On the first day of my last medieval literature course, our professor asked us to choose our favourite medieval character.  After my mind initially went blank (as it often does when such topics arise), it reached for Alisoun, the Wife of Bath: Geoffrey Chaucer’s subversive, brazen pilgrim and serial monogamist.

 

I encountered her during my first year at Wellesley as a wide-eyed English major with a sudden appetite for medieval lit.  Her tale of maistrie has fascinated me again and again, so it is only fitting that in my first post I focus on one of the themes which has captured not only me (and my favourite dead white guy Chaucer) but also a smattering of other storytellers from the medieval period.

For those of you who have not read the Wife of Bath’s Tale (or those simply wanting a refresher), Shmoop provides a respectable summary here.

The Loathly Lady

The archetype of the loathly lady is of Irish origin and was a staple in Arthurian romance.  The Wife of Bath places her tale in Arthurian tradition by making her setting evident in the very first line: “In th’olde dayes of Kyng Arthour/ Of which that Britons speken greet honour,/ Al was this land fulfild of fairye” (ln 857-9, Chaucer and Robinson).  Chaucer places the Wife’s tale in line with The Tale of Florent in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c. 1390) and the anonymous Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell, and the Wife transforms it to conform to the sentence of her prologue, which subverts power dynamics in marriage; I find the idiosyncrasies surrounding the loathly lady portrayed by the Wife most delightful for both their sentence (meaning) and solaas (entertainment).

 

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The Wife of Bath’s Tale

From the very beginning, the knight of the Wife of Bath’s Tale entirely lacks gentilesse, which sets up the tale to be rooted in the genre of estates satire.  He gets into trouble in the first place because he rapes a beautiful maiden while gallivanting around the countryside; his behavior towards women does not improve even after the queen (unnamed in the tale but taken to be Queen Guinevere since the knight is of King Arthur’s court) intercedes to save his life.  It is not until he is given a dressing down by Chaucer’s version of the loathly lady, an ugly fairy woman, that he takes his first step toward redemption by relinquishing his maistrie to her.  The old hag’s gentility sermon distinguishes her from the other two loathly ladies of the knight Florent (in Gower) and Gawen.  Beginning at line 1109, the knight’s ugly bride delivers a speech that echoes Alisoun’s philosophy on authority:

But for ye speken of swich gentillesse

As is descended out of old richesse,

That therefore sholden ye be gentilmen,

Swich arrogance is nat worth an hen!

Looke who that is moost vertuous alway,

Pryvee and apert and moost entendeth ay

To do the gentil dedes that he kan.

Taak hym for the grettest gentilman.

Crist wole we clayme of hym oure gentillesse,

Nat of oure eldres for hire old richesse (Chaucer and Robinson, lines 1109-1118).

The Wife’s old woman goes on to invoke such personages as Dante, Seneca, and Boethius; her lecture functions to restore some amount of agency (or at least an element of reality) to the figure of the loathly lady, creating a more vibrant character than exists in either Gowers’s or Gawen’s tales.

Her lesson gives way to her final proposition:

To han me foul and old til that I deye,

And be to yow a trewe, humble wyf,

And never yow displese in al my lyf,

Or elles ye wol han me yong and fair,

And take youre aventure of the repair,

That shal be to youre house bycause of me… (Chaucer and Robinson, lines 1220-1225)

In brief, she offers to be beautiful yet potentially unfaithful or old and ugly yet loyal to him.  Interestingly, the other two tales feature a slightly different offer; both loathly ladies force their husbands to choose between having them fair by day and foul by night or vice versa.  In the spirit of Harry Bailey’s stipulations for the pilgrim’s tales, the prospect of cuckoldry does give the Wife of Bath’s version of the tale greater solaas.  

The knight defers to her judgment on the matter, and, transformed by the love of the old woman, the knight becomes agreeable and loving towards his fair and faithful fairy wife, and they live happily ever after.

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Sir Gawain

The knight in The Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell is none other than Syr Gawen (or Gawain), an Arthurian regular.  The unnamed narrator of this tale describes Dame Ragnell, the loathly lady, as vividly hideous, but both King Arthur and Syr Gawen generally behave with nobility.  At least with as much nobility as one can expect.  For example, in lines 303-8 King Arthur replies to the dame’s offer with mixed horror and humour (driven by incredulousness):

Alas! he sayd, nowe woo is me,

That I shold cause Gawen to wed the,/

For he wol be loth to saye naye.

So foull a lady as ye ar nowe one

Sawe I never in my lyfe on ground gone;

Gawen, in contrast, does agree to marry Dame Ragnell if it means saving his king’s life, even after Arthur insists that the sacrifice is too great:

…Thowgh she were as foull as Belsabub,

Her shall I wed, by the Rood,

Or elles were nott I your frende… (Correale and Hamel, lines 345-347)

Even after Gawen has beheld the repulsive Dame Ragnell, he behaves courteously, reflecting the gentilesse that is only exhibited by the Wife of Bath’s knight post-transformation.  After Dame Ragnell refuses to be wed early in the morning (line 575), the narrator describes her preparing for the ceremony:

She was arayed in the richest maner,

More fressher than Dame Gaynour:

Her arayment was worth iii thousand mark

Of good red nobles, styff and stark,

So rychely she was begon.

For all her rayment she bare the bell

Of fowlenesse that ever I hard tell,

So fowll a sowe sawe never man! (Correale and Hamel, lines 590-597)

Even as the narrator starkly compares the dame’s revolting appearance to the magnificence of King Arthur’s court, Gawen’s nobility shines through, for unlike the Wife’s loathly lady, Gawen’s bride-to-be does get a proper wedding.  Unfortunately there is a leaf missing from the manuscript shortly after the festivities begin, and the narrative does not pick up again until after Gawen and the dame have gone to bed.  The wailing and tossing characteristic of the Wife of Bath’s knight is missing from the description of Gawen’s first night with his bride.  Instead, we find the knight simply turned away in bed while Dame Ragnell pleads with him to at least kiss her for saving his king (line 635).  And without needing the lecture received by the Wife’s knight, Gawen responds to her:

…I woll do more

Then for to kisse, and God before! (Correale and Hamel, lines 638-639)

The Wife of Bath’s Tale ends at this point, but the tale of Gawen’s marriage continues for some 150 lines.  After the glorious kissing of two fair people, a vital piece of the dame’s background is explained.  She is a princess cursed by her stepmother and has been awaiting her Prince Charming.  The first time I read through this tale, I thought the additional background surrounding Dame Ragnell made her more realistic and less archetypical, but after returning to the Wife of Bath’s loathly lady, I am more inclined to see Dame Ragnell as an archetypical fairytale princess.  In this anonymous Arthurian poem, the loathly (cursed) lady (princess) undergoes transformation.  In contrast, the Wife of Bath’s loathly (fairy) lady acts upon the errant knight to elicit change in him.  There is no indication in the tale that she required anything from him in order to undergo her physical transformation.

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Florent

The Tale of Florent resembles Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale more closely than that of Syr Gawen, so it does reveal some of the knight’s less-than-noble tendencies (although the Wife’s knight still takes home the dirtbag award).  Like the tale of Syr Gawen’s wedding, John Gowers’s tale of a knight named Florent features a more or less demure loathly lady who seems to have been waiting around in the forest for her Prince Charming to break her ugly spell.

Florent’s trespass is not as repugnant as that of the Wife’s knight; he is accused of murdering an emperor’s son, Branchus, while in a foreign land and must go on a quest to discover what women desire most in exchange for the king and queen’s pardon.  (Apparently Florent’s gentilesse is so well-known that the king and queen have mercy on his noble spirit.)  We begin to see the similarities between Gower’s knight and Chaucer’s knight when Florent encounters the unnamed hag; Florent, a bit more clever than the Wife’s knight (who does not inquire after the loathly lady’s one demand until after she saves his life), asks after the ugly woman’s intentions and rejects her proposal upon hearing it (line 166).

After some reasoning, Florent reconsiders the advantages and disadvantages of marrying an old hag, though he thinks it through before he actually says anything (again, more prudent than his contemporary counterpart):

And thanne he caste his avantage,

That sche was of so gret an age,

That sche mai live bot a while

And thoghte put hire in an ile [isle],

Wher that noman hire scholde knowe,

Til sche with deth were overthrowe. (Correale and Hamel, lines 180-185)

It is not gallant, but it is more in line with the concept of gentilesse than Chaucer’s knight since Florent is not so vocal about the misery of his situation and sets the old hag on his horse to take her to the castle:

Thogh sche be the fouleste of all,

Yet to th’onour of wommanhiede

Him thoghte he scholde taken hiede;

So that for pure gentilesse,

As he hire couthe best adresce,

In ragges, as sche was totore,

He set hire on his hors tofore

And forth he takth his weie softe… (Correale and Hamel, lines 323-330)

With the hope of being pardoned by the wisdom of his hideous bride-to-be, Florent takes her to his castle to prepare her for the court; Gower adds more delicious detail to the foulness of the lady while conveying Florent’s noble efforts to have her treated like a fair one:

Hire ragges thei anon of drawe,

And, as it was that time lawe,

She hadde bath, sche hadde reste,

And was arraied to the beste. (Correale and Hamel, lines 350- 353)

…

Thei myhte hire hore lockes schode,

And sche ne wolde noght be schore

For no conseil, and thei therfore,

With such atyr as tho was used,

Ordeinen that it was excused,

And hid so craftelich aboute,

That noman myhte sen hem out. (Correale and Hamel, lines 355-361)

Florent and his loathly lady wed under the cover of night like the Wife of Bath’s knight and lady, but following in the footsteps of Gawen, Florent’s gentility prevents him from doing anything more than turning away from his ugly wife on their wedding night (line 388).  He ultimately resembles Gawen, and the loathly lady, rather than Gawen, ends up undergoing dramatic transformation.  Like the poem, this tale ends with the explanation that Gawen’s new bride was a cursed maiden on a quest to break a spell that made her hideous.  We do hear the terms under which the spell can be broken, which involves a knight who is willing to surrender his maistrie to his loathly-looking lover, but the tale’s emphasis remains to be the physical transformation of the dame and not the psychological change of the knight.

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The Genius of Tweaking Tradition

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is a triumph of integration, and it is reflected in each tale.  Though I have chosen to focus on the archetype of the loathly lady and to read only two similar medieval works alongside it, I have stumbled across dozens of other connections to the text from as far away in time as Ovid’s Metamorphoses (more information on that here).  The most difficult decision was to choose which thread to follow.

Looking at these three texts–The Wife of Bath’s Tale, The Weddyng of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell, and The Tale of Florent–helps us grasp their intertextual richness and consequently helps us tease out and appreciate their individualities.  The loathly lady archetype comes to life in unexpected ways in each tale, especially the Wife’s; we can better get a sense of Chaucer’s purpose for the text if we know how it differs from others: Alisoun’s subversive, feisty attitude trickles down to the old woman in her tale; it manifests in her gentility lecture, the details of her proposition, and importantly in the tale’s focus on the internal transformation of the knight that is evoked by a fairy woman.  And that, dear reader, is why the Wife of Bath’s Tale is still my number one.

 

Works Cited:

 

Chaucer, Geoffrey and F.N. Robinson (ed.). The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. pp. 116-122. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987. Print.

Correale, Robert and Mary Hamel. Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. II. pp. 405-448. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002. Print.