I have just started reading “The Good Wife of Bath” by Karen Brooks. I am familiar with the Wife of Bath from my previous study of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” in which she is one of the 29 pilgrims on their way to Canterbury. She is described in the General Prologue to that work as well as in her own self-descriptive prologue to her tale in which she declares herself an expert on marriage, having had five husbands … and in the market for another.
Brooks has the wife as a first-person narrator of her novel. Brooks’ Wife claims to have been a friend of Chaucer, whom she refers to as “the poet,” but clearly feels the need to correct the version of herself that Chaucer presents by telling her story in her own voice.
Reimagining a centuries-old character from a modern perspective is a remarkably bold choice. Anyone care to take a shot at Hamlet? In preparation for reading this book I have refreshed my recollection of this character. I’m going to guess that based on the vitality and self-confidence of Chaucer’s Wife, Brooks sees the seeds of an anachronistic feminism. Along with that idea, let’s call her character Ms. Bath, giving her a modern family name rather than a place name, as Chaucer did as was the custom of his time. Chaucer does let us know that her first name was Alison, and that she was a cloth merchant.
Chaucer dissects his 14th-century society so that is a good place for me to prepare for Brooks’ version. During this feudal period, power flowed down from the monarch and nobles until it reached and shaped the lives of ordinary folk, such as Ms. Bath and her husbands. Mention must also be made of the medieval clergy from the priests up through the bishops leading to the pope long before the Protestant Reformation broke it into warring schisms.
Ms. Bath cites the Biblical advice in Corinthians that it is “better to marry than to burn.” Based on her extensive history, she has a lot to say about the institution of marriage as a recognition of the shared sexual impulses of men and women, and deciding how to use that shared sexuality to her advantage. She explains that her choice of husbands tilted toward rich old men whom she could attract and then inherit from.
In respect to this emphasis on chastity, I am reminded, as I am sure Ms. Bath would agree, that this virtue was known more as an ideal than as an absolute fact since even some popes had concubines with whom they had children, as did priests. But as she no doubt will tell us as well in her revised autobiography her marriage to her one younger husband, driven by love rather than gain, did not turn out well as he seems to have been, in modern terms, a sexist.
I don’t know if Ms. Bath will have anything to say about the tale Chaucer gave her to share with the other pilgrims. It is a retelling of a traditional legend in which a knight who has committed a heinous capital crime can save his life by finding out within a year what women want. He gets an answer from an ugly old who woman who conditions her help on his agreeing to marry her. He accepts, and is happy to see that on their wedding night she transforms into a young and beautiful woman.
His correct answer to the question: women most desire sovereignty.
Ms. Bath, no doubt, will have a great deal to say on that topic.
I’ll let you know.