Seductive violence and three Chaucerian women

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

This connection between violence done to women and the male's security in his power occurs at a deeply ingrained level; it is processed as natural, though in fact it is a cultural product. In this way it is far more elemental even than the more doctrinal justifications for exercising violence against women discussed by Angela Weisl (1998). For her the two foundations for what she calls "normalized violence" against women in the Middle Ages are, first, that women must be kept under control and, second, that they must suffer retribution for the sins of the first mother, Eve (116-17).These are rationalizations for punishing and silencing women, however, not the foundations of the acts. Because she is a construct of Chaucer's imagination and thus of his schooling and reading, Alison seems to know the texts circulated among males and the way they portray her as the object of violence. In her fabricated dream she represents herself in just such a passage of violence toward women as Jankyn-and perhaps Chaucer-might have been trained to parse, or in just the kind of situation that he might have been trained to conceive in order to remember a passage or fact. In this sense the passage re-creates Jankyn's culturally, pedagogically established maleness in terms of violence upon women. The bloody vision of violence to herself that Alison provides constructs Jankyn's manhood and seduces him at the same time.6

The representation of violence in this passage from the Wife of Bath's Prologue involves some fundamental complications. First Alison herself activates conventions of violence against women as a means of securing Jankyn. Second, in so doing she claims to be following her mother's lore, the collective wisdom of her gender. Such gendered wisdom emerges for instance in la Vieille's advice to "Fair Welcome" in The Romance of the Rose. She says that the woman receiving the lover into her house must dramatize the potential violence in the situation-the possibility of her husband discovering them and slaying her before the lover's eyes, or the two of them being punctured by helm, hauberk, or spear, and disemboweled in some secret room (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun 1962, 13815-3829). Third, Chaucer, the male author, is impersonating-creating his own dream of-both the individual woman and her gender's self-destructive, self-violating contrivances for securing men. The third of these elements, of course, overrides the other two and makes easy generalizations about Chaucer's feminist sympathies problematic.7 The issue here is not simply, as Weisl (1998, 117) explains, that Chaucer's tales show how profoundly women became what was said about them; the fact is, Chaucer, the male author, has these female characters become what males say about women.

Many of the elements that operate in the Wife's contrived but culturally dictated dream reemerge in the Shipman's Tale. Again a single episode captures the dynamics of this seductive violence.That episode involves the wife's arranging to sleep with the monk for a hundred franks, which she needs in order to buy a special piece of clothing for her next appearance at church. While her husband is in his counting house, the wife moves from hinted complaints about her marriage to a solid agreement to sleep with the monk once the merchant sets out on his business venture. During this exchange the wife several times stylizes herself as the victim of violence, and these stylizations, I would like to propose, are based on the violence toward women in saints' lives.