https://orcid.org/0009-0003-8701-6629
ABSTRACT
Since the Wife of Bath’s initial appearance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, readers in different eras have often found her to be—in the words of John Dryden—“too licentious,” in terms of both the topics she discusses and her frankness in discussing them. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century adapters and modernizers working with the Wife of Bath’s Prologue responded to this perceived licentiousness in different ways. This article examines two eighteenth-century ballads: The Wanton Wife of Bath and a later Scottish variant The Wife of Beith. By shifting the focus from the Wife of Bath’s sexual unruliness to her vocal unruliness, and, later, to her status as an old woman, these ballads mark the Wife as a socially obscene figure in need of correction. Deploying misogynistic and ageist tropes, these ballads respond to an ongoing eighteenth-century preoccupation with controlling women’s voices and lives, a preoccupation reflected in popular novels, conduct books, and periodicals of the time. This preoccupation continues to this day.
- Award Group:
- Funder(s): Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
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In notes to her play The Wife of Willesden (2021), Zadie Smith describes Alisoun the Wife of Bath as “brash, honest, cheeky, salacious, outrageous, [and] unapologetic.”1 While these qualities might make Chaucer’s Alisoun appealing to a contemporary author like Smith, they posed challenges to adapters from earlier periods, when such qualities were almost overwhelmingly viewed as unattractive in women.2 In the eighteenth century, a number of adapters and modernizers took a particular interest in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, detaching the Wife from her Canterbury Tales context and recreating her both on the page (by poets such as Alexander Pope and Andrew Jackson) and on the stage (by John Gay).3 Well before these recreations, the Wife of Bath had been brought to life in ballad form in the broadside Wanton Wife of Bath, written sometime before 1600, and a Scottish variant, The Wife of Beith, adapted about a hundred years later, both of which continued to be popular through the eighteenth century.4
Though Chaucer may not have anticipated such reinterpretations of his character, he clearly had a sense of the Wife’s potential to escape the bounds of her text.5 In Lenvoy de Chaucer a Bukton, a poem concerning a friend’s upcoming marriage, Chaucer advises the friend, “The Wyf of Bathe I pray yow that ye rede / Of this matere that we have on honde” (29–30), signaling her continuing hold on Chaucer’s imagination and her ongoing relevance to matters of everyday life, particularly the “wo that is in mariage” (WBPro, III 3).6 Since then, the Wife of Bath seems to have embodied a clash of the appealing and the repulsive, the popular and the unacceptable, a dynamic that emerges clearly in John Dryden’s discussion in the Preface to his Fables Ancient and Modern (1700). Dryden writes that he would have included the Wife of Bath’s Prologue in his book, rather than her tale alone, “If I had desir’d more to please than to instruct,” speculating that her prologue would have attracted “many Friends and Readers.”7 In the end, however, Dryden felt compelled to omit the Wife of Bath’s Prologue from his Fables “because ‘tis too licentious.”8
As the Canterbury Tales have been reprinted, rewritten, modernized, and adapted over the centuries, the Wife of Bath has continued to interest and challenge readers, writers, and scholars. Carolyn Dinshaw labels her “apparently irrepressible,” noting that “she pops up again and again” and “bursts out of even the confines of her ‘fictive universe,’” while Marion Turner dubs the Wife of Bath “a bookrunner—a figure that escapes her own text.”9 In the past five years alone, the Wife of Bath has been the focal point of numerous adaptations across a variety of formats, including Caroline Bergvall’s verse collection Alisoun Sings (2019), Douglas North’s modernized The Wife of Bath: A Transformation (2020), Zadie Smith’s above-mentioned play The Wife of Willesden (2021), and Karen Brooks’s novel The Good Wife of Bath (2022). But as Betsy Bowden’s work on the Wife’s eighteenth-century afterlife has shown, Alisoun’s career as a bookrunner experienced a particularly fruitful period over four hundred years ago, aided in part by the appearance of popular ballad adaptations.10
In this article I consider two texts that continue the story of the Wife of Bath as a character and pick up where her prologue leaves off, separating her from her Canterbury Tales context in order to tell an entirely new narrative. I argue that, by shifting the focus from the Wife’s lifelong sexual unruliness to her vocal unruliness as an old woman, The Wanton Wife of Bath and The Wife of Beith mark the Wife as a socially obscene figure. As Mary Flannery’s introduction to this special issue notes, what is considered obscene changes with time, place, and situation. But, no matter what form it takes, a noteworthy quality of the obscene is that, by designating what is “horrible, offensive, or morally repugnant,” it delineates a border between the acceptable and the transgressive.11 As I will show, these ballads use antifeminist and ageist tropes to reduce Chaucer’s psychologically complex character to a stereotypical “unruly old woman” in need of reform. The ballads reflect an ongoing eighteenth-century preoccupation with the need to control women’s voices and lives—an attitude alive in popular novels, conduct books, and periodicals of the time.
This article has four parts. The first considers the breadth of scholarship concerning the Wife of Bath, both as she was written by Chaucer and as she appears in eighteenth-century ballad adaptations. Drawing on the work of Nicole Nolan Sidhu, I introduce the concept of social obscenity as a way to understand how the Wife’s vocal unruliness has occasionally been perceived as threatening. The second section focuses on The Wanton Wife of Bath and its emphasis on the Wife of Bath’s unruly voice. In the third section, I turn to The Wife of Beith and discuss how the addition of the Scots concept of the carling further develops the broadside ballad’s emphasis on feminine verbal unruliness with an added dimension of aging. In the final section, I consider how social obscenity provides a lens through which to view the stigma attached to feminine aging—in other words, the “problem” of the older woman who refuses to remain off scene.12 Despite their lightness and humor, the ballads use the figure of the Wife of Bath to persuade readers that women’s verbal behavior, and even feminine aging itself, must be controlled, rendered socially appropriate, or hidden from sight—a sentiment that remains both upsetting and recognizable today.
“Think upon your former state”13
When one reviews the history of scholarship on the Wife of Bath, the “straunge strem” (I 464) of diverse discussions quickly threatens to become an impassable flood of questions. Is she based on a then-living person known to Chaucer? Is she a feminist? Is she the living embodiment of all that antifeminist writers railed (and rail) against? Why does she tell her tale? Was she meant to tell a different tale? Was Chaucer’s view of her relatively positive? Or was he making fun of her and, by extension, “al hire secte” (IV 1171)?14 In an effort to answer such questions, scholars have examined Chaucer’s Alisoun through focused consideration of her constituent parts—her clothes, her profession, her relationships, her voice, her body, her vocabulary, her tone. Despite the overwhelming wealth of scholarship, focused consideration of her status as a middle-aged woman is almost entirely absent. Chaucer’s decision to make the Wife of Bath middle-aged was as deliberate as his decision to make her a skilled businesswoman, a serial pilgrim, and a snappy dresser. The text itself leaves her precise age unclear, specifying only that she is at least forty years old and still in robust health (III 601), “boold” of face and “fair” (I 458). When this moment of age-related ambiguity attracts critical attention (which is not often), it has been met with different responses and assumptions from scholars and adapters alike. But the issue of the Wife’s age—and, in particular, adapters’ attitudes towards it—deserves closer consideration than it has thus far received.
The interplay between feminine aging and obscenity speaks to our understanding of Alisoun as a character, and it also shares a remarkable number of similarities with the cultural treatment of feminine aging today. In Shame and the Aging Woman (2016), J. Brooks Bouson writes that an “aging woman, who was an object of desire in her youth, becomes an object of disgust as she gets older” and that “to bear the visible bodily marks of old age is to take on a socially devalued, stigmatized identity.”15 A similar view finds expression in a particularly poignant moment during the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, when Alisoun states that age
Though Alisoun declares that “ther is namoore to telle,” she continues in this vein for several hundred more lines, including the passage about what her “bren” has brought her: Jankyn, a husband half her age who married her when “He was, I trowe, twenty wynter oold, / And I was fourty” (III 600–601). Immediately after mentioning the difference in their ages, Alisoun describes herself as young for her age (“yet I hadde alwey a coltes tooth” [III 602]) and points to the qualities that she feels make her attractive—her gap-toothed smile and “Venerien” (III 609) birthmarks—and also signal her continuing sexual desirability. This urge to preemptively defend her own sexual qualifications and attractiveness (despite her age) suggests Alisoun’s—and therefore Chaucer’s—keen awareness of the difficulties of aging and the supposed simultaneous waning of desirability faced by medieval women in middle age.
Scholars often touch on the topic of feminine aging in discussions of the Wife of Bath, but they rarely explore it in any depth. Interestingly, some seem unable to resist an impulse to present Alisoun as very aged despite a notable lack of textual evidence to support such a reading. Writing in 1983, Lee Patterson, himself then in his early forties and arguably middle-aged, refers to the Wife of Bath (and her precursor La Vieille in the Roman de la Rose) as a “garrulous old wom[a]n,” and her supposedly advanced age plays an important role in his argument.16 Stephen Rigby, briefly discussing the Wife’s age and status as a remarried woman, considers Alisoun in light of Christine de Pizan’s assessment that “nothing is more ridiculous than old people who lack good judgment or who are foolish,” arguing that Christine would not have been likely to approve of Alisoun’s behavior at her age (though he simply refers to Alisoun as “older,” citing her reference to her “coltes tooth” as evidence).17 Mary Carruthers notes a tendency in scholarly literature to heap denigration on Alisoun due to her age (and even to make her older) when she observes that “the fiftyish Wife is hardly a candidate for a tombstone” and adds that “To see the Wife as the ugly old crone of her tale . . . is to sentimentalise her well beyond the bounds of the text.”18
Whereas her age is rarely discussed in depth, Alisoun’s voice has been the topic of considerable interest. Scholarly discussions of both the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and the Wife of Bath’s Tale often consider Alisoun and her voice in relation to expectations of women as represented in medieval literature, much of it antifeminist in nature. Patterson notes that “Antifeminist literature presents woman as an inveterate and interminable talker,” adding that “for the male audience feminine speaking is never wholly divested of the titillating ambivalences of eroticism.” This analysis frames female speech as embodying two distinct problems: the quantity of women’s speech (“interminable”) and its potential impact on an audience.19 Jill Mann reads Alisoun’s “tirade” as speech that “functions simultaneously as a demonstration of female bullying and as a witness to masculine oppression,” and further argues that the ways in which Alisoun uses her speech are key to the reader’s sense of her as “a living individual.”20 This notion of the Wife as a “living individual” pertains not just to her prologue and tale, but also to her appearances within and beyond the Canterbury Tales. These scholars’ arguments agree on one thing: Alisoun’s voice, as both a source of power and a vehicle for provocation, represents two contrasting functions of female speech, exhilarating to some and upsetting to others.21
Connections between Alisoun’s verbal transgressiveness and her age have received little critical attention. Alastair Minnis, expanding on the work of Jan M. Ziolkowski, provides the most in-depth consideration I have found of the work being done by these two character traits in tandem. Minnis builds upon Ziolkowski’s statement that, “If in the Middle Ages any collection of individuals was implicated strongly in obscene language and was perceived to be habitual offenders, that group was old women.”22 Exploring whether the language used by Alisoun can truly be considered obscene, Minnis considers the figure of the vetula as embodied by La Vieille and observed in Christine de Pizan’s reaction to the Roman de la Rose. Although he notes that “if we are looking for blatantly offensive language, . . . there is little if anything to be found,” he gives further consideration to the context in which Alisoun speaks her Prologue and concludes that “much of her discourse may be deemed ‘obscene’ because of the nature of many of the things described therein, including the private parts of men and women and her own sexual feelings and exploits.”23 Minnis explains what this stereotype meant for Chaucer’s portrayal of Alisoun, focusing in particular on her similarities to and (more importantly) differences from La Vieille. According to Minnis, Chaucer decided to “make a figure who combined negative qualities of both vielle and veuve into the voice of reason, as she tells her tale of a loathly damsel.”24 In Chaucer’s text, in other words, the figure of the obscene older woman is complicated, because the potentially obscene speech in her prologue sits alongside the ethical teachings of her tale. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath exhibits unruly verbal behavior one moment and offers deeply moral teaching in the next.
While the Wife of Bath’s origins may connect her with prior models of sexual obscenity, they also connect her with what I here term social obscenity. Sidhu notes that modern definitions of obscenity typically focus on “sexuality, scatology, or anatomy,” but that “the strictly hierarchical culture of the Middle Ages also invests disobedience and resistance to the established order with a level of obscenity equal to the display of lower bodily functions, body parts, or sexual acts.”25 In other words, in the eyes of medieval readers, disobedience and resistance to order carried a transgressive charge that was just as powerful as that connected with sexual and scatological taboos. Sidhu also notes that, in cases where social obscenity is displayed, sexual transgression often accompanies it.26 She further argues that the employment of obscene discourse relating to gender roles and marriage would have “worked to affirm existing hierarchies” and “would also have been perceived as affirming those hierarchies by medieval audiences.”27 Thus the presence of obscenity in medieval texts presents transgressive behavior in order to reinforce existing power dynamics rather than to upend them.
While the texts under consideration here are not medieval, Sidhu’s arguments concerning obscenity are useful when considering how adapters responded to Chaucer’s framing of the Wife of Bath as obscene—in terms not just of her bodily behavior, but also of her loquacious and domineering way of being—and how their responses reflect the values of their time. Viewed through the lens of social obscenity, adapters’ responses to the Wife of Bath can be seen to respond to how Chaucer constructs Alisoun as socially obscene and to reflect on how that social obscenity resonates with eighteenth-century values regarding proper feminine behavior. The concept of social obscenity expands the obscene beyond the sexual and scatological, to also consider those qualities or behaviors that authors signal as transgressive and seek to control through alteration, expansion, or omission of source material. The lens of social obscenity illuminates these later reinterpretations of the Wife of Bath partly because—as I will show—one of these ballads’ more striking details is their removal of most references to the Wife’s sexuality. Instead, they shift from Chaucer’s emphasis on Alisoun’s sexual obscenity toward to the social obscenity of a loquacious, aging woman refusing to “leave the stage.”
The Wanton Wife of Bath
Among early adaptations of the Wife of Bath’s story, The Wanton Wife of Bath has been singled out as particularly sensitive to the nuances of Chaucer’s character. Helen Cooper, for example, describes it as “the most attentive and responsive reading of Chaucer,” a text that displays “a much greater commitment to exploring what Chaucer actually makes of the Wife.”28 The Wanton Wife began to circulate in London in the early seventeenth century. The earliest mention of the ballad is in relation to a fine levied in 1600 against two printers and a seller as punishment for the printing of “a Disorderly ballad of the wife of Bathe.”29 Although no copy of a ca. 1600 printing appears to survive, The Wanton Wife circulated until the 1820s.30 The ballad’s long lifespan supports arguments for its popularity, as does its mention in 1711 on the pages of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison’s The Spectator.31 Its frequent printing and reprinting in broadside form as well its inclusion in ballad anthologies show it to have been widely distributed and easily accessible.32
The Wanton Wife opens as follows:
Having mentioned Chaucer, the ballad then removes him from the picture as the Wanton Wife takes center stage.33 The Wanton Wife tells the story of the Wife of Bath’s life after the Canterbury Tales. It takes as its starting point the moments immediately following her death, when the recently deceased Wanton Wife finds herself outside the gates of heaven. Denied entry, she is compelled to argue her way in via a series of confrontations with biblical patriarchs including Adam, David, and Solomon before finally meeting Christ in debate and securing her salvation. Across the ballad’s 140 lines, the Wanton Wife argues her case, often by calling out the patriarchs’ sins in ways that shame them or render them silent. The ballad ends with the Wanton Wife in conversation with Christ, who initially resists her pleas before finally offering forgiveness and welcoming her into heaven, thanks in part to her “repenting Cry” (line 138).
Frequent complaints about the Wanton Wife’s volubility and noisiness are the chief insult levied against her in the ballad. This quality of noisy unruliness also characterizes Chaucer’s Alisoun, who in her prologue explains how she berated her former husbands “by continueel murmur or grucchyng” (III 406). When interrupted by the Pardoner, the Wife of Bath orders him to “Abyde,” adding that her tale “is nat bigonne. / Nay, thou shalt drynken of another tonne” (III 169–170). She displays in present time exactly the type of verbal behavior she had begun detailing in her life story. In terms of unruly noisiness, the titular protagonist of The Wanton Wife, true to the ballad’s initial declaration that her story is “As Chaucer he doth write,” is a clear descendant of Chaucer’s Alisoun, as she is accused by other characters of knocking “With such shrill sounding Notes” (line 42), “mak[ing] all this Strife” (line 50), and “wear[ying] Christ with Cries” (line 108). The narrator of the ballad describes her knocking “with might and main” (line 33). Jonas states he has never heard “so vile a Scold as this” (line 74), and Thomas declares, “Women’s Tongues / Of Aspen-Leaves are made” (lines 77–78). The force of both the Wanton Wife’s knocking and her voice are cited repeatedly as disturbing the heavenly peace.
Given the Wife of Bath’s distinctive capacity for making noise, it seems somehow particularly fitting that when she is brought back to life in The Wanton Wife, it is in a text that takes the form of a ballad, designed for loud oral delivery. Ballads were a part of everyday eighteenth-century city life, and Patricia Fumerton describes them as “saturat[ing] daily urban life for the middling to low.”34 They covered a variety of subjects, from current events to repetitions of older stories, and they served both to inform and to entertain. Sarah F. Williams explains that eighteenth-century ballads commonly used “the heightened language of poetry to disseminate stereotypes of female excess and acoustic disorder,” which places their protagonists in a long line of loud ladies.35 Williams argues that verbal excess often accompanied depictions of female transgression in this period; many broadside ballads “depicted aural excess as a symptom of disorder, discord, and even a pact with the devil.”36 This trend lends to the repeated accusations of excessive noisiness found in The Wanton Wife a more serious significance, marking the Wanton Wife as not just annoying, but also as potentially dangerous or threatening in her disruptiveness. Her loudness goes against prevailing social expectations that mark a good Christian woman: obedience and silence.
The ideal of womanly silence was one that the long eighteenth century shared with the Middle Ages. In a 1711 essay in The Spectator entitled “Women’s Tongues” (in which he makes mention of “that excellent old ballad of The Wanton Wife of Bath”), Addison launches an attack on women’s speech, stating that his goal is to “cure it of several disagreeable notes . . . which arise from anger, censoriousness, gossiping, and coquetry. In short, I would have it always tuned by good-nature, truth, discretion, and sincerity.”37 Standing in stark contrast to Addison’s idea of the properly controlled female voice, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath would have struck readers like Addison as, in the words of Carruthers, “a voice that requires response”—and this description also suits the Wanton Wife of the ballad.38 In highlighting the volume and disturbing nature of her cries outside the gate, the ballad writer directs attention to the social obscenity of her unruly voice, which causes Adam to flee, Judith to blush, and even Christ to concede.
The Wanton Wife’s concern with unruly feminine speech is apparent even in its structure. The bulk of the ballad comprises words spoken directly by the Wanton Wife. In each interaction, she is greeted with an accusation or a complaint, to which she responds with verbal attacks of her own, with each conversation ending only to have her current interlocutor replaced by the next biblical figure in line. Her accusations are just, her charges of hypocrisy are accurate, and her demands for equal treatment are not unreasonable (she provides ample biblical evidence to support them), yet she is still treated as an object of mockery and disdain. In each interaction, it is the Wanton Wife who has the last word, until she finally gains her audience with Christ. In this conversation, she admits her sinful nature and cites biblical precedent for her forgiveness, reminding Christ of the thief on the cross and the prodigal son. Over the course of the broadside ballad, the Wanton Wife’s tone undergoes a significant shift from heated accusations hurled at the patriarchs to her later acknowledgment to Christ of her sins and plea for mercy. Coming around from her earlier unruliness and acknowledging her sinful behavior, the formerly loquacious Wife secures her entry to heaven and is finally silent.
In place of the sexual obscenity in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, this eighteenth-century ballad presents its readers with a Wanton Wife who is, above all, verbally transgressive. By virtue of her unacceptable speech, the Wanton Wife is socially rather than sexually obscene. Omitting her bodily transgressions and focusing on the social obscenity of her voice (which is eventually brought under patriarchal control), this ballad reflects and responds to eighteenth-century concerns with controlling women’s voices through a unique reimagining of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in which, despite the power and insistence of her voice, her unruliness can ultimately be tamed.
A Scottish Variant: The Wife of Beith
Around 1700, The Wanton Wife of Bath ballad was revived in a Scottish variant, The Wife of Beith, which takes the Wife into new territory, literally and figuratively.39 This adaptation of an adaptation expanded the 140 lines of The Wanton Wife to several hundred, and it stayed in print a few decades longer than the earlier text.40 Frequently printed as a twenty-odd-page chapbook, The Wife of Beith includes additional plot points that Bowden notes appear similar to John Bunyan’s 1678 allegory Pilgrim’s Progress.41 While The Wanton Wife opened with the Wife outside heaven’s gate, the recently deceased Worthy Wife of The Wife of Beith begins her journey with a pilgrimage to hell before a long uphill trek, after which she finally beholds “Jerusalem / On Sion’s mount whereon it stood” (lines 137–38)—only to find the gates locked against her. From here, the ballad follows The Wanton Wife’s pattern of verbal combat with complaining patriarchs, but with several added biblical interlocutors and a more extended debate with Christ.
While Alisoun retains her transgressive chattiness in both The Wanton Wife and The Wife of Beith, the latter ballad frames this quality in relation to another: her age. This change is most clearly evidenced by a word the ballad uses to characterize the Worthy Wife: the Scots word carling. The online Dictionaries of the Scots Language defines carling (a variant of carline) as “generally an old woman and often in a disparaging sense” and “a witch.” In other words, it is not only a gendered term with pejorative connotations, but one specifically associated with advanced age.42 This addition suggests that the target of The Wife of Beith’s satire is not simply the figure of the talkative woman, but rather women who are both talkative and aging.
The Wife of Beith opens in much the same way as the broadside ballad, introducing the main character of the story and briefly informing readers or listeners of its original Chaucerian source: “In Beith once dwelt a worthy wife, / Of whom brave Chau[c]er mention makes” (lines 1–2). As in The Wanton Wife, no further mention of Chaucer is made. Instead, the ballad continues by familiarizing the reader with the Worthy Wife herself, emphasizing her talkative nature, advanced age, and resultant death: “But death did come for all her cracks, / When years were spent and days out-driven” (lines 5–6).43 Whereas in The Wanton Wife, the Wife lingered in sickness and eventually died (“Upon a time sore sick she was, / And at the length did dye” [lines 5–6]), things proceed quite differently in The Wife of Beith: “suddenly she sickness takes, / Deceast forthwith, and went to heaven” (lines 7–8). The ballad suggests that this sudden sickness may have been the inevitable result of the Worthy Wife’s behavior in her youth: she “lived a licentious life, / And namely in venereal acts” (lines 3–4). “Venereal,” in this usage, highlights her sinful sexuality and serves as a potential reminder for readers of the dangers of sexually transmitted illness.44 Later mentions in the ballad of the Worthy Wife’s illness and “bloody issue” (line 610) serve as further reminders of the perils of a “licentious life.” These details stress the Worthy Wife’s age and licentiousness as her key characteristics. While Chaucer’s Alisoun is brimming with life (and considering the possibilities of a sixth husband), both the Wanton Wife and Worthy Wife are characters of a more moribund nature.
Upon arrival in the afterlife, the Worthy Wife is met by Judas, who offers to act as her guide.45 Although she initially rebuffs his offer, he soon convinces her, as she “know[s] not well the way” (line 38). The two begin their journey with a stop at hell, where the Worthy Wife is met by an anxious Satan, who declares,
Satan is depicted as just another hen-pecked husband, emasculated in the face of this “mistress.” The devil describes her words as a form of physical violence (“biting”), and this verbally aggressive behavior helps to mark her as “lewd.”47 Interestingly, this lewdness does not set her apart but instead marks her as a member of a large population of women already in hell—so numerous that Satan “cannot turn [his] foot about” without encountering one. According to Williams, “the domestic scold’s ability to out-curse the devil” is a frequently occurring trope in ballads.48 These lines paint a picture of hell as crammed full of argumentative and verbally aggressive women, suggesting that this gendered form of social obscenity is an all too common problem: the Worthy Wife may be exceptionally unruly, but she is also representative of the general female population.
In The Wife of Beith, unruly speech is highlighted and given a specific name, “flyting” (lines 74, 161), defined by Bowden as “a folk-ritualistic insult exchange” of which the Worthy Wife is an acknowledged master.49 Flyting could refer to the works of celebrated (male) poets, as in The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie, but, according to Carissa Harris, “in addition to naming a popular literary genre, ‘flyting’ referred to the crime of obscene verbal wrangling associated with unruly women.”50 These two kinds of flyting, then, apply to very different situations: one is an exchange of insults between women, often in public, that could result in criminal charges, while the other is a highly stylized exchange of poetic insults between well-educated men.51 The argument between the Worthy Wife and the devil defies the strict gendering of these two kinds of flyting (as either women versus women, or men versus men). Their exchange fits Harris’s definition, and the devil’s fear of the Wife’s abilities appears well founded. By labeling the Worthy Wife’s verbal excess a “flyting,” The Wife of Beith makes clear its transgressiveness and highlights its undesirability: not even the devil can tolerate it!
After this encounter, wherein she and the devil agree that neither wants her in hell, the Worthy Wife continues her journey: “Tired and torn she went on still, / Sometimes she sat and sometimes fell” (lines 125–26). Apparently now alone, she travels the long path away from hell. Upon reaching a “goodly plain” (line 130) of fields and flowers, she stops to “rest and weep her fill” (line 131), physically and mentally exhausted from her journey, before she finally arrives at the tightly shut gate to heaven. Her early moments—both in hell and her continuing journey—have built upon the ballad’s initial brief allusions to her “licentious life” to give readers a precise picture of the Worthy Wife: she is immoral, aged (even in her afterlife), loud, emotional and argumentative—in other words, a carling.
Over the course of The Wife of Beith, the Worthy Wife is called a carling nine times by her heavenly interlocutors and the unnamed narrator. Noah is first to use the term. After his interaction with the Worthy Wife, he remarks to Abraham “How that the carling made him dread / And how she all his deeds did ken” (lines 203–4). Noah is alarmed at both the confrontation itself and her biblically-based knowledge, which he sees as threatening rather than the wisdom of the elderly (“olde folk kan muchel thyng” [III 1004], notes the old woman of the Wife of Bath’s Tale). Focusing on Noah’s sin and making no mention of the admirable qualities and biblical significance for which he is most remembered, the Worthy Wife accomplishes what Chaucer’s Alisoun only speculates about when she declares “if wommen hadde writen stories, . . . they wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse” (III 693–95).52
A few lines later, Abraham, recently warned by Noah, tells Jacob that “he thought the carling mad” (line 220). After a confrontation of his own with the Worthy Wife, Jacob approaches Lot to ask him to “staunch the carling of her crying” (line 236). The Worthy Wife is disparaged for both gender and age. Repetitions of carling occur alongside accusations of being too knowledgeable or knowing what she shouldn’t, of mental decline, and of unruly noise—all of which appear frequently in caricatures of feminine aging tracing back hundreds of years and forward to the present day.53
After her arrival at heaven’s gate and confrontations with various biblical personalities, the Worthy Wife finds herself in conversation with Christ. In The Wife of Beith, however, it is not her “repenting Cry” that Christ acknowledges as saving her. Instead, Christ instructs her to “speak no more, / Thy faith, poor soul, hath saved thee” (lines 637–38). With the Worthy Wife’s vocal unruliness thus dealt with, the ballad continues with one more significant change: upon receiving Christ’s forgiveness, the Worthy Wife undergoes a physical transformation that restores her youth and beauty. She acquires a white robe and a jeweled laurel crown, and her appearance changes: “Her face did shine like to the sun, / Like threads of gold her hair hung down, / Her eyes like lamps [unto] the moon” (lines 649–51). As a reward for her penitence (and her silence), the Worthy Wife is made young again. This transformation is reminiscent in some ways of the physical change undergone by the old wyf in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, who tells the knight to “Cast up the curtyn” and reveal “That she so fair was, and so yong” (III 1249–51). In both cases, the youthful beauty brought on by the transformation can be read as a signifier of spiritual and physical purity and worthiness.
Such a transformation as that of the ballad is not without literary precedent. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress features a moment of transformation as the culmination of spiritual striving, which, when considered alongside The Wife of Beith, highlights the different social expectations for men and women during this period. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, the transformation occurs in the final pages of the text. The long pilgrimage, narrated in the form of a dream, nears its end as Christian and his fellow traveler are greeted at the gates of heaven by “a company of the Heavenly Host” with much joyful shouting and “melodious noise.”54 God commands that the gate be opened and the pilgrims welcomed inside:
Now I saw in my Dream, that these two men went in at the Gate; and loe, as they entered, they were transfigured, and they had Raiment put on that shone like Gold. There was also that met them with Harps and Crowns, and gave them to them; The Harp to praise withall, and the Crowns in token of honour.55
This passage emphasizes the clothing, crowns, and harps given to the two men, with these gifts’ significance further explained: the harp allows its recipient to offer praise, while the crown celebrates his worthiness. By contrast, in The Wife of Beith, the Worthy Wife’s transformation is characterized as a return to ideal, youthful, feminine beauty. Her robe is of virginal white, rather than gold, and her crown is more richly described as “A laurel crown . . . / Spangled with rubies and with gold / . . . / Of precious stones rich” (lines 645–52). Instead of a harp, she receives a white palm, and the harping is offered by King David, who earlier had insisted she “knock nae mair” as they were all “troubled with [her] cry” (lines 296–97).56 The celebration of her salvation/transformation is so monumental that the narrator declares, “Such music and such melody, / Was never either heard or seen, / When this poor saint was placed so high” (lines 657–59). In a gesture of humility and contented subjugation, the transformed Worthy Wife lays her newly received crown at Christ’s feet and begins to sing and rejoice that she has finally acquired “lasting pleasures” in contrast to the earthly pleasure of her former licentious life.
With the ballad’s closing lines, the Worthy Wife’s physical and spiritual transformation is complete and her tamed voice is now exclusively devoted to the socially and spiritually appropriate task of singing praises. In this respect, The Wife of Beith’s depiction of the Worthy Wife’s ultimate end exemplifies the point made by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic, that “a life of feminine submission, of ‘contemplative purity,’ is a life of silence, a life that has no pen and no story, while a life of female rebellion, of ‘significant action,’ is a life that must be silenced.”57 In the scene of her transformation in the Scottish ballad, the Worthy Wife gives up her story and embraces her heavenly reward. It is an end difficult to imagine for Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. If he had continued her story past the Canterbury pilgrimage, it seems unlikely that Chaucer would ever have reduced Alisoun to “a life of feminine submission.”
The Wife we find at the end of these ballads is, like the “leon” (III 692) referenced in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, painted anew—transformed from a model of socially obscene femininity to a model of silence and contented submissiveness. Cooper writes of Chaucer’s Alisoun that, “above all, she is concerned to justify her own way of life,” a quality that shines through in the ways she creatively cites and employs biblical personages and proverbs, amongst other authorities.58 While this concern may be a hallmark of Chaucer’s Alisoun, in both ballads considered here the female protagonist shifts her focus to a more urgent desire—forgiveness and redemption—as she acknowledges the grave consequences of a life “spent . . . in vain” (The Wanton Wife, line 122). While her socially obscene behavior might serve to secure an audience with Christ, it is ultimately only through renunciation of such behavior that she can be redeemed.
Alisoun Speaks: “Lat go. Farewel! The devel go therwith”
As printed literature became more available during the eighteenth century, conduct literature aimed at women increased in popularity. The era was a turning point at which “conduct books for women actually surpassed in quantity and variety those directed at men.”59 Many of these texts focused on the qualities women should display to attract desirable suitors and, later, to function as agreeable wives: modesty, humility, household efficiency, obedience. The Wanton Wife of Bath and The Wife of Beith portray women who, aged and unruly of speech, as well as lacking humility and obedience, stand in stark contrast to the acceptable social behavior prescribed by this conduct literature. It is therefore unsurprising that the impulse to “reform and correct” the Wife of Bath of the Canterbury Tales should have inspired such a response to her perceived obscenity on the part of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers. Having offered up their new versions of the Wife of Bath and highlighted the problems of her socially obscene voice and advanced age, both ballads “correct” her in order to bring her in line with cultural expectations of appropriate feminine behavior.
The Wife of Beith, in particular, shows how ageism can be weaponized to reform and correct the figure of the unruly, sexually-experienced woman. Such tactics will not be unfamiliar to contemporary readers. In August 2022, Paulina Porizkova, a well-known model born in 1965, sparked a heated debate on social media after posting a nude photograph of herself.60 In a follow-up comment, she asked,
Why [is] a photo of an older woman daring to feel sexy so unsettling to all these same-aged dudes? When I did photos like these as a teen, I sometimes got shamed by women, but never the men. This is a most interesting social experience. The only thing that’s changed is my age.61
The decision of an eighteenth-century adapter to emphasize the Wife of Bath’s age, despite no clear indications of precisely how old she is in Chaucer’s text, is a similar response to how unsettling such women can be. Threatened by what they view as the Wife of Bath’s socially obscene unruliness, the anonymous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers aged her up in an effort to make her a more obvious object of disgust. It is therefore a matter of some curiosity (not to mention consternation) to note the frequency with which Alisoun is aged-up in some academic texts as well.
In her 2018 book Empowered, Sarah Banet-Weiser observes that
the intensification of misogyny in the contemporary moment is in part a reaction to the culture-wide circulation and embrace of feminism. Every time . . . it spills beyond what are routinely dismissed as niched feminist enclaves—the forces of the status quo position it as a peril, and skirmishes ensue between those determined to challenge the normative and those determined to maintain it.62
In other words, as feminism grows and expands, so too does the popular misogyny that responds to the threat it understands this growing feminism to be. The clerics trading antifeminist writing in Chaucer’s day taught that women seeking power or control in the household or in their marriages were a threat and required a response. This same threat is understood in numerous eighteenth-century conduct books that focused on the character and the social role of women, with titles such as The Whole Duty of Women (1695), The Character of a Good Woman, both in a Single and Married State (1697), and The Young Ladies Companion or, Beauty’s Looking-Glass (1740).63 One way of trying to contain such threatening behavior is to paint it as obscene, thereby enabling public condemnation, shaming, and social policing to help keep unruly women in line.
As the reception of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in these ballads demonstrates, the problem with socially obscene phenomena is that they are seen as dangerously powerful and dangerously contagious. Writing about Alisoun’s continuing appeal, Carruthers observes that “what is extraordinary about the Wife’s power is that she keeps it; no effective effort is made in the poem to restrain or squelch it.”64 Chaucer, in other words, does not reform or correct her by removing her power. According to Minnis, in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue,
Chaucer took one of the most despised stereotypes in medieval literature, the sexually rapacious widow, and provided her with a powerful scholastic-style defense of sexual desire. . . . In her Tale this character depicts an even more despised stereotype, the vetula or vieille, dispensing wisdom of the highest order rather than talking dirty and teaching the art of sexual promiscuity.65
Like Minnis, I believe Chaucer offered readers a new example of a powerful aging woman. The Alisoun of the Canterbury Tales is a nuanced character, full of contradictions, who has led and continues to lead a full life. Other than her talkative nature, this Alisoun bears little resemblance to the descendants depicted in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ballads: in these, presented to readers as just another unruly older woman, she is pushed to the edges, commanded to be silent, urged into invisibility.
In the foreword to her 2017 book on contemporary celebrities, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, Anne Helen Petersen discusses how unruly women are often viewed.66 Her succinct comment that if you “Refuse to disappear, you’re the problem” immediately caught my eye.67 Where I have struggled to articulate my views on aging and obscenity, Petersen was able to sum up the matter in six words: refuse to disappear, you’re the problem. Most people likely do not associate old age with obscenity at first glance, for it is neither sexual nor scatological, but aging women in texts both medieval and modern are often subjected to the same treatment as familiarly obscene topics: they, too, are played up for humorous purposes; or omitted, altered or dismissed; or adapted to serve the author’s needs; or even censored. Above all, the aging women’s desire is meant to be kept off scene. The biblical patriarchs of the Wife of Bath’s ballads, in other words, are not the only ones hoping to “staunch the carling of her crying.”
NOTES
I would like to extend my warmest thanks to everyone who read and offered helpful suggestions on this article, including Elisabeth Dutton, Mary C. Flannery, and Lucy Fleming, as well as to the article’s readers—it would not have been possible without you. Research for this article was undertaken as part of the Swiss National Science Foundation Eccellenza project “COMMode: Canonicity, Obscenity, and the Making of Modern Chaucer, 1700–2020,” led by Mary C. Flannery at the University of Bern, for which I am very grateful.
Zadie Smith, The Wife of Willesden (London, 2021), xiv.
For more on the development of gender roles and expectations in England, see Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, 1995). Fletcher notes numerous texts that point to “fears and worries about women’s energies and initiative, about their sexual and verbal power”; these feelings “did not invariably or necessarily amount to a generalised hatred of women” but do suggest the prevalence of “an acutely felt anxiety in Tudor and early Stuart England about how women could best be governed and controlled” (27).
On adaptations and modernizations of the Wife of Bath in the eighteenth century, see David Hopkins and Tom Mason, “Some Eighteenth-Century Wives of Bath,” in their Chaucer in the Eighteenth Century: The Father of English Poetry (Oxford, 2022), 214–51.
Betsy Bowden, The Wife of Bath in Afterlife: Ballads to Blake (Bethlehem PA, 2017), presents variants of both ballads and discusses their titles, printings, word choices, and woodcuts. I have chosen these titles as representative of the two “groups” of ballad variants: The Wanton Wife of Bath represents the original broadside ballad, and The Wife of Beith represents the later Scottish chapbook variant. Quotes from these ballads are taken from the variants printed in Bowden’s appendices (307–28) and cited by line number.
On the Wife of Bath in the context of historical medieval women, and as a “bookrunner” with an extensive afterlife of readerly response, see Marion Turner, The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton, 2023).
All quotations from Chaucer are drawn from The Riverside Chaucer, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn. (Boston, 1987).
Citation of Dryden is from Derek Brewer, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer: The Critical Heritage Volume I: 1385–1837 (London, 1978), 160–72, at 167.
Brewer, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer, 171.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, 1989), 116; and Turner, The Wife of Bath, 26.
Bowden, The Wife of Bath in Afterlife, 1–24.
OED, s.v. obscene (adj.). On the medieval obscene, see, for example, Jan M. Ziolkowski, ed., Obscenity: Social Control and Artistic Creation in the European Middle Ages (Leiden, 1998); Nicola McDonald, ed., Medieval Obscenities (Woodbridge, 2006); Nicole Nolan Sidhu, Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia, 2016); and Carissa M. Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca, 2018).
As Mary C. Flannery notes (introduction to this issue), the etymology of the word obscene remains the subject of debate. In the essay “Poetry and Obscenity,” Robert Graves proposes that scænus/skene related to the theatrical world and to what could and could not be shown on stage (Robert Graves, Difficult Questions, Easy Answers [New York, 1971], 63–65). This usage is discussed in Geoffrey Hughes, An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-Speaking World (London, 2006), 332; Alastair Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia, 2008), 294; and Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, 15. However, the OED considers this etymology “doubtful” (s.v. obscene [adj.]). Regardless of this etymology’s accuracy, the idea that some things are so taboo that they must be kept offstage is useful when considering obscenity and social expectations.
The Wanton Wife of Bath, lines 83–84.
For early feminist criticism, see Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards, eds., The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism (Amherst, 1977; repr. 1988), in particular Arlyn Diamond, “Chaucer’s Women and Women’s Chaucer,” 60–83. For a key moment of change in approaches to the text, see Mary Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” in Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds., Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London, 1994), 22–53, originally published in 1979 and here republished with a new afterword acknowledging the controversy and the article’s impact. On Chaucer and gender, see, for example, Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics; Priscilla Martin, Chaucer’s Women: Nuns, Wives and Amazons (London, 1990); Jill Mann, Feminizing Chaucer (Cambridge UK, 2002); and Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley, 1992). For a testament to the variety of approaches to WBPro and WBT, see Peter G. Beidler, ed., The Wife of Bath: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Boston, 1996).
J. Brooks Bouson, Shame and the Aging Woman: Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women’s Writings (Cham, 2016), 39–40.
Lee Patterson, “‘For the Wyves love of Bathe’: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales,” Speculum 58 (1983): 656–95, at 663.
S. H. Rigby, “The Wife of Bath, Christine de Pizan, and the Medieval Case for Women,” Chaucer Review 35 (2000): 133–65, at 148–49.
Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” 39.
Patterson, “‘For the Wyves love of Bathe,’” 660–62.
Mann, Feminizing Chaucer, 64.
For more on women’s speech and potential obscenity, see Minnis, Fallible Authors, 294–311, esp. at 294. For further discussion on speech and power, see in particular the Afterword to Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” 39–53. On Alisoun’s use of gossip and small talk, see Susan E. Phillips, Transforming Talk: The Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (University Park PA, 2007), 106. On confession in the structure of WBPro, see Jerry Root, “‘Space to Speke’: The Wife of Bath and the Discourse of Confession,” Chaucer Review 28 (1994): 252–74, at 260–62.
Jan M. Ziolkowski, “The Obscenities of Old Women: Vetularity and Vernacularity,” in Ziolkowski, ed., Obscenity, 73–89, at 73.
Alastair Minnis, “From Coilles to Bel Chose: Discourses of Obscenity in Jean de Meun and Chaucer,” in McDonald, ed., Medieval Obscenities, 156–78, at 171, 177.
Minnis, “From Coilles to Bel Chose,” 178.
Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, 25.
Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, 25.
Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, 27.
Helen Cooper, “The Shape-shiftings of the Wife of Bath, 1395–1670,” in Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt, eds., Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer (Cambridge UK, 1990), 168–84, at 180–82. Prior to recent publications by Bowden and Turner (see notes 4–5 above), these ballads had been discussed only briefly and with the main consideration being their publication history and records of suppression. On the possible political and religious implications of The Wanton Wife of Bath, see Ernest Kuhl, “The Wanton Wife of Bath and Queen Elizabeth,” Studies in Philology 26 (1929): 177–83, who argues that the ballad’s early suppression as “disorderly” resulted from its political undertones.
Bowden, The Wife of Bath in Afterlife, 5; and Turner, The Wife of Bath, 155.
Bowden, The Wife of Bath in Afterlife, 5, 7.
“That excellent old ballad of The Wanton Wife of Bath has the following remarkable lines: ‘I think, quoth Thomas, women’s tongues / Of aspen leaves are made’” (The Spectator [December 13, 1711], 247).
Turner notes that it survives in “fifty-four separate ballad printings” (The Wife of Bath, 155).
In this article, “Wanton Wife” refers to the title character of The Wanton Wife of Bath, and “Worthy Wife” refers to the title character of the later Scottish Wife of Beith (on various descriptors for the Wife in the Scottish ballad, see Bowden, The Wife of Bath in Afterlife, 6). The broadside ballads reached varied audiences, perhaps only a few with knowledge of Chaucer: “For several centuries, for better or for worse, an English speaker most likely first heard the name Chaucer in line two of a ballad” (Bowden, The Wife of Bath in Afterlife, 1). A version of The Wanton Wife of Bath printed in a 1723 anthology refers to the source material as Chaucerian: “I need not acquaint my Readers that the following story is borrow’d from old Chaucer” (A Collection of Old Ballads: Corrected from the Best and most Ancient Copies Extant, with Introductions Historical, Critical, or Humorous [London, 1723]; reproduced in Bowden, The Wife of Bath in Afterlife, 307–11, at 307).
Patricia Fumerton, The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics (Philadelphia, 2020), 97.
Sarah F. Williams, Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads (Farnham, 2015), 100.
Williams, Damnable Practises, 89–91.
Joseph Addison, “Women’s Tongues,” in Joseph Addison, Essays of Joseph Addison, ed. James George Frazier, 2 vols. (London, 1915), 2:41–46, at 45–46.
Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” 41.
The earliest known dating of each ballad is taken from Caroline Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357–1900, 3 vols. (Cambridge UK, 1960), 3:54.
Bowden, The Wife of Bath in Afterlife, 5, 7.
Bowden, The Wife of Bath in Afterlife, 5–6.
Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL), s.v. carline; OED, s.v. carling (sb.). The word carling and its variants appear in examples of flyting quoted by Harris, Obscene Pedagogies, which include: a woman referring to another mockingly as a carling (71); a mention in a poem by Dunbar of the “cryis of carlingis” (72); and another of “decrepit karlingis” (79).
DSL, s.v. crak. Crack can refer to “gossip, bragging, or boasting,” as well as “easy conversation” or even “an entertaining or scandalous tale.”
OED, s.v. venereal (adj.). The OED records this usage as far back as the seventeenth century.
OED, s.v. Judas (sb.), sense 2 (used as a noun).
DSL, s.v. cummer. The word can refer to a “godmother (in relation to the parents and other godparents); a female intimate; a woman gossip.” While less negative than carling, cummer is still a heavily gendered term.
OED, s.v. lewd (adj.). The OED offers numerous definitions in use during this time period, including 3.a.: “Of a person, action, etc.: bad, wicked, unprincipled”; and 5.: “Lascivious, lecherous . . . Later usually: sexually explicit, offensive, or crudely suggestive.” Taking into consideration the Wife’s reputation for flyting and her “licentious life,” lewd can refer to her transgressive verbal and sexual behavior.
Williams, Damnable Practises, 27.
Bowden, The Wife of Bath in Afterlife, 7.
Harris, Obscene Pedagogies, 70–71.
Harris, Obscene Pedagogies, 70, 73–75.
His interactions with the Worthy Wife are not Noah’s first literary run-in with an abrasive and unruly woman. Medieval audiences of biblical drama would be familiar with the formidable and forceful character of Mrs. Noah. On Noah’s wife in medieval drama, see Jane Tolmie, “Mrs Noah and Didactic Abuses,” Early Theatre 5 (2002): 11–35.
Ziolkowski, “The Obscenities of Old Women,” 81. On medieval perspectives of feminine aging, see Sue Niebrzydowski, ed., Middle-Aged Women in the Middle Ages (Cambridge UK, 2011). For a psychological perspective on contemporary Western cultural perceptions of middle age, see Richard A. Shweder, ed., Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural Fictions) (Chicago, 1998). On feminine aging in literature, see Marilyn Pearsall, ed., The Other Within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging (Boulder, 1997).
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Cynthia Wall (New York, 2009), 123.
Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 124.
The Worthy Wife’s white robe and palm align with the description given in Rev. 7:9: “After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands.” The robes worn by this multitude are later said to signify their passage through great suffering and tribulation.
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2nd edn. (New Haven, 1984), 36.
Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford, 1989), 148–49.
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds., The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality (New York, 1987), 4.
“As a young model exposing my body, it was because of someone else’s approval and celebration of it. I didn’t know enough to have an understanding of consequences. Hence, objectification. Now, when I expose my body, it it with my full knowledge and consent. Hence, celebration.” Paulina Porizkova (@paulinaporizkov), Twitter (August 26, 2022, 4:48 p.m.), online at: x.com/paulinaporizkov/status/1563176642742083584?lang=en.
Paulina Porizkova (@paulinaporizkov), Twitter (August 27, 2022, 9:09 p.m.), online at: x.com/paulinaporizkov/status/1563604525499289601?lang=en.
Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham NC, 2018), 3.
On conduct books directed at women in this era, see Nancy Armstrong, “The Rise of the Domestic Woman,” in Armstrong and Tennenhouse, eds., The Ideology of Conduct, 96–141.
Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” 43.
Minnis, Fallible Authors, 309.
Anne Helen Petersen, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: the Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman (New York, 2017). Petersen’s book considers women who are “Too Old” (chap. 5), “Too Shrill” (chap. 7), and “Too Loud” (chap. 9). See also Rachel Vorona Cote, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today (London, 2020).
Petersen, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, xiv.
