Seductive violence and three Chaucerian women

College Literature, Spring 2001 by O'Brien, Timothy D

The only fully portrayed females on the pilgrimage to Canterbury, the Wife of Bath and the Prioress make a curious pair, which becomes an even more curious trio when we add the wife in the Shipman's Tale, whose sexual economics and position in a tale originally intended for the Wife of Bath connect her with Alison, and whose position in the tale just before that of the Prioress links her, strangely at first, with the more devout of these two female pilgrims. More than a matter of redundancy in the material Chaucer had on hand for his arch wife and more than a function of narrative sequence, this association among the three characters makes sense also because of their tendency to represent themselves as objects of violence. And they represent themselves in this way, as crude as the observation at first seems, in order to make themselves attractive to men. Violence to women generates desire in men-that is the fundamental equation within these portraits. My aim in this paper is to trace some of the circuits by which this equation finds its way into these characterizations. One of these paths is the process of gender formation itself, at least to the extent that gender formation can be captured by some essentializing concept. The other, a discussion of which will make up the bulk of this paper, consists of some particular educational and literary conventions revealed in textbooks and saints' lives to which even Chaucer, however keenly aware he was about his society's construction of himself and others, was unavoidably subject.

In part, isolating the seductive violence in these portraits builds upon a focus in recent literary, cultural, and theoretical commentary on violence done to women, ranging from physical dismemberment to textual silencing. In Chaucerian, and more widely, Middle English studies, such commentators as Carolyn Dinshaw, Elaine Hansen, Kathryn Gravdal, and Louise Fradenburg, to name just a few, have observed the ways in which male authors-as well as male scholars and critics-support their hegemony by positioning women characters as objects of violence, whether the aim is some form of violation or an equally threatening rescue. Often such commentary is supported by psychoanalytical, post-structuralist theory concerning the origin of gender and language-Derrida, Lacan, and Kristeva are among the usual sources. Such theory expands enormously the scope of violence beyond ravishing, torturing, and stabbing. Entry into language and the associated differentiation of genders; scraping parchment, writing, and reading a text; recording history; and looking at a woman (the gaze)-all these and more are acts of violence. They enact violence insofar as they divide and differentiate, insofar as they work to determine the indeterminate, and insofar as they establish boundaries and mark something as alien in order to determine individual and/or group identity. Because woman is the indeterminate or the object that can stand in for the original loss of the "real," to use Lacanian terms, she is the focus of a determining, differentiating violence. Without a clear demarcation between inside and outside, she becomes the site whereon man can define borders and thus his masculinity. 1

This isolation of violence as the origin of gender helps to take us beyond such important observations as Hanks's that love and sex in Chaucer are often violent affairs. It uncovers the underlying structure of that violence. But it also remains limited without a sense of how the self-representations of these three female characters also originate in the texts-particularly the schoolbooks, saints' lives and romances-that helped to shape male identity in terms of violence toward females. Chaucer's characters attract us because they uncannily reflect "human nature," but at same time they are textual, products of Chaucer's literate experience. Perhaps this distinction does not amount to a difference: even characters who strike us as real do so precisely because they are composed of the "texts" from which our expectations about what is authentic have themselves been formed. Certainly these three female characters present themselves in terms of texts that confirm the expectations of their male audiences.

The notion of the feminine as liminal, as a force or place that obscures boundaries, but at the same time as the site upon which difference and subjugation can be, in all senses of the term, conceived, pervades the representation of violence in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale.The scenes of violence are hardly rare: they include the slugfest between Alison and Jankyn at the end of the Prologue and certainly the rape beginning her Tale. However, I would like to focus on a much less frequently noticed representation of violence, one that perhaps more startlingly than these others expresses the complexity and illustrates the cultural foundations of Chaucer's linking violence with seduction. I am thinking of the dream Alison devises in order to secure Jankyn's interest in her. Still married to her fourth husband but like the wise mouse always preparing an alternative hole into which to scurry, she contrives for Jankyn a story about a dream she had of them. Here is what she shares of her scheme: