Chaucer’s Wives Come Knocking
I first read the stories of the Wife of Bath and Patient Griselda[1] when I was sixteen, at the American School in London. I was there for a year while my father was on a sabbatical. He got a grant to leave his job in the Oncology unit at Kaiser Permanente Sunset in order to study new treatments for breast cancer at Guy’s Hospital. My mother sold our family home, the house in Los Angeles they bought for a song and traded in for what seemed like a fortune, wrangling places for me and my siblings at an American private school in St. John’s Wood. We settled into a series of short-term lets, and my sister, brother, and myself were set free as only carpooled children could be discovering a city with a safe public transportation system. My mother also felt loosened from the tight bonds of her role as wife and mother. She had been a second-generation Greek daughter of mountain peasants who fought against the expectations of her immigrant community to find her voice as a journalist and editor in Manhattan in the late 1950s. Then in 1962, she fell for my doctor father and followed him when he got a job in California. Having children, living in the infinite suburb of LA, she often loudly complained that her life in the desert city was a kind of death, a disappearing off the face of the earth. London was a chance for her to remake herself. She told me later she had no intention of ever going back, although that is not how things turned out. It was 1979, and like many other women, she was enjoying a new sense of freedom. She joined an amateur drama class and picked up a younger gay best friend. She met a lot of interesting bohemian Londoners who were also interested in her.
One of them was my English teacher, Don Jesse. We were encouraged to call him that, first and last, transforming the “Don” into an honorific, like Don Quixote or Don Juan. Don Jesse had grown up in Boston, the son of an immigrant Dutch maid and the princeling heir of her wealthy Jewish employers. At least that was the story. He was a self-invented character, bald and stocky with a rasping, deep laugh and a love of the tall tale. After a brief marriage to a Rothschild, he became an itinerant teacher, travelling the globe and landing in London where he lived for most of his life with a gentle-hearted man from Wales who could sew quilts and fix an engine. When it was time to teach us Chaucer, Don Jesse showed up wearing full courtly Medieval writer’s gear, complete with a sweeping velvet hat and wine-colored stockings. He made us memorize and recite the opening lines in the original:
Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote
the drocht of March hath perced to the rote
and bathed every holt and heath in swicht liqueur
of which vertu engendered is the fleur
The sound of the words rolled off his tongue and rumbled in our mouths with a satisfying, pebbly foreign sensation, close to familiar but far enough away to pull us along, and the images leaped into our minds. For the first time as a native Californian, I had lived through winter, and understood the drought of March, how worn down you could become by the sere, bare brownish grey, and the idea of sweet showers coming and piercing the earth, the way flowers suddenly crowded onto verges and front gardens: daffodils, tulips, lilacs; I loved it.
We read the tales; we had to write our own. I was drawn to the Wife of Bath, but at the same time, she embarrassed me, like my own mother did at sixteen. She seemed a comical character, played for laughs: a Lucille Ball broad, her young lover climbing the wall, her old rich husband, her appetites, her humiliating spillage. What did she have to be so boisterous about, I thought, furiously. She was fat and out of control, and it was easy to make fun of her. I wrote a mocking modern tale about a loud-mouthed woman in Los Angeles who sold real estate, like my mother did at the time. I got a good grade, and I proudly shared it with her. God forgive me.
The other character who really drew my attention was Patient Griselda. She seemed extreme in her masochistic acceptance of her fate, and yet venerated, there in the pages of the Clerk’s Tale. The peasant girl who got chosen by a powerful lord: a story as old as Cinderella. But after becoming a wife, Griselda was far from secure. She had one baby after another taken away, and still, she embodied fatalism and meek acceptance. Then the final twist: getting thrown out from her husband’s bed to the kitchens, while he told her he was marrying a younger, better version, a story I knew well enough from growing up in divorce-prone, self-discovery California of the 1970’s. After all that pain, Griselda achieved her reward: status, children, husband handed back on a platter. She was a model woman, held up in the pages of Medieval Literature to shine for all time. Old as it was, Griselda’s story circled like an electric fence around the idea of what waited for me in adult womanhood. There was something about Griselda that felt like fate. She horrified me, and she made me feel ashamed—not only of her, but of myself. I understood already that part of being a woman was going to mean never feeling good enough.
It was about mid-way through the early child-rearing years that I started to hear the voice of Griselda in my head. I was living in London, yet again, having moved back across the Atlantic to marry a young British philosophy student I fell for in graduate school. By the time we started raising our family, I was a full-time writing teacher at a small American university in charge of two departments, publishing poetry and fiction, and felt secure and strong in my voice, as far from my mother and her fate, as far from Patient Griselda as I could get. With the birth of my second child, I stopped teaching “to give myself more time to write,” and soon I had stopped doing that, too. Years went by in the world of women and children, and I lost the thread to my former self. I felt delirious with love for my children, but also bereft and lost at times, living exactly the constrained, care-taking life my mother had so railed against.
During those sandbox years, Griselda’s voice insisted on my attention. She wanted to explain what it was really like, being picked out of the crowd by a handsome man on horseback, leaving her father’s cottage and moving into a distant castle, how her husband would go out into the wars of his times and slaughter other men as if fearlessly, and come back, drained and mud-caked, and how in the secret sanctuary of their marriage bed, he tossed and turned, woke up anxious, drenched in sweat, and how she tried to find a way to help him, to get him to pay attention to their children, to the life they were bringing into the world together. He did not trust her, and he started to find a way to test her, not believing she could really be as loyal as she seemed. I imagined what it must have been like for her to lose first her daughter, and then her son, the loneliness she must have felt, alone in her tower. She explained how even after that same man asked her to make way for a better wife, to leave their home and go down into the depths with all the other servants, she took up the dough between her hands and wrapped the scarf around her head and got to work. In the story, her final loyalty test involves her coming out with all the other servants to stand at the back of the chapel and watch her ex-husband get married to his new, young bride. Then a scene reminiscent of the Oscars; she is pulled forward, given her reward at last for having passed the tests he set: here was her daughter, here her son, here the warm embrace of family, husband waiting to place the crown back on her worthy head, his queen.
Why did Griselda rise up in me, insisting on her poem? Voiceless women in history and mythology have always drawn me. My first novel included re-imaginings of Greek myths from a woman’s point of view. Sometimes an imagined figure would start to speak, and I would follow her voice into myself. Ariadne, Persephone, Medea, Eve: all have visited me at times.
My husband was no cruel overlord. He was a sensitive and devoted father, who was a cheerleader for my work, my voice. We were equal in power, and before we had children, we promised each other we would remain so. Economics had pushed us into traditional roles. Motherhood felt messy and self-immolating. From the moment I started breastfeeding, I became as much liquid as solid. For years, I would travel with a change of clothes for three because both my children were prone to motion sickness, and one or all of us were liable to end any journey covered in vomit. Like many formerly cerebral mothers, I felt as if I were constantly fighting against a tide of rising chaos to find a few moments of quiet in my head, and I think I both embraced and resented my abject position. Maybe Griselda spoke to me about how I longed for the moment my sacrifice would be recognized for the marathon-level physical feat it really was, for some kind of medallion or trophy or even just a thank you. My husband, who was working hard, really hard, and had his own stress, sometimes seemed like the unwitting setter of tests I had to pass, tests that were about the loss of things that had once been precious: my work, my status, my girlhood, my girlfriends, my will, my voice.
When I think of those years, I seem to see Griselda all around me, in the women of my generation: not just in the mirror but also at the gym, at the school gates, in the culture. I remember one frail-looking woman I knew, a mother of four. She boasted that none of her children had ever eaten a store-bought biscuit or cake. Everything was baked with her own two hands, and her kids were enviably clear-skinned, kind, and energetic. She had been a senior nurse in a busy hospital but gave it up to raise a family with her salaried husband. One morning, she invited the class mothers over to tea. She dressed plainly, in smock-like dresses with no make-up, but her table was lavish: covered with multi-colored homemade cakes, biscuits, and pies we eyed up as if they were a field of mines. In those days, it seemed to me we were always bringing each other sweets we never ate. We were soldiers in a war whose rules we did not invent, willing to cut off our own arms to make sure we remained among the chosen, running businesses, running families, running in marathons while subsisting on pieces of watermelon. Many women I knew were half-recovered anorexics, still hooked on the habit of self-abnegation begun in high school. I wanted us to discover our strength, but all I saw were women putting themselves away. Griselda’s poem revealed that under her meekness was a fierce rage, a compressed and deeply packed away energy.
~
My mother used to say that Margaret Mead advised every woman to have three marriages: the first for love, the sexual attraction that helps you leave your family of origin; the second for co-habitation, to raise children; and the third for companionship. She claimed to have had all those marriages, but with the same husband. Probably around the third marriage with the man I have been with since I was 26, I began to think again about the Wife of Bath. Our two children were more or less grown; we had started to have noisy sex in the empty house. My newly discovered invisibility as an older woman felt liberating. I stopped dyeing my hair. I started to notice older women on the street, how beautiful they were, how settled into their bodies, how they carried their own weight with pride. At work, all the people who got things done seemed to be women of a certain age. I was looking forward to what the third or even fourth marriage with my husband might bring.
But all was not well with the wider world, I had not failed to notice. The two countries in which I held citizenship, the UK and the US, were in the grips of a kind of deadly return of the Griselda story: it was not just women, but the entire system of mutual care-giving, the rule of law, our ecological well-being, education—being pushed out of the bed of the heartless overlords of the new far-right. The years following 2016, the pink hat years you might call them, brought me back into an anxious engagement with politics, and maybe I needed to find a model from the start of capitalism in the West who seemed to stand up fearlessly in a full-throated voice, an archetype from Chaucer waiting all along. As I started to write a poem in her voice, I found I was not the only one who felt the Wife knocking on her inner door. I came across a new book about her as an enduring cultural character. According to the writer, we had misunderstood the ups and downs of women’s history. The Wife came from an era when English women were surprisingly empowered. It’s there in her lines: a businesswoman, a cloth trader, a traveler across Europe who fights the husband who tries to diminish her. Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor were a tribute to her. But soon afterwards, she slipped into the rising misogyny of the age of Enlightenment and colonialism. She became a hate figure, shunned and despised, feared and mocked. Up to the 1970s, you could find a version of her on an art house film poster, laid out as a frightening mass of rolling human flesh ready to swallow up the tiny male pilgrims who surround her. Recently, she has been given a new life—particularly by Black British women; she is the subject of extended poems and a play by Zadie Smith in which she is the absolute star.
Just as with Griselda, I started to see the Wife of Bath everywhere. She was marching beside me, holding a witty sign about the crimes of Boris Johnson. She was being interviewed on a TV program called Planet Sex in the body of a curvy, honeyed woman with silvery locs, talking about Tantric kissing between two adoring bear-like lovers: husband and boyfriend. On a train trip to Newcastle to visit my daughter, she was the voice in my ear of Iris De Menthe singing about “workin’ on a world” of a future we might never see; when my daughter and I went out for cocktails, I felt as if she were in the streets with her friends, wearing a tight tiger-striped dress over her enormous breasts, thighs as wide as the Tyne, gap-toothed, head thrown back, having the time of her life.
My poem about her though, was a bit stuck, until I put her into conversation with Griselda. Then it was hard to shut her up. She was the one who pointed out to me the way the two women were linked through time; they were two sides of a coin, two versions of being a woman, tamed and free—or so I thought. It was great to get rid of the rigidly formed Griselda and open myself up to the free-verse lines of the Wife of Bath. What value could meek Griselda have now in our fight to make the world safe for future generations? Even Margaret Atwood, published a story around this time in the New York Times: Impatient Griselda.
Then I took my poems and my commentary to my writing group.
“What about Griselda?” they asked me. “Have you short-changed her? Doesn’t she have anything else to say?”
Griselda! No way, I thought, I am well and truly finished with Griselda.
But sometimes criticism can open a new door, raise a question you did not know you had. When I got home to my own kitchen, as I made dinner and folded laundry, her voice in my head started speaking, and what she said truly surprised me.
Griselda asked me to consider if there was another role for her, beyond the Wife of Bath and her beautiful self-assertion. What did I think was going to move us forward into a better future if not some kind of enormous sacrifice of wants and desires, a tremendous act of care-giving, for each other, for the planet? She pointed out that she was there, during the Pandemic, when the economic engine of the world had shut down—she was making PPE in her kitchen for the nurses, stocking the supermarket shelves, picking up trash. The fight for the future Iris sang about was beyond gender, politics, or economics. It was something much bigger, what bell hooks calls an ethos of love[2]. When I hated myself for giving up my “real work” to look after my children when they were young, what was I telling myself about my own values? I painted Griselda as angry and energetic as a counter to a world that would have turned her into a doormat, stepping right over her in their getting and spending. I was so impressed by the Wife of Bath when I discovered she was a successful cloth trader and partner to five men, but Griselda might turn out to be a true revolutionary.
~
Griselda Speaks to the Wife of Bath
You were always on another page: a voice,
a threat, a joke, a bawd, a kind of girth:
gap-toothed, unbordered, queen of choice.
I was modesty herself, in needs, size, birth.
My one husband my entire tale: a Duke.
We had two kids, each lost in turn: a son,
daughter, ripped from my roots. Not a word
slipped from my lips. I never came undone.
Cast off to the kitchen, I kneaded sweet bread
for his new wedding and bride. Unprotesting,
pulled from the crowd, I bent my head down:
To find reward! Children grown; crown restored,
fame gained. To you alone I can boast my pride:
My coal heart was crushed to a diamond inside.
The Wife of Bath Explains a Thing or Two
Griselda, a sonnet! Why did you even try? It only makes things worse.
Loosen up your girdle and enjoy free verse—the lines should fit you,
not the other way around, no need to squeeze into some rule book,
cooked up by men to sing to their imaginary loves, who I am sure,
were well and truly sick of hearing their plaints: Beatrice, the Dark Lady—
give her a break and let her get on with unstrapping that old bra: idol,
pedestal. Climb right on down here. I felt for you, honey, all along—
so thin and wan, so mild and good. You never asked to be a prize,
a pawn in some man’s sick game of catch and release. He had it all,
and a great big hole inside, besides, and you don’t have to tell me:
golden toilet, golden tower, golden you at the top, it’s never enough!
He’s still around, sending his rockets to Mars, probing the oceans,
just like he plumbed his wife—the ultimate boundless mystery, right?
Now you’ve reached across the aisle after 600 years, and guess what?
We’re teamed up as ever! Chaucer gave me the most lines, but for ages,
you won first prize: Angel in the House, Madonna, Sacrifice. While I,
you’re right, remained the butt of laddish jokes, fat, loud, or worse,
hated and feared for my lusts, a figure of fun or the cunt with a bite,
held to account for my unruly appetite. Finally, the time’s come ripe
for us to muscle out the middleman, spill truths, grab the spotlight.
Personally, I knew you were more than you appeared. The self-denied
hold their own power: it’s modesty’s dark side. You were never
as simple as the tale told, good girl driven to distraction: dieting,
decluttering, working hard for your reward. A wife! Tricky business,
we both get that. I had five goes, and would have more. I salute you.
That Duke of yours, I bet you wiped his sweat at night, his psychic
sores. Under his great carapace, a trembling boy holding a sword.
He thought you might be keeping score. He had to lock you up, tight
knot we’ve all felt closing round our throats like prison walls.
Now you’ve busted out and want to talk, I’m here to cheer you on.
Let’s stop competing in a stupid game with rules we did not write:
chosen or mocked, virgin or whore, not enough or way too much.
This heartbroken old earth needs new songs and now’s our chance:
I’m an optimistic seller of new cloth, barging the barriers, my voice
getting louder and louder (and dear Griselda, welcome to yours.)
I hope a more ample table waits down the road for our hungry love.
Griselda Writes Back After a Long Time
Yes, my dear, a diamond is a hard rock.
Also, a form of light made out of dark.
You trussed me up in twelve tight lines,
but imagination is a wilder sort of ride.
Everything dies. People, ideas, sun, planet.
The self, however strong, will not save us.
Do you ever wonder if the universe may
be a woman breathing matter in and out,
here, not here, mothering and worrying,
coaxing out a bit more love each round?
Of course, I know you do. You worry so,
if that’s not too light a word—autocracy,
plutocracy, insect-empty fields and floods,
you long for some other story, a way out.
Maybe I can help. Self-sacrifice scares us;
it’s the role woman represents that we hate.
In a grabbing world, we show another way,
putting aside ourselves to make a path
for the generative future we call children:
not just womb, but some potential in us all.
As my friend, Sister Julian, promised, all
will be well and all manner of things well.
Thanks for the chance to stretch my legs.
You might not have seen me otherwise:
sewing PPE with other mothers, collecting
rubbish, emptying bedpans, shelving stock.
I hope you visit me again, visit with us both,
in the timeless where we are. The future’s yours.
This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.
