Queering Genres, Battering Males: The Wife of Bath's Narrative Violence

Queering Genres, Battering Males: The Wife of Bath's Narrative Violence Tison Pugh Why does the Wife of Bath tell a romance? This question is virtually a critical cliché, but for good reason: "The General Prologue," the pilgrims' prologues, and the narratives preceding her tale establish the expectation that she will tell a tale suited to her social class and vocation. As even the most casual reader of The Canterbury Tales cannot help but observe, the speaker of a tale generally chooses a genre that reflects his or her character : in the majority of the tales, the speaker's economic class or vocation relates at least peripherally to the genre of his/her tale.1 The Wife of Bath, however, disrupts this pattern: although her "Prologue" establishes her as a bawdy and raucous figure, on a similar economic level of such other fabliau -tellers as the Miller and the Merchant, she breaks from her socioeconomic position to tell a romance rather than a fabliau. Furthermore, Alison 's "Prologue" and "Tale" are virtually surrounded by fabliaux.2 They must follow the texts of the introductory Fragment I, which contains the Miller's and the Reeve's fabliaux, and they immediately precede the fabliaux of Fragment III, "The Friar's Tale" and "The Summoner's Tale."3 Given her social position, her bawdy temperament, and her place in the overarching narrative of The Canterbury Tales, it seems much more likely that Alison would tell a fabliau than a romance.4 Indeed, scholarship has established that readers who are surprised by the Wife of Bath's romance and who expect her to tell a fabliau are perJNT : Journal of Narrative Theory 33.2 (Summer 2003): 115-142. Copyright © 2003 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 116 J N T ceptive to Chaucer's own authorial editing: "The Shipman's Tale," a fabliau , appears to have been Chaucer's first choice for Alison's tale, which he later replaced with a romance (Pratt 47). Helen Cooper observes the generic appropriateness of the fabliau for Alison and argues that the choice of a romance humanizes the bawdiness of her character: "The fabliau of 'The Shipman's Tale' that was apparently once intended for her, with its venal wife getting the better of her unsuspecting husband, would have been a more obvious fit. By giving her a romance, Chaucer adds another side to her character: she is an incurable romantic" (156). A more moderate view of Alison describes her as "an equalitarian moral revolutionary " (Long 282). But can we really see the Wife of Bath either as an incurable romantic or as any type of moralist? Her utilitarian, sexually rapacious and economically motivated views of sex and marriage reveal her to be a lusty yet hard-minded woman, not a helpless romantic aquiver with lofty ideals of love.5 Given her earthiness and her hungry focus on fulfilling her sexual appetites, Chaucer appears to be preparing Alison to narrate a tale matching her own lascivious lifestyle, but then pulls the rug from under his audience's feet. Through this toying with readerly expectations of genre, Chaucer explores the tensions and fault lines of the courtly genre of romance when it is spoken by a character more appropriately located in the world of fabliau . The two genres oppose each other in virtually every feature: romances depict stories of courtly love and chivalry, set in the past, with noble characters engaging in noble actions; fabliaux offer tales of unlicensed sexuality, set in the present, with base characters acting basely.6 These definitions of the two central terms of this inquiry may appear excessively brief and marked by broad assumptions, and recent scholarship has investigated fault lines within these definitions. However, these brief definitions capture the tropes of the genres within the dynamics of the storytelling competition in The Canterbury Tales, in which only male characters have told tales prior to Alison. Within the fictions of the pilgrimage, men control and, in effect, create the parameters of all genres for this unique discourse community because no woman has yet narrated a tale. To defeat the romance and the men who represent a romantic ethos, Alison must assail the masculine...