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Love & Lust in ‘Wife of Bath’ and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’
The Wife, Giovanni and Anabella are challenging the established order of their
respective societies - The Wife through her confrontation of misogyny in society;
dominating her husbands, having multiple husbands etc
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Additionally they are also unconventional due to the
adultery involved (in regards to Annabella/Soranzo/Giovanni) and the extramarital
sex
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For example, the
way in which The Wife unconventionally dominates the majority of her husbands
and offers her sexuality as a medium of exchange, and the way that this is so
unconventional compared to the norm in society
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AO2 – ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore

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‘must I not do what all men else may – love?’ (line 19)
o With no sense yet that Giovanni will act on his incestuous desire, or
that it will be reciprocated, he spends most of this scene attempting
to justify incest theoretically
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However, the Friar becomes more resistant to Giovanni’s ‘logic’ and
more disturbed by what it means
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‘Must I not praise that beauty which, if framed anew, the gods Would make
a god of if they had it there, And kneel to it, as I do kneel to them?’ (lines
20-23)
o Giovanni’s incestuous desire is blasphemous not only because it
defies God’s prohibition against incest but also because it makes
Giovanni guilty of idolatry by placing his love for Annabella above
his love for God
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Faustus’ was about a
brilliant university student who misused his intellect and
condemned himself to hell
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‘One soul, one flesh, one love, one heart, one all’ (line 34)
o This language seems to contradict the Friar’s assumption that
Giovanni has simply fallen prey to lust
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1
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AO4: Yet, there is one allusion to the transgressive nature of their
desire
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‘Father, or brother, all is one’ (2
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44-45)
o Putana’s name in Italian means ‘whore, and she is at ease with
fulfilling her sexual desires at all costs and with whoever is available
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When Giovanni is pretending to still believe Annabella is dying and that he
brought the Friar to give her absolution, he is ironically congratulated by
Florio for showing ‘a Christian’s care, a brother’s love’ (3
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32)

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The friar imagines Giovanni as one of the souls in hell, crying , ‘O, would my
wicked sister/ Had first been damned, when she did yield to lust!’ (3
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2930)
o This questions the Friar’s insistence that Annabella is more to blame
than her brother and uses this image to make Annabella more
contrite
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AO2 – Wife of Bath

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But wel I woot expres, withoute lye,
God bad us for to wexe and multiplye:
That gentil text can I wel understonde
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" It's hard to deny that it's impossible to
obey this commandment without having sex!

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Telle me also, to what conclusioun
Were membres maad of generacioun
And of so parfit wys a wright y-wroght?
Trusteth right wel, they were nat maad for noght
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The wife says that they are made for both
urinating, and sex; and uses the analogy of work and pleasure
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Love & Lust in ‘Wife of Bath’ and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’
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I nil envye no virginitee:
Lat hem be breed of pure whete-seed,
And lat us wyves hoten barly-breed
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(142-146)
o The last time the Wife used the word "refresshed" was in her wish
to be refreshed, or sexually fulfilled, half as often as Solomon
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o Or, the wife could be using sexual innuendos and saying that virgns
and white break and non-virgins are barley bread
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(204-206)
o Here the Wife explicitly connects love to money
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But she could also be implying that by winning
her husband's love, she's won his property
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Thou liknest it also to wilde fyr;
The moore it brenneth, the moore it hath desir
To consume every thyng that brent wole be
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o We consume love as desirable so, the more it burns, the more it has
desire
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Thewhole of the prologue and
tale are about the struggle for ‘maistrie’
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Love & Lust in ‘Wife of Bath’ and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’
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‘Wommen desiren to have soverinetee
As wel over hs housband as hir love,
And for to been in maistre him above
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Chaucer thus achieves both a structural and thematic parallel in the
prologue and tale which are aesthetically satisfying and critical in
reinforcing the Wife’s views
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Finally, it considers how language ‘makes
what is social and constructed seem transparent and “natural”’

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Annabella, like Giovanni, rebels against moral and social conventions, freely
expressing and acting in her own desires
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She is increasingly confined- first, in the narrow forbidding space
of the Friar’s cell, then in her own chamber when she has been imprisoned
by Soranzo, and finally in her arms of her lover Giovanni, who kisses and
then kills her
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Alison
Findlay argues in her book ‘A feminist perspective on Renaissance Drama:
‘Annabella is constructed as a figure of desire and of sacrifice
by the men around her
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All she can do is to negotiate a pathway between the
various roles laid out for her by the male characters’

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The Wife of Bath is shameless about her sexual exploits and the way she
uses sexual power to obtain what she wishes
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Even though her
actions might at first seem to be rebellion against the male-dominated
society in The Canterbury Tales, and more generally, the medieval period
for women, there is very little that she does that is truly revolutionary or
empowering for women of her time
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In general, this
female character stereotype is meant to be seen as a parody of sorts since
she embodies a number of negative female characteristics including

Love & Lust in ‘Wife of Bath’ and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’
stupidity and arrogance; deceitfulness, and lewdness
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Critics
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“Sexual regulation in Renaissance England was based on holy matrimony,
which was used to normalize sexual behavior and procreation, and to
castigate deviations from the norm
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” - Minghsiu Chen

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“The Wife’s sexual leverage gives her dominion over her husbands’ money
and it makes her husbands subject to her every whim

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