The Wife of Bath as Chaucerian Subject

The Wife of Bath as Chaucerian Subject H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. University ofCalifornia, Santa Cruz Th,t,sk I am ,bout hm is not to ,u,ck ot defend the drnm,ci, theory-that has already been well done in this session-but to revise it, to reexamine some ofthe issues it raises with an eye to reinterpreting them, to leave behind what seems misleading and to make use in a different way of what still seems valuable. lo particular I want to focus on the issue of the selfor personality-which has always been central to the dramatic theory­ in order to urge a revision of it that will reaffirm its centrality in Chaucer's poem by redefining its nature. 1 The title ofthis chapter conceals, ifthat is the right word, a pun thatmay help define my subject more modestly. It is common nowadays in lin­ guistics, social theory, and some kinds of psychology and philosophy to avoid expressions like "self" and "person" and "living character" and to substitute the term "subject" intheirplace. Oneadvantageofthe substitu­ tion is that the term emphasizes those aspects of an individual's existence that the individual does not originate or fully control, those aspects of experience to which the individual is subject. In modern theory the subject is not conceived as substantial, as a thing, like a rock, but is seen as a position in a larger structure, a site through which various forces pass. One example is the grammatical subject, a place in discourse governed from outside itself by the rules of language, but the psychoanalytic subject, as a location of unconscious desire, and the social subject as an institutional construct-a role, a status, a member of a class-are equally important instances. Insofar as it is possible to make a plausible case for speakers in The Canterbury Tales who seem to reveal more aboutthemselvesthan they know, and insofar as the poem does seem concerned with questions of social relations and social power, both of these perspectives are surely 1 For an earlier attempt toaddress some ofthese issues, see my "The Art oflmpersonation: A General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales," PMLA 95 (1980): 213-24. 201 RECONSTRUCTING CHAUCER appropriate to its study, but that is not my subject here, or at least not all of it. 2 The subject, as construed by the disciplines I have mentioned, is the continually shifting vector product of all the forces in play at the subject site: unconscious desire, concealed or mystified material and social power, the structures of language, and anything else I have left out, including, of course, consciousness. The essentialist view of the self as a substance, something permanent and fundamentally unchanging that "is you,"-or he, or she-which I am questioning,3 is, from this point of view, an illusion. What may seem to consciousness (one's own or another's) a stable and continuous given is in fact a construction and an interpretation whose character is in large part dependent on who or what is doing the construct­ ing and interpreting.4 I make this excursion into the modern theory of the subject because I want to argue that this way of understanding the nature of individuality is already present in Chaucer's text. I am going to make things easy for myself-and incidentally to beg a number of important questions-by taking an example that everyone seems to agree warrants some sort of dramatic reading, whatever that is taken to mean, namely the Wife of Bath's story of her life in her Prologue. If the poem is not exactly a typical tale, it is at least a story of sorts, and, more important for my purposes, it is a conscious and explicit discourse about the self. The reason there is so much agreement that the poem is to be read dramatically is that this is one of the only two fictional performances in the Tales-the other is the Pardoner's5-in which self-presentation is the announced aim of the fic­ tional speaker. The Wife, like the Pardoner, announces that she intends to 2 I have chosen from a vast number of accounts ofthe subject in...