EXCERPT ANALYSIS: The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, l. 606-626

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“He was, I trowe, twenty winter old,

And I was fourty, if I shal saye sooth –

But yit I hadde always a coltes tooth:

Gat-toothed was I, and that bicam me weel;

I hadde the prente of Sainte Venus seel

As help me God, I was a lusty oon,

And fair and riche and yong and wel-bigoon

And trewelry, as mine housbondes tolde me,

I hadde the beste quoniam mighte be.

For certes, I am al Venerien

In feeling, and myn herte is Marcien:

Venus me yaf my lust, my likerousnesse,

And Mars yaf me my sturdy hardinesse.

Myn ascendent was Taur and Mars therinne –

Allas, allas, that evere love was winne!

I fowled ay my inclinacioun

By vertu of my constellacioun;

That made me I coude nought withdrawe

My chamber of Venus from a good felawe.

Yit have I Martes merk upon my face,

And also in another privee place.”

This is an excerpt from The Wife of Bath’s Prologue, where at first she describes how her fifth husband is basically half her age. However, she goes on to describe how basically, thanks in due to her “constellacioun” (i.e., her horoscope) in which both Mars & Venus are heavily featured, she (albeit being a woman) had (and has) the sexual appetite of a young man.

She was gap-toothed (in Medieval times gap-toothed women were considered amorous) and her birthmark of “Sainte Venus seel”, she was well off, lusty as she was; so much so that she apparently has the best “quoniam” (female sexual organ) around.

She’d always followed her sexual inclination, and she thanks Mars for her boldness. The expression “men are from Mars and women are from Venus” gives us a good frame of reference here: Venus (or Aphrodite) had given this woman all her beauty and feminine qualities, where as Mars (or Ares) had given her her fiery lust and sexual appetite. She does say “have I Martes merk upon my face,/ And also in another privee place”.

This passage could also be interpreted in a very different manner: Mars is a man, and the mark on the woman’s face and in another private place (here, we’re back to the “quoniam”) could very well be interpreted as male ejaculation.

The Wife of Bath, like the Miller, is rather churlish and crude, in that she does not hide behind romantic ideas and literature (which she in fact discredits on some occasions), and this excerpt is a very good example of it.

Women were meant to be chaste, or at least seen to be chaste, in those days. They were not meant to have sexual pleasure. In fact, around this time, the Church would at times bend a knife into a hook, insert it into the woman’s vagina, and scrape out the top, damaging the nerves to the clitoris. This way, whenever a woman had an orgasm, she would experience pain, not pleasure.

So, for the Wife of Bath to announce how lusty she was, how much she enjoyed sex, and was not ashamed of it, would have been perceived as very crude indeed.

Original analysis by: C. F. Pelletier

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