The Wife of Bath

• Her Portrait• Her Prologue

– Let’s divide into two parts

Lines 1-168Lines 199-834

Wife of Bath

• GP Portrait Line 447

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

Book of Wikked Wyves

• Line 672 ff.

• Valerian and Theophrastus• Anti-Feminist tradition

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

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”

Whose “Fantasy” is this?

• Arthurian Romance• Parallels between Prologue and Tale

The Wife as Text

• Antifeminist nightmare?

• Who speaks for “woman”?• l. 698

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 (llampert@ucsd.edu) Subject heading: Chaucer challenge

The Pardoner’s GP Portrait

• Line 671

• What does a Pardoner do?

• Gelding or Mare?

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 Prologue

• Confessional like the Wife’s

• Hypocrisy and Deceit

–“Relics” (line 59)

The Pardoner’s Prologue

• Hypocrisy and Deceit

–Relics and blackmail l. 89 ff.

The Pardoner’s Tale

• Form of the tale

–Sermon

–Exemplum

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 Black Death

The Black Death

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

The Pardoner’s Ambiguities

• Why does the Pardoner try to “con” the pilgrims?

• “Epilogue” Line 631 ff

• Why does the Host react so violently?