One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is a civilisation as a whole that produces this creature . . . (Simone de Beauvoir 273)
I believe that Simone de Beauvoir’s words perfectly characterise the subject of my investigation: the “phenomenon” of the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. I have deliberately opted for the word “phenomenon” since it is my intention to emphasise the fact that, as Pearsall also acknowledges, “Alisoun of Bath is not a
‘character’ in the modern sense at all, but an elaborate iconographic figure designed to show the manifold implications of an attitude.” (Pearsall 76) In my analysis I shall consider Alisoun primarily from a feminist film theoretical point of view, especially the “male gaze” theory of Laura Mulvey, and through this I wish to compare Chaucer’s fourteenth-century “original” and the 2003 BBC film version of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, directed by Andy de Emmony, which is one in a series of six tales that the BBC decided to adapt. By showing that Mulvey’s theory is applicable both to the film version and the fourteenth-century text, I would like to prove that despite the immense temporal distance and the shift of media, the character of Alisoun shows a surprising constancy. In addition, I will also elaborate on how the figure of the woman as the “beast” was created (and has been re-created) in order to nourish and at the same time deter the male fantasy through the centuries. It is obvious that the Wife of Bath cannot be brought to our age directly, thus it is a great challenge for filmmakers to visualize her. However, the BBC adaptation manages not only to successfully grasp the “phenomenon” but to convey something of the atmosphere of Chaucer’s work as well.
Alisoun of Bath is a peculiar character, who has for a long while divided the readership, especially feminist critics: some argue for, others against her (and Chaucer’s) feminist or anti-feminist tendencies. I would, however, occupy a standpoint somewhere in between, or rather, outside these debates, bearing in mind a point made by Evans and Johnson according to which “‘feminism’ is not an historically portable term: during the passage of some six hundred years women’s social, legal, cultural and ideological status has shifted considerably, and with it the corresponding modes of resistance”. (1)
Although I do not wish to take sides on the question of Chaucer’s “feminism”, I would like to begin by referring to a feminist critic, Laura Mulvey, whose theories and concepts I will rely on to be able to grasp the phenomenon of the Wife of Bath on the screen and the page. In her influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the British feminist film theorist presents and develops the concept of the
“male gaze” and formulates a ternary structure around it. Relying heavily on psychoanalytic, mainly Lacanian, theory she defines the “male gaze” in order to characterise a phenomenon most typical of Hollywood-type cinema. As she explains,
“pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy to the female figure, which is styled accordingly.” (Thornham 62) She continues: “traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as the erotic object of the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium” (Thornham 63). This way she delineates the tripartite structure consisting of the “eye” of the camera, the gaze/look of the male protagonist, and the gaze/look of the spectator. She states that the “eroticization of women on the screen comes about through the way the cinema is structured around three explicitly male looks or gazes” (E. A. Kaplan 30). In connection with this theory, there is another concept I will use from Mulvey’s essay, namely, the “fetish” and the fetishization of the female body in motion picture through the lens of the camera.
The fetishizing tendencies of the camera are made apparent from the very beginning of the BBC adaptation. In fact, the first glimpse we have of the Wife of Bath (in the film, Beth Craddock, a famous actress) or, more precisely, of her carelessly dangling foot, is in one of the interview scenes which frame the narrative.
In these interviews, in a contemporary setting, we hear Beth and other characters (e.g.
her husband or her colleagues) reflecting mainly on her personal life and career. It is also in the interview frame that the characters are first introduced to the audience:
Beth’s present husband, the dentist James; her next husband Jerome, a young actor in the crew, who plays Beth’s partner in the series they are shooting; and her niece Jessica, who is also Beth’s personal assistant. Beside the interviews there are two more narrative layers in the film: the first one is the level on which Beth lives her everyday life, while the second level visualises the TV series in which she is the leading actress. These layers are embedded into each other, using a “Chinese box”
technique: the uppermost layer is the interview frame in which Beth reflects on her life, then comes the level of her ordinary life, and at the bottom is the television series. Thus, from the very first moments we can see that the 2003 BBC version is far from being a traditional adaptation of the Wife of Bath’s Tale; it does not dedicate itself to close fidelity to the literary text, but interprets it in a rather liberal way. In the film version, elements of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue are heavily mixed and intertwined with elements of her tale; however, it is predominantly based on the Prologue.
As outlined above, the three narrative levels in the film are: (1) the level of the interviews, which corresponds to the pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales, giving a frame to the stories, (2) the level of Beth’s everyday life, which is reflected on in the
interview frames, and which corresponds to the story of Alisoun’s life and her marriages in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, and (3) the level of the television series she acts in, which is structurally in the same position as Alisoun’s tale in Chaucer.
Considering these tripartite divisions, I would like to argue that Mulvey’s system could be fruitfully applied not only to the BBC adaptation but to the Chaucerian text as well. The author/narrator corresponds to the eye of the camera; the gaze within the narrative to the point of view of the pilgrims and the characters in the film; and finally, the male spectator to the reader or the viewer.
The multi-levelled structure of the film allows Beth to act and to be represented in a complex way. Of course, just like Beth, Chaucer’s Alisoun is also acting a part, but in the film this is properly highlighted by assigning to the character the job of a real actress in a TV series. This matches Beth’s character perfectly also because “female screen performance has always, quite overtly, included . . . exhibitionist display,” as Laura Mulvey observes in her book Death 24x a Second, when she elaborates on how the displayed body gives visual pleasure through the lens of the camera (162–163). Playing a role is central to Beth, even in her private life, which may be effectively illustrated with a recurring motif from the film: at various points of the narrative, Beth (almost ritually) performs an obviously faked lewd story about a vicar’s daughter, which she uses to pursue her male prey. Role-playing is also what young Jerome, her new husband accuses her of in a very tense scene, when she says that she loves him:
Jerome: So tell me, you love me.
Beth: I do love you.
Jerome: Properly.
Beth: I just did...
Jerome: YOU’RE ACTING! YOU ARE PRETENDING! You’re so bloody good that you believe your own shit, don’t you?”
Beth’s artificiality is further emphasised by the mock-documentary interview frame. Through this, it is again and again brought to our attention that what we are watching is a movie, a piece of fiction. With the help of the frame Beth is circumscribed by the world of fiction—by the realm, of course, where she rightly belongs. Again and again, the interviews break the “natural” flow of the story, just like in The Canterbury Tales when the pilgrims interrupt Alisoun, or when she addresses the reader, this way dislocating the reader/spectator and thereby creating a distance from more mainstream constructions. Beth’s—and the whole narrative’s—
artificiality is also highlighted by the front credits of the film, which lead us from the level of the interview to the layer of her “real” life. In these moments we see how the stage is “set” for her by people preparing the make-up tools, the lighting, the costumes, adjusting the camera. These subtle, self-reflexive moments simultaneously also evoke the fourteenth century through the soft lute music playing in the
background. Through all these means, the film manages to make the viewer quite uncertain about the truthfulness of Beth’s words.
The motif of artificiality is, of course, already present in Chaucer’s text as well. Let us consider the passage in which Alisoun tells about her dream to her husband: “It was a lie. I hadn’t dreamt at all. / ‘Twas from my godmother I learnt my lore / In mattes such as that, and many more.” (Chaucer 292) These lines aptly illustrate her capabilities as an actress (not to mention the way she presents her life or her tale). The situation is the same when she continues: “No one can be so bold—I mean no man— / At lies and swearing as a woman can” (282); or when she describes her marriages:
Lies, tears and spinning are the things God gives By nature to a woman, while she lives.
So there’s one thing at least that I can boast, That in the end I always ruled the roast;
Cunning or force was sure to make them stumble,
And always keeping up a steady grumble.” (287)
Through passages like these, we are convinced over and over again of her dramatic skills. Alisoun (like Beth, of course) is a role player whose natural medium is acting.
Moreover, she even calls attention to her own artificiality: “And please don’t be offended at my views; / They’re really only offered to amuse.” (281).
Alison “exists in her own language” (Crane 20), as Susan Crane states in her article about the Wife of Bath. This is true indeed, but this language, according to Elaine Showalter, is still male-dominated (and it continues to be so even in the twentieth century). As Showalter claims in “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”,
“the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative” (Showalter 181), and this way language is always already confining (for) women. The Wife of Bath is constructed (or, rather, forced to be constructed) by her tale; she is made to sell herself through it. However, her words are not her own, as “all dominant images are basically male constructions” (E. A. Kaplan 33). Therefore, the Wife is placed in and constructed by a completely male-dominated discourse (on page and on screen as well); “‘giving of words’ and ‘giving of self’” (Blamires 140) cannot originate purely from her person.
The Wife of Bath comes to represent a peculiar “type”. She is a
“phenomenon,” a pattern, a construction. She becomes much more than a single creature, she embodies woman as a construct, the “Wife” of six centuries. In this position she is not articulating herself but is being articulated by external (but already internalised) pressure. She is forced to adjust herself to the circumstances of a primarily male-dominated environment. As Peter G. Beidler remarks, “words are powerful and determine reality” (Chaucer, “The Wife of Bath” 283), and Chaucer is prominent in articulating and determining the nature of the “beast”. According to Harold Bloom, “Throughout her Prologue and Tale, the Wife combats the subjection that arises from the definitions of sexual difference generated by antifeminist texts”
(103), but she also “has to battle with glossators and clerks in a complex combat of words and authorities, a medieval battle of the books that seriously study gender and power” (Bloom 107). The Wife gets into a paradoxical situation in which she is both created by words and at the same time defended by them. She fights with words against words—as she asserts about her opponents:
But paid them out as far as I was able.
I say, so help me God Omnipotent,
I owe them nothing, paid them word for word Putting my wits to use, and they preferred To give it up and take it for the best
For otherwise they would have got no rest. (287–288)
Her most effective weapons are her tongue, her voice, and all that follows from her natural medium: acting. It is important to emphasise that she typically recites memorised clichés which are always already written for her. She never just says something but performs her script.
The artificiality of the Wife, while pointing to her constructedness, can also be interpreted in terms of the strange persistence and cyclic nature of her character. I would like to highlight three typical motifs from the film in connection with this: the first is Beth’s bawdy story about the vicar’s daughter which is told twice, at the beginning and at the end of the film. The second motif is a visual one: when Beth is rolling down the shutters of her caravan, it always implies that she is having sex with somebody at the very moment. Finally, the third one is a verbal reference in the final interview, made by Jessica, Beth’s niece when she comments on Beth’s enduring
“man hunting”: “She never stops trying, she never gets put off. She still has this unswerving belief that one day she will find Mister Perfect.” After this there is immediately a straight cut, and in the next scene we are shown how she tells the well-tried story to her new “prey” and how the shutters are lowered.
We saw that all these scenes are referring to Beth’s sexuality, her lustfulness and frivolous behaviour and that, apparently, the director regarded these characteristics to be of central importance. Similarly to Chaucer’s text, the film constrains Beth (the Wife) into already existing (and male-given) categories, which do not seem to have altered much through the centuries: “the carnal”, “the frivolous”,
“the lewd”, and so on. In this respect, the twenty-first century articulation of the character does not seem to differ from the way Chaucer depicts her. Moreover, Mulvey’s system also helps in establishing a continuum between Chaucer’s time and the twenty-first century, as it is able to deal with not only the temporal distance but also the medial shift. The ternary structure, the visual and textual equivalences travel through the centuries and point to the permanent features of the Wife.
This permanence is also apparent in such simple gestures as the title of her tale. She is not emancipated in the twenty-first century either: her story is still identified under the title “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and not “Alisoun’s” or “Beth’s Tale”, for instance. Every pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales is identified by an attribute
or a profession; this particular tale, however, indicates that her definition is assigned in relation to her husband and not as a separate individual. The actual identity of the husband is less important—what counts is that she is a professional Wife. In The Canterbury Tales she says, “I will bestow the flower of life, the honey, / Upon the acts and fruit of matrimony.” (279) Something like this appears in the film as well, even before it begins, at the rather emphatic point where the episode is “announced.”
It appears as a kind of motto: “I mean to give the best years of my life to the acts and satisfactions of a wife.” (“The Wife of Bath’s Tale”, Emmony) Beth in the film adapts these tags and labels to herself, as she is still in a strongly dependent relationship with male characters that surround her. This, however, is a mutual dependence, because, in turn, the characters around her need the “Wife” to project their fears, anxieties, and distresses onto her.
This peculiar relationship of the male characters to the Wife is apparent in her relationship with her husbands, and also in how they take leave of her.
... frying him in his own grease Of jealousy and rage; he got no peace.
By God on earth I was his purgatory. . . (289)
In the Tale all her husbands die but in the film it seems (except for one literal death), that we rather witness symbolic deaths: as if taking leave of her would destroy the husbands’ existence; as if she had the power “to suck men dry and destroy them”
(Pearsall 73). In the film Beth’s first husband, James is destroyed first existentially (by losing his car, an Aston Martin, which is obviously a symbol of his manhood, and by being forced to live in a “semi in Ashford”, which means the destruction of his social status) and finally literally as well. Jerome, after breaking up with her, goes to LA to work in a club (“or bar”) which is a symbolic death for him as an actor. Beth’s husbands are deprived of all their dignity, and sometimes even of their lives.
The “Wife”, therefore, represents male anxieties and, above all, the dreaded castration. Basically, all the fears of the male characters are condensed in her character. This is not only presented in the film but is also, of course, already suggested by Chaucer’s tale. Alisoun’s story of her life and her tale itself is full of references to male castration, either verbally or physically (or both). As the emphasis is on having dominance and control, taking away the authority from the male equals castration. She refers to her dominance when she says, “mine shall be the power all his life / Over his proper body, and not he” (280). Also, tearing the pages from John’s book of the “Wykked Wyves”, or simply having verbal and rhetorical superiority in general (instead of fulfilling the expected subordinate position) suggests the Wife’s dominance and can be recognised as various forms of symbolic castration, as male dominance, including both their biological and social existence, is based upon possessing these symbolic roles or artefacts. In Chaucer’s tale the Wife castrates her first three husbands through her verbal superiority and theatrical skills; she gets the upper hand emotionally with the fourth, but it is even more prominent in the fifth case, because when she attempts to symbolically castrate her fifth husband, by taking
the authority in her hands, the situation, finally, evolves into a physical battle of the sexes for the possession of control. As Bloom remarks: “the prologue recounts a medieval battle of books” (Bloom 111) and this particular book (which John reads and cites with a pathologic pleasure, like a mantra, this way reinforcing his manhood
the authority in her hands, the situation, finally, evolves into a physical battle of the sexes for the possession of control. As Bloom remarks: “the prologue recounts a medieval battle of books” (Bloom 111) and this particular book (which John reads and cites with a pathologic pleasure, like a mantra, this way reinforcing his manhood