Artifice Only: The Reception of Ars amatoria III in the Wife of Bath’s Tale

The strong tradition of reading and admiring Ovid in Medieval Europe has been well documented by Coon and others. Particularly in Medieval England, the effect of Ovid’s Ars amatoria has been shown by Hoffman to have been deep and broad upon Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. A number of scholars, such as Weissman and Desmond, have worked extensively with regard to the reception of the Ars in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Chaucer’s Wife, Alisoun, demonstrates by overt references in her Prologue that she has mastered the lessons from all three books of the Ars. But very little has hitherto been said about the impact of Ovid’s didactic love elegy upon the Wife of Bath’s Tale. Alisoun’s story of the knight’s quest to redeem his life from King Arthur’s death sentence for rape and his rescue by the wit of a magically shape-shifting woman , though scholarship has not proven it until now, is a narrative permeated by Ovid’s praeceptor amoris and his wholly exterior-focused lessons. The Wife’s story shows clear signs of Alisoun’s having digested Ovid’s advice in Ars III which centers on the advisability of meeting potential lovers at funerals. After passage upon passage on taking the utmost care to present themselves as prettily as possible (3.135ff; 3.225; 3.261ff), Ovid’s speaker tells his female students that they ought to go with disheveled hair to places where men expect them to grieve (3.431-2). These modes of physical appearance are completely inconsistent with each other and cohere only on the apparently shifting basis of male expectation. This incongruous standard of coiffure is, of course, merely one example of the ever fluctuating bar which Ovid’s praeceptor amoris sets for his discipulae. But this paper will show that Alisoun has thoroughly assimilated both the particular instructions on hair-dressing, and the larger aim of presenting one’s self as one is expected to be, good and bad, coiffed and bedraggled. The Hag-Beauty who rescues the knight in the Wife’s tale fully grasps the need to be as the knight expects to find her—or the rest of the world. The Hag-Beauty, at the moment when the knight is in the depths of self-despair, presents herself as despicable. Without attending at all to any semblance of her own interiority, the praeceptor amoris’ lesson yields precisely the harvest which the Hag-Beauty sought: the willing attention of a potential amor. Particularly in the character of the Hag-Beauty, Alisoun’s tale demonstrates that, at least in Chaucer’s representation, Medieval English women had so digested Ovid’s lessons on recreating themselves to suit the vacillating desires of the men around them from Ars amatoria III that beyond even striving to be an unattainably ‘ideal woman,’ a truly ‘good woman’ endeavored to be an ever-changing façade, until she was nothing but a rippling artifice. This paper will demonstrate that in at least with respect to women, a facet of mourning taken up by elegy is the regret with which women at least must be loved merely as an image, but never as a whole. It will also demonstrate that this normalization of female emptiness echoes from one metropolis to another, far removed by both space and time: whether in the midst of Augustan Rome or London in the thrall of the 100 Years’ War, the shifting fabrication and re-formation of a woman’s wholly exterior identity remained par for the course in poetic representation.

WORKS CITED

Desmond, M. 2006. Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: the Ethics of Erotic Violence. Cornell. Weissman, H. P. 1980. “Why Chaucer’s Wife is from Bath.” The Chaucer Review 15: 11-36. Hoffman, R. 1966. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” In Ovid and the Canterbury Tales. Pennsylvania.129-44. Hoffman, R. 1966. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” In Ovid and the Canterbury Tales. Pennsylvania. 145-9. Coon, R. 1930. “The Vogue of Ovid since the Renaissance.” The Classical Journal 25: 277-90.