The postfeudal stance toward romance has also left its mark on modern criticism of The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Perhaps because we share with the Wife both a nostalgia for the romance and a desire to reform it, we have, as critics, tended to replicate rather than to understand the Wife's ideological position. Thus, a number of commentators, focusing chiefly on her nostalgia, have viewed her tale as an escape from the realities of the Prologue, or a fantasy fulfillment of the wish for youth and beauty, or a feminist's capitulation to masculine eroticism; others, focusing on her desire for change, have argued that the tale satirizes the romance genre. But it has made, on one level at least, surprisingly little difference which of these two kinds of readings has been pursued, for both kinds represent, in essence, a single critical tradition, one which -- following Bishop Hurd and more recently Eric Auerbach-- relegates the romance to the status of a regressive fantasy.

The Wife's nostalgia for romance, far from making her regressive, is an important part of what makes her seen progressive or modern (nostalgia and condecension --hers and ours -- are in this instance but two sides of a coin). Had the Wife told the Shipman's tale, it would paradoxically have dated her; not the Wife's Prologue alone but the coupling of Prologue with tale marks the extent of her commonality with us and makes her recital a favorite battleground for arguments about the modernity of The Canterbury Tales. The Wife of Bath's performance has inspired discussion of modernity because it actually poses the problem of "modernity" itself—of what it is and how it is to be understood in contrast with that which is not modern. The Wife of Bath's performance asks us to consider a special kind of modernity --one aspect of which is precisely a consciousness of modernity--that was still relatively new in the fourteenth century, however old it may now appear to us. And her use of romance brings this question into focus. We have failed to see this because we find the romance passé, but it is precisely a "modern" sensibility that will feel romance to be irrelevant, to be lost in time. Chaucer chose to give the Wife a romance rather than a fabliau because he found that by doing so he could explore in a more complex way the crisis in desire brought on by the end of the feudal order.

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The Wife's tale does not seek to immortalize aristocratic identity by representing it as impervious to the perils of difference, but neither does it entirely undo this "reactionary" fantasy. Instead, in keeping with its pioneering work in the field of bourgeois romance, it gives aristocratic identity a new lease on life: it reimagines the fantasy as part of a historical prediction. The feudal order will collapse --the knight will die, or his "'nacoun'" will "'foule disparaged be'" (lines 1068~69)--if it refuses alliance with an increasingly powerful bourgeoisie. The challenge is clear, but is defused by the offer of assimilation. The tale likewise poses a threat to the feudal order by exposing the lethal quality of the "dit-femme/ diffame" for the knight as well as for the victims of his oppression. But once again, through the transfiguration of the hag, the fantasy is reconstituted: the woman is represented as an other who can live in happy obedience to the same, provided that the same rescues her from fairyland and then worships her as the angel of the house.

These reconstitutions of feudal ideology, moreover, reinforce and condition each other. The tale's concern with the knight's transgressions against womankind is displaced by its concern with his class prejudices; the specter of difference raised by the battle of the sexes is thus reconsidered in terms of class conflict and dissolved by the promise of social mobility. Class conflict, in turn, is reinterpreted in terms of sexual difference: the solution to the knight's class prejudices is represented as a romantic marriage and hence transforms the social into the private. The tale is doubly explosive: it challenges dominance on the levels of class and gender, But the tale is also doubly reductive: because it offers to resolve social conflict through sexual fulfillment, and sexual conflict through upward mobility, problems of class and gender marvelously vanish into thin air.

L.O. Aranye [Louise O.] Fradenburg, “The Wife of Bath’s Passing Fancy,” SAC 8 (1986): 31-58 [34-5, 54]

My second conclusion is about the genesis and meaning of the Canterbury Tales. Prior to the writing of the Canterbury Tales, all of Chaucer's poetry -- with one possible exception, the strange and brilliant poem called the House of Fame -- all of Chaucer's poetry can be accurately characterized as courtly. This is not to say that it was written for the court, since we really know very little about his audience. But it is certainly written within the ideological and cultural context of the aristocratic world. This is, however, not true of the Canterbury Tales: in fact, the only one of the 24 tales that is without question aristocratic is the Knight's Tale. Now: what is interesting about the Knight's Tale is its context. First, by being placed in the Canterbury Tales at all it is defined not as a work by Geoffrey Chaucer but explicitly as a tale told by a knight. Unlike all of his previous poetry, this poem is presented not as Chaucer's view of the world but rather as that of a typical member of the ruling class of fourteenth-century England. Second, the theme of the Knight's Tale is precisely a crisis in governance: it tells the story of how the Athenian man of reason -- Theseus -- tries to control and discipline -- to govern -- two Theban men of blood, Arcite and Palamon. More than this, however, the Knight's Tale bespeaks a crisis of governance in the way it is told: the Knight is continually anxious about organizing, controlling, structuring, and disciplining -- about governing -- his own narrative. In my view, both Theseus and the Knight fail in their efforts: the tale does not in fact describe a world governed by a benign rationality but one tormented by random accident and malignant vengefulness. Third, as soon as the Knight tells his tale he is immediately challenged -- as I've already said -- by a drunken Miller, who has a very different view of the world and insists that it be given attention.

What does this mean? Does it mean that the events of the late 1380s turned Chaucer into a political radical? I don't think so, and the fact that the Miller's Tale opens the door to the embittered and dangerous Reeve and then the disgusting Cook suggests that Chaucer had second thoughts -- or at least that he wants us to. But I do think that the events of the 1380s shook Chaucer loose from an aristocratic culture that he was already finding less and less satisfactory as a context for both artistic production and for life. And the result -- to our great benefit -- was the Canterbury Tales. But the Canterbury Tales are not a radical political document; they promote no consistent political position, nor do they comment in any direct way on any contemporary problems. Certainly they are non-aristocratic, but they do not propose any alternative social vision to that of the aristocratic world. On the contrary, they escape from politics entirely by focusing their attention upon individuals, upon character. The Canterbury Tales, in other words, respond to their time largely by withdrawing from it. Whether this represents political cowardice or simple prudence on Chaucer's part is an open question. But what cannot be disputed is that Chaucer's response to the material conditions of his life resulted in a work that twentieth-century Americans have found both politically congenial and aesthetically irresistible.

Lee Patterson, English 125 lecture (http://www.yale.edu/engl125/text-only/lectures/lecture-1.html), n.d.