Although the Wife of Bath, in her Prologue, argues in a quasi-feminist voice for the validity of her own experience and authority,² her narrative seems ambiguously—and ambivalently—both feminist and anti-feminist.³ This sense of the narrative becomes clearer when we consider the Wife to be a textual “feminine”⁴ representation, one constructed within the parameters of “masculine” discourse and articulated in masculine terms,⁵ even as specific components of the construction may be identified as feminine. My interest in the textual feminine here corresponds not to any internal textual privileging of an écriture féminine⁶ but to masculine and feminine components of an epistemological metaphor of paradigmatic distinction. The feminine may be understood as an engendered epistemological construct existing within the parameters of an ostensibly masculine discourse. The Wife, herself a textual construct, does not produce what could be described as a feminine discourse; rather, she is produced by and reiterates an ostensibly masculine discourse, though as I hope to demonstrate, her narrative calls attention to an ambivalent feminine poetics within those parameters.

As a character within a fictional frame, the Wife exists as words of narrative; her existence is a textual reality. And as a fictional voice articulated from moment to moment by narrative structures, the Wife does not control the agency of her own narrative, her “own” voice, even as the narrative voice constructs the illusion of character. As Marshall Leicester notes,

What we call the Wife of Bath exists in the text as a set of unresolvable tensions between self-revelation and self-presentation, repentance and rebellion, determinism and freedom, the individual and the institution, Venus and Mars, past and present. In each of these cases the opposition is both necessary and unsustainable, and the terms ceaselessly turn into one another. Of course the Wife is a construction, an interpretation.⁷

The Wife may be read as both narrative construct and literary character, the former existing discursively, as a rhetorical construct, and the latter as a mimetic reality, having an imagined history and psychological profile. Although without the latter there would be no “Wife,” Chaucer's concern lies more clearly with the former, and my own remarks attend primarily to the Wife as the narrative/discursive construct that Chaucer uses to delineate his own discovering of the limits of discourse. While the Wife ultimately does not replace or supplant the masculine with what could be construed as an écriture féminine, her characterization nonetheless challenges patriarchal orthodoxy in its evocation of the feminine component of epistemological dualism and the text's grappling with the tensions thereby introduced.

This said, I want to consider the linguistic, discursive, and sexual ambiguities of the Wife's attention to “glossing,” which I shall eventually connect to the narrative's articulation of an ambivalent feminine poetics. This poetics in turn inscribes Chaucer's concern with his own glossing, his own sense of the equivocalness of discursive investiture. To gloss a word, phrase, or passage is to supply a new and more readily accessible interpretation or annotation, ostensibly for clarification or explanation. Owing to the word's etymology,⁸ however, an underlying erotic sense informs its use in the Wife's discourse. For example, the Wife's description of glossing—“Men may devyne and glosen up and doun,” “Glose whoso wole, and seye bothe up and doun” (III.26, 119)⁹—not only suggests a thorough attempt at interpretation, covering both ends and everything that is between them, but also hints at erotic activity, of the connotations of which the Wife is no doubt aware and in which, indeed, the character delights. It is important, too, to note the shift in gender identification: first, the Wife insists that “men” may gloss (III.26), using a noun which while signifying a general sense of “people” is nonetheless masculine; she then uses “whoso” (III.119), signifying “anyone,” masculine or feminine.¹⁰ What is initially described as a masculine activity is arguably subsequently assigned to—or appropriated by—the feminine. Both men and women may “gloss,” be it sexually or textually; as the Wife clearly demonstrates in her own ambiguous “glossing,” the tongue is, in effect, androgynous or bisexual,¹¹ belonging to and representative of both the masculine and the feminine.

Glossing informs the role of the text as mediation of desire, underscored throughout the Prologue by the Wife's articulation of sexualized language “pleye”:

But yet I praye to al this compaignye
If that I speke after my fantasye,
As taketh not agrief of that I seye;
For myn entente nis but for to pleye

III.190-92

claims the Wife, using a disclaimer typical of Chaucerian narrators (who remind us not to “make ernest of game” [I.3186], not to impart to the text with such seriousness that it is stripped of its wit and pleasure).¹² Glossing is connected to sexualized textuality¹³ in the Wife's description of the episode involving Jankyn's “book of wikked wyves” (III.685), for example, an episode which demonstrates that this particular text serves as an instrument of seduction.¹⁴ It is, after all, the book that prompts the confrontation that in turn leads to reconciliation (according to the Wife's narrative of events). Jankyn is described as preferring the book to his wife, substituting the eros of the text for the eros of the marital relationship; the Wife notes that he amuses himself with the book, reading it “gladly, nyght and day” (III.669). The confrontation between Jankyn and the Wife is provoked by the Wife's apparent jealousy over her husband's preferring to spend his evenings with his book rather than with her. Thus the book substitutes for desire (for Jankyn) and then effects desire's mediation, ultimately bringing together Jankyn and the Wife. Indeed, the Wife notes that he gave her control “of his tonge and of his hond also” (III.815), again suggesting the correlation of eros and language in her controlling of his “tonge.”¹⁵ The Wife's narrative insists upon an alignment of the two, eros and language, and indeed her Prologue itself “glosses” one in terms of the other.

There is, then, a crucial connection between eros and language that the Wife draws upon throughout her narrative; her attention to sex may be understood as attention to language and vice versa, for her discourse on marriage is not only a commentary on marriage as institution, but also on the discourse of that institution and, indeed, on discourse itself. Further, as the Wife embodies the textuality of the framing narrative, her textuality is sexualized just as her body is textualized. The relationship of textuality and sexuality is underscored by attention to the abuse of each component in that abuse of eros—perversion—serves as a commentary upon or metaphor of the abuse of language. As Eugene Vance comments, “The equation between idolatry, including idolatry of the letter, and sexual perversion became a subtle force in medieval poetics,”¹⁶ informing sexual metaphors that call attention to their own signification processes in addition to thematic considerations of the activities described. The Wife's inclusion of fairly explicit double entendres, then, provides an incessant, though erratic, reminder throughout her Prologue that the character is commenting on both medium and message, that the narrative addresses concerns of both textual representation and normative presuppositions in the narrative's moral dimension. Chaucer sets out the Wife as a kind of narrative decoy in order to confront normative/narrative presuppositions and to test the dangers of glossing in relation to his own poetic appropriation. He demonstrates the inevitability of discursive promiscuity—an inhering insistence upon the resistance of language to unmitigated subjection.

While moralizing readings that fault the Wife's behavior or find her wanting—conventional masculine readings—are clearly supported by the text's own emphases,¹⁷ the Wife, as a narrative construct, as a textual representation of Woman, also supports a reading that challenges this perspective without ignoring the unfavorable details included in the Wife's construction. In other words, to find a feminine valorization inhering in the Wife's narrative is not—and need not be—to ignore the reality of the portrait.

The Wife delights in talking about sexuality;¹⁸ the language of eros is, for her, apparently far more appealing than is any active participation itself. Indeed, with regard to her “olde houbondes” she notes,

For wynning wolde I al his lust endure,
And make me a feyned appetit;
And yet in bacon hadde I nevere delit.

III.416-18

She endures her husband's sexual demands in order to maintain her profit-making status as “wyf.”¹⁹ Moreover, she confesses outright that she feigns an appetite, that she fakes arousal and desire because she has no interest in nor derives enjoyment from “bacon.” (She describes her husband[s] sexually as “bacon,” old meat, aged and dry, while her own female anatomy she identifies as “bele chose,” beautiful thing [III.447, 510].) Her comment suggests that for all her sexually charged banter and erotic “pleye,” language is the medium of eros for her, and the excitement she does not find any longer in active sexuality, she finds in language, its substitute. The Wife participates in an eroticization of the letter, for the erotic sense of language apparently holds for the Wife far greater appeal than does participation in the activities to which the language refers; her “bele chose” is her “pleye” of language, not the play of her female anatomy, and she apparently derives satisfaction from the response that her word-“pleye” elicits from her audience. To construct her “pleye,” then, she imposes connotations not only according to her pleasure, but for her pleasure as well.²⁰

The Wife's use of “appetyt” to describe her desire for sexual/textual pleasure—jouissance—is curious in its apparent inconsistency, for she claims first to feign an appetite, suggesting that none is present, and then to follow an appetite of her own natural desires: “And make me a feyned appetit” (III.417) and “evere folwede myn appetit” (III.622). “Appetit” is first described as absent, then present. Clearly, while the Wife desires to desire (to borrow the phrase made popular by Mary Anne Doane),²¹ she apparently finds actual sexual desire lacking; in its place she not only constructs the illusion of its presence, but then claims to follow that very (feigned) desire as well. The apparent contradiction is reconciled, however, by the Wife's implicit core intention: to elicit a response from her predominantly male audience, even if her narrative/rhetorical performance demands inconsistencies in the narrative/rhetorical line. “Rhetorical” here suggests that “desire” is constructed by the discourse; it exists only as the rhetorical line suggests its existence; the rhetorical line is not informed by an a priori desire, but rather the line generates it simultaneously with its articulation even if the articulation contradicts itself. “Desire” is for the Wife rhetorical, for her desire to desire seems to be accompanied by a desire to be recognized as having desire; she seems to construct her narrative for the effect of eliciting approval from her audience and, as such, the narrative voice ventriloquizes, speaking their language—the language of the audience—rather than her “own.” Hence her claims of sexual promiscuity (“I ne loved nevere by no discrecioun”—III.622) and her impulse to talk about this alleged lack of discretion may be understood as an attempt to enhance the likelihood of acquiring this recognition from her audience. Indeed, the Wife's attempts to maintain audience interest render her a caricature, an exaggeration of a woman who not only desires to desire but who uses that desire as a rhetorical strategy, as a sexualized captatio benevolentiae. As a caricature of a feminine desire produced by the dominant masculine discourse, the Wife is not only made a spectacle, but is shown as a conspirator in her own objectification.²² Hence too her own narrative of desire continues despite interruption (“Abyde! quod she”—III.169), while the subsequent telling of the formal Tale is contingent upon the audience's interest (“if ye wol heere”—III.828; “right as yow lest”—III.854; “If I have licence”—III.856). Her Prologue, which reports her own desire, is privileged over her Tale, which narrates the desire of wholly fictive others (themselves produced by a fictive construct).

Moreover, in calling attention to her “appetit,” the Wife calls attention to her desire as a desire to consume, be it sexually, textually, or otherwise. In effect, as she “glosses,” she consumes both partners and texts, appropriating them for her own use and deriving from them whatever satisfaction she can find. Her warning—“For peril is bothe fyr and tow t'assemble; / Ye knowe what this ensample may resemble” (III.89-90)—uses the consumption metaphor of fire and fuel that suggests, or “resembles,” the consuming nature of sexuality.²³ In addition, her attention to consumption imagery calls attention to the twofold manifestation of her ambivalent desire: it represents both lack and surplus. Louise Fradenburg comments:

The inability of the Wife's desire to find closure—the sense in which it is a desire for desire—is thus presented, on one level, as lack. But of course this characterization of her desire is meant to constrain the text's presentation, on another level, of desire as multiplicity, a supplement or surplus—as always more than its representations, and hence as always urged to remake the world.²⁴

Her glossing suggests a kind of excess that calls attention to its own vicariousness. In Derridean terms, the Wife's excess may be understood as supplement:

The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. … But the supplement only supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of-it; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void.²⁵

The process of consumption, as the Wife describes it, not only represents an attempt to fill in empty space, to satisfy some perceived lack, but also suggests the underlying almost paradoxical nature of desire as represented by the Wife: in her quest to fill the empty spaces, she is depicted as consuming far more than is needed but remaining necessarily unfulfilled by the vicariousness of her excessive supplementation. Thus Chaucer locates in the Wife his angst about his own measure of supplementation and appropriation; he constructs and embodies in the Wife his own concern with excess.

It is therefore quite fitting that the Wife should be initially described as having “hipes large” (I.472), as having excessive flesh or girth, for she apparently fails to respect any boundary or limit of consumption. (Overconsumption of food and drink²⁶ is obviously manifest in the kind of carnal evidence that cannot be negated through language alone.) Further, she aligns her excessive consumption of drink with other sumptuary interests: “And after wyn on Venus moste I thynke: / For al so siker as cold engendreth hayl, / A likerous mouth moste han a likerous tayl” (III.464-6), suggesting that perhaps she must ply herself with alcohol to trigger a minimum erotic response or, additionally, that in her mind activities of consumption—carnal behaviors—are locked together. Her comment, too, erotically aligns “mouth” and “tayl,” noting that both may be described as “likerous,” that is, lustful, greedy, eager; “likerous” suggests “gourmandizing—with food, drink, and licking,” and its connotations extend to “lechery;” and here the Wife's alignment seems to emphasize the possible aural pun.²⁷ The Wife's “mouth” is as eager as her “tayl,” indeed even more so, and calls attention to the Wife's carnal excesses, for the mouth is the point of intake for excesses of food and drink, and it is a vehicle for her excess of words, most of which are associated with her “tayl.” Further, the “mouth” and “tayl” may be likened in sexual terms, an analogy articulated in contemporary feminist theory by Luce Irigaray and discussed at length in Jane Burns's recent analysis of fabliaux,²⁸ in that the mouth not only resembles the “tayl,” but serves as its substitute as well. For the Wife the mouth is instrumental in effecting not merely consumption but excessive consumption, both sexually and textually. Hence she describes herself as “Gat-tothed” (III.603), again associating her mouth with her sexual behavior, and reiterating that consumption—effected by mouth—is, for the Wife, an erotic act.²⁹

The mouth is the locus of sexuality for the Wife, for not only does it contain the teeth that apparently serve as a kind of beacon to her audience, affirming her erotic interests, but, more important, it houses the origin of speech—it is the location of the tongue of which the Wife seems so fond. Indeed, the tongue mediates the instrumentality of both textuality and sexuality. Flesh and text cleave through the instrumentality of the tongue, and the two are united through the metaphoricity of “glossing.” The tongue both covers and consumes; for the Wife, to “gloss” a text is to sexualize it, and, in turn, the sexualized text elicits erotic excitement. The tongue seduces as well, having potential use as an instrument of flattery and deception; the efficacy of flattery may be accorded to the tongue.³⁰ Along these lines the Wife notes that her husband could easily seduce her with his tongue: “And therwithal so wel koude he me glose / Whan that he wolde han my bele chose” (III.509-10). In this respect, “glossing” functions as erotic foreplay.³¹

The Wife exploits the etymology of “glossing” and the practice of glossing biblical texts to construct a sexual rhetoric. Her treatment of patristic authority in conjunction with her descriptions of her own experience results in a kind of “holy erotica,” a scriptural glossing designed for titillation. Her quasi-holy erotic discourse represents a rhetorical mixing, for her sexual rhetoric comprises a mixing, or coupling, of two distinct registers, the theological and the erotic.³² Erotica represents a “coupling” of textuality and sexuality, for it textualizes sex and sexualizes the text in its sexual instrumentality. Moreover, the instrumentality of erotica is an autoerotic one, for it serves the self and requires no other; it is narcissistic, an erotic exclusion of otherness manifest in self-affection.³³ Glossing the Bible and its concomitant patristic directives is, for the Wife, an erotic act; she derives a kind of erotic excitement and satisfaction from her glossing and in conveying—or exhibiting—her glossing to an audience. The autoeroticism of the glossing is extended further in that the body as textus becomes a target for her own glossing as well; she, in effect, glosses herself.

Moreover, this sexual rhetoric is again a substitution, interchanging textuality and sexuality in a blurring of the boundaries between the two. This substitution is of course not limited to the female alone, as the Wife notes, for Jankyn himself used the text as a substitute for eros (III.669-70). In addition, the Wife argues that such substitution by men is fairly commonplace:

The clerk, whan he is oold, and may noght do
Of Venus werkes worth his olde sho,
Thanne sit he doun, and writ in his dotage
That wommen kan nat kepe hir mariage!

III.707-10

But the major difference between masculine and feminine substitution, according to the Wife's demonstration, is that while men read and write about eros, women talk about it. Speaking to an audience provides the kind of direct, immediate response not possible through writing; while men derive satisfaction from the solitary act of writing about eros, women, the Wife suggests, desire active appreciation and response from an audience, an “other.” Erotic textuality is an active oral process for the Wife, delighting both speaker and audience through the instrumentality of the mouth and tongue.

Having identified the narrative's use of “gloss” as both a destabilizing erotic metaphor and a discursive operating feature of narrative errancy, I would now like to turn to the self-reflexive, or metatextual, “glossing” that underscores the narrative's attention to an en-gendered epistemology, beginning with the Wife's rambling treatise on the role of sex in marriage, wherein she argues in favor of unrestrained sexuality by suggesting that procreation justifies such behavior (though she acknowledges no offspring of her own):

For hadde God comanded maydenhede,
Thanne hadde He dampned weddyng with the dede.
And certes, if ther were no seed ysowe,
Virginitee, thanne wherof sholde it growe?

III.69-72

By first aligning the image of seed and sowing to “virginitee” as the desired fruits of that labor, the Wife extends the metaphor not only to evoke the relationship of seed and sowing to sexual reproduction, but also to question the paradox inhering in what she has determined to be the scriptural privileging of virginity.³⁴ Human seed must be sown if procreation is to take place, and, according to widespread fourteenth-century explanations of physiology and reproduction, this sowing entails both male and female seed—the female contributes her own seed to the conception process even as she serves as the receptacle for the male seed.³⁵

The Wife's exegetical glossing here is flawed by hyperbole, for she uses an extreme example and has lifted out of context the exegetical directives regarding marriage and procreation. One could of course argue that she is reacting to the views of Jerome, whose rigid and excessive advocation of virginity is coupled with an attack on marriage. To this end, the Wife fulfills Jerome's realistic recognition that his virginity directive could hardly be met with widespread acceptance or successful implementation.³⁶ Further, her ironic, satiric treatment of marriage doctrine calls attention to the flawed structure of such directives, suggesting that

all pretensions to and regulations of marital affairs, all selective codes of behavior, are ludicrous because, as the Wife of Bath suggests, they come from precisely those people who know least about them;³⁷

again the Wife privileges “experience” as “auctoritee.” Her response to Jerome, however, is in part problematic because Jerome's views are hardly typical of the Wife's contemporary social context, and, moreover, the Augustinian argument that “Christian virginity could be praised without denigrating marriage”³⁸ marks a more realistic and acceptable stand for both the Church and those who follow the Church's directives.³⁹ Thus while the Wife shows off her knowledge of patriarchal “auctoritee,” she simultaneously is shown to demonstrate her appropriation of anachronistic core issues, to avail herself of patriarchal orthodoxy in the construction of her rhetorical lines even as she mis/represents them by omission or exaggeration. And because virginity is too rigid a directive, the Wife accepts no directive, no restraint; she rejects the notion of continence in its entirety, observing no balance or moderation within the parameters of sexual behavior. It is hardly surprising that she who delights so in talking of sexuality would be aghast at what she perceives to be the virginity directive's rigid constraints and at the implicit repression that such a decorum represents.

But by casting sexuality in the radical division of virginity/promiscuity, the Wife leaves no middle ground for women. Her dichotomizing imposes upon her social/political reality what might be described as patriarchal binary thought, “this endless series of hierarchical binary oppositions that always in the end come back to the fundamental ‘couple’ of male/female”;⁴⁰ virginity, as the patriarchal ideal, is privileged within this schema as the positive, male component of the dual, while promiscuity serves as the negative complement, ultimately the target of scorn. Here, then, the Wife subverts her ostensibly assertive stance to an insidious and ultimately oppressive patriarchal context. And clearly, too, the Wife seems to invert the positive/negative valuation underlying her dichotomy—perhaps owing to her desire for audience approval—and identifies herself as promiscuous: “I ne loved nevere by no discrecioun” (III.622), she notes, boldly stating that she lacks discretion or discrimination in matters of “love”—love in its erotic, sexual sense, which the Wife herself equates with sin: “Allas, allas! That evere love was synne” (III.614), she exclaims, smugly identifying herself as a sinner. The either/or rigidity of the Wife's imposed identifications is as reductionistic and value-laden as the patriarchal “auctoritee” against which she ostensibly rails. Further, her identification calls attention to the problematic masculine nature of her stereotypical sexual boasting: she in effect speaks like a man about acting like a man, using a bullying sexuality to confront restrictive social and theological guidelines, yet seeming to sacrifice her femininity in the process of adhering to the masculine dichotomy that she herself introduces to the rhetorical line.

The Wife's sexualized dichotomizing is further problematized by engendered tropes of fertility and propagation. In terms of the Pauline sowing metaphor, “seed” must be “sown” if the word is to propagate, and unsown seed represents unused potential. with regard to the command “to wexe and multiplye” (III.28), the Wife notes, “that gentil text kan I wel understonde” (III.29). The pleasures of the text are propagated by multiplication, and, therefore, by extension, to deny multiplication is both to deny the pleasure of the text and to curtail further propagation. Following this analogy, “virginitee” may be understood not only as the physical state of sexual chastity, but also, as the Wife suggests, a state of unused capability, of wasted potential—of seed unsown. Literal and figurative manifestations of “seed” constitute a complex relationship of signification structures that underscores the Wife's Prologue's attention to poetic language, specifically as the language of the Prologue explicates what may be described as its own figurative multiplicity, its awareness of the crucial relationship between polysemy and poetry. The sexual wordplay in the Prologue may be understood as a commentary on the necessity of polysemy if poetic language is to mean.⁴¹ Through this garrulous, vulgar voice, Chaucer addresses his own concerns about the complex dangers of discursive fertility/promiscuity, the paradoxical necessity of the author's appropriations of language to his own task. Poetic language is necessarily polysemous, and no matter how the poet wishes to control his own words, to limit their fertility, he proves by that very desire that language is too fertile, promiscuous, beyond control. The Wife exploits the polysemy of language in order to construct her sexual wordplay; she insists that many seeds be sown, many shades of meaning inhere in the language of her discourse in order for the “pleye” to occur. The Wife as a representation of Woman is a caricature, an exaggeration that draws from an anti-feminist tradition even as it ostensibly attacks that tradition. The Wife is shown to delight in the entertainment value of the word-“pleye,” yet at the same time she seems oblivious to the contradictions inhering in her self-revelatory discourse, making unclear just what, in fact, she is advocating, though clearly she couches her argument in sexual terms to an ostensibly feminist end.

The Wife seems similarly oblivious to the ramifications of those contradictions in terms of what many readers perceive to be the Prologue's valorization of the feminine. To this end, the Wife's discourse calls attention to an apparent and problematic alignment of the “feminine” and the “carnal.” The pairing of “flesh” and “female” suggests a correlation of the feminine and the carnal, in that the seductive threat of the female to the male finds epistemological representation in the seductive threat of the carnal to the spiritual (indeed, many well-known instances of medieval misogyny can be traced to this analogy).⁴² And in a positive sense, just as the literal carnal is, in terms of signification, the base starting point from which further spiritual meaning may be conceived, so, too, the feminine represents positive potential.⁴³ But to suggest that the feminine be equated wholly with the carnal as the Wife embodies carnality is to suggest that the Wife's limiting, restrictive, and rather hostile generalizations—the either/or dichotomy of virginity and promiscuity—are valid. The crux here is the Wife's appropriation, that is, her attempting to take possession—“assertively” and “knowingly,” as Carolyn Dinshaw argues⁴⁴—of the patriarchal language of which she presumably recognizes the efficacy, or at least the necessity. The Wife would arguably not need to appropriate patriarchal discourse if she had at her disposal an alternative discourse; nor would she appropriate the patriarchal if she were not confident of its efficacy and utility. In short, she usurps what she knows works—or, more accurately, what she knows should give the illusion of working—apparently hoping that the appropriation will supply her discourse with the authority, credibility, and efficacy that she herself finds lacking.

The Wife's appropriative glossing may be understood, in terms of medieval sign theory that designates language in terms of property, as a problematic dichotomizing of public and private (or, in Bakhtinian terms, as the public or social dimension rather than an authoritative or privileged system).⁴⁵ Medieval theologians, philosophers, and poets would have understood language in terms of the literal and figurative, proper and improper, as usurpative and polysemous: the literal sense is considered “proper,” that is, the signum proprium, signifying the most immediate level of meaning, while the figurative sense is improper, the signum translatum, in the sense that meaning is transferred.⁴⁶ In dealing with “property,” Augustine, for example, realizes that one must also deal with appropriation in the sense of usurpation: “metaphora est usurpata translatio,” notes Augustine in Contra mendacium, identifying metaphor as a usurpative translation, a transferring of meaning that is not only arbitrary but pleasurable as well—“impositio ad placitum”—imposed according to the pleasure of the imposer;⁴⁷ the Wife, of course, is no stranger to the pleasures of textuality. To use language figuratively is thus to usurp meaning and transfer it; beyond the literal sense, language signifies according to usurpation and transfer, and transfer by usurpation allows for the Wife's bawdy and significant word-“pleye.” Usurpative transfer, then, allows for public access to private appropriation.

Further, the public/private semantic implications of the Wife's attention to glossing are framed by the aforementioned patriarchal binary thought, manifest in the ubiquitous medieval “epistemology by contraries,” which asserts that comparison is the basis for all understanding and that definition is contingent upon the difference identified by the process of comparison.⁴⁸ This epistemology likewise comments on poetic language itself, for poetic language—metaphor—may be understood as the comparison (or ratio) of differences. Jean de Meun's well-known commentary on this epistemology in Le roman de la rose, perhaps its best medieval articulation,⁴⁹ is informed by medieval commentaries on the polarities outlined in Artistotle's Metaphysics, which Aristotle himself attributes to Pythagoras, whereby polarities are used to construct an epistemology of contraries through a series of related opposites, including, among others, male and female, limited and unlimited, one and plural.⁵⁰ It is reasonable to argue, as does Toril Moi, that “it doesn't much matter which ‘couple’ one chooses to highlight: the hidden male/female opposition with its inevitable positive/negative evaluation can always be traced as the underlying paradigm”;⁵¹ therefore, associations may not only be traced between paired items but extended to the male/female implications of any duality as well.

Clearly, the epistemology by contraries, in its construction of oppositional binarisms, dichotomizes. The dichotomizing of contraries within the epistemology, however, is not the rigid, exclusive dichotomizing evident in the Wife's demonstration. For while the Wife uses dichotomy to construct a valuated identification strategy of patriarchal labels, the epistemology uses dichotomy to establish difference, not to condemn it, and to use that difference as a means of freeing or enhancing thought, not to constrict or reduce it. If the Wife's narrative is interpreted within a context of this epistemology, her use of sexual language takes on additional connotations. Significantly, the epistemology aligns “female” with “unlimited” and “plural,” suggesting that that which is “female” may be understood as “unlimited” and “plural” as well. (This ancient connection between the feminine and the plural is articulated in contemporary feminist theory by Luce Irigaray, who argues that “women's speaking lips / écriture-féminine metonymically suggest plurality, multiplicity, and the dissolution of bounds.”⁵²) Although infinite limitlessness would ultimately call into question the very possibility of meaning, the “unlimited” taken in conjunction with “plural” connotes a sense of polysemy, that is, a choice of more than one even if some ultimate limit must be identified or assumed. In this sense, the table of polarities supplies a means of understanding the impact of gender polarities on medieval language and thought.⁵³

But the usurpative appropriation demonstrated in the Wife's narrative is problematic owing to the ostensibly feminine agency of the appropriation in relation to private discourse.⁵⁴ On the one hand, the excess of the Wife's glossing—culturally marked as feminine—underscores the Wife's insistence that the restrictive, oppressive signifying practices of the patriarchal “auctoritee” be opened up; the Wife invites further glossing even as she herself glosses, thereby challenging patriarchal claims of interpretive closure. Additionally, one might situate the Wife's challenge in a context of Lollardy, specifically the Lollards' rejection of patriarchal interpretive exclusivity. Peggy Knapp, in her analysis of the Wife's glossing, convincingly argues,

The “gospel glosen” associated with Lollardy did not, of course, immediately cause the patristic glosses to lose currency, but Wyclif's attack on the system's authority and attempted substitution of a “gloss” with different underpinnings made the ideology that sustained it visible. Ideology works best not when it is an idea being argued for but when it is the ground on which other ideas are argued: it cannot become fully visible without losing some of its privilege.⁵⁵

As such, the Wife may be seen as challenging the propriety of private, self-serving glossing by exposing its underlying ideological exclusivity.

And yet the Wife is herself shown as privatizing language. The Wife usurps patriarchal discourse, patriarchal “auctoritee,” in an apparent attempt to challenge its dominance; and yet her usurpation effects an exclusivity not unlike that which she confronts. Just as she speaks like a man in challenging men's speech, so too she speaks the exclusive language of patriarchy in professing to speak out against patriarchal “auctoritee”; it is no less exclusive just because it intends to confront exclusivity. The Wife's struggle with exclusivity marks Chaucer's own anxiety about appropriation: How is he to effect the usurpation necessary for polysemous signification without himself risking a personal exclusivity? Can the poet use language effectively and poetically without claiming it as his own? To retain possession to the exclusion of other possibilities is to render language problematic in that the possessive usurper not only denies language its proper—and thus accessible and universal—sense, but also attempts to control how the language is understood. In short, exclusive appropriation denies language the very plurality that allows it to signify beyond the literal; attempting to privatize language renders the language meaningless to anyone except the private, possessive usurper.

The Wife professes to argue against virginity, the restricted sowing of seed, but in her attempt to usurp patriarchal language, she renders her language (as she possesses it) unisemous, not polysemous—in a sense, “virgin.” In other words, in attempting to possess language that she cannot own, she harbors its meaning as a secret unto herself, attempting to control through possession the propriety of its signification. In fact, the Wife explicitly desires to mark her discourse as her “own,” as having private meaning susceptible to misinterpretation by an audience: “If that I speke after my fantasye …” (III.190). Her discourse is a subjective external articulation of an internal narrative, private and inaccessible even if partially, and willfully, exposed; it is a “queynte fantasye” (III.516) not unlike that which she says belongs to “[w]e wommen” (III.515). In attempting to appropriate language—in effect, “re-virginizing” it—she denies it the polysemy it would otherwise entail; the “virgin” word is unisemous. Moreover, the unisemy of the “virgin” word may be likened to the unisemy of the autoerotic word; both represent private appropriation—or retention—of ultimately wasted potential. A significant feature of the Wife's autoerotic textuality is in her female-ness; although the metaphor of male auto-/homoeroticism (what R. Howard Bloch terms “sterile perversions”)⁵⁶ representing delight in one's own language is treated by Alan of Lille, Dante, and others,⁵⁷ Chaucer's treatment of the metaphor is given an interesting—and significant—twist in that the Wife's autoeroticism is female. While masculine metaphors of auto-/homo-eroticism call attention to the spilling of seed/language, the Wife's own autoeroticism calls attention to the retention, or privatization, of seed/language. In short, the Wife harbors, hides, and covers her words, veiling them in her own autoerotic delight.⁵⁸ The Wife, then, usurps, or tries to usurp, from language its capacity to produce meaning outside of her own control, denying language its polysemous potential, rendering it tantamount to unsown virgin seed.

If the “female” sense of language is “unlimited” and “plural,” then virginity defeats that sense; virginity hinders language because just as the virgin female represents wasted potential (as the Wife suggests), so, too, the “virgin” word lacks the sense of unlimited, plural signification. And although, as Hélène Cixous has convincingly argued, the binary epistemology inevitably reduces anything aligned with the female to a negative, inferior status within the hierarchy,⁵⁹ in poetic terms the association of “feminine” and “plural” is significant. In attempting to deny the “unlimitedness” or “plurality” of language (that is, in attempting to control its signification), the Wife “re-virginizes” her language by denying its “unlimitedness” and “plurality”; she arguably denies it its “femaleness” as well. In short, the Wife reduces the unlimited to the limited, the plural to the one and, in essence, the female to the male even as she seemingly attempts to valorize a new sense of the feminine. Thus, while the Wife is sterile, “her” words are not; she wastes but all the same exploits and entertains potential. Chaucer's impulse to re-virginize words, to appropriate them to limited, private use, in fact foregrounds their resistance to such appropriation. Bakhtin might understand this as the public and social dimension of words, a “dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments, and accents,” where a word “weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others,” and where it “cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads.”⁶⁰ The Wife, with every attempt to control words, instead empowers them to escape her control. Through the Wife's narrative Chaucer suggests that this desire for re-virginizing is essentially unappeasable; it exists as a kind of wishful thinking, an index of e(xc)lusive desire: “if that I speke after my fantasye,” “if wommen had writen stories” (III.190, 693, my emphasis).

But the Wife's appropriation of masculine discourse does not supply a newer “feminine” discourse; it merely supplies what could be labeled “the Wife of Bath's” discourse, an écriture d'Alisoun (“sounding other”—al-i-soun). The Wife's attempting to privatize—to possess privately—language not only denies it the plurality necessary if her argument is to work within the context of her discourse, but also provides commentary on the relationship between eros and language given attempts at privatization. Again, the Wife's attempt to make private that which is public may be understood in conjunction with her eroticization of the letter—her delight in talking about sexual issues—as an auto-erotic act. Not only does the Wife find pleasure in words, in glossing, she finds pleasure in her own words, her own glossing. As a lover of her own words she is, in effect, her own lover. Her autoerotic textuality is private and exclusive, and although she may evoke a laugh from her audience through her “pleye,” that laughter serves less to corroborate her complaints than to reinforce the autoerotic motivation for her sexual rhetoric. She supplies the object of her own delight, and attempts to retain possession even as such possession effects a sense of wasted potential through its exclusion of plurality. (The ambivalent nature of the Wife's appropriation is illustrated by her own framework: because the Wife insists upon the rigid parameters of her own reductionistic dichotomizing—virgin/harlot, in particular—she effectively excludes even herself as wyf.)

To this end, the Wife's sexual representation is both paradoxical and ambivalent. As a harborer of the autoerotic “virgin” word, the Wife represents a sexuality unwilling to participate within masculine parameters; it is, in a sense, uncorrupted by masculine seed yet corrupted by its own exclusiveness. In seeking satisfaction, the Wife instead generates it herself through autoerotic textuality—erotic glossing—and revels in the experience of her own delight. Ultimately, however, the narrative speaks to unrealized desire, for the Wife's “holy erotica” is not enough; the privatization of eros leaves her hungry for more, and she remains—both textually and sexually—isolated and constrained within the parameters of the masculine discourse. Hence her promiscuity: the Wife is depicted as continuously searching, grasping, mixing, seeking rhetorical satisfaction through a series of appropriations. Thus her self-proclaimed status of bullying sexuality, her own attempts to depict herself as an unattractively aggressive and indiscriminate woman, is balanced with the reality of her own frustration and unfulfillment; the apparent auto-/homo-erotic valorization is yet another cover or veil. The Wife thus inscribes ambivalently the paradox of “re-virginized” language, implicating her author: the more the poet strives for the “virgin” word, the more he confirms the promiscuity of discourse.

The Wife herself provides a concrete example of what happens when meaning is made personal:

Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?
By God, if wommen hadde writen stories,
As clerkes han withinne hire oratories,
They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse
Than al the mark of Adam may redresse.

III.692-96

Her reference to Aesop's lion does call into question the subjectivity inhering in any artistic representation, and the Wife indeed uses the example effectively in this respect.⁶¹ However, the bitter, angry words that follow the example undermine her apparent efforts to demonstrate a need for a feminine-sympathetic perspective by suggesting that she seeks to replicate the masculine crime of misrepresentation; the women's stories would merely supply an equally distorted view, framed by an opposing perspective. Hence she advocates that the hegemonic patriarchal discourse be replaced by an equally hegemonic feminine one. The Wife's narrative seems to claim that a feminine replication of masculine “wikkednesse” should be advocated and privileged simply because its perpetrators are feminine, so that somehow the feminine is inherently better than the masculine, though she usurps the masculine, thereby suggesting that she cannot offer any equally effective feminine counterpart and that she must take what is not hers and claim it for herself. But rejecting or usurping the masculine does not constitute a feminine even as the Wife's inversion challenges the hegemony of the masculine. Hence the ambivalence of her narrative: her ostensibly pro-feminist arguments are betrayed by an articulation that supports what it professes to subvert.⁶²

Hence the Wife's narrative comes across as an anti-anti-feminist (rather than “feminist”) misogamous discourse that may be read as a kind of anti-feminist feminism. It attempts to refute the conventions of anti-feminist textuality—laying the groundwork for ideological challenge—but supports those conventions through illustration that seems only to validate the stereotypes upon which the conventions are based. As Robert Hanning argues, “The Wife is lost in a world of words of which she is also a constituent. She exists as a literary creation of men, a system of texts and glosses which she repeatedly attacks but always ends up confirming.”⁶³ Within the conventions of anti-feminist textuality, the Wife does fight back—or talks back—using the only weapon she knows, that with which she has been assaulted; as Deborah Ellis notes, “Indeed, women who verbally attack men most successfully use not their ‘own’ language but rather that of the men they resist.”⁶⁴ Hence the Wife's appropriation of “men's” language serves to articulate her complaints but does little to effect a newer, “feminine” system of discourse.

The character of the Wife is associated with that of a weaver of fabric and, likewise, she is a weaver of texts, lifting and borrowing from even the most unlikely of sources to weave together a narrative web both self-promoting and self-incriminating; as she asserts specific argumentative points, she subsequently undermines them in a discourse that wanders from one idea to another, perhaps never really certain of its own purpose. And while the text of the Prologue is itself a fertile and provocative commentary on its own textual processes and the processes of engendered epistemological representation, the fictive character who voices those words is rendered oddly pathetic by her own role in the process. Unable to promote any single argument to any effective end, the Wife employs a sexual rhetoric that may indeed be described as promiscuous, that is, “mixed” or “confused” as well as “indiscriminate” (from the root pro/miscere). Just as the Wife cannot confine herself sexually to any single partner—“Welcome the sixte, whan that ever he shal!” (III.45)—so, too, she cannot find rhetorical satisfaction in any single argumentative line.

But the Wife is presented as caricature, and her quasi-feminist appropriation invites further consideration in its necessary resistance to closure. Since any personal usurpation of the masculine hardly suffices as a feminine, her ineffectual promiscuous narrative perhaps underscores a need for some alternative; at a minimum, her futile usurpation calls into question the role of the feminine in a masculine hermeneutics, even if her ambivalent sexual textuality frustrates the reader's attempts to identify any potential resolution. Peggy Knapp comments,

Alisoun of Bath may become, then, a figure for the garrulous, incorrigible, inexplicable text, always wandrynge by the weye, always escaping from any centralizing authority that attempts to take over her story. She wants to be glossed and gives out a wealth of clues to reading her enigma, but no one reading will master the rest. And the glossing she invites is itself readable as the work of high intellect and spiritual insight, or the play of material forces and sexual cajolery, or both.⁶⁵

Indeed, the Wife's narrative, through its attention to the feminine utility of poetic polysemy, asserts a feminine valorization, albeit a problematic one: an ambivalent, paradoxical, and unresolved anti-feminist feminism. If the Wife leaves us with these unresolved problematic relationships of gender, language, and society, it is perhaps because through her we see the poet discovering the limits of poetry; she is, after all, his writing, and we read him both in her and through her. Hence the unresolved issues are crucial to readers' appreciation of Chaucer's narrative construction because they are unresolved, and they invite further critical conversation and debate. Indeed, as the Wife notes, “Have thou ynogh, thee thar nat pleyne thee” (III.336).

Notes

1. An early draft of this paper was presented at the Seventh Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 1 March 1991. I would like to thank David Allen for inviting me to participate.

2. See, for instance, Mary Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” PMLA 94 (1979): 209-22, who reads Alisoun's argument as “triumphant”; Marjorie Malvern, “‘Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?’: Rhetorical and Didactic Roles Played by an Aesopic Fable in the Wife of Bath's Prologue,” SP 80 (1983): 238-52, also reads the Wife as “triumphant” satire; Maureen Fries, “‘Slydyng of Corage’: Chaucer's Criseyde as Feminist and Victim,” in The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee Edwards (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 45-59, comments in the conclusion to her analysis of Criseyde that Chaucer, through his depiction of the Wife, is a “truly practicing feminist” (59); Barrie Ruth Straus, “The Subversive Discourse of the Wife of Bath: Phallocentric Discourse and the Imprisonment of Criticism,” ELH 55 (1988): 527-54, contrasts her own analysis with the conventionally “hostile” or “dismissive” readings of Donaldson, Robertson, Donald Sands, and Beryl Rowland.

3. Elaine Tuttle Hansen, “Fearing for Chaucer's Good Name,” in Reconceiving Chaucer: Literary Theory and Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Hahn, Exemplaria 2 (1990): 23-36, provides an extensive overview of Wife criticism in relation to feminist perspectives; see also Arthur Lindley's recent overview, “‘Vanysshed Was This Daunce, He Nyste Where’: Alisoun's Absence in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale,” ELH 59 (1992): 1-21.

4. I use quotation marks initially to introduce terminology, e.g., “feminine,” and while I omit them upon subsequent use, they should be understood throughout the text.

5. I use “masculine” and “feminine” to correspond to social/cultural perceptions of gender (gender = L. gener-, genus, of a kind, category, from genare, to beget; see Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” tr. Avital Ronell, reprinted in Critical Inquiry 7.1 [Autumn 1980]: 55-81, on the interconnectedness of gender and genre), distinct from “male” and “female” in the strict biological sense, though as we shall see, “male” and “female” are used in Aristotelian/Pythagorean epistemologies to correspond to both gender and sex. (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has further demonstrated the slipperiness of these distinctions in relation to sex, gender, and sexuality in Epistemology of the Closet [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990], 27-32, “Axiom 2.”) See also Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989) on the “masculine” and “feminine” in Chaucerian poetics; it will be useful to note here that Chaucer's being male does not necessarily indicate that his text is “masculine” or that the character of the Wife is constructed from a “masculine” perspective.

6. The possibility of an écriture féminine as a wholly feminine way of writing is theorized by Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray but rejected by Julia Kristeva; see Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen (revised version of “Le rire de la Méduse,” L'Arc 1975: 39-54), in The Signs Reader: Women, Gender, and Scholarship, ed. Elizabeth Abel and Emily K. Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 279-97; Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), esp. 28-32, 132-41; Julia Kristeva, “Women's Time,” trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology, ed. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 39-53.

7. H. Marshall Leicester, The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 138.

8. “Glose” derives from the Greek glossa, tongue; according to the MED, the word denotes commentary, interpretation, and explanation; further, the term is used to suggest blandishment, flattery, and cajolery. The word's origin, “tongue,” isn't lost on the Wife, however, and this underlying erotic sense informs her carefully constructed double entendres. See also Robert W. Hanning, “‘I Shal Finde It in a Maner Glose’: Versions of Textual Harassment in Medieval Literature,” in Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 27-50; Lawrence Besserman, “Glosynge is a Glorious Thyng: Chaucer's Biblical Exegesis,” in Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1984), 65-73; Peggy A. Knapp, “Wandrynge by the Weye: On Alisoun and Augustine,” in Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, 142-57.

9. All citations of the Canterbury Tales refer to the Riverside Chaucer, general editor Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); fragment and line numbers supplied in text.

10. My analysis is based on Fernand Mossé, A Handbook of Middle English (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1952), and Norman Davis, et al., A Chaucer Glossary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); see also John M. Fyler, “Man, Men, and Women in Chaucer's Poetry,” in The Olde Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World, ed. Robert R. Edwards and Stephen Spector (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 154-76, and Mary Nyquist, “Ever (wo)Man's Friend: A Response to John Fyler and Elaine Tuttle Hansen,” in Reconceiving Chaucer, 37-47.

11. See Dinshaw, Sexual Poetics, 193n14; I agree with Dinshaw's assertion that “Chaucer has a deep and acute sense of the differences between the genders in Western patriarchal culture,” and I use “androgynous” and “bisexual” to include both, not to blur the crucial distinctions—differences—between them even as they may likewise participate within identical textual parameters. (See also Leicester, Disenchanted Self, 414-17.) Hélène Cixous, in “Laugh of the Medusa” defines “bisexuality” as “the presence … of both sexes, nonexclusion either of the difference or of one sex, and, from this ‘self-permission,’ multiplication of the effects of the inscription of desire” (288).

12. Other Chaucerian disclaimers include the pilgrim-Chaucer's (I.727-44), the Miller's (I.3136-40), and the pilgrim-Chaucer's subsequent disclaimer of the Miller's disclaimer (3185-86). Barrie Straus, “Subversive Discourse,” argues that the Wife's disclaimer “could be read as the Wife's acknowledgment of ‘woman's place’—traditionally restricted to privacy, domesticity, and silence. … Under the guise of knowing her place, however, the Wife proceeds to transgress it” (529), but I read the Wife's disclaimer as mimicking the masculine disclaimers rather than as challenging them.

13. As Lisa J. Kiser comments, “It has become something of a truism among modern critics that the Wife of Bath's performance demonstrates the close relationship between narrative and personal desire” (Truth and Textuality in Chaucer's Poetry [Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991], 136). The connection between eros and language is ubiquitous in medieval poetics.

14. Dante's Inferno 5.137-8 supplies a textual model: “Galeotto fu 'l libro e chi lo scrisse: quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante” [“A Gallehault indeed, that book and he / who wrote it, too; that day we read no more”]—ed. and trans. Allen Mandelbaum (1980; New York: Bantam, 1982); all further Inferno citations refer to this edition, with canto and line numbers supplied. See related commentary by R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1984), 261n6; Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 165-70; Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads “The Divine Comedy” (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 59-63; Jesse M. Gellrich, The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 149-54.

15. Chaucer's alignment of “tongue” and “hand” is, I believe, a possible play on the Latin sexual pun of tongue and hand (glossae tradere). On “glossae tradere” and “cunnum lingere” in the Latin tradition, see Jan Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille's Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth-Century Intellectual (Cambridge: The Medieval Academy of America, 1985), 55-56; and J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London: Duckworth, 1982), 134-6.

16. Eugene Vance, “The Differing Seed: Dante's Brunetto Latini,” reprinted in Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1986), 232.

17. On such “moralizing” readings, see commentary in the articles by Lindley, Straus, and Hansen, cited above.

18. Of course since the Wife is narrative, she can only talk; however, her apparent attitude toward her subject matter varies. Clearly she suggests delight when speaking of sexual matters, just as she clearly suggests anger when describing antifeminist stereotypes of women.

19. “Wyf” according to the OED, means not only “woman” in a general sense but “especially one engaged in the sale of some commodity,” “the mate of a male animal,” and “a woman joined to a man by marriage.” The Wife evokes all four senses when she describes herself as “wyf,” though she focuses on “wyf” in terms of marital status. See also Davis et al., Glossary, 171.

20. The correlation of pleasure and text is suggested by the ubiquitous medieval theory of signification used by St. Augustine, Dante, and others, impositio ad placitum, “[meaning] imposed according to the pleasure” [of the reader]; see Shoaf, Currency, 175: “For [the Wife], ‘le plaisir du texte’ is ‘le texte du plaisir’—and that is her ‘écriture’.” See also M. D. Chenu, O.P., “The Symbolist Mentality,” in Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 99-145.

    In contemporary theory the relationship between pleasure and text is perhaps best articulated by Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), esp. 17, 59. In Lacanian terms, this pleasure corresponds to jouissance, “the place of a hole in knowing, being and feeling [Lacan] called the place of desire” (Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Introduction to Lacan and the Subject of Language, ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher [New York: Routledge, 1991], 2). In Julia Kristeva's words,

    our only chance to avoid being neither master nor slave of meaning lies in our ability to insure our mastery of it (through technique or knowledge) as well as our passage through it (through play or practice). In a word, jouissance.

    See the Preface to Desire in Language, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), x.

21. Mary Anne Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940's (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).

22. Feminist film theory analyzes “spectacle” in relation to women and desire; see, for instance, Laura Mulvey's “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6-18, reprinted in Women and Cinema, ed. Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1977), 412-28. “Spectacle” analyses derive from applications of the Lacanian “gaze”; see Jacques Lacan, “Of the Gaze as Objet petit a,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller and trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 65-119. Sarah Stanbury has recently used feminist film theory in medieval “gaze studies”; see, for instance, “The Virgin's Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion,” PMLA 106 (1991): 1083-93.

23. The MED notes that “assemble” suggests, in addition to “come together, gather; join, blend,” “[t]o have intercourse.” On the use of “assemble” in conjunction with “fyr,” see H. Marshall Leicester, Jr., “Of a Fire in the Dark: Public and Private Feminism in the Wife of Bath's Tale,” Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Hope Phyllis Weissman, WS 11 (1984): 157-78, especially 170-71.

24. Louise O. Fradenburg, “The Wife of Bath's Passing Fancy,” SAC 8 (1986): 44.

25. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 144-45.

26. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), comments on the “wide range of positive resonances for both physicality and food” among religious women of the period (300). Bynum effectively demonstrates that the consumption of food was not regarded with the kind of fear and control that characterizes modern attitudes, but it is still important to acknowledge the attitude toward excessive food consumption, or gluttony—“intemperate or special appetite for food and/or drink … the sixth of the seven deadly sins” (MED). Dante, for example, places the gluttons in the Third Circle, “per la dannosa colpa de la gola” (“for the damning sin of gluttony”—Inf. 6.53). Langland, too, speaks harshly of gluttony, and links it to the mouth and tongue (The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Complete Edition of the B-Text, edited by A. V. C. Schmidt [London: Dent, 1978]): “‘Shryve thee and be shamed therof, and shewe it with thi mouthe.’ / ‘I, Gloton,’ quod the gome, ‘gilty me yelde—/ That I have trespased with my tonge, I kan noght telle how ofte …’” (5.367-9).

27. Thomas W. Ross, “Taboo-Words in Fifteenth-Century England,” in Fifteenth Century Studies, ed. Robert F. Yeager (New York: Archon, 1984), 150; see also Paull F. Baum, “Chaucer's Puns,” PMLA 71 (1956): 240.

28. E. Jane Burns, “Knowing Women: Female Orifices in Old French Farce and Fabliau,” in Skirting the Texts: Feminisms' Re-readings of Medieval and Renaissance Texts, ed. Barrie Ruth Straus, Exemplaria 4.1 (Spring 1992): 81-104. Burns analyzes a fabliau which uses anal descriptions to identify female genitals: “To call a vagina an asshole is to characterize woman's lower orifice in terms of man's own singular hole, obscuring the fact that women have two distinct openings in the lower body” (87); the Wife, in using the ambiguous word “tayl,” would seem to evoke a similar confusing of the masculine and the feminine, reducing the feminine plural to the masculine singular.

    Luce Irigaray suggests an extended analogy between oral and genital “lips” in “This Sex Which is Not One” and “When Our Lips Speak Together,” both reprinted in This Sex Which is Not One, 23-33 and 205-18, respectively. Elizabeth Gross, “The Body of Signification,” in Abjection, Melancholia, and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, edited by John Fletcher and Andrew Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1990), comments (88),

    All sexual organs and erotigenic zones, Lacan claims, are structured in the form of the rim, which is the space between two corporeal surfaces, an interface between the inside and the outside of the body. … The erotogenic rim which locates the sexual drive in a particular bodily zone is a hole, or gap or lack seeking an object to satisfy it.

    Medieval poets were themselves aware of the obvious similarities; see Evelyn Birge Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire (New York: New York University Press, 1989), especially 86-87, and Helen Lemay, “Women and the Literature of Obstetrics and Gynecology,” in Medieval Women and the Sources of History, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 189-209; Lemay's essay is particularly useful for its bibliography.

29. Caroline Bynum comments on medieval concepts of “erotic” in “The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg,” reprinted in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1991), 79-117, especially 86-87, suggesting that medieval perspectives on the body—and genitals in particular—as represented in art were not as sexually focused as are modern interpretations. Along these lines, see also Karma Lochrie, “The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh, and Word in Mystical Discourse,” in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. Allen J. Frantzen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 115-40, especially 119. John A. Nichols, “Female Nudity and Sexuality in Medieval Art,” in New Images of Medieval Women: Essays Toward a Cultural Anthropology, ed. Edelgard E. DuBruck (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon, 1989), 165-76, however, argues that there is an underlying eroticism that focuses negatively on women, a “medieval concept that the female nude is an unnatural and immoral state for a woman” (176). See also Elizabeth Robertson, “Medieval Views of Spirituality,” in Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 32-43.

30. Dante, for instance, comments on the flatterer's “sufficiency of tongue” in Inferno 18. 109-136. See also related commentary in Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, “Erotic Sin in the Divine Comedy,” in Human Sexuality in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Douglas Radcliff-Umstead (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1978), especially 64-67.

31. Carolyn Dinshaw, “‘Glose / bele chose’: The Wife of Bath and Her Glossators,” in Sexual Poetics, comments (125):

    But, curiously, it is the openly pejorated, carnal, ostentatiously masculine glossing by the clerk Jankyn that the Wife—the body of the text—finds so appealing, so effective, so irresistible. … Glossing here is unmistakably carnal, a masculine act performed on the feminine body, and it leads to pleasure for both husband and wife, both clerk and text.

    While this particular instance of “glossing” represents a masculine act, the Wife's treatment of “glossing” here does not preclude the possibility of reciprocation; indeed, the Wife seems herself quite capable of “glossing”—one could argue that as the Wife usurps the masculine propriety of “glossing” in its textual sense, so too does she usurp its erotic sense as well.

32. Though secular rather than spiritual, the Wife's discourse is not unlike that of the mystics, who articulate spiritual experiences in vividly erotic language. On the mystics' erotic language, see Wolfgang Riehle, The Middle English Mystics, trans. Bernard Standring (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 24-103. The Wife's erotica, in particular, is “feminine,” that is, aural rather than visual; on visual/masculine/religious pornography, see Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 117-68. See also the review article by J. Giles Milhaven, “A Medieval Lesson on Bodily Knowing: Women's Experience and Men's Thought,” JAAR 57 (1989): 341-72.

33. On autoeroticism as a good, see Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which is Not One” and “When Our Lips Speak Together,” in This Sex Which Is Not One. The present argument, I should emphasize, identifies autoeroticism as it is depicted in medieval poetry and poetics, where it is clearly negative in suggesting wasted potential, a point to which I shall return.

34. Here the Wife evokes a medieval commonplace of fertility imagery based on seed and sowing used by Alan of Lille, Jean de Meun, Dante, and others, to suggest fertility, regeneration, and fruition. “Seed” in this sense corresponds to the “seed” of conception—with biblical origins—and, by extension, to “seed” as “word,” informed in part by Pauline sowing metaphor. For Pauline “virginity” directives, see 1 Cor 7.25-40. On “virginity” as a cultural and literary aesthetic informed by theological dicta, see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. 93-112.

35. See James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 450-51, on physiological connotations of “seed” with regard to conception.

36. Elizabeth A. Clark, “‘Adam's Only Companion’: Augustine and the Early Christian Debate on Marriage,” in The Olde Daunce, 18; see also Erik Kooper, “Loving the Unequal Equal: Medieval Theologians and Marital Affection,” in the same volume, 44-56.

37. Katharine M. Wilson and Elizabeth M. Makowski, Wykked Wyves and the Woes of Marriage: Misogamous Literature from Juvenal to Chaucer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 161.

38. Clark, “Christian Debate,” 19; see also Judith Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 124-25, on the relationship between Jerome and St. Paul with regard to permitted behaviors.

39. See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 410.

40. Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), 104, commenting on Hélène Cixous; see Cixous's “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays,” in The Newly Born Woman, translated by Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 63:

    Man
    ———
    Woman

    Always the same metaphor: we follow it, it carries us, beneath all figures, wherever discourse is organized. If we read or speak, the same thread or double braid is leading us through-out literature, philosophy, criticism, centuries of representation and reflections.

    Thought has always worked through opposition …

41. “Polysemy” corresponds to the “many senses” of language, the crucial plurality or multiplicity of figurative language. Chenu, Nature, Man, and Society, notes, “So essential a characteristic was [polysemy] that to constrict its meaning for the sake of clarity would have been to sterilize it, to kill its vitality” (136).

42. On examples of medieval misogyny and their patristic origins, see R. Howard Bloch, “Medieval Misogyny,” in Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Frances Ferguson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 1-24.

43. The Wife embodies the ambivalence of the “carnal” in terms of the body; on the one hand, the carnal, as grotesque and vulgar as it may be, is the human state, yet the carnal is simultaneously condemned in theological discourse. Mark C. Taylor comments in Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), that (172)

    The body as grotesque is the body that eats, drinks, shits, pisses, and fucks. The boundary between bodies is a permeable membrane; it has gaps and holes to let the inside out and the outside in. … When inside is only inside and outside is only outside, when eating, drinking, pissing, shitting, and fucking stop or are stopped, vital current no longer flows and the body truly dies.

    This necessary carnality is acknowledged within medieval theology; Julia Kristeva comments (Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, 1987], 167, citing Bernard of Clairvaux, Oeuvres complètes 4.69):

    Let us recall one of the many expressions of that ambivalence: “We also love our spirit in carnal fashion when we break it through prayer, with tears, sighs, and moans. We love our flesh with a spiritual love when, after we have subjected it to the spirit, we exercise it spiritually for the good and watch with judgment over its conservation.”

    The validity of “carnal” as a starting point of interpretation is suggested by Langland throughout Piers Plowman B, particularly Passus 1, where Holi Chirche offers Will the “mesure” directive of moderation with regard to carnality. Similarly, Henryson explores metaphors of carnality in the Testament of Cresseid, especially in the opening stanzas, lines 22-40.

    Robertsonianism has insightfully—if excessively—explored “carnality”; see D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 318-36.

44. Sexual Poetics, 120.

45. Bakhtin argues that these dimensions are not necessarily dichotomized, that they need not be mutually exclusive. See “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist and translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 342ff.

46. Marcia Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge, revised edition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 42; see also Shoaf, Currency, 33-34:

    In the Middle Ages “proper” denoted what we mean by the word “literal”—the first, the primary sense of a word. This sense is the “property” of the word. Extraliteral or metaphoric senses of a word were indicated, most suggestively, by terms like “usurpata translatio.” These senses are “improper”: they are not the property of the word; they are brought to the word, added to it, imposed upon it.

47. Eugene Vance, “Augustine's Confessions and the Poetics of the Law,” reprinted in Mervelous Signals, 9.

48. It is important to note that the pairing exists within the parameters of an epistemology. Outside the epistemology, valuation necessarily obtains; Mark C. Taylor notes, “Invariably one term is privileged through the divestment of its relative. The resultant economy of privilege sustains an asymmetrical hierarchy” (Erring, 9). There is then an epistemologically contingent value relationship articulated by the dual, without necessarily a coincidence of internal and external valuation.

    R. A. Shoaf has articulated a methodology of “juxtology,” whereby a critical utility of difference is made accessible by the coincidence of opposites. See “Medieval Studies After Derrida After Heidegger,” in Sign, Sentence, Discourse: Language in Medieval Thought and Literature, ed. Julian N. Wasserman and Lois Roney (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1989), 9-30, esp. 23-24, and, in connection with Renaissance poetics, “‘For There Is Figures in All Things’: Juxtology in Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton,” in The Work of Dissimilitude: Essays from the Sixth Citadel Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. David G. Allen and Robert A. White (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 266-85, esp. 272-73.

49. See Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le roman de la rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1966-74): 21543-52. Jon Whitman discusses the Aristotelian origins of Jean's comment on definition, in “Dislocations: The Crisis of Allegory in the Romance of the Rose,” in Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 259-79, esp. 275-76.

50. Aristotle in Metaphysics comments on the construction of contraries by the Pythagoreans Alcmaion of Croton, Parmenides, and Melissus; the Pythagorean contraries are listed (in Aristotle: Selected Works, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle and Lloyd P. Gerson [Grinnell, Iowa: Peripatetic Press, 1982], A.5):

    Finite-Infinite	Resting-Moving
    Odd-Even	Straight-Curved
    One-Many	Light-Darkness
    Right-Left	Good-Bad
    Male-Female	Square-Rectangle

    Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), comments on the gender-specific implications of the ancient polarities; see especially 2-9.

    See also Prudence Allen, R.S.M., The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution (750 b.c.-1250 a.d.) (London: Eden, 1985); Thelma S. Fenster, Introduction, Gender and the Moral Order in Medieval Society, ed. Thelma S. Fenster, Thought 64 (1989): 201-7; Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 2-3; Bynum, “‘… And Woman His Humanity’: Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages,” reprinted in Fragmentation and Redemption, 151, and “The Female Body and Religious Practice,” in the same volume, 200-22, on the Aristotelian dualities manifest in medieval thought. (As the present essay was being readied for print, I read Sheila Delany's “Anatomy of the Resisting Reader: Some Implications of Resistance to Sexual Word-play in Medieval Literature,” in Skirting the Texts, 7-34, which makes a connection between the epistemological “female” and poetic “polysemy” similar to the argument that I present here.)

51. Sexual/Textual Politics, 105.

52. Anna Anapoulous, “Writing the Mystic Body: Sexuality and Textuality in the écriture-féminine of Saint Catherine of Genoa,” in Feminism and the Body, ed. Elizabeth Grose, Hypatia 6 (1991), 204n12, commenting on Irigaray's “When Our Lips Speak Together.”

53. Caroline Bynum comments (“… And Woman,” 151),

    Male and female were contrasted and asymmetrically valued as intellect/body, active/passive, rational/irrational, reason/emotion, self-control/lust, judgment/mercy, and order/disorder. In the devotional writing of the later Middle Ages, they were even contrasted in the image of God—Father or Bridegroom—and soul (anima)—child or bride.

54. See Leicester, Disenchanted Self, on the Wife's “private” construction that “do not produce a single, ‘true’ private self revealed behind the facade of the public performance” (99).

55. “Wandrynge by the Weye,” 153; Knapp continues,

    The Lollards accused users of patristic glosses of obscuring the truth of the Bible, and ecclesiastical authorities accused Lollards of the same thing. … In short, “gloss” had become by the fourteenth century, in Bakhtin's phrase, “an active participant in social dialogue.”

    (276)

56. R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropology of the French Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 136. “Sterile” identifies wasted, as distinct from deficient, potential. Apparently, forbidden (sterile) sexual activities involving women together were considered far less sinful and had far less dire consequences than did sexual sins involving men, though female “solitary vice” was considered equivalent to a woman's “vice with a woman.” Medieval penitential handbooks identify the penitential obligations incurred by specific acts and thus provide some basis for comparison. For example, Patrick Geary, Readings in Medieval History (Lewiston, NY: Broadview, 1989), cites the penitential code of Theodore (ca. 668-690), noting that (278) a man who “defiles himself” does penance for forty days, while a woman does penance for three years; a man who commits sodomy with a man does seven years (“this is the worst of evils”), while a woman who “practices vice with a woman” does penance for three years, the same as for “solitary vice.” See also Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 398-400, 472-4, and Bernadette J. Brooten, “Paul's Views on the Nature of Women and Female Homoeroticism,” in Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 61-87.

57. See, for example, the conversation between Dante and Brunetto Latini in the realm of the sodomites (Inferno 15) and the description of sterile grammar in De planctu naturae (Meter 1). See also commentary in Vance, “Differing Seed,” and Joseph Pequigney, “Sodomy in Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio,” Representations 36 (1991): 22-42.

58. With regard to the relationship between “female” and “hidden,” Irigaray attacks Freud's equation of the hidden and nothingness in terms of female sexuality in “This Sex Which Is Not One” (26):

    While [a woman's] body finds itself thus eroticized, and called to a double movement of exhibition and of chaste retreat in order to stimulate the drives of the “subject,” her sexual organ represents the horror of nothing to see. … This organ which has nothing to show for itself also lacks a form of its own.

    Irigaray correctly distinguishes between nothing to see (the hidden) and nothing (absence or lack); the former denotes existence, even if removed from sight and therefore mysterious and unknown.

59. Cixous notes, “Traditionally, the question of sexual difference is treated by coupling it with the opposition: activity/passivity. … It is even possible not to notice that there is no place whatsoever for woman in the calculations” (“Sorties,” 64).

60. “Discourse,” 276.

61. See also Sheila Delany, “Strategies of Silence in the Wife of Bath's Recital,” in Reconceiving Chaucer, 49-69; Delany notes (54),

    To return to the painting of lions: If we interpret the fable consistently, we find that its narrative line forces the conclusion that woman's best hope is to work within the controlling sphere of a superior (presumably male) intelligence. In this way, the Wife of Bath, like the lion she quotes, also speaks against herself, and can only do so in citing this story whose givens—animal versus human—already constrain interpretation, already load the dice.

62. Laura Kendrick, Chaucerian Play: Comedy and Control in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), notes (126):

    The Wife both tempts and masters us, making us identify with repressive female authority, which knows what is best for us. Even so, the Wife of Bath's and woman's ascendancy is temporary after all; it occurs in the unreal play time and space of the Wife's stories.

63. Hanning, “Maner Glose,” 45-46. See also Ferster, Chaucer on Interpretation (124):

    But she claims not to be merely the antifeminists' nightmare, but their creation, and she attacks their language because it demeans and limits women. By describing women as monsters of sensuality, greed, and deceit, they produce monstrously sensual, greedy, and deceitful women.

64. Deborah Ellis, “The Merchant's Wife's Tale: Language, Sex, and Commerce in Margery Kempe and in Chaucer,” Exemplaria 2 (Fall 1990): 601.

65. “Wandrynge by the Weye,” 157.