In both the Wife of Bath's Prologue and the Romance of the Rose, there was a very strange amalgamation of Christian and pagan spirituality that seemed extremely prominent to me. Starting with the Wife of Bath's Prologue, I found it very difficult to discern to what faith she prescribed. Although she begins her prologue by extensively discussing the Bible and Jesus's word for around 150 lines, as her prologue goes on, she seems to both forget her Christian piety and hint towards her other spiritual beliefs. One such example is when she implies that if women are deceitful or manipulative, God has purposely made them so: "For al swich wit is yeven us in oure birthe; / Deceite, weping, spinning, God hath yeve / To wommen kindely, whil they may live" (400-2). It seems slightly transgressive to me for her both blame her faults on God, and imply that He purposely made women such conniving creatures as if to torment men. Later, she gives even more reason to question her piety when she discusses how influenced by Venus and Mars she is: "For certes, I am al Venerien / In feeling, and min herte is Marcien. / Venus me yaf my lust, my likerousnesse, / And Mars yaf me my sturdy hardinesse" (609-12). She seems not only to believe in the Greek/Roman gods, but also in astrology, all as governing supernatural forces.
This combination of religions is also apparent in the Romance of the Rose. In the Jealous Husband's speech, he says that women are "misguided fools" who "give great shame to God" because "they do not consider themselves rewarded with the beauty that God gives them," and instead a woman "preens herself and primps as she goes through the town" (p 164, c. 9045). He is ostensibly implying that women are impious for not being grateful for and happy with what God has bestowed upon them, and yet he seems incredibly displeased with just about everything he has and does not. When he describes his feelings, he makes it more than obvious that he is quite guilty of various sins. He says, "I am overcome with envy of their comfortable life" (p. 167, c. 9250) and "I quite pine away with anger" (p. 167, c. 9269). But it was quite unnecessary for him to admit those sins, because he makes it rather apparent otherwise-- especially when he calls his wife's mother a "dirty painted old whore" (p. 168, c. 9345).
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Seriously you beat me to this topic by 24 minutes. I hope your proud. This amalgamation was present throughout the stories as you point out. It led me to wonder if the illiterate and uneducated at the time still held on to earlier beliefs. If the time before printing and mass production of the bible was a time where religion was still in a hybridized state between pagan, animistic and Christian?
ReplyDeleteApropos of Christianity, I was very puzzled by the Wife of Bath’s use of Scripture in the prologue. She says, for instance, that “God bad us for to wexe and multiplye” (28). In other words, she quotes Scripture in order to buttress her argument. And yet, at the beginning of the prologue, she says: “Experience, though noon auctoritee/ Were in this world, is right ynogh for me/ To speke of wo that is in marriage” (1-3). Does this inconsistency suggest a disbelief in her self-proclaimed authority?
ReplyDeleteI also noticed this, and wondered how the pagan deities and inclusion of astrology (seemingly as a backbone for her words, as she refers to it as an authority to justify her points) would have been perceived by the contemporary audience. Were they a genuine reflection of the zeitgeist of the time- a hodgepodge of Christianity, paganism and animism, as Carlos suggests? Or were these mocking touches that Chaucer put in to undercut the Wife of Bath (or her precursor in the Jealous Husband piece) and make her not only lecherous, shallow and corrupt, but ignorant as well? I assume these beliefs (paganism etc) would still have been floating around at the time, but would they have had marked lower class associations? Or is the characterization particular to the personality of the Wife of Bath, a way to show her hopping in and out of the beds of different religions just as frequently and shamelessly as she does the beds of men?
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