word maistrie in “Thanne have I gete of your maistrie?” has the primary meaning of control, dominance, rulership while in “haven maistrie,” its sense is “to prevail, win the victory, or be victorious” (Thomas).
This brings us back to the question of sovereignty. Does the wyf in the tale want sovereignty as in government’s rulership over their subjects or does she desire sovereignty through independence and self-control (Thomas)? If we go back to the woman telling the tale, she defines sovereynetee in her sermon as the ability to “define, and, thus, control, one’s own desires” (par 6).
So, it is in everyone’s grasp, then, to be master of themselves. In this tale, the pilgrim tells us, through the Wife of Bath, and through her own experiences, that woman does not have to be subservient to man but have her own identity and be master of her own destiny. Her characterization and that of the wyf, and even the queen’s presiding over Arthur’s court as judge, place woman ahead of the Middle Ages time. They foreshadow the Women’s Liberation Movement, a political alignment of women and feminist intellectualism which came to the fore in the 1960’s and continued into the 1980’s essentially in the industrialized nations of the Western world (Wikipedia ). To recall, the goal of the movement was to secure emancipation from male supremacy. in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, feminism as a movement also aligned with the civil rights movement and call for equal pay between the sexes, as well as give voice to females and non-binary individuals (Stevens pp. 220-1).
Works Cited
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The General Prologue. The Canterbury Tales. Damrosch, David and Kevin J. H. Dettmar. editors, The Longman Anthology of British Literature: The Middle Ages. 4th ed., vol. 1A, Pearson, 2010.
Liberal Arts. “Frame Story.” Liberal Arts. https://www.liberalarts.oregonstate.edu, Accessed 31 January 2023.
Stevens, Anne H. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Introduction. 2nd ed., Broadview Press, 2021.
Thomas, Susanne Sara. “The Problem of Defining Sovereynetee in the Wife of Bath’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review, vol. 41, no. 1. The Pennsylvania State University, 2006, Accessed 31 January 2023.
Wikipedia. “Women’s Liberation Movement.” Wikipedia, https://www.en.m.wikipedia.org, Accessed 31 January 2023.
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