The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner (review)

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• The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner
• Kathleen Forni

marion turner, The Wife of Bath: A Biography. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2023. Pp. x, 320. 14 color illustrations. isbn: 9780691206011. $29.95.

Highly readable, affordable ($20.97 for the ebook), with color illustrations and a striking green and pink cover featuring a design of the Ellesmere Wife of Bath, Turner’s book is a model for public-facing humanities. Princeton University Press has done its share to promote the book, which immediately created buzz, featured on National Public Radio and warmly reviewed by the Guardian, New York Times, New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement (to name only a few print venues) within weeks of its release. And the title itself is catchy, given that it’s a biography of a fictional character. Indeed, the book casts a wide net, and is intended for both Chaucerians and an educated audience with an interest in the Middle Ages and literary history. Chaucerians will recognize the enormous amount of research and scholarship that informs Turner’s details about Chaucer’s historical and social milieu, and less specialized readers will appreciate the story-driven narratives that control those details.

I had an undergraduate who said that he would ‘kill himself’ if he were married to the Wife of Bath, and Turner is adept at describing the power and, for some, the appeal of this fictional character. Although citing literary antecedents such as La Vielle in the Romance of the Rose, Turner makes a compelling case for the originality of Chaucer’s characterization of an ‘ordinary,’ female, middle-class, self-conscious, first-person narrator, tracing the interest in subjectivity and interiority partly to the tradition of confession (dating to the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215). Neither a real medieval woman nor a mosaic of misogynistic textual stereotypes, the Wife of Bath (Alison) nonetheless has characteristics that audiences in the fourteenth century would have recognized. The first part of book situates Alison within the social and historical context of northern medieval Europe in which the Black Death had afforded economic opportunities (working in service, victualling, brewing, textiles, and clothes production) that allowed women a new degree of social mobility. Turner compares [End Page 107] the Wife of Bath to real women who worked, remarried (among others, Chaucer’s mother, cousin, and granddaughter), went on pilgrimage, and wrote (Margery Kempe, Heloise, Christine de Pisan, Julian of Norwich). Turner makes the case that the Wife of Bath would not have been considered unrealistic or absurd in terms of her experience, nor in terms of her complaints against the tradition of clerical antifeminism. Compilations such as her fifth husband Jankyn’s ‘book of wikked wyves,’ while perhaps carrying some authority (or providing light entertainment), were nonetheless old fashioned and anachronistic.

The second part of the biography traces the trajectory of the Wife of Bath’s afterlife from 1400–2021. Her character challenges masculine, religious, and political authority and provokes a reactionary conservatism as she is engaged, invoked, and adapted by scribes and later literary artists. Turner is keen to reassert that Shakespeare ‘was a great Chaucerian,’ and finds the influence of the Wife of Bath most apparent in the character of Falstaff and in the play The Merry Wives of Windsor. Going further than some who have suggested Chaucer’s influence on Shakespeare is subliminal, or so ingrained as to be hardly recognizable, Turner makes a convincing case for Falstaff as a ‘transformed and transgendered’ Wife of Bath, although careful to qualify the comparison: ‘Correlation is not causation’ (pp. 172, 173). She is nonetheless right, I think, that Shakespeare scholars have downplayed his medieval influences in favor of the classical tradition, as they perhaps have too in the case of Alison’s echoes in James Joyce’s Molly Bloom, which Turner also finds deeply influenced by the Wife of Bath. Although John Dryden knew her Prologue would be popular, he does not translate it for Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), but Alexander Pope does, omitting all references to genitals and marital sexual activity. The adaptations of John Gay, Percy MacKaye, Voltaire and Pier Paolo Pasolini betray efforts to tame, punish, or demonize...