Studies in the Age of Chaucer

The Wife of Bath's Passing Fancy Louise 0.Fradenburg Dartmouth College In h;s Lettm on Chi,a/ry andRoman" (1762), B;shop Hmd tdls, tale that can help us better understand the strange power of the Wife of Bath's own storytelling. The bishop's tale, like the Wife's, is about the death of romance: ...at length the magic ofthe old romances was perfectly dissolved....reason, in the end, ...drove them off the scene, and would endure these lying wonders, neither in their own proper shape, nor as masked in figures.Henceforth, the taste ofwit and poetry took a new turn: Andfancy, that had wantoned it so long in the world of fiction, was now constrained...to ally herself with strict truth, if she would gain admittance into reasonable company. What we have gotten by this revolution, you will say, is a great deal ofgood sense.What we have lost, is a world of fine fabling.1 This passage suggests the extent to which the romance genre, in postfeudal eras, comes to be identified with the wonders and enchantments that had formerly helped make up the plots ofromance. By the timeofBishop Hurd enchantment comes to be seen not as something which the romance form depicts but as something which it does: the genre itself enchants unwary readers. Bishop Hurd accordingly represents the struggle between romance and other genres as an allegorical struggle between lies and truth for fancy's allegiance. Romance, equated with the abuse of fancy, must for Bishop 1 Bishop Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 1762, ed. Edith J. Morley (1911; rpt., New York: AMS Press, 1975). My attention was drawn to this work by Patricia Parker's Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics ofa Mode (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), which makes use of this quotation as an epigraph to chap. 1, and to which my discussion of the romance is indebted at many points. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Brenda Silver, Lee Patterson, and Donald Pease for reading various drafts ofthis article. All citations ofChaucer's poetry are taken from F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works ofGeoffrey Chaucer, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1957). 31 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Hurd be understood as both a psychological and an epistemological prob­ lem-as a mode both of desire and of ignorance. Moreover, we find in Bishop Hurd the heart ofa cavalier, the sensibility ofaristocratic exile: the "world offine fabling" is irretrievably and lamenta­ bly lost. The passing ofromance-offancy in her wanton youth, before her subjection to "strict truth"-makes her an image of the absent, the re­ gressive, the heart's desire; continuing allegiance to her would indeed be a fine and foolish gallantry, like the gallantry of so many poets of the previous century, whose Altheas helped them evoke the passing ofan age. The experience ofnostalgia, specifically ofthe gallant futility ofaristocratic exile, depends on a particular experience oftime. It is, in fact, the essence ofa particular kind oftime to experience feudalism, romance, and women as the vanished objects of an archaic, archaizing desire: "Time is Male," writes Adrienne Rich, "and in his cups drinks to the fair."2 For the past to be either desired or rejected as such-for its pastness to be investedwithmeaning-it mustfirstbe imagined aspast,as different from the present. The nostalgic cavalier stance is in this sense inseparable from its obverse, the forward-looking roundhead stance. Both poeticize the past; both give it a newly interior resonance-a moral, a psychological status. "Strict truth"-the new,secular, "everyday" reality, with its distaste for carnal and temporal prodigality-may seem to stand opposed to the "lying wonders" of romance: Bishop Hurd's fancy is a Duessa, a wanton whose constraint by "strict truth" "dissolves" the old bad magic. But everyday reality-the new bourgeois "reality principle"-takes shape through its very opposition to the old world of enchantment. 3 The new reality persuades us that it exists, that it is all there is- persuades us both of 2 From Adrienne Rich, "Snapshots ofa Daughter-in-Law," in Snapshots ofa Daughter-in­ Law (New York and London:W...