Chastity in Writing: Iron Clad Authority

The idea of feminine chastity through figurative and literal virginity is stressed as a way for women in the medieval period to gain authority and respect from men. The credibility this gives them and their respective works of nonfiction leads them into male dominated fields and allows them to enter into a public male sphere. This spherical move often happens when the authoress claims a retraction of her authority to gain more intellectual believability from her male peers unless she is already a member of a religious order. Then her visions and writings are given authority through the ultimate patriarchal figure of God.

Women given the power for public speech, whether that is orally or written, must be ever vigilant and thankful to a higher male power who allows them to break into the public sphere without repercussions and protects them. This female awareness of male acceptance over female speech dominates the majority of female authored works in the medieval period such as Marie De France's Lai's, whereas male speech writing as female, such as Chaucer's

The Wife of Bath's Tale, defies gender reverence because as a male, he doesn't need it, leading to biased and false representations of women's literary voice.

In order to be accepted women writers must pad their works with humility and reverence to their male predecessors. This can be seen most clearly through Julian of Norwich's reverence to God where she calls herself: "a women, unlettered, feeble and frail,"(Gilbert 37) in relation to her male counterparts writing in the time period. It's also seen in Marie De France's prologue where she states to the king, her main audience: "Please don't think that I say/ This from conceit-pride's not my sin."(De France Handout) basically asking him to forgive her boldness in writing him stories and presuming to know anything about her chosen topic. This reverence and humbleness on her part towards the King is specifically important when the themes she is stressing are to expect and accept adultery in all marriages and the reversal of gender roles.

She goes in depth on the theme of loveless marriage in "Yonic" where a May --December marriage is made worse by the wife being locked in a tower: "Sadness surrounded her, these years/Weeping and sighing, frequent tears/She lost her beauty in this way/Like one whole will has drained away"(Gilbert 26). The woman begins an emotional affair with her neighbor, a hawk through the window. Marie then chooses to have the bird killed by the jealous husband in front of his wife who mourns the relationship, even after bearing her husband a son and heir. Her adultery means so much to her, that once dead after inciting all the wrong doings of her dead husband to the public, she dies and is buried next to her lover rather than her lord.

This is a very strong statement to make for Marie for whom a good marriage and devote respect and faithfulness to the husband were both expected and required by social gender norms. There is no confusion in lai's such as "Yonic" and "Laustic" that the writer is allowing these women to get away with adulteress deeds outside their marriage to put their own happiness before their husbands. Yet, Marie appears to not condone these descions in her prologue, where she apologizes for her speech and doubts her ability to speak at all as a woman. She leaves her work open for interpretation so when spoken orally, as most of her works were, both genders could come to their own conclusions on the plots outcome.

Without leaving room for personal opinion, being a woman, Marie as an author writing about such controversial matters as adultery and sex would have been shamed and given no authoritative leeway to her speech. Rather than seeing the exchange of gender roles in "Lanvel" where the main female character rides up and saves the male as presumptuous, the audience is told to laugh at it in good fun, not to find it threatening. While hiding behind her supposedly simple lai's and social acceptance with the King by demeaning her intellect to his standards, Marie was safely able to inhibit her true thoughts: "To whom God gives intelligence,/And the great gift of eloquence,/Shouldn't hide or silence talent,/But show it and be valiant!"(Gilbert 17). Using her way with words and the playfulness of her poetry to encounter multiple meanings within the text gave her the power to hide behind the King's male authority as a controlled and respected poet despite her humble and most unworthy nature.

Geoffrey Chaucer on the other hand should have taken a lesson on womanly debasement through siding with the male spoken authority in his work "The Wife of Bath's Tale" which showcases a defiant woman speaker. The Wife is irate and challenging the very right to male authority through both her speech and the anti-feminist texts she has orally memorized:"All my born days, I've never heard as yet/Of any given number or limit./All I know for sure is, Gad has plainly/ Bidden us to increase and multiply/A noble text, and one I understand/"(Blamires 199). However, because she is a women character created by a male author, her defiance is unchallenged and her speech authority only seen as bitchy rather than morally wrong. Unlike Marie De France, Chaucer doesn't need to set up his prologue to a specific male audience, nor does he have to deny his anti-feminist motives in textual ploys and interpretive plot twists. The Wife is able to utter whatever she wants because the man behind her portrayal has all the power which in turn reverts to the legitimacy of The Wife as a socially acceptable and well defined woman through speech.

If Marie had not thinly veiled her feminine characters with go-get 'em attitude in pity and anguish, making the readers feel sorry for their plight, her voice would never have been heard and she would have been disgraced by King and Court. Chaucer also wrote for Court and often to the same audience but his oral voice was taken as authoritative to the habits of "difficult and unruly" women. In the end The Wife triumphs, the ultimate cougar after her marriage trials and tribulations secure that her oral speech and voice dominate those of her male counterpart. In the lai's the only way Marie's characters receive a voice is when they are doing good by their gender stereotypes or like in "Launvel", when their master and lord is dead. This gender role relationship between spoken word and authority of texts in the public sphere relies on specific social roles given to either male or female writers of the time. Chaucer presents a mockery of the female sex which the public views as the "bitch" or "cougar" stereotype which then plays out in the way the public categorizes and socially accepts all women of that time.

By being male and writing of a female stereotype Chaucer's words are given more voice and more truth because he doesn't have to define himself as authoritative like his female counterparts. He's also allowed to dabble more freely with taboo topics even when playing a woman as opposed to being one. This is shown in The Wife's prologue where she shares her sexual escapades and talks about her need for Jankin overcoming her sadness at her previous husband's funeral:

"I wept for him, what a sad face I wore!/As all wives must, because it's customary/To the church they bore my husband in the morning/And one among them was the scholar Jankin./So help me God, when I saw him go past,/Oh what a fine clean pair of legs and feet/"

The blatant sexuality in this poem by The Wife would not have been tolerated had it been written by Marie because no man would have backed up speech that went against the already well placed social norms. In this representation of women as unchaste seductresses Chaucer is able to portray a side of women that men see as negative, putting a spin on a "normal" woman with healthy urges into someone who has uncontrollable lust and bitch-like greed.

Both these texts approach speech and the gendered social norms addressed through a speech act. However, male and female speech acts differ in their representation of the female narrative through the amount of male authority they must acknowledge in order to give their voice authority.