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beccaelizabethI read 'The Wife of Bath's Tale'. We're studying Chaucer next week then going back to Greek stuff for the week after. So I read it, and got frownier and frownier.
The word that came to mind is foul.
It's told in cheerful and engaging language. And it rhymes. I'm sure that bit was tricky.
But it's all about how women are basically all the things men complain they are, even when they say they're not. And it's put in the mouth of a woman, just to make the thing seem more true.
She talks about the husbands she dominated with lies and trickery, and the husband she wandered off from to go out on the town in a scarlet dress and find a much younger man and get him to promise to marry her when her current husband dies, and then how that husband was the only one she loved... who beat her, knocked her out, and made her deaf in one ear.
The introduction kept talking about irony. I'm failing to find a way of reading it that isn't just all wrong. Monsters everywhere.
And then the story she tells is the one about the knight who finds out that what every woman wants is her own way. But it's not phrased like that. Instead of being about what a woman wants for herself, to make choices, it's phrased so it's about women wanting to dominate men. Which is a whole other thing. And the story kicks off with the guy raping a woman, being sentenced to death, and being let off by women so he can go and be taught this lesson. Which is a nasty bit of opinion shuffling. Oh look, it wasn't that the men ignored the rape, it's the women who wanted to keep him alive! Urgh.
So the whole thing ends up being about how women are tricksy and want to dominate, and love people who beat them.
And I think I rather hate it.
There's just not enough irony in the world to make that turn out acceptable.
The introduction is all about how Chaucer's language is great and his characters are all different and psychological realism this and interesting that and... enough, so he's a dead white male that some male in 1951 thought was every kind of cool ever. Blah.
So thus far I'm not liking this one.
Medea is a monster, yeah. Sort of a magnificent monster, with interesting enemies, but still a monster. Has lots to say about the unfairness of how women are treated. So does the Wife of Bath, in a way, but mostly in the way that's about turning it upside down and making the women out to be doing well anyway. And Medea added to a lot of other Greek tragedy is a bit 'let that be a lesson to you' about inadequately controlling women. But Greek tragedy gives women a bunch of compelling reasons to act that way. Like, men buggering off breaking vows and getting them exiled, or men killing their kids. It feels like it has put more sides of the story in. Chaucer just makes it a jolly little funny about the way women act, and that's... well, okay, he did say she got hurt with some lasting consequences, even if she's being cheerful about it, he could have said she got knocked about but no harm done, so that's... sort of better, in a disturbing way. It's just the and-then-she-loves-him-best part that's really really freaky.
I want to go watch some Buffy, or Sarah Connor Chronicles, or Torchwood, or Doctor Who. Women who save the world and are not evil. Are they really that much a modern invention???
The word that came to mind is foul.
It's told in cheerful and engaging language. And it rhymes. I'm sure that bit was tricky.
But it's all about how women are basically all the things men complain they are, even when they say they're not. And it's put in the mouth of a woman, just to make the thing seem more true.
She talks about the husbands she dominated with lies and trickery, and the husband she wandered off from to go out on the town in a scarlet dress and find a much younger man and get him to promise to marry her when her current husband dies, and then how that husband was the only one she loved... who beat her, knocked her out, and made her deaf in one ear.
The introduction kept talking about irony. I'm failing to find a way of reading it that isn't just all wrong. Monsters everywhere.
And then the story she tells is the one about the knight who finds out that what every woman wants is her own way. But it's not phrased like that. Instead of being about what a woman wants for herself, to make choices, it's phrased so it's about women wanting to dominate men. Which is a whole other thing. And the story kicks off with the guy raping a woman, being sentenced to death, and being let off by women so he can go and be taught this lesson. Which is a nasty bit of opinion shuffling. Oh look, it wasn't that the men ignored the rape, it's the women who wanted to keep him alive! Urgh.
So the whole thing ends up being about how women are tricksy and want to dominate, and love people who beat them.
And I think I rather hate it.
There's just not enough irony in the world to make that turn out acceptable.
The introduction is all about how Chaucer's language is great and his characters are all different and psychological realism this and interesting that and... enough, so he's a dead white male that some male in 1951 thought was every kind of cool ever. Blah.
So thus far I'm not liking this one.
Medea is a monster, yeah. Sort of a magnificent monster, with interesting enemies, but still a monster. Has lots to say about the unfairness of how women are treated. So does the Wife of Bath, in a way, but mostly in the way that's about turning it upside down and making the women out to be doing well anyway. And Medea added to a lot of other Greek tragedy is a bit 'let that be a lesson to you' about inadequately controlling women. But Greek tragedy gives women a bunch of compelling reasons to act that way. Like, men buggering off breaking vows and getting them exiled, or men killing their kids. It feels like it has put more sides of the story in. Chaucer just makes it a jolly little funny about the way women act, and that's... well, okay, he did say she got hurt with some lasting consequences, even if she's being cheerful about it, he could have said she got knocked about but no harm done, so that's... sort of better, in a disturbing way. It's just the and-then-she-loves-him-best part that's really really freaky.
I want to go watch some Buffy, or Sarah Connor Chronicles, or Torchwood, or Doctor Who. Women who save the world and are not evil. Are they really that much a modern invention???
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Date: 2008-11-02 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-03 12:15 pm (UTC)... all about a boy, but cool.
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Date: 2008-11-03 10:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-11-03 12:14 pm (UTC)so not very modern.
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Date: 2008-11-03 02:55 pm (UTC)I think gender is such an ephemeral social construct that you will never find a modern interpretation of it in anything other than modern texts, and it is a waste of time to look because how could you possibly expect anything else. As for trying to work out how a text was interpreted in the past - well that is such a complex job it boggles the mind, and it is surely one for historians, not literature studies. I'm certainly not comfortable with the idea that the text is 'meant' to be read as 'ironic'. That is problamatical on so many levels - never mind the whole idea of 'meant' did 'irony' even have the same meaning then as it does to us now? And anyway, does it matter? Even if we spend a lifetime studying medieval culture and assimilating notions of how they thought and experienced the world, we will still be viewing the tales through a 21st century lens and cannot but help react to them accordingly.
This is why studying literature is always such a morass!