PERSONA AND VOICE: PLAIN SPEAKING IN THREE
CANTERBURY TALES 1
ROGER ELLIS
SCHOOL OF ENGLISH, JOURNALISM AND PHILOSOPHY, UNIVERSITY
OF WALES COLLEGE OF CARDIFF
One of the subjects of this paper received pointed and humorous
application a few years ago at a conference I organized. One of the
speakers could not be present, and asked another conferee to read his
paper for him. The latter, in turn, asked another participant to read
for him the many quotations in a foreign language. This second voice
was itself being quoted in the paper, so we heard it twice, once
speaking a foreign tongue, once being impersonated by another voice.
In all, then, we heard the voices of the actual speakers; of the writer of
the paper; and of his written sources, medieval and modern. I offer
this story as an analogue for the role of voicing in The Canterbury
Tales, which I shall be considering with particular reference to the
voice or voices that we 'hear' narrating the tales of the Second Nun and
Merchant, and the Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale. 2 A secondary
theme of the paper concerns the different ways in which 'plain
speaking' can be understood in the three tales. 3
Partial as it is, the analogue throws into relief one important point
1 Parts of this paper were read at the International Conference of the New Chaucer Society,
Vancouver, 1988, as part of a seminar organized by Dr David Lawton on the theme 'Persona and
voice in Chaucer' Most writers on The Canterbury Tales address the question of voicing
indirectly: two that do so directly are D. Lawton, Chaucer's narrators, Chaucer Studies, xiii
(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), and H. Marshall Leicester, The disenchanted self: representing
the subject in the Canterbury Tales ( Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press,
1990).
2 Quotation is taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L.D. Benson et al. (,Oxford: O.U.P.,
1987), and citation is by line number and, as appropriate, fragment, from this edition.
3 'Plain speaking' occurs a number of times in Chaucer's works, and its meaning regularly
shifts according to the company it keeps. It is normally advanced as a conscious reaction to
needless complexity or obfuscation, and is frequently ironic. Sometimes it relates to matters of
register or style IV 16-19, V 718-26), a question of making the word 'cosyn to the dede' (I.
742. cf.727j; mostly it relates simply to the communication of the subject matter. Thus (i) it
abbreviates a narrative or argument (I. 1091, II. 990, IV 1431, VII. 929^30). (ii) Alternatively, it
makes manifest what was previously concealed, or in danger of being concealed - a conspiracy
(II. XXfi); the truths of the faith i VIII. 2X4 ; the future < VII. 2757 > - or it describes the total
comprehension of a foreign language made possible by magic (V 151 >. The texts of'olde' books
can have it (I. 1464, cf.VII. 2091): before, that is, the glossators get to work (Legend 328 . It
regularly partners 'short', 'plat', 'at a word clause', 'open', and opposes words like 'glose' For
other examples, see A concordance to the complete n-orks of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. J.S.P. Tatlock
and A.G. Kennedy (Gloucester, Ma : Peter Smith, 19631, s.v. 'plainly'
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about the question of voicing. Voicing is never simply a matter of
expressing or embodying a personality or character. 4 Like those other
convenient generalizations, personality and character, voice exists as
the meeting point of other voices, speaks in full or partial consciousness of them, and is realized as a voice only in relation to them. To
simplify, there are two contexts to the act of voicing, the horizontal
and the vertical. 5 The horizontal level provides the immediate context:
someone in my immediate circle has just said something to which I
want to reply. The vertical level extends the model to a more remote
context of remembered and recorded speech. (As I read the latter, I
am metaphorically listening to words produced in imitation of, or
approximation to, the voice of the writer.) The interaction of these
levels of voicing with the different personae which make up my
character creates the voice I speak at any moment. The situation is
complicated, of course, if neither vertical nor horizontal level is
actively acknowledged when I am speaking: if I seem to be speaking on
myn owene auctoritee. Yet it would be a mistake to make more of such
'original' words than they deserve. As Eliot understood, and as
Chaucer demonstrates, the most original elements of a person's spech
may be those in which the ancients are most clearly heard.
This model has immediate relevance to the study of The Canterbury Tales. In this work we see both levels of voicing, though generally
in isolation from each other. Outside the tales, in the link passages, the
voices relate, primarily, to voices of the speakers' own time, usually to
the Host and/or the speaker who is to tell the next tale. Because the
primary context of this voicing is the horizontal one of the pilgrimage
narrative, speakers are able to create some sense of that narrative
context and so to flesh out their 'characters' for us. Inside the tale, by
contrast, the voice normally relates to voices from the past, sometimes
named, sometimes not, who have handled the same topic. This
relationship requires us to attend to the narrator not as pilgrim but as
storyteller. (Alleged instances of horizontal, voicing within tales, as
when one narrator is presumed to answer or comment on another's
narration, often lie, if not in the eye of the beholder, at least in a
generous reading of the evidence. 6)
How then to recognize voicing and 'voice' in a narrative?
Self-evidently, everything in a narrative is produced by, and
expresses, a controlling authorial 'voice', which we can most easily
describe as a series of rhetorical strategies varying in the degree to
4 Cf L. Patterson, '"For the wyves love of Bathe": feminine rhetoric and poetic resolution in
the Roman de la rose and the Canterbury Tales', Speculum, Iviii (1983), 656-95 ('this poetry is a
mimesis not of character but of language', 661).
5 For an earlier use of this distinction, see D. Brewer, Chaucer: the poet as storyteller (London'.
Macmillan, 1984), 68 and n. 38, where it is applied to narrative.
6 On this point, see also C.D. Benson, Chaucer's drama of style: poetic variety and contrast in the
Canterbury Talcs (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), ch. 1 (chs.
5-6 also include material on the Merchant's and Second Nun's Tales).
PLAIN SPEAKING IN CANTERBURY TALES
123
which they draw attention to themselves. At one end of the scale, they
include total commitment to narrative specificity (this person in this
time at this place); they pass through a stage of increasing generalization (use of metaphor and simile, episodes generalized so as to
summarize or anticipate the concrete detail of the narrative); finally,
they yield fullblown commentary (an T external to the narrative
directly addresses a 'you', similarly outside the narrative, or is
addressed by that 'you'). At the one end of this continuum we have a
story which appears to be telling itself. 7 Such a story has no narrating
voice separate from the totality of narrative effects which creates the
voice o/the narrative. It is to the other end of the spectrum that we
must turn for the clearest example of narratorial voicing, of voicing
formally distinct from the voices of the characters in the narrative. The
author creates a narrating voice distinct from the narrative to draw out
its implications, either to disagree with them, or to reinforce them, or
even because he fears the story will not survive his telling of it. 8 In
choosing to give voice to his understanding of the narrative, or in
leaving it to speak for itself, the author thus realizes himself admittedly, only in very general terms - as a 'character'.
The author's self-presentation interacts with the narrative in a
whole variety of ways to construct the work, and hence give it its
meaning. One such concerns the voicing of a speech which might
belong to the narrator or to one of the characters in the story. The long
preamble to the Merchant's Tale, for example, though normally read as
spoken by the narrator - which is how I read it - has been interpreted as
spoken by January. 9 And other questions need to be addressed, too.
Does the narrator's commentary, when it occurs, reinforce the
narrative, or some part of it - as when the narrator identifies \vith one of
the characters in the story - or undermine it? Does it embody a
coherent view of the narrative, or does it reveal a narrator responding
haphazardly to its surface detail? Where does the commentary occur in
the work, and how regular a feature of the work is it? (The 'talky
beginnings 1 identified by Barney are a very different affair, for
example, from the 'talky' ending of the Nun's Priest's Tale.) 10
The narratorial postures adopted in the different Canterbury
Tales - the voices thus created - can often be distinguished one from
another, almost like a thumbprint. These voices are not as fully
7 \Vith the phrase 'telling itself, earlier used in R. Ellis, Patterns of religious narrative in the
Canterbury Tales (London: Groom Helm, 1986), 134, compare comments in T Whittock, A
reading of the Canterbury Tales 'Cambridge: C.U.P., 1%S), 110 (on the 'innocent directness' of
the narrative under consideration).
* The best example of the first position is the Clerk's Tale; of the second, the Prioress's Tale;
of the third, the tales of the upper-class narrators, the Knight, Squire and Monk.
'' For comment on these different interpretations, see D.R. Benson, The marriage "encomium" in the Merchant's Tale: a Chaucerian crux', Chaucer Review, xiv (1979-80), 4S-51.
1(1 On 'talky beginnings' see S. Barney, 'An evaluation of the Pardoner's Tale', in Twentiethcentuty inic>-pn'Uiiu»is of the Pardoner's Tale, ed. D.R. Faulkner l.nelcwood Clitls. N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1973), 88, and Fllis, Patterns of religion* luimitire, 232.
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developed as the voices in a George Eliot novel (think of Mr Brooke's
unforgettable conversational tics), but they are much more fully
realized than the voices in medieval narrative collections like The seven
sages of Rome or even The decameron. 11 Arguably, they are organized,
for the most part, about a central idea or turn of phrase, which
normally relates, if in general terms, to the primary role, social,
religious or intellectual, assigned to the named narrator.
These observations will seem - and are - scarcely relevant to the
Second Nun's Tale. 12 The narrative of the Second Nun gives very
little sense of voicing outside of the prologue: and most of that little
does not originate with her, since, at the outset, she has declared her
dependence, as translator, on the voice of her sources, 'hym that at the
seintes reverence/The storye wroot', James of Varaggio. 13 She subordinates her own voice to that of the sources, and any comments she
makes emphasize their givenness and reinforce their view of the
narrative. This first level of vertical voicing encloses another: a text
inserted by James into his own and described as spoken by St.
Ambrose. 14 (In the following quotation of the Ambrosian text, I
indicate the Chaucerian voice by underlining, that of James of
Varaggio by capitals, and that of St. Ambrose by italics)
AND OF THE MYRACLE OF THISE CORONES TWEYE
SEINT AMBROSE IN HIS PREFACE LIST TO SEYE:
Solempnely this noble doctour deere
Commendeth it, and seith in this manere
The palm of martirdom for to receyve
Seinte Cecile, fulfild of Goddes yifte,
The world and eek hire chambre gan she weyve;
Witnesse Tyburces and Valerians shrifte,
11 For a Middle English version of the former see The seven sages of Rome, ed. K. Brunner,
EETS, OS, 191 (London, 1933); for a modern English translation of the latter, The Decameron,
trans. G.H. Me William (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972); for comment on both, H. Cooper,
The structure of the Canterbury Tales (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1983), 23-4,
28-30.
12 For a review of the secondary literature on this work see C. Collette, 'Critical approaches to
the Prioress's Tale and the Second Nun's Tale', in Chaucer's religious tales, ed. C. David Benson
and Elizabeth Robertson, Chaucer Studies, xv (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1991), 95-107. See
also, in the same volume, J.C. Hirsh, The Second Nun's Tale', 161-70.
13 For the sources, see Sources and analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, ed. W.F Bryan
and G. Dempster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), 667-84; for a modern
translation, Chaucer: sources and backgrounds, ed. R.P. Miller (New York: O.U.P., 1977),
112-20; and, for comment on Chaucer's use of his sources, S.L. Reames, The sources of
Chaucer's "Second Nun's Tale"', Modern Philology, Ixxvi (1978-79), 111-35, and The Cecilia
legend as Chaucer inherited and retold it: the disappearance of an Augustinian ideal', Speculum,
Iv (1980j, 38-57. I speak of the 'voice' of the sources because, although Chaucer was using two
different versions of the story, both speak effectively with the same voice.
14 Reames, Modern Philology, Ixxvi, 114 and n. 18 is uncertain whether or not James
introduced the Ambrosian material into his text; J.S.P. Tatlock, 'Chaucer and the Legenda
Aurea', Modern Language Notes, xlv (1930), 296-8, claims that he did. See also M. Henshaw,
The preface of St. Ambrose and Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale', Modern Philology, xxvi (1928),
15ff.
PLAIN SPEAKING IN CANTERBURY TALES
125
To whiche God of his bountee wolde shifte
Coroncs two of floures wel smellynge,
And made his angel hem the corones brynge.
The mayde hath broght thise men to blisse above;
The world hath wist what it is worth, ccneyn,
Devoioun of chastitee to love (VIII.270-83). 15
In this passage, the voice of St. Ambrose is represented directly
only by the imperative 'witnesse'. Nevertheless, though it reaches us
through the mediation of two other voices, these add little to it. Both
frame it at the outset; James additionally marks the return to his own
voice at the end of the quotation with his version of closed quotation
marks, 'hec Ambrosius'. Chaucer's narrator reinforces the voice of
Varaggio by repetition at the outset, and emphasizes the Ambrosian
narrative line by means of asseverations ('certeyn'), doublets ('to
love'), and other conventional language ('of his bountee'). Not
surprisingly, the voices run into one another, and come to inhabit
almost the same space as the voices in the narrative (Cecilia instructing
Tiburtius and Valerian, or resisting the prefect, expresses the same
certainty of divine mission and justification as Ambrose-JamesSecond Nun). If we had to talk of a voice in this passage, it would
hardly be the Nun. She remains as shadowy a figure in her narration as
in the pilgrimage narrative. Writers have, it is true, credited her with a
voice on the basis of presumed links of her tale with others before or
after. Yet the striking character of her narrative is precisely its isolation
from the total narrative context of the pilgrimage: she responds to no
tale, no narrator responds directly to hers. 16 The Ambrosian voice is
differently paradoxical. It achieves prominence in the total fabric of
the work by being the only independent voice cited, yet it hardly
interrupts the narrative line. In this text the primary voicing is that of
the narrative itself. And what the narrator understands by plain
speaking can be readily seen in her comment on the kind of narrative
she is producing: 'but atte laste, to tellen short and pleyn' (360). In
this tale, then, plain speaking, which I take to be a version of sermo
humilis, expresses the narrator's desire to interpose herself as little as
possible between the hearer and the original voice of the narrative.
Plain speaking is a very different matter in the Merchant's Tale, where
the levels of voicing, and their interrelations, are much more complex
than in the Second Nun's Tale. As with the Second Nun's Tale, of
15 The Latin of this passage reads: 'Huic miraculo de coronis rosarum Ambrosius testatur in
prefacione, sic dicens: Sancta Cecilia sic celesti dono est repleta, ut martyrii palmam assumeret.
Ipsum mundum est cum talamis exsecrata: testis est Yaleriani coniugis et Tyburcii prouocata
confessio, quos, domine, angelica manu odoriferis floribus coronasti; viros uirgo duxit ad
gloriam; mundus agnouit quantum ualeat deuocio castitatis. Hec Ambrosius.' (Sources and
analogues, 673, trans. Miller, Sources and backgrounds, 116).
16 For comment on one such attempt, by Grennen, see D. Pearsall, The Cantethmy Tales
London: (icorgc Alien and Umvin, 1985), 2?6.
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course, the primary level of the voicing is vertical, and this is indicated
not only by citations of authority - many more, and much more
diverse, than in the Nun's Tale - but also by explicit quotation.
Comparison is instructive. At the centre of the Merchant's opening
commentary we find a speech ascribed to Theofraste', warning against
marriage. Like the speech of 'Ambrose' quoted by the Nun, this
speech is formally framed at beginning and end ('quod he', 'this
sentence . . . writeth this man', IV. 1296, 1308). Now, Theophrastus
has come down to the Merchant-narrator through the ventriloquial
medium of a letter written by St. Jerome to Jovinian in praise of
virginity, against the latter's claim that virgins are no more pleasing to
God than married women. 17 Jerome frames Theophrastus, as James
did St. Ambrose, with his own version of quotation marks ('Fertur
Aureolus Theophrasti liber . . . statim intulit', 'haec et hujuscemodi
Theophrastus disserens'), and, again like James of Varaggio, identifies
his own voice with the voice of his source. As quoted by the
Merchant-narrator, however, the Theophrastan original has undergone a drastic transformation. It is framed by disapproving quotation
marks - 'What force though Theofraste liste lye?/. . . This sentence,
and an hundred thynges worse/ Writeth this man, ther God his bones
corse!' (1295, 1307-8) - and sandwiched in a long speech of very
different cast, initially in praise of marriage, and later recommending a
husband to take his wife's advice. This speech blends words spoken by
the narrator himself and the words of two other writers, Eustache
Deschamps and Albertano of Brescia, the former represented by his
Miroir de manage, the latter by the treatises produced for two of his
sons, the Liber de amore Dei and the later Liber consolationis et consilii. 18
The narrator does not acknowledge these borrowed voices, and he
treats them with considerable freedom.
17 For the original Latin, see Patrologia Latino, 23. 211-338 (the Theophrastan original,
I.xlvii, is cols. 276-8); extracts are printed in Sources and analogues, 208-13, 394-7; for a modern
translation of relevant portions, including all of Theophrastus, see Miller, Sources and backgrounds, 411-36.
18 For detailed comment on the borrowings, see the explanatory notes to the Merchant's Tale
by M.T. Tavormina, Riverside Chaucer, 884-9. For an edition of the Miroir, see vol. IX of
Eustache Deschamps oeuvres completes, ed. A.H.E. Queux (Marquis de St.-Hilaire) and G.
Raynaud, 11 vols. (Paris: Societe des anciens textes francais, 1878-1903); of the Liber de amore
Dei, Albertano of Brescia, Liber de amore et dilectione Dei et proximi (Coni, 1507); of the Liber
consolationis, Liber consolationis et consiln, ed. T. Sundby (London: Chaucer Society, Series 2, no.
8, 1873). Sources and Analogues contain extracts from the Ahroir, 215-22, 333-9, and an Old
French translation of the Liber consolationis, 568-614. Z.P Thundy, 'Matheolus, Chaucer and
the Wife of Bath', in Chaucenan problems and perspectives: essays presented to Paul Beichner, ed. E.
Vasta and Z.P Thundy (Noire Dame, Ind., and London: University of Noire Dame Press,
1979), 24-58, contests the alleged influence of Deschamps on the prologue to the Vufe of Bath's
Tale, and promises in a future study (52) to disprove similarly the influence of Deschamps on the
Merchant's Tale. H. Cooper, Oxford guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1989), 142-3, 204, argues that neither Deschamps nor Matheolus is a likely source for
either Chaucer text. I agree in respect of Matheolus (and see further n. 32 below), but think the
formal parallels between the Miroir and the debate section of the Merchant's Tale too strong to be
accidental, and unlikely, as Thundy claims, to have originated with Chaucer.
PLAIN SPEAKING IN CANTERBURY TALES
127
For one thing, the words borrowed from the Miroir and the Liber
consolationis belong to a different order of fiction to the Merchantnarrator's voice. They are voices of characters in their respective
narratives. The Deschamps voice occurs as part of a debate about the
desirability of the hero's marrying, and will reappear, in the person of
Placebo, in the debate engineered by the hero of the Merchant's Tale,
when he summons a council to advise him about his proposed
marriage. The voice which the Merchant-narrator has made his own is
that of a flattering counsellor, like Placebo, urging on January a
marriage which Deschamps's narrative will show to be against his best
interests. The Albertano voice, that of the heroine of the narrative,
also figures in a debate, as part of a council called by her husband to
secure approval for his planned vengeance on his enemies. The
speaker has offered her own as the best advice, and been overruled in
part because she is a woman. She thus has to defend her right as a
woman to counsel her husband: which she does by demonstrating how
men have done well in the past to heed the advice of their wives. The
two voices therefore are working to subtly different ends, one to an
ironic reversal, the other to a conversion, of the hero's point of view.
The Merchant-narrator, then, has created a voice for himself in
relation to three other, and very different, voices. Though existing on
different levels of fictional reality, 'Theofraste' and Prudence enjoy a
similar status in their respective 'fictions' of St Jerome and Albertano;
Deschamps's flattering counsellor, who inhabits the same fictional
plane as Prudence, will be formally disavowed by the narrative of
which he is a part. Yet it is Theophrastus whom our narrator reviles,
and Prudence and a flattering counsellor whom he yokes together. For
that matter, Prudence's examples acquire a surprising and unexpected
resonance in their new context. She had used them to authorize her
self-presentation as a wise counsellor to headstrong youth. The
Merchant-narrator creates a new context for them, in part by linking
them with the standard example of Adam and Eve in Paradise (also
derived from Albertano's Liber de amove Dei)., in part by his knowledge
of the direction his story will take, to authorize a picture of triangular
relationships (Adam and Eve and the serpent; Rebecca, Jacob and
Isaac; Abigail, David and Nabal; Esther, Mordecai and Ahaseurus),
centring on feminine deceit (Rebecca, Judith, Abigail, Esther) or on
feminine gullibility (Eve), and on a mismatch of years (AbigailNabal). 19 Adam and Eve with the, clearly implied, serpent in the tree
anticipate the principal event in the Merchant's Tale; suggest the
mythic dimension of the story which the intervention of Proserpine
19 For Adam and Kve, see 11. 1325-9; for Rebecca and Jacob, 1362-5; for Abigail and Nabal,
1369 71; lor Hsther, Mordecai and Ahaseurus, 1371-4; and for Judith, 1366-8. For general
comment on this feature, see J. Richardson, "Blameth nai me" a study of inui^'ty in Chaucer's
fabliaux (The Hague and Pans: .\\oulion, 19701, 13-14 and n. 27, 1. Brown, 'Biblical women in
the Merchant's Tale: feminism, antifeminism and beyond', Viator, \ (1974), 37S^12 (395 , and
Benson, Chtiuu't Ri-cica-, xiv, 56.
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will generate near the end; and express only in the most ironic
counterpoint the joys of marriage. 20 In any case, the sexual thrust of
the Merchant's Tale has been indicated at the outset, with its
preliminary picture of a dirty old man (or, if you prefer, a senex amans)
who decides to marry because of fantasies about the joys of wedlock.
This character points clearly in the direction not of a story exemplifying holy wedlock - though other couples similarly mismatched in
respect of years could have provided models and precedent, most
notably Joseph and the Virgin Mary21 - but of a fabliau.
But it is when the narrator speaks in his own voice that he finally
gives the game away. He has been quoting Albertano, this time from
the Liber de amore Dei, to the effect that 'A wyf is Goddes yifte
verraily'. Now he weighs in with an exercise in plain speaking: 'But
drede nat, if pleynly speke I shal,/A wyf wol laste, and in thyn hous
endure,/ Wel lenger than thee list, paraventure' (IV. 1311, 1316-18).
Ironically, the subject of such plain speaking was precisely - and
uniquely, among the texts being used by the narrator - a central
element in the speech of the vilified Theofraste, who had similarly
warned against women around the house. 22 The narrator's comment
therefore forces us to re-examine the cosy conspiracy of voices
assembled in praise of marriage, and to re-read the whole speech
ironically: the wife does not once say 'no' when her husband says 'yes'
(how many times does she say it, then?); she keeps his goods (for him,
or from him?), and never wastes any of them (is she miserly, then?);
and so on (1343-5). What looked straightforward suddenly turns itself
inside out.
This deliberate inconsistency of voicing recurs throughout the
tale. Plain speaking, which finds clearest - and unforgettable expression as the narrative reaches its literal and metaphoric climax
(2352-3), alternates dizzyingly with passages in high style apostrophizing the characters, and awarding the auctors brownie points or
demerit marks for their understandings and abilities. 23 A similar
20 Admittedly, the serpent was normally represented as female in illustrations of the Fall
(hence the comparison of the Sultaness, in the Man of Law's Tale, to a 'serpent under
femynynytee', 11.360), but by the time we reach the climax we have heard Damian compared to a
'naddre': on Damian as serpent in the Paradise garden, see also Pearsall, The Canterbury Talcs,
203, and E. Brown, 'Chaucer, the merchant and their tale', Chaucer Review, xiii (1978-79),
140-56 (145).
21 On this point, see also D. Wurtele, 'Ironical resonances in the Merchant's Tale', Chaucer
Review, xiii (1978-79), 75. Deschamps's flattering counsellor Folie defends marriage by
opposing to the example of Eve, used by Repertoire des Sciences, the example of Mary and
Joseph (Oeumes, IX, 8595-6).
22 Cf 'Si totam domum regendam ei commiseris, serviendum est . . propter dispensationem
domus et languoris solatia, et fugam solitudinis, ducuntur uxores: multo melius servus fidelis
dispensat' (Patrologia Latma, 23. 277).
23 Auctors thus praised include Martianus Capella (1732), Guillaume de Lords (2032), and
Ovid (2125); in the first two instances the praise is two-edged, since the writers are being told
they could not hope to represent adequately the scene being described. One vilified is
Constantinus Afer (1810), on whom see Brown, Chaucer Review, xiii, 146.
PLAIN SPEAKING IN CANTERBURY TALES
129
inconsistency characterizes several of the voices within the tale.
Required to choose between the warning voices of the past and the
siren voices of instinct, January decries the former as 'scole-termes'
not worth 'a panyer ful of herbes'; similarly, Proserpyne rejects her
husband's offered auctoritees as not worth 'a boterflye' (1568-9, 2304).
We thus arrive at an ambiguous identification of the narrator's voice
with several of the voices in his narrative, and a blurring of the
boundary between his voice, theirs, and those of their common
sources.
The link is closest, but not at all consistent, between the narrator
and his hero, who shares his narrator's penchant for plain speaking
(1431) alternating with fine rhetorical flourishes (for example,
2138-46). Haste, and a perverse ingenuity, characterize both. January
hastens to the imagined joys of his wedding night (1805);24 the
narrator hastens us to his hero's coming humiliation (2122), and thus,
incidentally, suggests a clear link between the two narrative moments.
January describes himself to himself as a great lover: he compares
himself with Paris (1754) and, via the passage quoted from the
Canticles (2139ff., cf. 1483) with Solomon. (These self-comparisons
are true in ways he cannot appreciate. The rape of Helen will lead to
the fall of Trpy; January's original in the classical love triangle is not
Paris but the ageing cuckold Menelaus; the love life of Solomon, as
Proserpine reminds her husband, 2292ff., very nearly cost him his
kingdom.) With comparably perverse ingenuity, as we saw, the
narrator rewrites one of his sources so as to turn its emblems of faithful
women into deceivers. Similarly, he creates metaphors which his
narrative will realize literally or restate, generally sexually. Thus
January's blindness has been anticipated by the narrator's warning
about the metaphoric blindness of love (1598); the latter's comparison
of Damian to a 'naddre' (1786) reminds us of the 'adder' the young
squire will become at the end of the story; the crucial role of the gods
at the end of the story - creating a mythic context for the action and
absolving the protagonists of responsibility - has been anticipated, in
part, by the narrator's quasi-metaphoric use of the gods on the evening
of the wedding (1722-3); the priest's injunction to May to be 'lyk . . .
Rebekke' (1704) restates another ironic emblem from the narrator's
opening speech (1363); crucially, his description of May on the night
of the wedding ('Hire to biholde it semed fayerye./ Queene Ester
looked nevere with swich an ye/ On Assuer', 1743-5) lodges May
between the ironic emblem of faithful woman which he had created at
the outset, in the words derived from Albertano, and the self-justifying
queen of fairy at the end; 25 and so on. For that matter, the servant
whom Albertano recommended in preference to the wife, and the wife
24 \Vurtele, Chaucer Revieu\ xiii, 73 4, claims January's haste derives from Cant. 2:10.
r I-'or May's link with the Queen of Faery see J.S.P Tatlock, 'Chaucer's Merchant's Tale',
Modem Philolo®\ xxxiii (1936 . 375-6.
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whom Albertano recommended in preference to the other counsellors,
join forces in the Merchant's narrative in ways neither Albertano nor
Theophrastus could have foreseen.
And even when the narrator is not overtly active as a voice, his
narrative is working to very similar ends. The 'privee signes' (2105)
exchanged between the lovers are realized literally when thrown into
the privy (1954). The warm wax in which May makes an impress of
the 'clyket' (2117), itself an ironic realization of an erotic detail in the
Song of Songs (5:4), is her conscious reaction to the 'impression'
Damian has made upon her (1978) and her unconscious reaction to
January's determination to mould her like warm wax (1430: ironically,
the only imprinting of May by January takes place in the latter's mind,
2178). 26 Conversely, the narrative allows January to describe his
squire in language perfectly appropriate to their social relationship ('If
that he deyde, it were harm and routhe./ He is as wys, discreet, and as
secree/ As any man . . ./ And therto manly, and eek servysable',
1908-11) while keeping him ignorant of the equal appropriateness of
the language to describe the squire's below-stairs dealings with a
master's wife.
But it is not January to whom the narrative accords its greatest
privilege, an example of horizontal voicing as significant as it is rare.
Justinus is given access to the narrator's own fictional realm. Recalled
by January with the other members of the council to be informed that
January has made up his mind 'of his owene auctoritee', he quickly
realizes January's haste to provide himself with matter for repentance.
Like the narrator of the Second Nun's Tale, if for rather different
reasons, he therefore abbreviates what would otherwise have been a
'longe tale' (1657), and ironically identifies with his master by citing
not an ancient 'auctoritee' but - as it appears - that plainest of plain
speakers, the Wife of Bath: The Wyf of Bathe, if ye han understonde,/
Of manage, which we have on honde,/ Declared hath ful wel in litel
space' (1685-7). Part at least of this joke resides in the speaker's
presentation of the Wife as a model of brevity (we remember the
Friar's goodhumoured 'this is a long preamble of a tale' and 'ye han
seyd muche thyng', III.831, 1273). The real point of the joke,
however, is that two separate voices, two separate levels of literary
reality, have been deliberately, if momentarily, fused. This moment is
the more significant because it is almost without parallel elsewhere in
the tales. As earlier noted, Chaucer normally keeps his fictional levels
separate: the framing narrative generates mostly horizontal voicing,
and any voices from the past cited there are normally brief, proverbial
and unironic (for example, 1.4331, 4357, II.25-8). Conversely, if we
except the tales of Fragment III, each of which expresses horizontal
26 On the 'privee signes', see G. Dempster, Dramatic irony in Chaucer, Stanford University
publications in language and literature 4.3 (Stanford: S.U.P., 1932), 51; on the 'warm wax',
Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, 203.
PLAIN SPEAKING IN CANTERBURY TALES
131
voicing shortly after its beginning, in an interruption by one of the
pilgrims, the tales normally unfold without reference to the pilgrim
audience. 27 Any audience addressed by the narrator is normally
projected outwards from the tale itself: thus the Knight addresses
lovers, the Wife wise women, the Physician governesses, and so on. 28
(The negative of this, of course, is most tellingly shown in the
Merchant's Tale, where the narrator addresses those who are least
likely to identify with his subject-matter, the 'precious folk', the
'ladyes': IV. 1962, 2350.)
We see, then, that the narrator's relation to the voices within his
narrative and to the voices upon which his own commentary is
constructed, in both horizontal and vertical contexts, is much more
complex than that in the Second Nun's Tale. Instead of resolving
potential or actual contradictions between the voices in his narrative,
his commentary merely repeats or re-enacts them. His performance
challenges my earlier claim that Chaucerian voices could be seen as
organized around a central idea or turn of phrase. I find no such
organizing principle in the commentary of this narrator, unless it be
that of a display of ironic virtuosity almost without parallel in the other
Canterbury tales. 29
A different complexity obtains in that other work which depends as
heavily on the anti-feminist tradition as the Merchant's tale, and, like
it, directly quotes Theophrastus and Deschamps's Miroir: the prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale.
Certain differences immediately need stressing. The voicing of
the Prologue does not grow out of or around an existing text or texts:
neither does it grow directly out of the 'true' story of the pilgrimage
narrative. Like the Merchant's Tale, the 'tale' of the Prologue is
designed to prove the point argued by the narrator in the 'talky
beginning' which gives so strong a sense of voicing. Unlike the
Merchant's Tale, however, the Prologue to the Wife's Tale is offered
with all the immediacy and partiality of direct personal experience.
The voicing of the narrative and the voice of the narrative are thus
more directly and immediately related than the parallel elements of the
Merchant's Tale could ever be: both allow us to identify the same
'character' at different stages in her development. The vertical context
of the voicing of the Wife's Prologue thus operates on two interacting
levels: voices from the immediate past (the Wife, and her husbands),
and voices from book time. The former has an immediacy more akin
to the horizontal level of voicing provided by the pilgrimage narrative.
27 These interruptions occur at III.163-S7, 829-56, 1332-7. 1761-3.
28 For the Knight's address to lovers, see I. 1347-53; the XX'ite's to wise women, III. 225-30;
the Physician's to governesses, VI. 72-92, and see Hlhs, Patterns of religious namimc. 25 and
n. 75. "
-"' CI' Pcarsall, The Canterbury Tales, 207 ('there is no centre to the poem').
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And this time the word 'voices' is not a metaphor. The Wife does
not read, but listens to, these other voices. Inside her narrative she
creates a speech with which to cow her first three husbands into
submission, and peppers it with words which she claims they have
said to her. She is also on the receiving end of the clerkly equivalent of
more than one curtain-lecture from her fifth husband. She has already
presented herself, in her introductory commentary, as having to listen
to, presumably, male voices (III. 9, 53, 119). 30 More importantly, she
understands the words of the texts which provide her prologue with
its context of vertical voicing as spoken rather than written. She does,
it is true, establish the scripted character of a proverb: '"Whoso that
nyl be war by othere men,/ By hym shul othere men corrected be.7
The same wordes writeth Ptholomee:/ Rede in his Almageste'
(180-3). Yet elsewhere she gives us the speaking voice of Jesus
(16-19), and she presents the written words of St Paul (cf. 1.80, 'he
wroot and sayde') with all the immediacy of speech (notably, 64-5,
160). Her voice, moreover, is clearly expressing itself as a voice for the
most part of the preamble ('heere', 1.35, was so understood, for
example, by the annotator of the Ellesmere manuscript, and glossed
as 'audi').
This same valid sense of speaking voices pervades the actual
narrative. The first three husbands are brought vividly alive by what
they are alleged to say, by way of repeated phrases such as 'thou seist'
and 'prechestow', or what they are alleged to have said ('thou
seydest'), by what the Wife thinks they ought to say (318), and by her
indirect and unwilling acknowledgement of what they may actually
have been saying (cf. 306, 316, 357). In the same way, the fifth
husband is realized primarily as the voice that gleefully recites the
lessons from his book to her ('tho redde he me', 'thanne tolde he me').
We observe a similar pattern in the Merchant's Tale, when January is
reporting back to his council that he has, after all, chosen his bride, so
they needn't bother to keep looking for one; but it is working to very
different effect there. There, the blend of reported and direct speech,
all mediated by the repeated, and parenthetical, 'he seyde' (IV. 1621,
1623, 1627, 1633) allows us to hear January's speech as an expression
of wilful self-delusion. Here, the strongly voiced preamble, and the
insistent repetition of such phrases in the body of the narrative,
regularly at the head of a sentence, ensure that we always have a
heightened sense of the Wife and her husbands as, before anything
else, voices.
These voices exist in clear relation to their own horizontal and
30 Here and elsewhere in this section my position overlaps with that of R.A. Pratt, The
development of the Wife of Bath', in Studies in medieval literature in honour of A.C. Baugh,
ed. MacEdward Leach (Philadelphia: 1961), 45-79. See also his 'Jankyn's book of wikked
wyves: medieval antimatrimonial propaganda in the universities', Annuale medievale, iii
(1962), 5-27.
PLAIN SPEAKING IN CANTERBURY TALES
133
vertical contexts. Until her violence and his answering violence force
both out of character, Jankyn is the only husband who actually speaks,
and he speaks only out of his book. Like the Clerk in the Clerk's Tale,
who speaks out of Petrarch's book, it is the book which provides the
primary context of Jankyn's voicing: as if he were holding a private
conversation with the voices in it. He seems to enjoy the 'conversation'
immensely. He reads the book with pleasure; he savours the tale of
Pasiphae; he reads the story of Clytemnestra 'with ful good devocioun'
(670-72, 734, 739). Admittedly, it isn't clear to what extent his
reaction to his book is a purely private matter between him and it, and
to what extent a reaction - if so, of what sort? - to his wife. A private
conversation is changed by the knowledge that an outsider is listening
to it. In all this while, we hear next to nothing of her reactions to the
stories he is reading to her. The stories proceed as uninterruptedly,
until her final outburst, as Chauntecleer's, in the Nun's Priest's Tale,
or the Monk's, in his. Her comments on the implications of his choice
of text (688-710), on the 'grisly' story of Pasiphae, which she alleges
he enjoyed for its 'shrewednesse', and from which she primly
distances herself (734 6), as on the part played by woman in the fall of
man (719-20), constitute her only reactions to his performance, and
belong, strictly, to the voicing of her narrative now. For the rest, it's as
if, while he was speaking, she had simply become a pair of ears. Only
the one detail shows her clearly reacting, at the time, to his voice,
when, like Proserpine rejecting the preaching of Pluto in the Merchant's Tale, she tells how she 'sette noght an hawe/ Of his proverbes
n'of his olde sawe' (659-60).
It doesn't follow, however, that the Wife is simply putting
quotation marks around Jankyn's words. Since we hear him only
through the ventriloquial medium of the Wife herself, we have to
allow for distortions in the medium. As she reports him, for instance,
he seems to favour a simple and direct speech not unlike her own; and
he seems to be offering rather a digest of the stories than actually
quoting them in full from his book, presenting vivid details in isolation
from their total narrative context. But whether these details faithfully
report Jankyn's speech - if so, they would show him talking down to
his wife: consciously adapting his message to her abilities to understand it - or whether they express her imperfect memory of his words,
rather like Chaucer's imperfect memory of Ovid, in The Book of the
duchesse, and Cicero, in The Parlement of foules, is not so easy to
decide. Whose voice, for instance, do we hear in the following words,
endorsing the message of the story of Adam and Eve ('Lo, heere
expres of womman may ye fynde,/ That womman was the los of al
mankynde', 719-20): hers to us or his to her? The Wife had earlier
used 'expres' to describe her own plain speaking, and k glose\ almost
equivalent to 1ve\ as part of a contrasting description of clerkly
language (26-7, 61, 119, 124-5). And she uses the latter term to
describe Jankyn's ability to turn a neat phrase to his own deceiving
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ends in bed ('so wel koude he me glose', 509). 31 So, when she uses the
word kexpres' to describe the plain truth that 'womman was the los of
al mankynde', she allows us to conclude that she is offering an ironic
reading (hers) of an earlier, unironic, voicing of the text (his).
Alternatively, we may be listening to Jankyn verbally dropping his
aitches, talking down to the Wife, impersonating her language.
In fact, the Wife does not always keep a proper distance between
hers and the other voices in her narrative, and she tells us so in the
context of her speech to her first three husbands, that part of the
Prologue which probably gives us the strongest sense of a speaking
voice. She declares that the words she accused her husbands of saying,
and the things she accused them of doing, were all false (379-82, cf.
231-2). Consequently, what we have experienced as an actual speech
to one of the unlucky husbands is in fact as typical an utterance of a
chiding woman as the Pardoner's Tale is of its unscrupulous narrator.
And this very fact of its typicality has two important consequences for
the matter of voicing. First, it seems that the Wife is creating her
speech in the light, and in the knowledge, of her relations with her
fifth husband. He it was, after all, who reacted to her roaming about in
the street from house to house, first, by forbidding her to do it; then,
when that failed, by treating her to a homily about it - preaching at her
as she says her first husbands did (641, cf. 247). She ignored his
preaching as she proposes in her speech to them to ignore theirs
(660-1, cf. 346-7). This detail suggests once more that for the Wife in
her tale voicing is primarily a matter of response to what someone has
actually said to her: that it is the horizontal context that is primary.
But the speech is typical in another way, and much more
importantly so: it grows out of those very texts - notably, 'Theofraste'
and the 'cardinal, that highte Seint Jerome' - that figured so prominently in Jankyn's book and bedtime reading (other major texts used
are Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la rose, the
Lamentationes of Matheolus, and Deschamps's Miroir)?2 At this point
the vertical and the horizontal levels of voicing blur. Words and a
voice which the Wife allows us to infer came to her by way of her fifth
31 For comment on this phrase, see P. Knapp, Chaucer and the social contest (New York and
London: Routledge, 1990), 115-17.
32 For detailed comment on the borrowings, see the explanatory notes to the prologue to the
Wife of Bath's Tale by C.R. Hilary, Riverside Chaucer, 864-72. For Theophrastus and Jerome,
see above n. 17; for the Miroir, above n. 18. For an edition of the Roman, see Guillaume de Lorris
and Jean de Meun, Le roman de la rose, 5 vols., ed. E. Langlois (Paris: Societe des anciens textes
francos, 1914-24), and modern translation, The romance of the rose, trans. C. Dahlberg
(Princeton, N.J.: P.U.P., 1971); and of Matheolus, Les lamentations de Matheolus
. edition
critique accompagnee de I'ongmal latin 2 vols., ed. A.-G. van Hamel (Paris: E. Bouillon,
1892-1905); for relevant selections from the former, Sources and analogues, 213-5; for modern
translations of other relevant antifeminist writing, Miller, Sources and backgrounds, VII-VIII.
Thundy, 'Chaucer, Matheolus and the Wife of Bath', 24-58, contests the alleged influence of
Deschamps, whom he would replace by Matheolus; Hilary rightly accuses him of placing too
much weight on the offered comparisons between Matheolus and Chaucer.
PLAIN SPEAKING IN CANTERBURY TALES
135
husband can be traced all the way back, via Deschamps, De Meun and
St Jerome, to Theophrastus (fortunately, the disentangling of these
complicated relations need not concern us here). 33
The speech blends these texts as daringly as the Merchantnarrator did his, but, initially at least, with greater singleness of
purpose. Theophrastus is used in two ways. First, he provides the
Wife with a fund of complaints against her husbands. In his Liber
Theophrastus had created a typical married woman to browbeat her
husband, using the very words that the Wife will appropriate, in a
similar nagging curtain-lecture: his direst imaginings therefore will be
realized literally in her voice. Secondly, words uttered in his own voice
on the difficulties of the married state, and intended to dissuade male
readers from marrying, give her the words to put into the mouths of
her three husbands (as if to say, 'You should have been like
Theophrastus, and thought of all these things before you married
me'). St Jerome, another male voice arguing against marriage, similarly becomes one of the Wife's hapless husbands. And Deschamps's
Miroir is treated similarly: the voice being cannibalized is once again
male, that of the counsellor Repertoire des sciences, who sends the
hero a huge letter urging him not to marry.
The situation is more complex in the Roman, since two speakers
are being paraphrased. Both are offering instruction on sexual matters
to young male companions. One, the cynical Amis, is counselling the
hero how best to achieve his end with women, in particular, by not
behaving like a jealous husband. Putting these words into the mouth
of the Wife so that she can 'prove' the male point of view with them
generates an irony comparable to that accomplished by turning
Theophrastus, St Jerome and Repertoire des sciences into respectably,
and unhappily, married men. The ironies are not so simple, though.
Amis's advice would confirm the worst fears of the savants about the
snares of sex; and such ironies are further compounded by the other
figure from the Roman. She is an old woman (la Vieille), and in
counselling Bel Acueil about the traps women can lay for those, like
him, unwary and inexperienced, she generates deliberate ironies,
which the other voices used in the Prologue do not. La Vieille's
self-revelation, or self-betrayal, not only authorizes details of the
Wife's speech, but, even more importantly, explains the Wife's
self-revelation to the pilgrim audience (when the Pardoner asks the
Wife to 'teche us yonge men of youre praktike', 187, he is ironically
casting himself in the role of the epicoene Bel Acueil in the Roman).
33 For a single example, consider 11. 282-92; according to Hilary's note, 'Chaucer is again
following Theophrastus . . . along with [the Romance of the rose] . . . and either Deschamps's
or, more likely, Matheolus' The borrowing from Theophrastus is definite for 11.
Miroir .
285-91; that from the Roman probable lor I. 292, though this detail could possibly have come
from ihe Minnr; additional material may have come from the Miroir or from Matheolus. The only
ili/ar link with Matheolus, however, comes in 1. 286 'diverse stoundes'; cl Matheolus,
I.unu'niuiion^ 800-1, 'ccrnit in isto'ac alio latere'
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Yet this voice is not simply an assemblage of antifeminist
commonplaces, proving the worst nightmares of the men in the
audience. It comes across as a distinct voice of its own.
Part at least of the voicing is oblique and ironic. Even before the
Wife had declared that she is speaking playfully (190-2) so as to
forestall negative reactions from the clerkes (125) - the Friar will later
remind her that serious talk is only for the experts (1275-7) - she has
presented herself as one whose commitment to 'experience' rather
than 'auctoritee' has closed her off from one whole area of voicing, and
condemned her to that very frame which Theophrastus had created for
her. Indeed, the whole prologue is so strongly coloured by a Theophrastan voice that we may be tempted to hear it throughout. Lines 1-76
and 115-62, in particular, show a voice enthusiastically betraying its
own ignorance and partiality. This voice is vigorous and colloquial,
and may be read as female because it loses its way in the intricacies of
its own narrative (585-6). We might even wish to see the voice as
female in respect of that other stereotype, a limited ability to control
complex patterns of subordination: such a claim would be much more
difficult to prove, and would require a comparative linguistic analysis
of all the other tales, hugely beyond the scope of the present paper.
Most importantly, the voice exposes its own incomprehension of the
subtleties of argument by its attempted contributions to the debate
(20-5). It appeals to common sense, to experience, to ad hominem
arguments (if they could do anything else clerks wouldn't be teachers).
It wilfully misreads texts, and replaces hard sayings by easier ones, so
as to confirm its prejudiced position (160-62). It reads metaphors
literally: for example, the phrase 'yifte of God' (39), which the Second
Nun's Tale had taken to mean 'grace', and the Merchant's Tale, with
heavy irony, 'a wife' (quotations above, pp. 124, 128) the Wife of Bath
reads as a euphemism for sexual energy;34 or she understands the
'dette', which, according to St Paul, the husband owes to his wife (cf 1
Cor. 7:3), as both sexual and monetary exchanges. Inevitably, these
details suggest the same voice as we hear in the Wife's invented,
Theophrastan, speech: one trapped in the immediacy of its own
experience and ignorant of its own limitations: a voice systematically
misreading all the other voices with which it comes in contact so as,
unwittingly, to confirm their understanding of it. 35 One is tempted to
apply to this voice the criticism of another woman's powers of
reasoning, much later, by another reasonable man: 'better be without
sense than misapply it as you do'.
34 On the Merchant's application of the phrase, see Richardson, Blameih nat me, 130 (offering
a source in Proverbs 19:14).
35 For a list of other fictional representations of female voice in medieval texts, see F.L. Utley,
The crooked rib (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1944). Use of innuendo and euphemism,
sometimes claimed as a feature of literary presentations of a lustful female voice, should rather be
read, in the Wife of Bath's Prologue, as characteristic of the voicing of fabliau.
PLAIN SPEAKING IN CANTERBURY TALES
137
So to hear the voice - and Mr Knightley does so hear Emma,
more than once - is, at least in part, to mishear it. 36 This is also a
voice, notably in 11. 64-111, well able to operate the technicalities of
argument in a cool and rational, almost impersonal, way. It glosses
texts efficiently and does not play to the gallery ('he mente', 'freletee
clepe I', 88, 93). It handles abstract terminology with easy confidence,
for example, the repeated opposition of 'precept' to 'conseil', or
abstractions like those in 11. 105-6: 'Virginitee is greet perfeccion,/
And continence eek with devocion'. It uses imagery as a subordinate
element, rather to point an argument than to prove it (the 'fyr and tow'
which it is dangerous to bring together, 1. 89, the serviceable vessels of
wood, 1. 101). It boldly takes the argument to the enemy, and rewrites
St Jerome, using his unflattering contrast between wheaten bread
(virginity) and barley (marriage) to argue the case for the latter, since
'. . . with barly-breed, Mark telle kan,/ Oure Lord Jhesu refresshed
many a man' (145-6). 37 More importantly, it is a voice constantly
questioning: 'why?' (21, 34, 129), 'what rekketh me' (53), 'wher' (59,
62), 'wherof, 'wherwith' (72, 131), 'to what conclusion' (115): most
importantly, 'who peyntede the Icon, tel me who?' (692). 38
This questioning is without parallel in the other narrating voices
of The Canterbury Tales. Sometimes the pilgrim-narrators use questioning to create a difficulty which they may then solve, sometimes to
excite and involve the hearers with the process and detail of the
narrative. An example of the first sort is provided by the Man of Law's
questionings (e.g. 11.498-504); of the second, by the rhetorical
address to Venus in the Nun's Priest's Tale (VII.3342-6). We draw
towards the questioning voice of the Wife of Bath's Prologue only in
the Clerk's Tale:
what neded it
Hire for to tempte, and alwey moore and moore
Though som men preise it for a subtil wit?. . .
But now of wommen wolde I axen fayn
If thise assayes myghte nat suffise?
(IV.457-9, 696-7)
In the Clerk's Tale, however, the professed identification with the
female point of view will be exposed as ironic both by the narrative line
and by the narrator's ironic envoi. No such irony, that I can see,
colours the questioning of the Prologue, and its very radical cast can be
36 Critics have sometimes heard the voice in a similar way. But cf Patterson, Speculum, Iviii,
678 ('her exegetical method is not . . a sign of her moral limitation but a knowing strategy
appropriate to her chosen genre').
37 St Jerome reads: 'Velut si quis definiat: bonum est triticeo pane vesci, et edere purissimam
similam. Tamen ne quis compulsus fame comedat stercus bubulum, concedo ei, ut vescatur et
hordeo.' (Patrologia Latino, 23. 219, translated Miller, Sources and backgrounds, 418).
38 For comment on this phrase, see M. Carruthers, The Wife of Bath and the painting of
lions', Publications of the Modem Language Association, xciv (1979), 209-22.
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well seen by a comparison with the Theophrastan original. The
Theophrastan curtain-lecture had given the woman a number of
nagging questions to put to her husband; these are well preserved in
the Wife's haranguing of her first three husbands. But there is an
important difference overall. Theophrastus had allowed the wife only
to register complaint about the specifics of her married state: 'Why is
my neighebores wyf so gay?/ She is honoured overal ther she gooth;/1
sine at hoom; I have no thrifty clooth' (III.236-8). 39 He thus
reinforced the view of woman as, at best, in Ibsen's phrase, a pretty
little songbird - more crow than nightingale, as he reports her - who
can't be expected to engage in conversation about serious matters.
Though the Wife conforms to this picture in her invented, typical,
speech to her husbands, her basic questioning role is altogether more
radical, particularly in the Prologue's 'talky beginning', where it
addresses the very arguments and professed principles of those who
would dictate the terms of her existence to her. 40 The questioning goes
right to the heart of the matter. By what right, with what justice, does
one voice, or the 'voice' of a group, get to call all the shots? Who says
that books have to know it all, and which books? 'What force though
Theofraste liste lye?'
This female voice is unique in both framing and framed narratives
of The Canterbury Tales. Though I have spoken of the voice of the
Second Nun's Tale as female, it is, in fact, of indeterminate gender hence its self-presentation, in the prologue to the tale, as a 'sone of
Eve' (VIII. 62), a liturgical term equally applicable to men and
women. Similarly, the voice that narrates the Prioress's Tale witnesses
not to frustrated feminine instinct, as often claimed, but rather to a
feminisation of religious sensibility that we can observe as well in male
as in female writers of the later Middle Ages. 41 Closer parallels might
occur with texts produced by other lay women of the time: by Margery
Kempe, for instance, who acquires a similar ambiguous identity from
what men have read to her, and who has similar difficulties with
organizing her remembered narrative. But the parallel should not be
pushed too far. Margery had no way finally to resolve the difficulties of
39 Cf Theophrastus, 'Cur aspiciebas vicinam? quid cum ancilla loquebaris?' (translated at 11.
239^4-0). The Miroir creates several Theophrastan speeches for the nagging wife; in one she asks
why she cannot have a fine coach, since the lawyer's wife, a poor village bourgeoise, has one
(1274-6); in another, she wants to know what present he brought from the market for a woman
friend (1605; in Theophrastus, the wife is asking what the husband has brought her: 'de foro
veniens quid attulisti?', Patrologia Latino, 23. 276). In Matheolus, by contrast, the narrator, or
the hapless husband, gets to ask all the questions (e.g. Lamentations, 111).
40 On this point, see A. Blamires, The Wife of Bath and Lollardy', Medium &vum, Iviii
(1989), 224-42.
41 On this point, see Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, 249-50; and, for fuller information about
'feminisation of religious sensibility', C. W. Bynum, Jesus as mother: studies in the spirituality of the
high Middle Ages (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982), chs.
4-5. See also comments on Chaucer's 'sentimental experiment' in The Canterbury Tales by R.O.
Payne, The key of remembrance: a study of Chaucer's poetics (New Haven and London: Yale U.P.,
1963J, 162. In making the comment I had in mind writers like Henry Suso.
PLAIN SPEAKING IN CANTERBURY TALES
139
speaking out in public as a woman except to dictate her memoirs to a
priest: it is not clear how much of his voice we are hearing in the text,
and how much of hers. 42
Here, then, is a voice of which we have to say that it adds up to
rather more than the sum of its parts. In this respect it contrasts
strikingly with the voice of the Merchant's Tale, even though its parts,
deriving largely from the vertical context of other men's books,
overlap to a large extent with those used in the creation of the
Merchant-narrator's voice: and even though the two texts treat this
common material inconsistently, 'bitwixe ernest and game/ ... of
[their] owene auctoritee'. The Wife of Bath has a perceived social
context which in large measure explains her assumption of a role to
which she is not entitled; nothing adequately explains the Merchantnarrator's wilfulness with his narrative. I hear her voice most clearly in
the questions it puts so insistently, and around which it generates
itself. I find no single centre about which the Merchant-narrator's
voice organizes itself. But in this very fact of the simultaneous
overlapping of, and contrast between, the Wife's and the Merchant's
voices, I think we shall find the measure of Chaucer's considerable
ventriloquial skills. At all events, I find in this very overlapping-andcontrast at least a partial explanation of the critical diversity of
response to most of the tales. That diversity of response applies to the
voices in, no less than the voicing of, a narrative. Consider, for a last
example, the speech which the 'sadde folk' address to the 'stormy
peple, unsad and evere vntrewe' in the Clerk's Tale (IV. 995-6, 1002).
On the basis perhaps of the marginal note 'Auctor' alongside this
speech in several manuscripts, some writers read it as spoken by
Chaucer: not by the 'sadde folk', not even by the Clerk. 43 In so
dissolving the fictional levels of The Canterbury Tales, such readers are
inclining, I think, to stress vertical voicing at the expense of horizontal, and maximizing the areas of overlap rather than those of contrast
between the voices inside (and outside) the tales. In my view, this is a
mistake. Any reading of voice in The Canterbury Tales is misconceived
to the extent that it overemphasizes the areas of overlap, or the areas of
contrast, between the voices. The first approach broadly yields the
view that Chaucer's voice is always paramount, the second leads to the
conclusion that each tale is the expression of the character whom we
have met in the General Prologue. 44 Chaucer, as always, has it both
ways: and so, somehow, must the critic.
42 Th<' Book of Mat^iy A'.w/v, ed. S.B. Meech and H.E. Alien, EETS, OS, 212 (London,
19401, for a modernized version, whose introduction addresses this point, see The Book of
.l/^nyrv AYw/v, ed. B. \Vmdcatt i Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
" So Brewer, Chaiucr the poet us sunylcller, 44.
4^ For comment on both approaches, and a list of relevant works, see Benson, ('hau^-r's drama
<>/ atvlc, 3 6