'He conquered al the regne of Femenye': feminist criticism of Chaucer

Author(s): MARION WYNNE-DAVIES

Source: Critical Survey , 1992, Vol. 4, No. 2, Feminist criticism (1992), pp. 107-113
Published by: Berghahn Books

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41555640

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'He conquered al the regne of Femenye': feminist criticism of Chaucer

MARION WYNNE-DA VIES

The first narrative in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales comm

statement of male domination quoted above. 'He', that is Theseus
Amazon nation, possessed their country, and wedded their queen,
patriarchal imperialism remain unquestioned by the Knight, wh
and by his audience of fellow pilgrims. This is hardly surpris
structure of the medieval society in which Chaucer lived and wro
archical; the political and cultural assumptions that the Knight wo
and that his story's message would reinforce dominant value sy
inevitable. Yet there is one character in 'The Knight's Tale' w
accept the role Theseus confers upon her- Emelye. When Palamo
to engage in mortal combat in order to win her hand in marriage, Em
goddess, Dyane, that all their 'hoote love', 'desir' and 'bisy tormen
focal point. For herself, she wishes:

... to ben a mayden al my lyf,

Ne nevere wol I be no love ne wyf.
I am, thow woost, yet of thy compaignye,
A mayde, and love huntynge and venerye,
And for to walken in the wodes wilde,
And noght to ben a wyf and be with childe.
Noght wol I knowe compaignye of man.
('The Knight's Tale', 2305-10)1

For a heroine in a courtly romance Emelye's understanding of h

somewhat unexpected; rather than reciprocating the love of her
cio's Emelye does in Chaucer's source text, Teseida, she rejects the
mother. Nor does she wish to devote her life to spiritual seclusi
would have been an acceptable alternative in the medieval period
wishes to remain an independent woman with all the privileges no
This evasion of a conventional feminine role would have been alm
medieval woman, indeed, even twentieth-century culture offers
women contented with being single. The ideal scenario, from Jac
Mills and Boon pulp fiction to 'respectable' novels like Antonia B
the romantic love of a heterosexual couple. Only a few works, su
ill's play Top Girls and the novels of Jeanette Winterson provide
who value their freedom- their ability 'to walken in the wodes w

© C.Q. & S. 1992

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108 Critical Survey, volume 4, number 2

attachment to a man.2 It is therefore all the more important to acknowledge the

rebellious nature of Emelye's desires. Moreover, although she will be suppressed
within a conformist marriage by the end of the tale, her initial radicalism is repeated
by other Chaucerian women.
Several of Chaucer's female protagonists act against conventional expectations:
they undertake traditionally male occupations- the Wife of Bath is a successful cloth-
maker, and Patient Griselda acts as the manorial judge when Walter is absent. They
are not punished for sexual licence and adultery- Alison tricks her husband in 'The
Miller's Tale', while May convinces her old husband of her faithfulness even after he
has witnessed her making love to another man. Others, like Emelye, do not wish to
marry, and both the Wife of Bath and Criseyde, having been wed, are aware of the
benefits of remaining widows, as the latter points out:

. . . Syn I am free,
Sholde I now love, and put in jupartie
My sickernesse, and thrallen libertie?
{Troilus and Criseyde II, 771-3)

Given the predominance of women in Chaucer's poetry who appear to contradict our
traditional ideas about medieval women, it is essential to examine some historical
material before progressing to literary criticism.
The field of medieval feminist studies is still quite small in comparison, say, to that
which has developed about nineteenth-century fiction. This carries disadvantages, in
that books devoted to single authors and themes are few- most current research is
laid out piecemeal in collections of essays. On the other hand, the amount of work
produced means that it is possible to keep track of recent developments in other
disciplines. Thus, any exploration of feminist literary criticism and Chaucer inevitably
takes into account the general historical critiques of woman's role in the medieval
period. However, feminist histories slip into the same binary division suggested by my
earlier analysis of Emelye's position: either women are shown to have been repressed
by a misogynist regime, or they are discovered to have challenged that system and
forged relatively individualistic identities for themselves. Early feminist historians
tended to stress the repression of women: both Eileen Power's Medieval Women
(1975) and Frances and Joseph Gies's Women in the Middle Ages (1978) accumulate
and list the sins committed by men against the brave and intelligent women of the
eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. These two texts are valuable, however, in that they
recount the lives of individual women, such as that of Abbess Hildegarde of Bingen.
A restricted role for medieval women is also uncovered by Shulamith Shahar in The
Fourth Estate (1983), where she describes the lives of different groups of women:
nuns, women in the nobility and townswomen. The text is a well researched and
unrelenting account of how women were oppressed by their fathers and husbands, the
church and the state. The section on marriage provides useful information about its
economic and dynastic significance for women:

Marital ties among the nobility were based on class, economic and political calculations.

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 'He conquered al the regne of Femenye': feminist criticism of Chaucer 109

Marriage ties with the right family could lead to links between lineages and help to create
alliances and agreements.3

This material may be used to explain details in Chaucer's poetry: for example, in 'The
Knight's Tale' Ypolita provides Theseus with legitimate rule over her country, and
the Duke uses Emelye's putative betrothal to bargain for peace with Palamon and
Arcite. Another negative view is offered by Margaret Labarge in A Small Sound of
the Trumpet (1986) where she writes about a woman's condition after marriage:

Although the noble woman might be the heiress of the title and the land and the riches that
accompanied it, her husband normally (always in England) took over during the marriage the
title, the wealth, and the accompanying duties.4

Labarge's text is also sectioned into female occupations, but it is distinctly accessible
in that it includes numerous illustrations as well as unusual and fascinating material,
such as the chapter on women as healers. Alternatively, some feminist historians
suggest that medieval women had a considerable amount of freedom; here, Patricia
Labalme's Beyond Their Sex (1980) and Bonnie Anderson's and Judith Zinsser's A
History of Their Own (1988) are two of the most useful texts; the latter is published by
Penguin Books and is thus an affordable and easily obtainable work for background
reading. What these last two books offer especially is a context for women writers in
the middle ages.5
While women might have been forcibly married, deprived of their property and
denied legal representation, they still found the opportunity to write. Few texts can
lay claim to authenticated female authorship, and those that can are not always
translated into modern English, nor are available in paperback. But there are four
pieces which would be worth employing as supplementary reading to analyses of
Chaucer's women. Christine de Pisan (1363-C.1429) was the first woman to partici-
pate in the querelle des femmes, the debate about the virtues and vices of women; she
directly refuted the misogynistic Roman de la Rose in her defence of women, The
Book of the City of Ladies (1404). 6 Reading querelle material is useful for understand-
ing the polarised stereotypes set up by Chaucer in characters such as the Wife of Bath
and Patient Griselda, where the former appears to encapsulate all the negative views
about women, and the latter seems to be an ideal of feminine virtue. Christine de
Pisan challenges these unrealistic 'types' and makes us aware of the medieval
woman's point of view- something that Chaucer was aware of himself, as may be
seen from his creation of the Lady Alceste, who turns upon her author and orders him
to write 'a glorious legende/ Of goode wymmen, maydenes and wyves' {The Legend
of Good Women, 483-4). Two further women writers, Julian of Norwich (1343-1413)
and Margery Kempe (1373-1439) recounted their visionary experiences; the latter
confessional autobiography postdates The Canterbury Tales by about forty years, but
Margery's forthright character provides a close analogue for the Wife of Bath.7
Finally, another fifteenth-century woman, Margaret Paston (c. 1420-84) provides us
with a series of letters describing the daily administration of a manorial estate.8 By
balancing the voices of real medieval women with those in Chaucer's poetry it is

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110 Critical Survey , volume 4, number 2

possible to measure the validity of the literary voices, and to reclaim for women a
period which literary history has hitherto identified as dominated by men.
The first and, still, essential feminist criticism of medieval literature is Arlyn
Diamond's and Lee Edwards's The Authority of Experience (1977); in this text the
familiar patterns of feminine ideal (Patient Griselda, Constance, Dorigen, Blanche of
Lancaster) and licentious shrew (Wife of Bath, Alison, May, Criseyde) are identified
as archetypes deriving respectively from the Virgin Mary and Eve.9 Diamond and
Edwards are careful to point out, however, that feminine identity is constructed by
cultural and social milieu, and is not determined by an unchanging essentialism. Their
insistence on society's role in the productivity of a text set the tone for the strong
future links between Marxism and medieval feminist criticism. Mary Carruthers's
'The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions' (1979), Sheila Delaney's 'Sexual Econ-
omics, Chaucer's Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe ' (1983), and Susan
Schibanoff's 'Taking the Gold Out of Egypt: The Art of Reading as a Woman' (1986)
all follow the same materialist path.10 Each essay uncovers the 'economic' situation of
literary and historical medieval women: their practical ability in trade, their recog-
nition of the 'maistrye' that individual wealth can offer, their equating of sexual and
monetary bargains, and their negotiation of a possible feminist 'profit' from the
seeming 'loss' of reading misogynist texts. Perhaps predictably, these three essays,
and indeed The Authority of Experience, all choose the Wife of Bath as their exemplar
of an independent medieval woman. While for male critics the Wife arouses at best
grudging admiration (E. T. Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer, 1970), and at worst
virulent attacks (G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry, 1915), feminist writers
consistently defend her independent character and claims to 'sovereynetee'.11
Unfortunately this has led to an imbalance in the criticism of Chaucer's women, and it
is still difficult to find any extended criticism of the Prioress's and Second Nun's
prologues and tales. Although it is understandable that critics should wish to con-
centrate upon exciting figures such as the Wife of Bath, with the expansion in
medieval feminist criticism it is now essential that we examine female characters who
do not coincide so readily with twentieth-century feminist ideals.
In the last four years, however, there have been three book-length 'feminist'
criticisms published on Chaucer alone; this was an inevitable and long-awaited con-
tribution to medieval studies. The first, Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Politics
(1989) is American and not readily available in British bookshops; but it is worth
ordering because of its scope- both Chaucerian and in terms of medieval philo-
sophy.12 Dinshaw includes the by-now-familiar analyses of the Wife of Bath and
Patient Griselda, but she also explores Troilus and Criseyde, 'The Man of Law's Tale'
and the notoriously recalcitrant The Legend of Good Women. Her observations about
the underlying patriarchal assumptions in the works of male Chaucerian critics are
welcome, and she consistently identifies readings specifically constructed as gendered
within Chaucer's poetry. Still, the all-knowing omnipotent male author remains
intact, and Dinshaw's identification of the 'feminine' with the rhetorical strategies of
irony hardly answers questions about the 'experience' of real medieval women. The
second book, Priscilla Martin's Chaucer's Women: Nuns, Wives and Amazons (1990),

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 'He conquered al the regne of Femenye': feminist criticism of Chaucer 111

while more readily available, should, on the whole, be avoided. At first it seems a
consummately useful text, allotting small sections to each of Chaucer's female charac-
ters, but it simply reworks the historical material about women's lives which is
presented more succinctly and with more evidence in Shahar's The Fourth Estate.
Indeed, Martin comments tellingly at one point that she doubts if feminist theory is
'appropriate in discussing medieval literature'.13 The third and most recent feminist
criticism of Chaucer is both the most useful and the most easily obtained- it is
published in Harvester's Feminist Readings series. In Geoffrey Chaucer (1991) Jill
Mann immediately identifies the central tenet of her undertaking:

'Woman' is not a sign that can be emptied of the meaning that has been poured into it for
centuries, and Chaucer does not pretend that it can; instead, he crams in even more meaning,
to the point where woman is at the centre instead of at the periphery, where she becomes the
norm against which all human behaviour is to be measured.14

In this bold enterprise Mann concentrates upon the Wife of Bath, but she also covers
a wide range of Chaucerian material, refers to other women writers, and includes a
parallel exploration of 'manhood' alongside her primary theme of feminine identity.
As such, Geoffrey Chaucer not only expands the feminist canon, but also contributes
to the growing field of gender studies. While Mann, however, never once questions
the necessity of redressing the gender imbalance in Chaucerian criticism, the gender
criticism undertaken by David Aers often threatens to relegate women once more to a
position of secondary importance.
It would be unfair to suggest that male critics have not made a contribution to
feminist criticism of Chaucer: David Aers's Chaucer (1986) is another reasonably
priced and accessible text, which covers several new theoretical approaches to Chau-
cer. In the final chapter on 'Chaucer's Representations of Marriage and Sexuality' he
describes current feminist theories about medieval literature and then explains their
practical application through several examples. In his later work, Community,
Gender, and Individual Identity (1988), however, Aers's gender analysis of Troilus
and Criseyde concentrates on Troilus's masculinity to the virtual exclusion of
Criseyde's sexual identity.15 While interesting in itself, this emphasis on the male
subject simply perpetuates the disparity between men and women existing in other
areas of literary criticism. A more self-conscious approach is undertaken by Richard
F. Green in 'Chaucer's Victimized Women', which is one of three essays on feminism
and Chaucer in the 1988 volume of Studies in the Age of Chaucer}6 Green's Marxist
account acknowledges that male readers are discomforted by the treatment of
women, in medieval history as well as in literature, but he endows Chaucer with an
unusual degree of radicalism.
The editing of the Chaucerian canon has also been a primarily male affair, although
The Riverside Chaucer (1987), which replaces F. N. Robinson's The Works of Geof-
frey Chaucer (1957), boasts several women contributors and its excellent annotation
includes a reasonable number of references to feminist criticism.17 If possible the
Riverside should be recommended as a set text, but its bulk and small print hardly
make it an appealing choice for A-level pupils. The popular alternatives are the

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112 Critical Survey, volume 4, number 2

individual tales issued by Cambridge University Press, although these are now lamen-
tably out of date and include presuppositions which are alien to the values of today's
students; James Winny's The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale (originally 1965, but in
1989 enjoying its twenty-first reprinting) is a particular offender.18 A new series of
Chaucer's major poems is badly needed. Similarly, none of the collections of critical
essays on Chaucer includes feminist criticism. Developments and changes in these key
teaching and resource areas are necessary and, indeed, are occurring slowly; The
Chaucer Review carries details of current research on Chaucer and includes a section
devoted to women's studies, while a more particularly feminist approach may be
found in The Medieval Feminist Newsletter . 19
In some ways, the contemporary pattern of pro- and anti-feminist responses to
medieval literature hardly seems to differ from the querelle des femmes of Chaucer's
own time. The alternating praise and condemnation of female characters like the Wife
of Bath and Patient Griselda remains a contentious issue today, but what we must
recognise in any analysis of Chaucer's poetry is that his loyalties were not constant-
for every faithless Criseyde, there is a true Dorigen, for every dominant Wife, a docile
Griselda. Who, then, mirrors, alters and returns Emelye's identity? As a whole, The
Canterbury Tales is constructed like a kaleidoscope, each tale and teller reflecting, but
also recontextualising, another pilgrim and her or his narrative. When the Knight
finishes his tale, the Host automatically turns to his ecclesiastical equivalent in status,
the Monk, to continue the sequence; the Miller, however, intervenes with a scurrilous
parody of the romantic legend of Palamon and Arcite. The complex but equal nature
of Chaucer's romance and fabliau tales has become a critical commonplace; 'The
Miller's Tale' is now seen as a critique of courtly pretensions, rather than as a
mocking portrayal of the bourgeoisie for the amusement of the nobility. The tales'
female characters follow this pattern. Emelye is endowed with the attributes of an
ideal courtly lady: she is like a 'lylie' flower, she sings 'as an aungel hevenysshly', and
she is described as 'shene' or bright ('The Knight's Tale', 1036, 1055 and 1068). The
overall impression we are given of Alison- the 'heroine' of 'The Miller's Tale'- is of
a sexually vibrant animal-like young woman, but she too is likened to flowers, 'a
prymerole' and 'a piggesnye', she also sings 'as any swalwe', and 'Ful brighter was the
shynyng of hir hewe/ Than in the Tour the noble yforged newe' ('The Miller's Tale',
3268, 3258 and 3255-6). The parallel is clear: Alison is enough like Emelye for a
comparison to be made, but the tonal differences- lily/primrose and angel/swallow-
serve to deflate the artificial idealism of the romance. Both women are also captives,
Emelye within Theseus's walled garden and Alison within the narrow 'cage' of her
husband's jealousy. Like all medieval women they are controlled and confined by
masculine desires. Emelye, as was suggested at the beginning of this essay, succumbs
to the absolute rule of patriarchy; she accepts a marriage determined by Theseus and
a husband chosen by the gods. Alison is not so easily suppressed; while remaining
within acceptable boundaries, she controls her own sexuality, resisting Nicholas's
libidinous approach until he has performed the required amount of verbal foreplay.
Moreover, considering the physical punishments meted out to the three male charac-
ters in the tale, she escapes without punishment or censure. Alison's relative

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 'He conquered al the regne of Femenye': feminist criticism of Chaucer 113

independence balances Emelye's powerlessness; indeed, for every imprisoned Chau-

cerian woman there is one who will outwit the men around her, echoing Alison's glee
at fooling Absalon:

'Tehee!' quod she, and clapte the wyndow to.'

('The Miller's Tale', 3740)
1 All Chaucer quotations are taken from The Riverside Chaucer , ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford, 1988); all source
texts for the poems are dealt with fully in The Riverside.
2 Antonia Byatt, Possession (London, 1990); Caryl Churchill, Top Girls (London, 1982); Jeanette Winterson, The
Passion (London, 1987) and Sexing the Cherry (London, 1989).
3 Eileen Power, Medieval Women (Cambridge, 1975); Frances and Joseph Gies, Women in the Middle Ages (New
York, 1978); Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (London, 1983), p. 131.
4 Margaret Wade Labarge, A Small Sound of the Trumpet (London, 1986), p. 72.
5 Patricia Labalme, Beyond Their Sex (New York, 1980); Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith F. Zinsser, A History of
Their Own (Harmondsworth, 1988).
6 Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies, ed. M. Warner (London, 1983); Jean de Meun, Roman de la
Rose , ed. and trans. H. W. Robbins (New York, 1962).
7 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love , ed. and trans. C. Wolters (Harmondsworth, 1966); Margery
Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe , trans. B. A. Windeatt (Harmondsworth, 1985).
8 The Paston Letters, ed. N. Davis (Oxford, 1983).
y Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards, The Authority of Experience (Amherst, 14//). Another general criticism ot
medieval women covering some Chaucerian material is Constance H. Berman, The Worlds of Medieval Women:
Creativity , Influence , and Imagination (Morgantown, 1985).
10 Mary Carruthers, 'The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions', PMLA , 94 (1979), pp. 209-22. Sheila Delaney,
'Sexual Economics, Chaucer's Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe ' in Writing Women (New York, 1983),
pp. 76-92. Susan Schibanoff, 'Taking the Gold Out of Egypt: The Art of Reading as a Woman', Gender and Readings ,
ed. E. Flynn and P. Schwieckart (Baltimore, 1986), pp. 83-106.
E. T. Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (London, 1970). G. L. Kittredge, Chaucer and His roetry (Harvard,
1915).
12 Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer s Sexual Politics (Madison, Wl, 1989).
13 Priscilla Martin, Chaucer's Women: Nuns, Wives and Amazons (London, 1990), p. 30.
14 Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), p. 3. There are two forthcoming works on feminism and
Chaucer: Jenna Mead and Stephen Knight, Authority and Seduction in Chaucer's Narratives (no publication details
available), and Elaine Tuttle Hansen, A Man's Grave: Chaucerian Fiction and Feminist Reading (University of
California Press).
15 David Aers, Chaucer (Brighton, 1986) and Community , Gender , and Individual Identity (London, 1988).
16 Richard Firth Green, 'Chaucer s Victimized Women , Studies in the Age of Chaucer , 10 (19öö), pp. 3-21. In the
same volume see Kathryn L. Lynch, 'Despoiling Griselda: Chaucer's Walter and the Problem of Knowledge in The
Clerk's Tale' pp. 41-70; and Susan Schibanoff, 'The New Reader and Female Textuality in Two Early Commentaries
on Chaucer', pp. 71-108.
u The Works of Geoff rey Chaucer , ed. r. N. Robinson ((Jxrord, IVD/).
18 The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale , ed. James Winny (Cambridge, 1965).
19 For details of The Medieval Feminist Newsletter write to Dr Lesley Johnson, School of English, University of
Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT.

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