The Wife of Bath's Urinary Imagination

The Wife of Bath's Prologue contains more references to urine than any other text produced by Geoffrey Chaucer. It is not, however, Chaucer's most scatological or disgusting work: while it abounds in urine, it makes no mention of feces. This essay examines how a surplus of urine in the absence of fecal matter affects the tone of the Wife's prologue. Chaucer associates the Wife of Bath with urine because antifeminist traditions often represented females as liquid, dripping creatures and because urine functioned as a deceptive medical signifier. The urine in her prologue thus makes the Wife vulnerable to a misogynistic interpretation. But fecal matter is better suited to aggressive satire than urine. The absence of feces in the Wife's urinary discourse preserves the lighthearted tone of the prologue: rather than becoming the object of satiric scorn, the Wife reposes as devious caricature who teasingly reveals the absurdity of misogynistic paranoia. In order to establish the different rhetorical effe...