← New Books Network
New Books Network
Marion Turner, "The Wife of Bath: A Biography" (Princeton UP, 2023)
00:44:57
An interview with Marion Turner
Loading summary
Transcript37 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast, do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread Podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon. This episode is brought to you by Ovid tv. Where do savvy minds go to find masterful documentaries and hard to find films from across the globe? Try a free month long trial at Ovid and go beyond the mainstream. Indiewire says Ovid is unafraid to program films that matter and the New York Times calls Ovid a terrific streamer for independent film fans. A boutique hand curated streaming service. Yet now with over 2,400 titles, Ovid is the home to films by auteurs from Chantal AK to Chris Marker to Wang Bing and has the richest collection of probing, avant garde and provocative films anywhere. Ovid offers many things except conformity. Try Ovid today and get your first month free. Use promo code N B N O V I D. That's Ovid TV promo code N B N O V I.
- [01:46]
B
D. So good, so good, so good. Give big, save big with Rack Friday deals at Nordstrom Rack. For a limited time, take an extra 40 off red tag clearance for a total savings up to 75 off. Save on gifts for everyone on your list from brands like Vince Cole, Han, Sam Edelman and more. All sales final and restrictions apply. The best stuff goes fast, so bring your gift list and your wish list to your nearest Nordstrom rack today.
- [02:16]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:20]
C
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books Network. New books in Popular Culture and today. I'm Here with Marian Turner, who is the author of the Wife of a Biography. Marian, thanks for being here with me today.
- [02:33]
B
Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
- [02:35]
C
So you have written a biography of the Wife of Bath. So can you talk a little bit about why you decided to write this, why you decided to put this together?
- [02:46]
B
Yeah. So, I mean, as you said, the title itself is a little bit counterintuitive because it's a biography of a fictional character. And we wouldn't usually think of a fictional character as having the kind of life that merits a biography. And for me, I think I felt that writing a biography of this fictional medieval woman was really a way for me to write the lives of many, many women. So it seems like a very focused topic, but it's actually a topic that then became very expansive and allowed me to tell a lot of stories, because I use the first half of the book really to weave the story of this literary character alongside many stories of real medieval women as well as fictional medieval women. So to think these lives that have very much been lost to time and there were so many really wonderful women whose voices haven't been heard, whose stories we don't know about. And I think people will like to hear those stories. And I suppose the other thing that I found very just fun and experimental about writing about this literary character was that it enabled me to go write across time, because this is a character that has had so much influence. And so, you know, usually I write books about the 14th century and a big chunk of this book is about the 14th century, but it also goes right the way up to 2021, because the wife of Bath has had this extraordinary influence on literature across time. And so the book finishes with Zadie Smith's play. So it allowed me also to think about women and gender across 650 years. And I found that enormously productive and fun. And I hope the readers will find it all fun too.
- [04:27]
C
So for those who. Well, I don't know if some people might not be aware, but just for folks who either are not aware or have read Canterbury Tales, maybe not very recently, can you sort of give a little sort of background of Alison and why in Chaucer's work and why this was such. Why she's such an important character to even examine in a book length work.
- [04:56]
B
Absolutely. So in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's most famous poem, he has a group of pilgrims come together in the Tabard Inn in Southwark in London, and they go on pilgrimage together and tell stories. Now, most of These characters, the pilgrim characters, are men. There are three women who tell stories. Two of those women are nuns. And then there is the wife of birth. So she is the only secular woman, the only non nun on the pilgrimage. And she also gives us more of her inner life than any of the other pilgrims, than any of the male pilgrims as well. She has a far longer prologue so section in which she talks about her own subjectivity, her own life. So we get an unparalleled insight into her. She has developed as a character much more than any of Chaucer's other characters. And really Chaucer is an innovator in terms of what he does with literary character. And he develops the idea of a deeper literary character going beyond the more two dimensional characters. He does that with the wife of birth. So she's really interesting in terms of literary experiment, but also, of course, extremely interesting as a female character. Because before Chaucer invented the Wife of Bath, there were not what I would call ordinary women in English literature. Ordinary women did not exist, did not have a voice in English literature. And by that I mean that when we look at texts, there's a huge range of texts being written in English at this time. But what are the women like? Well, we have princesses, we have queens, we have damsels in distress, we have religious women. We also have prostitutes, whores, boards, witches, old crones, those kinds of women. We don't have women like the Wife of Bath. So she's a middle aged woman who's had a working life, who's been married five times, who gossips, has friends, drinks too much, makes mistakes. I mean, there's probably many things here that many of us can identify with, though, you know, not the married five times, but, but she's so. She's ordinary in that she is of an ordinary social background. She's sexually active, she's working. She's also, of course, absolutely extraordina. So there's a. There's a contradiction in saying she's ordinary because she's also extraordinarily extraordinary in her, in her excess. You know, she talks so much, she gets married so much, she has so much sex, she's outrageous in so many ways and she's extraordinary simply because the ordinary had not been represented before.
- [07:30]
C
So you have this character and you've divided this book. You sort of have sort of situated her in the literary sense. But in the first part of the book you also situate her in the other women of the time and like you said, some of the women that we have forgotten. About or not even learned about. And so can you. Can we. Let's talk a little bit about that, because I have to say, I loved your book, but I found, like that beginning part, the first part, really fascinating because there are so many women and so many discussions about how women sort of live during that time period that we often don't talk about or think about. And so you start with thinking about sort of working women. And so can you talk a little bit about that, working women during that time and sort of who she represented during that time?
- [08:21]
B
Absolutely. So people often assume that women in the 14th century didn't have jobs, that the idea of working women is a much more more recent idea. But. But that's not right at all. Women have always worked, and in the Middle Ages, you know, many women had jobs, and women of all different social worked. So at the very top of the hierarchy, many very rich women were expected to be able to run estates and do the accounts and do business. And if their husbands died, they would be in charge of enormous land holdings and inheritances. And, you know, they were not expected to hand the reins over to a male relative. And then at the lower end of the spectrum, many women went into service. They were maids. And in between, you have. You have female apprentices. Lots of women worked in the cloth trade. So making. Making clothes. As the wife of Barney, who tells us that she's. She's worked in the cloth trade, making clothes, silk, women, those kinds of jobs, and also in the victualling trade. So food and drink, you know, women were often brewers, for example. But you also find evidence of women doing all kinds of things. You know, as you know, I talk in the book about a woman who owned a ship, a woman who ran a skinning business making furs after her, after her husband died. There's a female blacksmith, female scribes, female art and illuminators. So there are some women who clearly follow, either followed their talents or followed economic necessity into a whole range of quite unusual jobs. But there's some roles that we find many women in. And I think that there's a whole range of things about this that are interesting. So after the Black Death, which happened in England in 1348, 49, so when Chaucer was about six years old, this terrible pandemic hit, and it wiped out huge amounts of the population. People who survived then had more opportunities, you know, so they were needed to do the job. So more people entered the workforce, more women moved to cities. There were more opportunities for them. And women at this time did benefit from good inheritance laws in England, they could keep their money, they were motivated to work. And I think that, you know, once I started looking into, into these, these women, I think that it really encourages us to, to think about our own preconceptions. Because when you immediately hear about lots of women who are maids, for example, I mean, most of us think, well, that's not desirable. You know, very few people grow up thinking, I want to be a servant. And many women were servants at this time, but actually this was a role that gave them opportunities because in many other countries at that time, women didn't have the opportunity to go out and earn a salary. They were expected to do that kind of service work for free, you know, in their own household, that in a house, the daughters, the daughters in law, the unmarried sisters, the wives, they would be the people who were doing all that work. They didn't have any, any choices. But actually, when women were encouraged into service, they could earn a salary, they could leave their father's house, you know, crucially. And many of these women then were able to save money and then they had more control over their sexual destiny. And that's absolutely crucial. If you've got control over your economic destiny, you're much more likely to have control over your sexual destiny. They could choose their, their husbands. They weren't being married off by their, by their fathers. They were also marrying later because they were working for a few years. And this was something that was, that was a crucial part of the kind of marriage pattern in, in England and also in the Netherlands at this time. In contrast, in southern Europe, girls were marrying much younger. Usually they were not going out into service so much. They didn't have as good inheritance rights. They were having a lot more children because they married younger, so they weren' to contribute to the economy as much. So in fact, you know, many people have talked about the late 14th and 15th centuries in, in England and in northwest Europe as a golden age for women. And I really, really don't want to idealize it. Of course, this was a time when women did not have the vote, did not have proper medical care. You know, this was not a time in which I would want to be a woman. But it also was not nearly as bad as most people assume. They were protected by the law in various ways. And many women just managed to have really interesting lives, to take risks, to do things that no one expects medieval women to do. And I think that although the wife of Bath is this extreme character, she's based on literary sources as well as Historical ones. She also only makes sense in this post plague world where women could inherit, they could get married lots of times and keep their money, they could work, you know, all these things that the wife of Bath does just wouldn't make sense in most parts of the world at that time. But they make sense in England, although they are extreme and excessive and she is a. She's not supposed to be real, but nonetheless she makes sense in this very interesting moment for medieval women.
- [13:17]
C
Yeah, and you mentioned it, but I thought one of the fascinating things in this part, in this section was talking about those marriage laws and how often, like you said, that women could be married later in life and they could keep their inheritance and what all that meant and how that kind of situates them in that space. And so you have these women who are work. She represents sort of women who are working women who are getting married multiple times and also sort of women telling stories. So in this sort of part, this first part, you also talk about women as sort of storytellers and as wanderers. And I think those two sort of fit well together. So can you talk a little bit about that as well and how she represents these aspects of women during this time?
- [14:08]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So as you say, she's a storytelling woman and she's also a traveling, wandering woman. So as a storyteller, I mean, that's one of the most important aspects of her. Not only that she tells her own story and in fact tells two stories because her prologue is so long. So she tells this long story about her own life, about her marriages, about the fun that she's had and the things that she's done, but also about the domestic abuse that she's suffered. She tells us a lot, lot about her memories, her past, her hopes for the future. And then she tells another story, again, a very serious story, which inverts what we expect in romance stories. It's a story about rape, but also a story about redemption, about women working out how to make a rapist think about what he's done. And it's also a story about fairies and transformation. And it's wonderful, wonderfully interesting story. But as well as telling those stories, she also interrogates the principle of female storytelling. So in one of the most important parts of her prologue, the wife of Bath says that women have not had the opportunity to tell their own stories. And she says, you know, all these terrible things are written about women. And she is haunted by this book, the book of wicked wives that her husband read obsessively. Book about how awful women Were. There were many books like this in the Middle Ages, and there are still many books like that today, of course, course. So she's haunted by that book. And she says, well, these women have. All these. These women have been written about exclusively by men. Women have not had the chance to tell their own story. And she says, if women had told their stories as men have in their oratories, they would have said many things about the wickedness of men. And then there's this famous line where she says, who painted the lion? Tell me who. And that's a reference to a fable. And in this fable, a man and a lion are looking at this picture in which the man is triumphant and brilliant and, you know, triumphs over the lion. And the lion says, well, who painted that picture? You know, it was painted by a man. So of course he's. He's trying to depict men as wonderful rather than, you know, showing the lion maybe winning, which might actually be more realistic. And, and. And the wifeblood turns this into a fable about gender, you know, saying, well, essentially, if the pen has always been in. In men's hands, you know, this is something that Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf and many women across time went on saying, because these problems didn't. Didn'. So she very much foregrounds the issue of the importance of women being able to tell their stories in order to correct some of the bias of the canon. And Chaucer creates the Wife of Bath at a moment when more women were writing and were making their voices heard. Of course, there have always been women writers, but we find many more women writers writing in English in this era. So in the late 14th century and early 15th century, women such as Julian of Norwich and Marjorie Kemp write or dictate their own works. In France, we have Christine de Pizan, a really very interesting French author, writing very shortly after Chaucer. And she also writes precisely about the problems of women's voices not having been heard in the past in her book of the City Of Ladies, where again, she's so depressed by reading these terrible things about women all the time. And then these female allegory figures say to her, well, you've got to correct it. You've got to write some. Some books about, from the female point of view. So we're getting emerging female writers increasingly at this time. One of the things that we see is that so many women writers, and I talk about Heloise, about Christine de Pizan, about Marjorie Kemp, these fascinating women writers were then crushed by editors, printers, who either changed the authors to men as happened repeatedly to Christine de Pizan, or just cut the text to make it less radical, less interesting, as happened to Marjorie Kemp. A very limited version of her text was. Was printed in the late 15th century and early 16th century, and the full text wasn't recovered until the 20th century. So women were making their voices heard, but then kept being pushed back again. You know, they. And that's also something that we see happening to the wife of Bard's voice across time as we. As we might come to in a while. But you also asked me about story as well as about storytelling, about traveling, and. The wife of Bath is a great traveler. She has traveled many times to Jerusalem and all over Europe. And although she has again, seems to have traveled an excessive amount, it wasn't that excessive. You know, there were women at this time who traveled to the Holy Land, who traveled to Rome, who traveled to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Women were embarking on. On pilgrimage. They were going with groups of friends. They were sometimes transacting business in Italy. They were doing all kinds of. Of interesting things. And, you know, one of my. My favorite women from this book, though, though I don't think she's someone that you'd want to meet on a dark night necessarily. But one of my favorite women from this book is Margery Kemp's maid, who's had very little attention because, of course, Margery Kemp has been the focus of people's attention. But in her book, she. She tells us a few times about her maid who travels around Europe and the Holy Land with her, but in fact abandons her employer, heads off, gets a better job, then gets another better job and ends up, you know, really in a position of quite a lot of importance in Rome, dispensing charity to her former employer, as she has the keys to the cellars of the English hospice in Rome and is the person in charge of. Of the wine and provisions there. So she's a great example of a woman who kind of pulls herself up by her bootstraps and uses both service. I was talking before about the opportunities that in fact the service could give and also travel to make this new life for herself. You know, she seizes her opportunities and. And betters her betters herself, you know, gets into a. A far superior position a bit ruthlessly, but nonetheless, it's. It's kind of impressive.
- [20:00]
C
You know, no, the. And. And the stories of, like, not wanting to have anything to do with her former, you know, boss and, and all of these. So, yeah, so this is this fascinating time and, and like you said earlier it probably isn't a time you'd want to be a woman. Like, as I was reading and you talk some about the perils of travel for. For women, but still, the extent to which traveling across Europe during this time is. Takes time. Right. It's time consuming. It's dangerous. And what this meant and how many women were. How women were actually doing this and participating in these spaces we don't often think about out.
- [20:43]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's. There's so many interesting examples of the places women went. When you look in those kind of the guidebooks of, you know, how people were speaking to each other, what they were trying to do. You know, those. Those hilarious examples that I give where there are guidebooks that say, well, you've got to be really careful when you're traveling in this part of Spain because there the men like to give oral sex. And you're like, okay, something to look out for when traveling. I mean, they're just so bizarre. And again, what people often, they just don't expect to come across it in medieval travelogues.
- [21:13]
C
Yes. So you've got this. So you sort of situate her in this medieval time, but she doesn't disappear from literature. Right. She becomes, and she continues to become someone who is returned to, who's talked about, whose story is even. I teach English teacher. I teach future English teachers. And often, if they're going to teach the Canterbury Tales, hers is one that's often, like, repeated if they're picking stories. And so you bring us into sort of more all the way up to very modern time. But look and situate her in different spaces. So let's start with Shakespeare and the relationship between Chaucer and Shakespeare and the Wife of Bath, because this is one that's looked at often. So could you talk a little bit about the Shakespeare influence and. Or influence on Shakespeare?
- [22:01]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So. So it's well known that Shakespeare read Chaucer very carefully, and we can find references to Chaucer in all of Shakespeare's plays pretty much. I think that people talk a lot more about his classical influences than they do the medieval influences, but they're very strong, and he certainly was strongly influenced by Chaucer. There's two ways in which I think the Wife of Bath was particularly influential on Shakespeare, and that's apart from there are times when the, as you know, little quotes or linguistic echoes, but two more substantial ways. So one is the influence of the Wife of Bath on Falstaff. And this is something that other critics particularly Harold Bloom have written about the idea that Falstaff's main kind of antecedent was the Wife of Bath. You know, both of these characters, they're essentially Chaucer's favourite character and Shakespeare's favorite character. They're both characters that, that exceed their own texts. You know, they spill off into extra, into other texts. They pop up elsewhere. They both seem to die at one point but are then resurrected. You know, their authors just couldn't leave them alone. They both. And then the, the comparisons just multiply and multiply. They use the same biblical quotes. They talk very excessively, they, they self dramatize in ways that are knowing, that are bodily, that are very, very similar. So these two characters are. Who are both, I think so memorable mainly because they are really vital characters. Vital as in alive. You know, that their life seems to be more than the text itself. They seem to spill over and that's part of their excessive bodilyness, their excessive voice. But then the second way in which I argue that the Wife of Bath was influential on Shakespeare, which I mean I find completely fascinating once I started thinking about the connections between the Wife of Bath's prologue dog and Tail and the Merry Wives of Windsor. And I can't go into all the detail of the argument here, but look Forward to Chapter 7 readers for this. But the Merry Wives of Windsor is a very neglected Shakespeare play. And it's, it's the only play that's set in kind of Shakespeare's contemporary England in a mercantile world so very similar to the Wife of Bath's world. It's a world in which mercantile women end up on top, just like the Wife of Bath. It's a world in which mercantile women who are married and sexually active are middle aged. They are not, however, they're not whores. You know, I mean the Wife of Barth Source was a, was an old whore. She's not, she's a multiply married woman who is sexually active but, but respectable. These women are like that as well. And they are, they talk about their, their enjoyment of, of a kind of witty sexual repartee and so on. But also what we see in so those are things that connect the prologue to the play. But the tale, the Wifebird's Tale is also fundamentally connected to the play. So in both texts we see fairies, a transformation in the woods. We see a knight being taught that women are not automatically sexually available to him and being taught a lesson. We see crucially middle aged, middle class, unimportant women being the ethical centers of these texts. Again, the comparisons really multiply. And I think that this is a really unexamined aspect of Shakespeare's work, how closely he was influenced by the Wife of Birth in the construction of that play.
- [25:43]
C
Right. So you've got Shakespeare doing this work. You also talk a bit about how male writers sort of tried to silence, to mute Alison and this work. And so can you talk about that as well, how people try to sort of push back and stop some of the more radical elements of the Wife of Bath?
- [26:06]
B
Yeah, so we have ballads about the Wife of Bath that were written in the. In the 17th century and the printers were put in prison and the ballads were burnt because people were so frightened of Alison's voice. When we get into the 18th century, Alexander Pope wrote, wrote a kind of version, kind of translation adaptation of the prologue, but he cut hundreds of lines out. He cut out all the bits where she's talking about her body, her genitals, her enjoyment of sex, all that kind of thing. So he made it, he kind of cleaned it up. Dryden wrote a version of her tale, but says in his prologue to the fables that he just doesn't dare to translate the prologue because it's too licentious. So over and over again we see these examples of. Of male authors being obsessed with her, you know, fascinated by her, but also being made very, very anxious about her. So they, they can't leave her alone, but they also want to. To reduce her, to ridicule her, to cut her back. And we see that in. In various kind of creative versions as well. So John gay in the 18th century and then an American called Percy Mackay in the Twentiet, both wrote plays about the wife of birth. And they're very different plays, but they both essentially humiliate her and focus on kind of putting her in her place, you know, and both of them rewrote the plays, interestingly, again, in a. They can't leave her alone. But, you know, in Gay's play, in the, the second version, it's a. It's a comedy, as in a. The idea of a comedy like Shakespeare's comedies, where everyone ends up married, but she's the one who doesn't. She doesn't get married. She's. And she ends up on her own. She's the only one she's punished in that way. In McKay's play, in the, in the. From the early 20th century, you know, she's absolutely humiliated. I mean, it's an amazingly interesting play involving all kinds of. Of cross dressing and, and masquerading and so on, and she wants to marry Chaucer and she, she has a whole plot to do that. But in the end, you know, the author, Chaucer and the. And the royal family and lawyers all get together to trick her and force her into a marriage with the miller. Because when authoritative men get together, they're always going to be able to put this unruly woman in her place. And that's the kind of thing we see happening over and over again in these adaptations of the Wife of Birth. And so the things. I mean, one thing that I think is really fascinating about so many adaptations is that when we today, many of us, when we read the Wife of Bath's prologue and tale, many of us think, wow, these issues, you know, domestic abuse, rape, the difficulty in getting your voice heard, these are issues which are still really important today. They've been important right across time. We also might think this is such a powerful, interesting voice. It's so funny, it's so alive. Those two things were not always the things that adaptors were interested in, you know, across time. Often they didn't want to talk about these serious issues about rape and domestic abuse. They wanted to present her as kind of stereotype and then. And then ridicule her in some ways. And they wanted to crush that funny voice and make her something much, much simpler, much, much easier to put into a certain kind of box. But she always gets out of that box in the end. Coca Cola for the big, for the small, the short and the tall. Peacemakers, risk takers for the optimists, Peggy pessimists for long distance love for introverts and extroverts, the thinkers and the doers for old friends and new Coca Cola for everyone. Pick up some Coca Cola at a store near you. This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels.
- [30:00]
C
Jack Daniels and music are made for each other.
- [30:03]
B
They share a rhythm in the the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights.
- [30:08]
C
From backyard jams to sold out arenas.
- [30:10]
B
There's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and old number seven are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume.
- [30:18]
C
Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. And she has this influence. And one of the things you talk about is the influence and impact not only on British literature, Right. But you have the chapter Alison Abroad, right, And how she has impacted and influenced literature throughout the world. And so can you talk a little bit about her, her importance beyond British literature?
- [30:45]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And this is where I really wish that Everyone could open the book and look at some of the illustrations because there are, there are some really interesting pictures. And I'm thinking of this. I'm sure you'll remember Rebecca, the poster from communist Poland with this incredible image of, of the Wife of Bath. So this is from 1970s Poland where she's depicted as this, you know, this, this recumbent, semi naked, kind of pornographic figure, part of the earth with contemporary politicians dining off, off her of her flesh. I mean, it's absolutely extraordinary. You think, wow, why did the Wife of Bath have that kind of cultural resonance in 1976 in Poland? It's, it's amazing. But to backtrack a bit. So the Wife of Bath kind of gets out of England in the 18th century where she's multiply translated in France, but most notably by Voltaire. So the great French writer Voltaire bothers to translate the Wife of Bath's tale, makes it into something completely different. Absolutely takes away the idea of the woman as the ethical center of the story. Takes away the, the impact of the idea of the. The Rapist Night turns it into something quite different. And it is very. The gender politics of what Voltaire does, I think are extraordinary. And it's his version that then develops into a play that is performed all over Europe. So she hits, she hits Europe, you know, throughout the 18th century and it's very popular right across Europe, but also has. Has impact in, in many other countries. Just a few years ago there was a play about her in, in Brazil which I, you know, really interesting. She's still got that kind of, that kind of power. I already mentioned some of the American versions. So adaptations from early in the 20th century and Chaucer has had a lot of influence in America for many centuries. So there's lots of examples in the book. I think one of the most important kind of non English versions of the Wife of Bath or non British versions of the Wife of Bath is Pasolini film again from the 1970s. And many people's knowledge of Chaucer actually might come from Pierre Paolo Pasolini's Ira Conti di Canterbury. So the Canterbury Tales. And he makes the Wife of Bath into a completely monstrous figure, into an abomination. Sex with her literally kills her husband, her fourth husband. And I think part of the message is that that sex with a middle aged older woman is absolutely. Is disgusting, is monstrous. You know, that is. There is a really dark misogyny in Pasolini's interpretation. And when I was looking at all of these adaptations and interpretations across time and there were so many more than I was expecting to find. You know, I just kept thinking, oh, my goodness, and James Joyce. Oh, and Ted Hughes and another one and. And another one. Wow, why can't anyone leave her alone? But when I was looking at them, and as I say, finding so many, I start with, you know, 15th century scribal adaptations that end up in. In 2021. And, you know, often I think many of many people have an unexamined assumption that things improve as history moves on. And of course, there are some ways in which that that is true. But we also, I'm sure if we just think about things that have happened in the last even five years, we can also see that sometimes history seems to go backwards. And when you're looking at, I think, gender across time, it's not a story of a kind of constant progress and improvement. And I would say that the most misogynist and disturbing versions of the Wife of Bath have probably been 20th century ones. There are some bad ones earlier as well, but I think the 20th century ones are probably the. The very worst. The most kind of angry and kind of horrified by her sexuality and her body. Now, in recent decades, that's turned around a bit in the 21st century. But I think it is a really interesting reminder that we have to be alert because the march of history is not always in our favor.
- [35:14]
C
And on that, your last chapter sort of looks at black female writers and artists tackling and addressing this and looking at this and sort of tackling some of the history, especially history in England and London. And so can you talk about what you were finding in this very sort of more recent trend, in this trend with these female writers finally returning and bringing Allison's voice to their work worlds?
- [35:46]
B
Yeah, of course. So I think that many of the most interesting current, sorry, many of the most recent writers about Alison, they are women and many of them are black women, interestingly. And we're really seeing Alison's the wife of Bar's voice being reclaimed now. And so examples are, you know, Patience Ag Bugby, who is a Nigerian British author, for example, who written a version of all the Canterbury Tales. But the first one she did was the Wife of Bath who became the wife of Baffa. Another example is Jean Bintabrese, who died recently but was the first female dub poet. And you can look on YouTube for her wife of Bath in Brixton Market, where you see her reciting her version of the Wife of Bath in her dialect walking through Brixton Market. And then Zadie Smith, Smith's Very now, I think, very well known and acclaimed Wife of Willesden, but only premiered just over a year ago, so late 2021, which is a translation adaptation of the prologue and the tale, sticking very closely to Chaucer's text but also bringing it right up to the present day. And I think that, you know, if you look at a text like that, so it's, it's ostentatiously of the present moment. You know, references to. So the book of Wicked Wives is now books by people such as Jordan Peterson. There references to MeToo, for example, and Beyonce and your very current figures. But she also is sticking very closely to Chaucer's text, even to Chaucer's meter. It's in the iambic pentameter that Chaucer himself invented. So I think that one of the things that's going on there is that unlike some earlier authors, contemporary authors are indeed very interested in the. The relevance of these issues of rape, domestic abuse, women's voices, marginal voices. So this, because it's even more important for women of color, their voices do not get heard. It's harder for them to carve out space in the cultural environment. So the issues that the Wife of Bath was talking about remain very relevant in all kinds of ways. At the same time, you know, this is, this is also a story about the past, so it isn't about making this all up to date, but, you know, showing what's similar and what's not the same. So the Wife of Birth's Tale, for instance, is set in the kind of mythical Arthurian past of Britain. Now Zadie Smith's version is set in 18th century Jamaica amongst a freed slave slave, a free slave community. And, you know, I think that, you know, a key point that I get out of, of that is that all of these histories are relevant to, to all of us. So, and by us, I suppose here I particularly mean, you know, people from, from my country. So if you are, if you're British, whatever your own background is, thinking about the history of Jamaica is as relevant as thinking about the Arthurian past. You know, we need to think about all those histories as part of our identity and where our country came from. And that's something that I think is. Is really important to tie into the medieval past, which was itself diverse. And, you know, some people like to imagine that the medieval time was a time of cultural kind of homogeneity and that just could not be further from the truth. You know, Chaucer was a multilingual man, man living in A city that was full of immigrants that, you know, he worked in the customs trade. He saw ships come in every day bringing spices, silks, fabrics from all over the world, you know, right over to the islands of, of what we would call Indonesia today. This was a global economy and a well off man such as Chaucer, for a mercantile background, was absolutely aware of the importance of, of trade, of interacting with other countries and cultures. He was very well traveled. So this sense of that, that we, that I think is really important to, to recognize that just as our country now is diverse and as a country of, of immigrants, it always has been, you know, that that's not something new, that's not something that's changing, a, a kind of medieval purity. You know, quite, quite the contrary. You know, it's always been diverse and varied. And indeed, when we look at Chaucer's text, you know, his, his texts are. Oh, he could only write his texts because he was reading texts in Italian, in French, in Latin, sometimes in Latin that had been translated from Arabic. You know, he, we are, our culture is always embedded in this, in this broader world. And contemporary post colonial writers or writers from the African diaspora who are engaging, you know, so brilliantly with Chaucer are putting a new lens on those texts and I think reminding us of all the different ways that approach them.
- [40:54]
C
Right. And so, you know, you end with this and this sort of complexity and the importance of this complexity with Chaucer. And, and do you see. So I'll ask you two final questions, but one, and you don't talk about this in the text and you might not, but like, what do you see? I mean, do you see something next for the wife of Bath? Do you, you know, like, what is the next direction? Or what is the, the importance? Like why is this so important?
- [41:19]
A
Important?
- [41:21]
B
Yeah, I mean, that's a great, a great question. A really interesting thing to, to think about. So I think that why is, why is she so important? I mean, I think that the fact that she remains so alive, she is something completely different in English literature. We just don't have any other characters like her who've had this kind of influence, this kind of reach. So many of our most interesting current authors are inspired by her, inspired both to go back to that text and to create new texts. And I think this is a way in which, given that she is such a character that inspires so many people. She's just a great, a great way to engage people with, with great literature and with the past, you know, and to encourage creative responses as well as more traditional literary, critical responses. Because she just, she, she wakes something up in people, you know. You know, people. So many people have said to me, she's the character that I remember, you know, I remember of. Even if they don't know Jausta very well or they only know a little bit about it, they remember, she, she, she remains somewhere in their head. And again you see her popping up in so many different, different places. In terms of what's next for her. Well, I think one thing that's next for her is kind of computer game interactive versions of her. I've. I've recently been working on a kind of pilot AI chat tabard in experience, which encourages school students to go into the world of the tabard in. They watch little dramatized bits and then they can talk to kind of smart, smart characters, including the wife of the wife of birth. And I think there might be all kinds of ways that we can use new technologies. And I think the wife of Bath and Chaucer would love that, you know, this kind of doing really new, innovative things to keep on bringing her to life. It. With the new opportunities that we have in the current world of AI and, and computing technologies, you know, we, we have new opportunities and I think we need to. Not to shut our eyes to them, but to, to harness them at the same time. Of course, I want people to read actual texts as well. Right.
- [43:27]
C
But I will say I love that idea of computer games and AI. My son is a gamer and there are some games that he plays where he has learned a great deal, especially about medieval history, but histories through playing, through gaming. Right. And he's like. And I'll be like, why do you know that? And he's like, well, it happened in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. In this game. Right. So, and, and so I think that that's super fascinating.
- [43:51]
B
Absolutely. And it can really engage people with narrative. So.
- [43:55]
C
So you. This book is coming out January 17th, so it's coming out relatively soon. My final question is always if there's anything that you're new, you're working on or something with the book that will be happening during that time. Something, anything you want to promote and put out there.
- [44:13]
B
Well, for anyone who's going to be in England next year, I'm going to be putting on an exhibition about Chaucer at the Bodleian Library, which is going to start in December 23rd and run for a few months about Chaucer across time. So it ties in with some of the themes of this book, but also does other things. There's going to be a tie in book with that with that exhibition. I'm hoping to do quite a lot of promoting the book over the next few months, of course, with various radio appearances and festivals and so on. I really love just getting to talk to readers at those kinds of live events. And, you know, what a pleasure to be able to do some live events again after the live last the last couple of years, to actually to meet readers again is is just one of my absolute favorite things.
- [44:59]
C
Okay. Marian, thanks for talking with me. Marian Turner, who is the author of the Wife of Bath, a Biography. Thanks for talking me with me for New Books Network.
- [45:09]
B
Thanks so much.
- [45:10]
A
Rebecca.