"(Mann, 19)
Thus, the discourse of the Wife of Bath should be seen rather in this light, than as an antifeminist one. In fact, her prologue is to be read rather like a purposeful unmasking of the many antifeminist stereotypes circulated in that epoch. As Jill Mann has noted, the fact that the Wife of Bath recounts all the things that her husbands have told her, the specific nagging that takes place between men and women:
That is, she [the Wife of Bath] does not live in the insulated laboratory world of literature, where she is no more than a literary object, unconscious of the interpretations foisted upon her; she is conceived as a woman who lives in the real world, in full awareness of the antifeminist literature that purports to describe and criticize her behavior, and she has an attitude to it just as it has an attitude to her." (Mann, 64)
The Wife of Bath argues, as the Old Woman of the Romance, in favor for the same naturalness, that every woman should follow. She intentionally uses many Biblical texts, which she interprets in such a manner as to effectively support her own argument. In this way she attacks the basic source of moral- the clergy, and proposes that the Bible does not say anything against more lawful marriages or in favor of virginity:
Where can you see in any manner age
That high God defended marr age
By express word? I pray you telleth me.
Or where commanded he virginity?
A wot as well as you (it is no dread)
The apostle, when he speaks of maidenhead,
He said that precept thereof had he none." (Chaucer, 121)
As Mann observed what the Wife of Bath does, according to her own statement is to "assert her 'experience' against written 'auctoritee'"(Mann, 59), thus reinterpreting many of the well-known stereotypes about women in her age. She goes against Jerome's metaphors for virginity and sinfulness: wheat-bread, barley bread and dung:
n'ill envy no virginity.
I'll persevere; I am not prec ous.
In wifehood will I use mine instrument
As freely as my Maker has it sent." (Chaucer, 122)
The Wife of Bath seems to have followed the Old Woman's advice very well, as she proves in her account of how she profited from all her husbands:
But by my fay, I told of it no store:
They had me given their land and their treasure,
Me needed not do longer diligence
To win their love, or do them reverence.
They lov'd me so well, by God above,
That I ne told no dainty of their love." (Chaucer, 124)
As it is seen in both texts, the art of love presupposes much more pretending than any true loving. Both the Wife and Bath and the Old Woman argue in favor of the lack of actual feeling:
Upon my soul, if I had been wise, I could have been a very rich woman, for great men courted me when I was pretty and charming, and I had some of them firmly in my toils. But by the faith I owe God and Saint Thibaut, when I had taken from them, I gave away everything to a scoundrel who put me to great shame but whom I loved the best."
As Mann proposes, Chaucer's text goes beyond the antifeminist tradition mainly because of the structure that the Wife of Bath uses in her prologue: on the one hand she speaks her own liberal views on love and marriage, which are in perfect accordance with those in the Romance of the Rose, and on the other hand she also reveals the permanent nagging that she had suffered from her husbands. In this way she proves to be aware of the antifeminist literature surrounding her, and thus Chaucer departs from the former idea that the woman is a symbol of deceitfulness and betrayal:
Her long speech is almost entirely made up of the commonplaces of antifeminist tradition, presented as what her husbands allegedly said to her. This is emphasized by the obsessive repetition in varied forms of the phrase 'thou seyst' ('seistow', 'thou seydest'); it recurs twentyfive times in all in nearly a hundred and fifty lines. Almost all the Wife's tirade against her husbands, apart from the first twelve lines, is reported speech nothing other than what they are supposed to have said to...
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