The Wife of Bath
• Her Portrait• Her Prologue
– Let’s divide into two parts
Lines 1-168Lines 199-834
Lines 199-834 The 5 Husbands
• The Three “Good Husbands”– l. 410;
• The Revelour (#4) l. 487• Jankyn and the Book of Wikked
Wyves (#5) l. 509
Lines 1-168 The Wife as Exegete
• The Wife is Fiction• Exegesis• Experience vs. Authority• Sovereignty
Wife as Text
• Wife is made up from other texts
• Palimpsest
• Line 475 – (taken from La Vieille in Roman de la Rose)
Wife as Exegete
• l. 149
• 1 Corinthians 7:4• “For the wife does not rule over her own
body, but the husband does, likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does”
Raptus
• What is the relationship between teller and tale?
• What does “woman” want?
• Parallel endings to Pro (l. 817 ff) and Tale (l. 1256 ff)
Chaucer Challenge
• Optional contest – extra credit toward course participation grade
• Write your own General Prologue—set at UCSD
• E-Submit to Prof. Lampert-Weissig by 5 pm Oct. 28 ([email protected]) Subject heading: Chaucer challenge
The Pardoner’s Prologue
• Hypocrisy and Deceit–Line 41 ff
–Eating and drinking as he lectures on drunkenness and gluttony (line 34)
The Pardoner’s Tale
• The Black Death• Reaches England in 1348 and kills up
to 30,000 of London’s 70,000 inhabitants as well as up to 1/3 of total English population
• Plague reference is Chaucer’s addition to this widely transmitted tale
The Three Rioters
• They hear a bell announcing a death l. 376
• They understand death literally– (Paul: the letter vs. the spirit 2 Cor 3:6)
Parodic Inversions in the Tale
• How to learn to correctly read and interpret the world as a Christian
• Tavern/Church
• Oak Tree/Cross
• Earthly Treasure/Heavenly Reward
• Christ’s blood/wine
False Communion
The Pardoner’s Ambiguities
• The Pardoner also clearly suffers from a type of “blindness”
• His physical ambiguities mirror his moral ambiguities
• Chaucer creates a correlation between his moral and physical state