A Tale of Two Wives: Chaucer and Zadie Smith

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This Explication de Textes class (ET) will offer students the opportunity to practice and improve their close reading skills with a comparative twist: it will look at two texts that are distant of several centuries: 

“The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale”, which forms part of Geoffrey Chaucer's famous late fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales, and which has the promiscuous, garrulous, and overall larger-than-life Alisoun of Bath recount her life and opinions about marriage (in the Prologue), and then telling a tale of unpunished rape (in her Tale section). 

“The Wife of Willesden” a play by contemporary author Zadie Smith, who is of Jamaican and English descent. This, her first foray in the the genre of drama, is a rewriting of Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale”, taking place in a lock-in in a pub in Willesden, an area of northwest London, complete with its important Afro-Caribbean, Latin American, and Irish immigrant population.

We shall read the “Wife of Willesden” first, and analyse aspects of contemporary intersections between conceptions of gender, race, and age (intersectionality), before turning to the original Middle English text and see how this informs our reading of the updated version. The main objective of the class, as in all ET seminars, is to develop tools and strategies of close reading and textual analysis, here in particular the specific skills linked to reading poetry.