Wife of Bath Discussion- Class today

For class today- Group into small groups of 3-4.. go through the following questions: 

1. In her prologue, the Wife of Bath selectively reconstructs and presents her own life. What does she include, and what might she have left out?
   Does she accept any responsibility for her life and its troubles, or does she simply shift the blame onto her husbands, ‘men’ in general, or ‘women’ in general?
   What does the Wife depict as the male world-view, and how does it compare with what she presents as the female world-view? Is this a genuinely female view, or just her own, and if it is, why would she want to present it as that of ‘women’? Is it possible, in the late fourteenth century, to envisage a ‘female’ world at all?
   Is the Wife’s experience comparable to that of the other female pilgrims, the nun and the prioress?
   The Wife implies that she is uttering universal truths – are her words applicable today?
   Whose secrets is the Wife revealing – her own, her husbands’, or those of men/women in general, or all/none of these?
2. How does the Wife use language – does she succeed in turning the language of male dominance against itself, or does she simply present herself as guilty of all the ‘sins’ and failings which men (and priests in particular) allege? Is she a good theologian, or a good preacher? How does language prevent gender equality?
   What might be the impact of the Wife’s revelation that she (and every woman) is a gossip and a liar on the credibility of her story?
   What is the Wife’s attitude to the clergy, and does she reveal anything about a lay woman’s piety? Is Jankin himself an indictment of the clergy, or of clerical authority?
3. What authority does the Wife claim (she could be compared with the second nun and the prioress in this respect), and why does she claim experience over learning?
   Is this a carnivalesque ‘world upside down’, and if it is, does it represent a serious threat to authority?
   Is the Wife saying that learning is, or has become, divorced from real life?
4. What is the relationship between sex and violence in the Wife’s story, and how does this relate to the sex and violence (in this case, rape) in her Tale? Is Alison a ‘battered wife’, and what are the social and psychological points being made about this? Is this related to the male’s insistence upon linguistic and discursive dominance over the female? If the female body is text, what does Jankin’s, and the knight’s, violence represent?
5. The Tale centres around rape – is Alison implying that the forced marriage of a twelve-year-old girl is rape, in which Church and society both collude (this can be compared with the marriage of May and January in the Merchant’s Tale)? Can Alison be said to have ‘raped’ her old husbands? Is the implication that rape is a crime born of frustration and social exclusion – the young knight has no defined status – and is this how the knight feels he needs to prove himself? Therefore – who is to blame for this; the individual, society, the Church, the romance genre (which stresses the need for a young man of high status to prove himself as a lover), upbringing (in the chivalric tradition of winning honour by violence, and courtly love), or an unrealisable ideal?
6. Is the Wife’s prologue a sermon, a confession, an autobiography, an alternative hagiography (saint’s life), an exemplum (story illustrating a moral example), or what?
7. Why does the Wife choose an Arthurian romance – for example, is a sign of her middle-class aspirations? In what ways does the Tale take up the themes from the Wife’s prologue?
8. Does the knight get the punishment he deserves, or is he rewarded, with the collusion of the queen and her ladies, for raping the girl? Is the rape undone by the conclusion?
9. What DO women most desire? Is it what any of the women in the Tale say it is, or is it innocence, purity, childhood (as is possible with the prioress)? Could it be all of them at once. Does this imply that the Canterbury pilgrims are searching for these things also; that is, for a return to the Garden of Eden? Is Chaucer? Are we all?

After you are done, take out your literary theory questions and use these to go through the Wife's Prologue and Tale.. Use Formalism, Archetypal and Marxism... 

Read the Miller's Tale for Friday