Rebellious female characters in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales
sense of sexual autonomy here; yet arguably when applied to one’s ‘housbond’, the act of possession from the beginning of the tale is mirrored in the Wife’s ideology here. Instead of standi ng out as a woman fulfilling Davies’ ideal of ‘a relatively individualistic identity’, the Wife of Bath is arguably what Tuttle Hansen terms a ‘product of the masculine imagination against which she ineffectivel y . . . rebels’ : 4 while admittedly she is in control of her sexuality and commands autonomy, her creation of an sexuality for herself that merely imitates that of a man, as expressed in her tale, limits her to surviving in a misogynistic system to which her author can offer no alternative. In her, perhaps the most significant obstacle to a strongly feminist reading of Chaucer presents itself: can Chaucer, a man writing in a misogynistic, patriarchal society, effectively create rebellious, autonomous women with their own identities without perpetuating at least some of its hypocritical, limiting values and attitudes? Chaucer seems so aware of mechanisms for controlling women in his society, as shown by the Wife of Bath’s criticisms of them in her prologue and the way in which the Miller’s Tale is able to ridicule many of them; yet when writing female characters, he is limited by a ‘masculine’ perception of femininity. Indeed, it seems that Chaucer has created supposedly rebellious female characters who, as Peter G. Beidler 5 argues the Wife of Bath to do, ‘[reproduce] and [reinforce] masculine attitudes’; however, in this criticism, it is certainly important to acknowledge the influence of Chaucer’s wider world. Chaucer does seem aware of this: without it he simply could not have created such sharp comedy, exemplified by how Absolon’s pretensions of courtly love are reduced to farce in the Miller’s Tale. What proves problematic is that Chaucer both uses irony and comedy to critique a system that does not allowwomen true independence and supports the same system in his adherence to Christian virtues in valuing other women in the Tales. To say that the Tales have female characters who successfully break out of a patriarchal literary tradition is not only to ignore how these same women are still forced to construct any alternative identity using the same misogynistic language and forms that they, and Chaucer, are trapped within but also to ignore the existence of the work of Christine de Pizan and other female authors. De Pizan’s w ork moves beyond the societal trappings that appear to limit Chaucer: one of her earlier works, a poem titled ‘ Alone Am I ’ , details a mourning lover who choosing to continue on her own in a rejection of the normative structure of femininity upon which Chaucer relies. As her career at the French court progressed, so too did her writing, which grew into what Jill E. Wagner accurately describes as having ‘anticipated the feminist necessity of Virginia Woolf’s ‘a room of one’s own’ but [building] on a grand scale and [following] medieval tradition in deliberately selecting a city, not a room’; 6 Wagner draws a significant parallel between De Pizan’s construction of an eponymous City of the Ladies, the premise of a rebuttal of the misogynistic views of women propounded by her contemporary male authors, and Saint Augustine’s construction of the City of God, which is arguably the crucial difference between De Pizan and Chaucer. Chaucer’s Tales remain concerned with the same structures and seek to expose them without understanding the necessity of different language and schemata of relationships to achieve this; yet where De Pizan succeeds is in her use of these structures to provide legitimacy to an alternative voice, thus fulfilling Davies’ idea of ‘individualistic identities’ to a greater extent.
4 Hansen 1992: 35. 5 Beidler 1995: 109. 6 Wagner 2008: 69.
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