Thursday
I’ve been talking with Idaho English teacher Glenda Funk, who is proposing a panel for the upcoming NCTE convention (National Council of Teachers of English) on teaching literature in ways that make a tangible difference in students’ lives. After I mentioned how The Wife of Bath’s Prelude and Tale foreground issues of sexual assault, she sent me a powerful Time article by author Laurie Halse Anderson, whose young adult novel Speak (1999) “tells the story of a teenage girl struggling through the emotional aftermath of being raped.”
Anderson says she has discussed Speak in high schools all over the country. While she expected the responses she receives from girls—she has encountered literally thousands of victims in the 20 years since the novel was published—she was surprised to hear as much as she did from boys.
The good news is that many boys are deeply concerned about rape and assault issues. The bad news is that most are severely ill-informed:
In schools all over the country, in every demographic group imaginable, for 20 years, teenage boys have told me the same thing about the rape victim in Speak: They don’t believe that she was actually raped. They argue that she drank beer, she danced with her attacker and, therefore, she wanted sex. They see his violence as a reasonable outcome. Many of them have clearly been in the same situation.
They say this openly. They are not ashamed; they are ill-informed. These boys have been raised to believe that a rapist is a bad guy in the bushes with a gun. They aren’t that guy, they figure, so they can’t be rapists.
… This is only made worse by the other question I get most often from these teenage boys in the classroom: Why was the rape victim so upset? They explain, The sex only took a couple minutes, but she’s depressed for, like, a year. They don’t understand the impact of rape.
And then Andersen makes a comment that shows where Chaucer can help. As shocked as she was, she
quickly learned that reacting with anger and judgment did not help anyone.
In Wife of Bath’s Tale, a knight has raped a young woman and is brought before Queen Guinevere’s court. Rather than have him executed, Guinevere goes the educational route and grants him a year to discover what women “moost desiren.” If, after that time, he does not find the answer, the court will behead him. In short, to save his life he must see the world through women’s eyes.
I’ve written on this previously so I’ll just jump to where he ends up. He travels all over England interviewing women, and each one gives him a different answer. Finally, in despair, he accepts the help of an old crone, who is actually the queen of fairies in disguise. She tells him that women most want sovereignty, and the women in Guinevere’s court affirm that the answer is correct.
That’s not the end of the story, however, because he then must demonstrate he has internalized the insight. Furthermore, as I read the story, sovereignty is not the real answer. Or rather, it is not the entire answer. Yes, women want sovereignty over their own bodies and actions but they want something else as well. If the crone has given him the answer underneath the answers, he himself must figure out the answer that lies beneath even that answer. Women want r-e-s-p-e-c-t.
The knight demonstrates no respect for the old crone to whom he is married, the price she has exacted for telling him the correct answer. When he wails about having an old, ugly, poor, and lower-class wife, she learnedly explains why none of this should matter. As Jesus and others have preached, it is enough to have a beautiful soul. Everything else is superfluous.
The knight is incapable of such higher wisdom, however, and continues to lament his fate. Still in educational mode, his wife then offers him a choice. Either he can have her as she is, which while old and ugly is absolutely faithful, or she (being a fairy) can transform herself into someone who is young, beautiful, but also potentially unfaithful. Given the medieval fear of being cuckolded, which threatened one’s masculinity and sense of self respect, the knight has been given an apparently impossible choice.
Out of such impossible choices comes real learning. The knight, who after all has just undergone a year-long course on women, comes up with the right answer: he leaves the decision in his wife’s hands:
Quote
“Then have I gotten mastery of you,” she said,
“Since I may choose and govern as I please?”
“Yes, certainly, wife,” he said, “I consider it best.”
“Kiss me,” she said, “we are no longer angry,
For, by my troth, I will be to you both —
This is to say, yes, both fair and good.
His marriage, in other words, will now become a partnership where each consults the needs and desires of the other—which, after all, is how we want our young people (also our old people) to see their own relationships.
Unfortunately, the Wife of Bath does not manage to engineer such a marriage in her actual life. Her husbands are so hung up on medieval notions of patriarchal control that they never give her the respect she craves. Nor can she get such respect from her fellow pilgrims, who regard her as a more or less entertaining sideshow (entertaining to the pardoner and the summoner, irritating to the friar). Fairy tales gives her a place to dream.
We who live in a far less patriarchal world have more reason to hope. As Anderson tells us,
We need to ask our boys questions so that we understand what they think they know about sex and intimacy. Sharing books, movies and TV shows are a great way to open these conversations. Discussing the choices made by fictional characters paves the way for more personal conversations.
We need to tell our own stories to make sure our boys understand that these things happen to people they know and love. We need to give them the tools required to navigate relationships in a positive way.
Our boys deserve information and guidance. The only way they’ll get it is if we speak up.
Which books should one share? I’m in favor of teaching both contemporary young adult literature and the classics. YAL like Speak has the advantage of speaking directly to the issues in language that young readers will recognize, just as Chaucer spoke directly to medieval audiences. But the classics have a number of advantages as well.
First of all, they can elude the censorious radars of those parents who think that exposing their children to these issues will corrupt them. Wife of Bath’s Tale may seem toothless because they regard it as a dusty museum piece.
The historical distance, furthermore, cushions the rawness of the issues, as does the fairy tale structure. Such distancing has always been one of fiction’s strengths and it operates in Chaucer’s tale just as it does in, say, Twelfth Night, which allows students to safely explore transgender issues and same sex desire. Not everyone can handle the raw heat of direct expression.
Also helping out is the tale’s riddle structure, which puts students in a problem-solving mode. As the story progresses, a teacher can ask them what do women in fact most desire? And what makes for a beautiful relationship?
Furthermore, reading The Wife of Bath puts students in contact with one of literature’s most generous and open-hearted authors, someone who created a three-dimensional character of immense complexity at a time when women were stereotyped as either virginal madonnas, lascivious young maidens, or emasculating shrews.
On top of that, the poetry’s gorgeous.