The Loathly Lady as a representative of female sexuality and geo- and socio-politicaldivisions within medieval English society, with special reference to The Wife of Baths Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer.

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DevDutta, B.A. (Hons.) English IInd Year

Roll No. 0877

Topic: The Loathly Lady as a representative of female sexuality and geo- and socio-politicaldivisions within medieval English society, with special reference to The Wife of Bath’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer.

The Hag, or the Loathly Lady has been given various rolesthrough the ages on different levels of perception -as an imbroglio of ideas about gender power contestation,religious ideologies and conflict between urban and pastoralspaces. The loathly lady belongs in the configuration of goddesses who transverse stereotype, a group that includes Demeter, Hecate and Diana. In the rural space, the loathly lady represents ‘magick’ and supernatural wilderness. And therefore is associated with water and with forests.Just as it is typical that Chaucer’s hag meets her knight “under a forest syde”, so too it is in keeping with the genre that he commits his initial act of transgression, the rape of a maiden, as he “cam ridyngefroryver”. The wilderness backdrop is a reminder that tales of the loathly lady tend to offer a distinctive twist to the issue of gender destabilization.

In Chaucer’s tale the knight faced the penalty of death for his crime, although in actual medieval society it was not a crime or even unusual for a high-ranked soldier to rape a lower-class woman. In other tales the noble knight would simply have his way with a maid and go on with his quest, without any words wasted on the morality of the act.‘Dames’ and ‘Ladies’ however were a different class of women and knights were obliged to rescue them from distress, not take advantage of them. In the Wife’s Tale, not only does Chaucer draw attention to the wrongness of the deed of raping, he also seats a court of women in judgment of the knight. It is important however to note that it is a court of noble ladies who sit in judgment, not the victim.Upon being sentenced by this jury, he is sent on what seems like a mock-quest, to find, ‘that which women most desire’. Chaucer seems to suggest that the quest is a difficult one because in Arthurian legends no one bothered to ask women for their opinions. It is quite fitting (and yet ironic) that he should seek the answer to a question posed by the nobility in the wilderness.Susan Carter writes, “The royal court, seat of patriarchal power, counterbalances the wilderness setting. Like the forest, the court is an intrinsic context for the hag,but whereas the wilderness space functions consistently in the varioustales, the court marks the particular agenda of the individual author. Inthis way, Chaucer’s external spaces signal the motif’s tradition, while hiscourt shows his craft in giving the Wife subjectivity.”Alisoun the Wife is offering an alternate worldview to solve real problems of female oppression. She seeks to accomplish this through her Tale, with the aid of legends and the Irish Sovranty Hag. The court represents the seat of masculinity, dominated by Arthur and his Knights in which the ladies are insignificant, but the wild offers an escape from the laws that bind women in society, and also therefore offers a solution to the gender imbalance prevalent within the court in reality. In the wilderness he tries and fails to find a satisfactory answer, till he meets the ‘oldewyf’.

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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” . ...

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