By her beastly look, it becomes apparent that the loathly lady belongs in the wilderness. She takes on the role of a hunter who knows the predicament that the errant knight is in, and seizes the opportunity, and with ulterior motives come to the aid of the desperate man, the hunter on the quest, looking for an answer. Carter writes regarding the knight’s quest,“The rapist knight must go the long way round the woods to gain his wisdom, and the hag tellshim this in somewhat enigmatic words, rising towards him and declaring,“Sire knyght, heer forth ne lith no wey” . When the ‘oldewyf’ rises to prohibit the knight from the forest, she is acting accordingto earlier models of loathly lady tales, in which the forest shows its feminineand magical attributes as it excludes the males from its precincts,directing them towards the hag who will test them.” The knight’s subjugation to the loathly lady’s wishes is a curious reversal of the earlier situation in which a maiden was subjugated by the knight. Upon reaching the court he gives the correct answer to the queen -
“Wommendesiren to have sovereynetee
As wel over hirhousbond as hir love,
And for to been in maistriehym above.”
The silence of the court is taken as acceptance of the knight’s answer, and thereby the female psyche (as seen by Chaucer) is revealed. Having been subject to ceaseless oppression under the laws of Church and Court, it is understandable that women’s deepest desire is revealed by an agency outside the purview of either. The Hag belongs to the faerie-world predating Christianity and to the unknown wilderness untouched by expanding pastoral and urban spaces. Once the knight has fulfilled his quest for the court, however, his inner quest for wisdom is still incomplete. Therefore the loathly lady comes up to him in the court and in lieu of his promise, wishes for him to take heras his wife.Bound by his promise, the knight must swallow his pride and loathing.
Herein begins the true lesson of whatsovereignty means to women. When the two are in bed and contemplating the act ofconsummation, the hag asks him why he is so aloof (although perhaps in full knowledge of the reasons) and the knight responds with what can be seen as the stereotypical expectations of a man from a woman. He laments that she is old, ugly and of low birth, and so he would rather die than make love to her. Having eked out his prejudices from his own mouth, she proceeds to torture him further, by saying that she could amend all this in three days provided he behaves well towards her. The notion of three days is a reference to Christ’s resurrection, and therefore a statement of her power to transform. It is a subtle weaving of Christian logic into pagan myth, albeit with a hint of irony because her actual transformation takes very little time.
The Hag then criticises his notion of nobility as shallow and worthless. It was, and is, the norm to judge people of rich families as noble and chivalric. The ‘oldewyf’ seeks to impress upon the court that Christian doctrine dictates that only through one’s deeds in public and private can one’s nobility be bequeathed by Christ upon men and women, not by one’s ancestors.
"Heere may ye se wel how that genterye
Is nat annexed to possessioun,
Sith folk ne doonhiroperacioun
Alwey, as dooth the fyr, lo, in his kynde.
For, God it woot, men may wel often fynde A lordessone do shame and vileynye;”
This is a scathing remark on the knight’s own dishonourable behaviour in raping a helpless maiden. From a social standpoint, this can be read as the bourgeoisie speaking against the condescending attitude of the aristocracy.
The sermon then moves onto poverty, another class signifier. The Hag once again points out the voluntary life of poverty that Christ led. She makes an observation that is perhaps wasted on the knight – that a pauper content with his lot is spiritually richer than a man who covets wealth outside of his reach. After continuing this lengthy sermonawhile she gives the knight a choice- To either have her ugly and old, but a humble and true wife, or to have her beautiful, young and independent with questionable fidelity. Here the man is given to choose between satisfying his sexual needs or his expectations from a wife. Unable to decide, the knight gives the choice to his wife. The knight’s response is the key part of the tale’s redemption. Compliancewith female demands is inherent in the loathly lady motif, and this aspectis what makes it so suitable for the Wife’s discussion of marriage. This transfer ofchoice to her hands was precisely what she, as a representative of female sexuality, wanted. In his essay on the Fertility Myth and Female Sovereignty in the Marriage of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell, John Bugge argues that the woman’s sexual satisfaction, which had been ignored in ancient times, had begun to gain importance because of the advent of the ‘two-seed’ theory in medieval times. It gave importance to a woman’s ease and active participation in coitus for healthy child-bearing.Bugge also adds that in the Wife of Bath’s Tale and The Weddynge of Sir Gawain,it is an interesting paradox that granting sovereignty to the wife ensured that “she obeyed hym in every thing” thereby the social norm and marital harmony was preserved by the granting of equal sexual rights.
The closure of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, in consistency with other loathly lady tales, shows that female control rewards the male once he is willing to step outside the stricture of role play.Within a political context, the wife’s demand for sovereignty represents the demand of the pastoral space for acceptance from, and equality with the urban space, instead of mere exploitation and consumption. Since a figure of Irish myth from pre-colonial times is acting as the medium, it is fairly obvious that the advent of colonial absorption by the English Kingdom prevalent in Chaucer’s times was being cautioned. But given the resolution of the differences between the ‘oldewyf’ and the knight, it seems that the geopolitical expansion of English territory was expected to be reformed rather than dissuaded. Patricia Clare Ingham writes, “Thus the Wife of Bath’s Tale offers a view of the convergence of, andnot an opposition between, the body of the beloved and the territories ofthe world. Of course, colonial intimacy also marks such aconvergence.In the intimacy of the colonial setting, love and rule combine.”
UItimately it is the blurring and resolution of gender, class and socio-political divides that The Loathly Lady seeks, through the medium of otherworldly tales linked to reality, as narrated by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.
Bibliography:
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Susan Carter, Beastly Bride and Hunter Hunted: What Lies behind Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale (TheChaucer Review, Vol. 37, No. 4, 2003)
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John Bugge, Fertility Myth and Female Sovereignty in The Weddynge of Sir Gawen and Dame Ragnell (TheChaucer Review, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2004)
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Patricia Clare Ingham, Pastoral Histories: Utopia, Conquest and the Wife of Bath’s Tale (Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2002)
- G.L. Kittredge, Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage (Modern Philology Vol. 9, No. 4, University of Chicago Press, 1912)
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Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, ed. Harriet Raghunathan (Worldview Publications, 2002)