The "Double Sorwe" of The Wife of Bath: Chaucer and the Misogynist Tradition

There are several historical approaches that might be taken to the lengthy discourse of Alisoun, Chaucer's Wife of Bath. From the dated one known as exegetical criticism, her revelations mark her as a "hopelessly carnal and literal" exegete of holy scripture (Robertson 317). In this view, she serves to represent and embody the very complaints that moralists were making about widows who re-marry and wives who demand sexual pleasure. Hence she rails against the admonitions of "clerkes," particularly the "cardinal, that highte Seint Jerome" (674).1 Chaucer, devoted to the poet's moral duty to set forth in his fictions examples of caritas and cupiditas, is thus exhibiting in Alisoun living proof of precisely those wrongdoings that the Wife, to her anger, has heard condemned by church authorities. The most minor of these is her own admitted tendency to gossip (531-42). Various authorities, among them Thomas Aquinas and Gulielmus Peraldus, whose Summa vitiorum figures in the Parson's Tale, "repeatedly denounced female chatter as the scource of the new age and called for its suppression" (Dalarun 40). When more serious charges are examined, she is seen in context as, supposedly, Chaucer means her to be seen: an offender against incontrovertible moral and social codes.