The Heroic Knight in the Wife of Bath’s Tale
My pseudonym comes from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. If you haven’t read it, go do that.
Did you read it? If not, go read the Wikipedia synopsis at least before continuing. It’s short. [Edit: I’ve been told the synopsis makes what I missed obvious. So do, please, try to read the original instead of the synopsis.]
I first read this more than twenty years ago in college. I did so dutifully, reading each word and came to class prepared to talk about it.
It turned out I was not prepared. My instructor mentioned a rape at the beginning of the story, and I and a number of other students gave bewildered looks as we questioned if we had even read the correct story or not.
And yet, if you go backing the text, it’s right there. In fact, it’s the whole reason the knight has to scour the countryside for a year. And somehow I missed it.
Since then, as I’ve become more critical about media and my own consumption of it, my oversight seems no less forgivable, but much more understandable. The maiden raped by the knight is a non-playing character. She is an NPC who has no function in the story but to present a legal speed bump for the knight to overcome.
If this story were real life, she would have her own narrative. She’d have parents and siblings and hobbies. Also, her life’s progression wouldn’t end with her encounter with the knight. She’d need to figure out how to handle what had happened to her in a society that likely would have regarded her as damaged.
It isn’t real life though, so she is afforded none of that. She is literally nameless. Her only characteristic is her virginity. Also, she was apparently she was also “forlorn.”
Our hero the knight, however, gets a redemption arc. He gets a dramatic scene where he is condemned to death before a last-minute respite. He searches in vain for his salvation for a year before he is saved by an old hag, but only at a grievous price.
And then ultimately, he gets everything he could have ever wanted, and maybe even more. He suffers through some gentle feminist scolding on the way, but his refusal to make a decision when considering two options that disgust him equally is coincidentally the key to unlocking his salvation.
The reason this story is special for me is that I did not recognize any of this upon my first reading. It is an extraordinarily gentle introduction to some elementary feminist ideas like maybe women shouldn’t be treated as they were in the Middle Ages. Even then with this gentleness, I didn’t realize how much my desire to have a story that has a hero was being accommodated. I was a naive and foolish reader, and arrogant too. I chose the name Bath to serve as a reminder of that foolishness that I’m sure I still retain today.
Those of you who did the assigned reading, did you fall in the same trap? Did you forgive the knight as readily as I did? Or not even really notice it at all? Did you simply accept the narrative that cut short the life of the maiden and elevated the life of the knight and his fate to be the only one of importance?
I read the Wikipedia synopsis and remembered. Maybe I would have forgotten if I’d read the whole thing, but it seems like a pretty key fact about the knight’s character.Report
I do think it is more obvious in the synopsis. The text says something like
~”took her maidenhood”~ or something similarly obscuring the physical act, while the synopsis does not. Also, the synopsis being shorter is generally going to offer less opportunity forget stuff and focus more on the plot rather than the journey and the woman’s speech at the end.
It’s entirely possible I was just a dense reader too, but at least in my class, I was not the only one!Report
The old-timey English probably makes it harder to process and retain, as well.Report
“By very force he took her maidenhead.” Line 64
Even in a modern translation such as this (Coghill died in ’80 in his early eighties), the terms used don’t resonate with the modern reader, and one has to be pointed to the fact that yes this means something of greater importance. If it had said, “he raped her” it would be very obvious and jarring. And through the story, we learn that this is indeed a crime punishable by death. So, even in this most unfeminist period, we learn that there are mores and morals surrounding the crime.
But, the story of how to be a better husband and man is the point of the whole story, not some tale of getting away with lust, which was a big deal in the medieval period and its overarching Christianity. And to tell this story, which in reality is a parable, the victim’s story only detracts from its intended lesson. Which is the betterment of men in regards to women.
Could her story also be interesting? Yes, and I would have very much liked to have read it, as I really liked Chaucer and it would have been a nice closing of the circle there, but alas it is not to be (at least as far as I remember.)Report
That seems clear even in Middle English.
By verray force, he rafte hire maydenhed;
For which oppressioun was swich clamour
And swich pursute unto the kyng Arthour
That dampned was this knyght for to be deed,
By cours of lawe, and sholde han lost his heedReport
The Wife of Bath’s tale provides insight into the role of women in the Late Middle Ages, thank youReport
This is a really great article, well done.Report
Eliezer Yudkowsky refers to this phenomenon as “Moral Suspension of Disbelief”. He wrote a short story (short enough to be read in one session) called the Sword of Good that addresses the phenomenon:
http://yudkowsky.net/other/fiction/the-sword-of-goodReport
Hey, thanks for a great piece, I really enjoyed it.
I am of the opinion that sometimes a character speaks volumes even without being a central character. And I find that here. Yes, the maiden is not the protagonist (by a longshot) but I felt that carried a huge emotional punch. Something awful happened and yet everyone else’s life went on and she was just a footnote to it (which happens to victims all the time, of course)- but I still think she’s being advocated for in a way that seems centuries ahead of its time even without being the main character – and indeed in part, because she isn’t.
It’s interesting to me that you read this as a younger person because I found several times as a younger person I either missed things meant as negative commentary, or even took them to be endorsement because I wasn’t up to speed on subtlety yet. (wrote about that here, this is very controversial https://atomicfeminist.com/2018/10/31/a-kind-of-defense-of-brett-kavanaugh/) I wonder if as teachers/parents we need to do better at informing kids of the underlying moral complexity of literature rather than assuming what their takeaways will be.Report