What women want?

If what men want is to replace (or embrace) their mothers, and what women want is to supplant them, their respective ambitions can be caught by the narrative analogues of Lacan’s Discourse of the Master and Discourse of the Analyst respectively, namely $ → S₁ → S₂ → a and S₂ → a → $ → S₁. Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella if you like.

The respective narrative types are not confined to male and female protagonists, but nevertheless may be thought of as embodying stereotypical gendered aspirations. It is interesting, then, to see how they are treated in two of the Canterbury Tales where Chaucer seems to subvert the apparent message.

The texts I have in mind are the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Clerk’s Tale. In the first we have a knight who finds himself in the wilderness ($) when he is reprieved from sentence of death for raping a girl encountered by the riverside; the queen and the ladies of the court dispatch him to find the answer to the question what women want.

After a long and fruitless search the knight falls in with an old woman (the Donor), who provides him with the answer on condition he will agree to perform the first task she asks of him.

             ‘Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee

             As wel over hir housbond as hir love,’

is the answer provided, and when he returns to the court (the city), the ladies have to agree that he has satisfied them (and for those who want a point by point deconstruction of the narrative, this is the easy task).

The Hero must now, however, encounter the Villain: the role now taken by the ‘olde wyf’ in her insistence that the knight marry her: he protests

            But al for noght; the ende was this, that he

            Constreyned was, he nedes moste hire wedde;

            And taketh his olde wyf, and gooth to bedde.

(the easy journey).

Now he is in the new place, where the ‘olde wyf’ has the role of King: that is, she explains what true gentillesse consists of, and faces the Hero with the difficult task to choose

                                    oon of thise thynges tweye:

            To han me foul and old til that I deye,

            And be to yow a trewe, humble wyf,

            and nevere yow displese in al my lyf:

            Or elles ye wol han me yong and fair,

            And take youre aventure of the repair

            That shal be to youre hous by cause of me ...

The knight finally leaves the choice up to her: his reward is to find himself at last in the garden (a), where the woman, now his Princess, has made the choice not only to be young and beautiful, but faithful as well.

What women want? To help an abusive male live out his gendered fantasy? Couldn’t the fairy bride have done better for herself? Let’s compare this story with the Clerk’s Tale. Once again, the transition to the new place (for Grisilde) is connected with a wedding – here, by the surprising revelation of the marquis Walter’s desire to marry her.

Then he, in the role of King, faces her with the difficult task, or difficult ask, at least, of agreeing to submit without question to whatever he requires:

            I seye this, be ye redy with good herte

            To al my lust, and that I frely may,

            As me best thynketh, do yow laughe or smerte,

            And nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day?

Having sworn, Grisilde is now in the garden; Walter is her Princess. This completes the second part of the tale.

Parts 3, 4 and 5 are laid in the wilderness, and concern the trials put upon Grisilde by Walter in the character of antagonistic Donor. She is first made to believe that her daughter has been done away with, then her son, and finally that her husband is repudiating her in favour of a younger woman (the daughter, now twelve years old). All of this Grisilde bears without question or complaint; which brings about the ‘happy ending’:

            And whan this Walter saugh hire pacience,

            Hire glade chiere, and no malice at al,

            And he so ofte had doon to hire offence,

            And she ay sad and constant as a wal,

            Continuynge evere hire innocence overal,

            This sturdy markys gan his herte dresse

            To rewen upon hire wyfly stedfastnesse.

It is an easy task, it seems, for her to fall in with his change of heart, and we are back in the city, the polity restored:

            Ful many a yeer in heigh prosperitee

            Lyven thise two in concord and in reste ...

In both tales an abusive male gets what he wants, in the wife of Bath’s Tale as Hero, in the Clerk’s Tale as Other; however the narrative is gendered, it seems the women can’t win.

They are sort of depressing and reassuring at the same time, he thought, looking back down the aisle and turning over in his mind the possibilities of a review. Those Blue Mountains vistas hazed over with purple, and there are always a lot from round Yass or somewhere with a river at a distance between bare paddocks in a wiggle of trees, and sheds with rusty iron and old abandoned farm machinery. And that man that does river stones – he’s always there. Maybe it’s just always the same picture – who would know? Here and there are people taking photos of each other in front of the displays. Perhaps they’re the artists. It’s something to get hung, he thought, however meagre your talent. But just once in a while, there’s a picture that has something.

In front of him was a desert, or semi-desert scene done in overlapping glazes. There were areas where the paint had been applied so sparingly that the texture of the canvas was the chief thing you noticed, but others where the ground disappeared while the colour maintained a paradoxical appearance of transparency. And here and there verticals, thick strokes, almost calligraphic, were suggestions of trees, vegetation, people even, glimpsed from afar off.

Cliche, perhaps, but among the purple-headed mountains and the sheds and the not-quite-Streetons, not to mention the river stones, there was something about this picture that was not trying so hard to be representational – something of the dreamlike, a landscape in a mirage. Dennis liked the implicit metaphor that gave to the temporal beings their own dimension while the flat land stretched in boundless timeless surface all about them. He looked at the catalogue.

Untitled – Deniliquin, it said, and $800. That was pleasing. For all that this painting had reminiscences of Fred Williams, it was a sure touch, he thought, to let the metaphor of the picture flow through into its name. For what can we call those landscapes other than ‘untitled’ – and yet, as long as we presume to occupy them, whether our title is of the traditional or Torrens kind, we will put up our obsessive little signs like ‘Sandy Gully’ and ‘Ten Mile Creek’. Ghost towns too had street names once. This artist saw more deeply than most. He checked the catalogue again; the name meant nothing. Now he was about ready to move round the corner and begin on the watercolours.

‘Do you like it?’

Dennis didn’t immediately take the words as addressed to him. But they had to be, it seemed, for they clearly came from the only other static presence in the immediate neighbourhood. The lateral current shuffled the crowd along the aisles: they two alone, caught in an eddy, were slapping the seawall side by side. He had been conscious that there was someone else pausing near the picture, but hadn’t taken much notice.

It was a young woman, or young enough anyway – say 25 to 35. Jeans, a white shirt with unbuttoned cuffs, a long cardigan the way people were wearing them then: a patterned knit in a sort of weed-green.

‘It’s got something,’ Dennis said warily – was this perhaps the artist? ‘It’s certainly saying “look at me”, but I don’t think it’s saying “buy me”. But I’d sooner look at it than most of what’s here.’

‘Do you buy things?’

‘I have sometimes. And I think you always know when you really want to; I’ve never bought anything I wasn’t happy with afterwards.’

‘So you’ve got an eye – or you’re just pleased with yourself.’

‘Was that a question?’

‘Not really.’

This insolence from a total stranger was a precious thing.

‘I will tell you why I don’t want to buy it, then,’ said Dennis. ‘To me, the coloration is just a tiny bit vulgar.’

‘Vulgar – isn’t that a bit harsh?’

‘See that pink there, and that shade of green up here in the sky?’

Leaning over the barrier to make the point.

‘No touching the works of art, please, sir,’ from a security guard.

‘What really upsets me – no, it doesn’t upset me, it disappoints me – is that the artist, who is obviously an intelligent person, has let him- or herself down, and if someone comes along and buys it, it will only encourage them and they will keep on doing it.’

‘You’re very sure of your opinion – I’ll give you that. But you can have a few points for “him- or her”. You’re not as completely hateful as I first thought.’

‘I don’t find myself specially hateful. If I seemed a bit over-critical, perhaps I was just annoyed by that guard calling me “sir”. I don’t know about you, but I always find it irritating.’

The Goldsworth students had been profuse with their ‘sirs’.

‘I don’t get called “sir” much.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Shall we look at the watercolours?’

‘Why not? Do you like licorice allsorts?’

‘Intensely.’

‘Have some.’

The aniseed, the musk, the banana. Flavour and colour: perfect synaesthesia. They chewed in front of the watercolours.