"So Many Eras Do Really Want to Think They Invented Desire"
A Conversation with Marion Turner
Lately I’ve noticed that much of the writing online about women in middle age, at least in my algorithmic bubble, has a kind of Columbus discovering American vibe, as if this generation is the first to reach their forties and discover that it isn’t what they expected. There are some exceptions — I loved
’s essay on her exasperation with women in their thirties (!) bemoaning the aging process and feeling like their best years are behind them. And I thought that ’s essay on the “blowing up your life” phenomenon was the best unpacking I’ve seen of the difference between the Miranda July-fueled, zeitgeisty mid-life crisis and the very male, cliched red convertible tableau I was raised to roll my eyes at.But what if I told you that all this thinking about what it means to be a woman of middling age who still experiences all kinds of desires in opposition to a culture that mostly erases her has a beautiful, centuries-old literary foremother?
Enter Alison of Bath, a 40-something year-old middle class merchant — predeceased by five husbands and on the lookout for a sixth — who is notable among Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims because she is the only woman who isn’t a nun. Widely known as the Wife of Bath, Alison loves sex, defends her right to remarry by quoting scripture at the clerics who say she should remain a widow, and rails against the gender problems of the biblical and literary canons both. By God, she says, if women had written stories, as clerks have within their oratories, they would have written of men more wickedness than all the mark of Adam could redress. What kind of world would we be living in, she asks, if women had been the ones in charge of the stories?
Marion Turner’s brilliant book, The Wife of Bath: A Biography, unpacks the ways in which Alison is constructed out of the worst medieval stereotypes of women and also turns them inside out, breaking free of their constraints to become a crucial and enduring literary figure across centuries and cultures. Turner is the J.R.R Tolkien Professor of English and Literature at the University of Oxford and this book is a perfect example of what public scholarship can and should be, a phenomenal read for academic and general audiences alike. Oh, and she wrote it during the pandemic with two kids in and out of school. Read on for our conversation about writing a biography of a fictional character, balancing a public audience with an academic one, and how 21st century readers are more prudish than their medieval counterparts.
Talk to me about kind of coming to write this book, a biography of a fictional character.
So I think it does really relate to the book that I'd written before this, Chaucer: A European Life. I mean, I obviously tried to do innovative things in that biography; to focus on place and space, to think a lot about the imagination, and so on. I was very pleased with that book and with its reception but I also felt that having just written a big biography of a famous male poet – and he deserved that, I don't think that's a bad thing to do – but I really felt like as a scholar at that point, I wanted to write a book that was explicitly about women and about women's experiences in the Middle Ages. And so really, I was thinking, do I want to write another biography? Do I want to write about a woman writer? What are the different things that I might do? I like the biography form, I actually think it's very flexible.
What do you like about writing biographies? What gets you excited about them?
It's the interdisciplinarity, that when you're writing biography, especially literary biography, you are doing history and literary criticism and looking at history of art. You can do all kinds of different things in your methodology. So archival work, but also I did lots of footstepping, going to the places he'd been to. But I think it's also very open to experimentation. So that whole sense of how do you want to structure it? But I suppose what I felt was that I didn't want to write a biography of someone who wasn't creative, and I didn't want to move away from literature. I didn't want to write a biography of an interesting woman with no literary aspect to it. And I think I increasingly was thinking about the ways in which, if you are writing biography and you're interested in an older period of time, you need to be experimental almost inevitably.
You don’t have the voice.
Exactly, so the sense that actually you need to be breaking the genre because the genre wasn't designed for female experience and particularly for female experience from an older period where, yeah, the voices, the texts, they haven't survived, people haven't been interested in them. So things like composite biographies and imaginative biographies, those things speak more truly to female experience. And because I'd already been thinking about the different kinds of limits to biography, what kinds of things can you push? What can you do? Then this kind of idea of, okay, well, what about a biography of a character? Of someone that hasn't existed? And when I was trying to decide what new book to write, I kept having different ideas and they didn't stick. I would have an idea and I'd think about it, and then I'd be doing other stuff in my job and my life. And this one just really- it really stuck.
Right, it has to be something that pulls you away from everything else.
Exactly. And so this one stuck, and I thought, this is what I want to do. I think I can do something that's scholarly and appealing and experimental, and that speaks some truths about women's experiences, women’s representation that I think are important. And then the book did change in structure across time. I originally conceived it as a three-part structure. A smaller beginning would be a kind pre-life of the Wife of Bath. Then the major section, the heart, the central chunk of it would be the Wife of Bath herself, and her different elements. And then a final quarter-length section would be afterlife. And when I then actually started doing the research, that structure didn't work for two reasons. The first was that I couldn't talk about the source and backstory separately from the Wife of Bath herself, because the reason those things were interesting to me was what Chaucer had changed, what had happened. And then the afterlife also just totally got out of control because I knew a good amount about the afterlife, but then I found so much more.
You didn't realize how much people had played with her over time?
I was confident there was a decent amount, but I had no idea how much. And so that was just fantastic to find. I knew she was influential, but you get to a point where you're like, are there any books that aren't based on the Wife of Bath?
You write that there was a basic assumption that the Wife of Bath is part of the cultural fabric in England, and I know that, for example, Candace Barrington is doing such great and important work with Global Chaucers. It’s clear there’s a modern audience for The Canterbury Tales and medieval literature more generally. I'm wondering how much of a public audience you envisioned for this book versus more academic.
It's what I think of as the real sweet spot, which is that crossover audience. I try and write in such a way that I don't lose the students, the scholars, the people are who are to a certain degree expert. But I'm also bringing in the kind of educated general reader. I'm not writing for a very populist audience, but I’m interested in people who are not scholars and students as well. And I think it is really easy to underestimate that audience. And I've found it just incredibly exciting, actually, how many people are out there. And people don't want to be talked down to or patronized and, you know, people like learning new things, they don't mind if they have to look some stuff up and find things out. It is really lovely to get letters from readers and emails and to speak to a lot of people at book festivals and things like that and realize that plenty of people know a bit about Chaucer. Maybe more so here than the U.S., but there's also people for whom he is just a really vague name but then they come to your talk or they pick up the book in the bookshop and they suddenly get really hooked.
Oh, this is, actually, interesting.
Yeah, and obviously the best compliment for me is when people say, right now I'm going to go read The Canterbury Tales. And that happens a lot. Last year I curated a Chaucer exhibition here at the Bodleian Library and 75,000 people came. And it's not like it's in London, it's here in Oxford. But a lot of people, they want to come and look at manuscripts and look at film posters or films based on The Canterbury Tales and watch the little cartoons that we had showing in the booth but also look at William Morris's Kelmscott Chaucer and look at medieval manuscripts and Caxtons.
Yeah, I was able to catch the exhibit on medieval women at the British Library at the beginning of the year and it was thrilling to see all the people there.
And this stuff is interesting. We know that, but, actually, everyone thinks that. Maybe not everyone, but a lot of people do. I also do feel that there is absolutely a place for very niche academic work, and I would always defend that. The very niche, very specialist article only a few people will read and that will move the field forward, there is absolutely a place for that. But I also know I'm in a really privileged position in my job and in the kind of platform that it gives me, and I think it is really important to use that position, partly of course, for my own students here and for furthering research, but also for defending and promoting my field, the field of literature, of history, of the value of exploring the medieval past. I really enjoy doing it, but I also think it is a really important part of being an academic, that at least some people should be doing that kind of work, and that it is a crucial part of our role. And those of us that really, really, passionately care about the humanities, you have to be doing that.
Build that bridge.
Yeah, getting out there and not just talking to each other.
In your acknowledgements, you write that the majority of the book was written during the first year of the pandemic. How old were your kids at the time? What was that like? How'd you get it done?
I mean, it’s crazy, isn't it? I'm sure we've all been thinking a lot recently because it's been the five-year anniversary of it all, and wow. So early 2020, my daughter had just turned 11, which means that she was in the last year of what we call primary school here in the UK. And my son was eight. The book was under contract and I'd been working on it. I had a big Leverhulme, an externally funded research grant for the calendar year. These things are kind of gold dust. Basically, this external philanthropic body is buying your time, helping you to have this uninterrupted research time and to pay someone else to cover your teaching duties and so on. So these are amazing when you get them, it's a wonderful organization. They're very hard to get, it's a complicated application process. So I had just started that grant year.
You’re like, this is gonna be the year. Time to write.
Right, it’s going to be great. And then the pandemic hit. And I feel like whenever you talk about this, you feel it's really important to put in all these caveats of other people had it so much harder. I mean, not only in terms of privilege in that we had a garden, the kids could have endless devices and laptops and Kindles to do their schoolwork on. When you think of the people who were in small apartments trying to do homeschool on a shared mobile phone, a totally different world. We were fine. And also, I actually think it was much harder for people whose kids were very little or whose kids were actually about 15, 16.
The teenagers, I keep thinking about that now that I have one.
Right now my kids are 16 and 13 and now if we had to be isolated like that, it would be much worse. So I think all things considered compared to a lot of people, eight and 11, they can do a lot of stuff for themselves and so on and so on. At the same time, obviously it's not ideal.
It was not the writing year you envisioned for yourself.
And you can't say to an eight-year-old, stick on your headphones, do homeschool for the day, see you at five o'clock, right? I mean, you just can't.
I remember the homeschool being very hands-on. I had to keep troubleshooting it, and there weren't long stretches where I could be not…present.
Yeah, there aren't long stretches. I think the schools were great and the kids were great, but what I found was that every 20 or 30 minutes, there was just a kind of- someone needs a snack, someone needs help setting up their clarinet Zoom lesson, someone has lost their pencil. And it's also miserable for the kids. And my husband's an academic as well so we could tag team a bit, but also he was teaching online as well. And I did get things done in those short bursts of work. And what was lucky about this book compared with the previous book was that the previous book had required a lot of travel and this book, I didn't have to travel. And the other thing is that the librarians are the best in the world. The Bodleian librarians would go off, not in the absolute depths of the lockdown when they weren't allowed to, but for much of the time that we were locked down they were doing a scan and deliver service. It was an absolute lifeline. But I mean, it was a very strange time. You find it hard to imagine now. It’s a bit like when I think back to the kind of five years when my kids were little and I didn't ever get a night's sleep, I just think, how did I do that? How did I go to work? Now if I don't get a good night's sleep, I feel like it's outrageous.
I was just recently thinking the same thing when someone was up sick one night.
But at the time you cope with it. And then I do remember when they went back to school in the September- I mean, there was another lockdown the following year, but when they went back to school properly in September, I had a couple of months where I worked in a more focused way than I ever have in my life before or since. And just that extraordinary sense of I just have to think about myself and my work all day, even though the day might have just been 8:30 to 4:30 or whatever, but compared to 20 minutes day after day after day, it was just extraordinary. And I'd say I just did more in a couple of months than I would usually have done in, I don't know, six months, ten months, a long time. I felt like I had this crystalline concentration, which was very unusual. So it was a really strange process writing that book, it was very strange.
In the book you talk about the Wife of Bath as the first character in English literature, that “sense of a mind” that the reader gets from her. And then there’s the length of her prologue. Do you think Chaucer just kind of fell in love with her and got carried away?
Absolutely. I mean, there's so many different angles to thinking about the innovative aspect of the Wife of Bath and what Chaucer was doing with her. I think there's all the kind of factual innovations – to have a principal character who is a middle aged, working, sexually active woman who drinks with her friends and has a job and goes traveling alone. This whole sense of someone middle class, in our kind of terms. This is not someone that is interesting to people in literary history or to authors in literary history. You get the princesses, you get the queens, you get the nuns and the saints. You don't get women like this. And as you know, she's the only woman on the Canterbury pilgrimage who's not a nun, and there's not many women to start with. So she really stands out as different demographically. But then the differences that I'm also very interested in are this sense of what Chaucer does with character. Most of the pilgrims have a prologue and then their tale, and mostly the prologues are short. There might be a little interchange between a couple of the pilgrims, a little introductory section. And three of them have these longer prologues that are known as the confessional prologues. So the other confessional prologues are by the Pardoner and the Canon’s Yeoman and confessional prologues tend to be where the pilgrim talks about themselves and their lives. And it's really interesting that all three of those figures who have the confessional prologue are outsider figures. They're all on the margins in terms of class and identity and then gender.
Yeah, I’m interested in that because once he starts giving interiority to pilgrims, why not give it to everyone?
I think he is more interested in thinking about giving a greater voice to the people that don't normally have voices. I think the idea of the whole point of the Canterbury Tales being, let's not just listen to one kind of voice, particularly not hegemonic voices. But I don't imagine that Chaucer’s creative process was that he sat down and thought, I'm going to invent literary character. He was doing lots of different things at lots of different moments, and he was experimenting with different things that he was interested in. So I think it was one strand in what he was doing. People have talked about the idea that he's pretty much inventing free indirect discourse in the General Prologue, that when he's describing these characters, he's describing them as if he's thinking about it from their perspective. So he's doing lots of interesting things with a different sense of interiority and narrative. But when we think about those prologues, the Wife of Bath’s is so much longer than the others. The other confessional prologues are a couple of hundred lines; hers is 850 lines. So much longer, so much more detail. And so this innovative aspect where he is more interested in female interiority, maybe because it is alien, maybe because it is more of a stretch and it's more of a challenge to think what might it be like to be in her head, to walk in her shoes, which I'm sure were absolutely fabulous shoes.
No question.
And again, this has to be hedged a bit. He’s doing other things as well. Of course, he gets her character from all kinds of sources, and he's messing with it, but part of what he's doing is trying to imagine what it's like to be a middle aged, middle class, sexually active, mercantile woman. And so I think he does that in so many different ways. And a big part of that is through this voice and through this sense of this being someone who is circling through memories, who thinks about the future, who has an existence outside the page, who has a depth, and that depth has a lot of light and shade in it. And again, one of the really important things about the Wife of Bath is that she's not an unambiguously likable character the way that female characters are still supposed to be if we're supposed to go along with them. Lots of aspects of her are really unpleasant and difficult and problematic and contradictory. And of course, she is based on all kinds of misogynist stereotypes that she's then playing with, challenging, some would say embodying, doing lots of different things. But I suppose I would point to a few things that are particularly interesting. I mean, one is the fact that she absolutely acknowledges the fact that she is a creature of a misogynist tradition, because that's all there is. So that when she's saying, ‘Well, what else can I be? If women had written stories, things would be different.’ I mean, that's so important when Chaucer has to kind of step outside of those sources and say, ‘If women had written stories as men have in their oratories, they would've said of men more wickedness than the mark of Adam can redress,’ in this sense of that women haven't had the chance to express themselves. And of course, they still don't through her because Chaucer is a man, we're not actually getting a female voice. But the fact that he's imagining what's it like never to be represented, never to have anyone speak in your voice, these are still issues that are so current today, that people still talk about so much today. And that here we have a woman who's not only staking her claim to talk actually more about herself than anyone else does about themselves, but that is also saying, ‘And not only am I going to have a voice, I'm going to tell you about domestic abuse and rape.’ I mean, it's kind of crazy that this was happening in a 14th century text.
Right, and she’s confessional, but she's not narrating a religious or a visionary experience. She’s the beginning of a new kind of interiority. I'm wondering how you see her both in relation to the confessional modes of her own time and of ours, like the so-called personal essay boom, the gendering of personal writing that we see in our own literary landscape.
When we think about the Wife of Bath in her own time, confession had been mandated at the beginning of the 13th century, so that all Catholics, which was all Christians in the western church, now were supposed to go to confession. And so you get this rise of texts called penitential manuals to try to help priests understand how to take confession, what people should be confessing, what sins they should be going through. So confession becomes something that's really central to the culture, that people were supposed to confess their sins and get penance and be forgiven. And you get these texts which break down the sins, break down what people are in a very reductive way, as if you are just this collection of sins. But they encourage people to look inside. The whole point of confession is you don't just go about your business doing things and then being like, ‘Right, I've done that.’ You’re supposed to look inside and think, okay, what did I do? Why was it wrong?
It's a personal history, too, right? It's examining yourself as a person who has lived.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, it’s a very interesting thing to do. I was personally brought up as a Catholic, though I'm now not a believing Catholic. But as a child, I did have to go to confession. And it's a very strange thing to do when you do have to kind of think back and you have to tell someone else about the fact that you were mean to your sister or you were rude to your mother, whatever your quite sweet little sins are. But it is real. It is a very interesting technology of the self to be forced to do that, to pause and think about your actions and think about, are you sorry? Because the whole thing doesn't work if you're not sorry.
It's also a mandated secret telling, things that we keep inside.
And that's such an important point because it's the paradox of it in a way that it's both something that is personal, but it's them making it open. It is this idea of thinking about yourself as an individual but all individuals can be broken down in the same way. So it's a really interesting tension between a private individuality and a togetherness with other people. So that background of confession is crucial to the idea of these confessional prologues in which people talk in detail about themselves, about what they've done in the past, and they look inside. So that I think is really fundamental to try to understand the kind of genre that Chaucer is playing with, though he also plays with lots of other genres as well.
I want to talk about the libidinal aspect because I'm always so taken by the fact that she is a woman with desire. She likes sex. And I know that it's a misogynistic commonplace – in the book you mention the vulva pilgrim badge that represented the misogynistic idea that women just went on pilgrimage to have sex – but I’m interested in thinking about the Wife of Bath against the backdrop of our own cultural conversation about midlife desire and so-called perimenopause books.
I've read about them. I don't think I've actually read them.
All Fours by Miranda July is the most prominent example but there’s been a bunch of writing dealing with middle age and midlife desire and what marriage means for women and what it does to women. And Alison strikes me as the foremother of all those texts. She talks about ‘the woe that is in marriage’ but she keeps getting married. She's an incredible character in part because she doesn't actually give anybody entirely what they want. It’s hard to make a feminist hero out of her but you also can't turn her into a so-called trad wife because she doesn't have kids, or at least she doesn't talk about having kids. She's independent and she's full of desire. She talks about her husband being her sex slave, and she likes younger men, but she also ends up in an abusive marriage. So I mean, maybe that's what is most enduring about her, that she doesn't fit into any one category.
And I think that sense of desire is so important because the idea of the Wife of Bath as a vital figure of life is what's so enduring, that her voice speaks to people as someone that is always alive. And I think that connects to the fact she's had this long afterlife that people are interested in her even when they don't like her. She's this vital thing. And part of that is desire and appetite. She likes life, even though terrible things have happened to her. She wants to be alive, and she wants to have sex, and she wants, like you say, new husbands. Even though things have been bad in the past, she doesn't give up hope and she keeps going, and she wants to have new experiences and taste new things. And she says that in her prologue ‘but yet to be right myrie wol I fonde,’ I will keep on trying to be merry. I will keep on being happy. I will keep on sucking the marrow out of life. And part of that is sexual desire, but it’s not the only part. It's also, I want to keep traveling. I want to experience new things. I mean, it's so appealing to most of us, that sense of, yeah, well, she has been literally knocked about by life, but she's still hopeful. She's still getting up again. And I think that thinking about desire more broadly, so many eras, but maybe particularly the 20th century onwards, do really want to think they invented desire. And actually, we look back at any period- when you look at the classical texts and some of the Greek novels from the first, second century, these extraordinary depictions of things like the female orgasm, in great detail. Desire is always there in literature. And there are of course some eras which are more prudish about it than others, but those eras are not the medieval. That whole kind of ‘sexual intercourse was invented in 1969,’ you could say about lots of different eras, which think that they're inventing desire. I remember when Zadie Smith was talking about writing her version of the Wife of Bath, and that people often assumed that she had added in all the most explicit bits. And she’s like, ‘No, no, I had to cut stuff out because a modern audience wouldn’t be ok.’
It would make them blush.
But it was fine in the 1390s. What's so interesting about what Chaucer does is that the idea of the libidinous older woman has had a very long life. And before Chaucer, this figure is monstrous, risible, awful, ex-prostitute, procuress, a figure who everyone is disgusted by, no one would actually want to have sex with. It is a figure of not just fun, but kind of horror; the idea of the vagina dentata. This is a woman who's going to destroy men. And Chaucer takes that image and completely changes it. His middle-aged woman – and indeed she's probably not that old, she's maybe early forties – is depicted as respectable. You can be someone who likes sex and has sex with lots of people and be respectable. She's not an ex-prostitute; she's someone who keeps getting married.
Right, men keep wanting to marry her.
It's fine, it's not that unusual in the Middle Ages. And she is appealing and attractive in her voice. She doesn't have that solely cynical aspect that people like La Vieille, the Romance of the Rose source, has. But then what's so fascinating is that Chaucer takes these stereotypes and makes them more interesting, humanizes her, makes her attractive. And then ever since then, people have been trying to put her back in her box. So many of the later versions make her into the stereotype monstrous old woman because, actually, audiences across time have often not been able to handle the idea of the middle aged woman who is attractive and deserves respect and deserves to be listened to. So you get these monstrous versions of the Wife of Bath, Pasolini’s is the most egregious example, whereas, as you were suggesting, in lots of ways, these novels about a desiring menopausal age woman which are so new at the moment-
They’re looking for something that already exists.
That had been snatched out by lots of people, lots of authors were trying to do something different. But as you say this, that's perhaps a really lovely idea of a descendant of the Wife of Bath, those kinds of books.
As you said, everybody thinks that they invent desire, especially midlife desire.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s so great where you're like, no, people were talking about this back in the 14th century. And it’s so interesting when we think about the stereotypes of women that still pertain today, the whole idea of this is someone who's not identified as a mother. And of course, on the one hand, she might have children. We don't think that the men don't have children just because they don't mention them.
Yeah, it reminds me of all the talk about Margery Kempe. ‘Why doesn't she ever talk about her children?’ Well, maybe sometimes women who are mothers talk about other things.
Yeah, exactly. But I think on the other hand, given how confessional the Wife of Bath is, how much detail she gives, I think we are supposed to understand her as someone that doesn't have children. And that's interesting too because it’s still perceived as a problem for middle-aged women, as something that people have to ask about, ‘But why don't you have children?’
And she doesn't apologize for it, or she doesn't feel that that needs to be addressed at all.
And if anything, when she talks about knowing the old dance and the arts of love and so on, it might be that that's a hint that she knows about contraception.
Right, and this is by choice.
Yeah, which you can understand for her.
It's really interesting, especially in this moment of- I don't know how it is in the UK, but the US is experiencing a period of pro-natalism. We want to make women great again by reminding them how wonderful it is to have children and to find fulfillment in that. And also, I think as a kind of pushback, we have a bunch of novels that are saying, ‘Hey, are you feeling this desire even after you've had children? Why don't you go explore that?’ And so, I mean, the Wife of Bath is ever fresh and speaking to us.
When you look at the afterlife stories- I was so interested in that 1970s novel, Vera Chapman, The Wife of Bath, where she's, as an author, totally on the Wife of Bath’s side, thinks she's great, but in order to make her into a likable character for the 1970s audience, she gives her children, she makes her into a devoted mother. She makes it so that her final husband that she meets in this book was actually her first love and if they hadn't been pushed apart by circumstances, she probably would only ever have slept with him.
Yeah, I find that so interesting, the whole likable character discourse. Chaucer is not interested in that at all and we are still reading him.
And in that same 1970s book, she keeps being depicted as a damsel in distress who needs rescuing by men. And it's so depressing that these things are still- we can look at any film really, and all those kinds of things that women should want- they should all have maternal instincts. They should all accept the fact that men are stronger than them and will be able to rescue them, those kinds of tropes that are still absolutely everywhere. And the Wife of Bath would have absolutely none of it, just not at all. That's not the person that she is. And indeed, her story shows us that if you expect men to rescue you, some really terrible things might happen to you. So I think the way Chaucer is doing something which is so radical, speaks to us so much today, but also that the way that across time, people have been fascinated by that, but they haven't known what to do with it so that people have responded to her with such fascination, such obsession, really across the over six centuries. But yet what we see over and over again is people trying to make her conform and make her more conventional.
I loved the afterlives section because in a certain way, what all of them are doing are mirrors of what the Wife of Bath herself does, taking the texts of the past and refashioning them, using them for her own purposes. I think she makes us think about how we’re all creatures made of text and those of us who write are in many ways trying to put all of that to new use. I’ve been working on a retelling of the Clerk’s Tale and so I keep thinking about Griselda being dragged through time and all the retellings of her story, being tested over and over again, and she's just like, when are we going to finally figure this out? And it seems the same for the Wife of Bath, where she continues to be who she is, and we are the ones who are trying to understand her.
Yeah, though I more think of the Wife of Bath marching through time rather than being dragged.
Right, Griselda is dragged, Alison is marching.
If I think about Alexander Pope and Pasolini, yeah, they're kind of trying to drag her, they’re doing not very nice things to her. But when I think of the last couple of decades where she has been reclaimed by lots of women authors, particularly by lots of women authors of color, all these wonderful new adaptations: Caroline Bergvall, Patience Agbabi, Zadie Smith, Jean “Binta” Breeze. I kind of see her as- she's shaken off a lot of the people who tried to drag her down.
You can imagine her being like, Yes, finally.
And it was worth her kind of keeping on walking through, because you see- I mean, Caroline Bergvall's version, she really talks about Alison, the Wife of Bath, speaking to her through the mists of time. It's very much like a kind of muse or an inspiration where you see her as someone who really has got out of her book and has this separate existence from the one that Chaucer created, and that she is continuing to dominate and to spread her influence in all kinds of ways. So I think now I do see it as a hopeful thing, a good thing that she hung on through what James Joyce was trying to do to her, or what Dryden was trying to do to her. She hung on, and that was good. Nevertheless, she persisted.
Get your copy of The Wife of Bath: A Biography here.
