Clapping Back to Misogyny from 1402 to 1949

Part one: Introduction to the “Shadow Canon”

The Wife of Bath in the Ellesmere Manuscript of The Canterbury Tales

Way back in August when I introduced this semester’s classroom journal, I promised a forthcoming post on Simone de Beauvoir, and I have yet to get around to it, having been distracted by the series on Shakespeare and other issues. But last week when I sat down to brainstorm about what this post might look like, I realized that if I were going to write about Beauvoir, then I would first want to write about Virginia Woolf, and if I were going to write about Virginia Woolf, then I would first want to write about Jane Austen, and if were going to write about Jane Austen, then I would first want to write about Germaine Necker de Staël, etc.

It would have to be a series, and it would chart the trajectory of a selection of literary women who wrote back against misogyny and, in one way or another, imagined a sort of “shadow canon”—a history of unrealized geniuses that persistent antifeminist discourse had silenced, like Virginia Woolf’s fictional Judith, “Shakespeare’s Sister.” The term shadow canon first occurred to me while teaching Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue, in which the speaker claims that:¹

By God, if wommen had writen stories,
As clerkes han withinne hir oratories,
They wolde han writen of men more wikkednesse
Than all the mark of Adam may redresse.

The Wife tells the story of her fifth husband, the Oxford scholar Jankin, who reads to her every night out of his favorite volume, the “Book of Wicked Wives.” Finally, when she can take no more, she tears three pages out of the book and hits him on the cheek with her closed fist, sending him backwards into the fire. He gets up and hits her back, knocking her down and partially deafening her in one ear—at which point she tells him that she is dying and calls him to come close for one last kiss. Jankin, suddenly afraid that he may be guilty of murder, kneels before her and asks forgiveness, at which point, she clocks him again and then makes him burn his book.

This moment of domestic violence, which is deeply uncomfortable for modern readers (or at least I hope that it is), is played for laughs, but who is meant to be the target of our mirth? Is it the misogynist who gets what is coming to him? Or is it the “hen-pecked” husband whom Jankin becomes after he submits and gives her “the brydel in myn hond”?

As is often the case with Chaucer, it’s difficult to pin him down. The Wife’s invocation of the “shadow canon” of silenced women would seem to signal a feminist perspective, but Chaucer’s later short poem, his “Envoy to Bukton,” seems to put him back in the misogynist camp. In this poem, Chaucer is advising a friend who is considering matrimony, and while he will not say that marriage is like the chain of Satan, he will say that if ever Satan became free of his chain, then he would be a fool to submit to a second imprisonment. He concludes by suggesting that his friend go read the Wife of Bath for more advice on the matter—at which point he would find the story of her victory over Jankin and her assertion that what women want most is power over their husbands. You might dismiss this as a joke, but it is the sort of joke that assumes a male, misogynistic audience.

The frontispiece of the Cambridge Manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde. It is apparently meant to depict Chaucer reciting to a listening audience of men and women.

At every turn, Chaucer seems to be playing both sides against the middle. While his narrator seems empathetic toward Criseyde in his Troilus and Criseyde, he also perpetuates the narrative of her guilt. He writes The Legend of Good Women, but in the prologue to that poem, he sets about its composition as penance for his antifeminist poetic sins. He seems to condemn the barbaric Walter’s testing of the patient Griselda in The Clerk’s Tale, but Walter is rewarded in the end with a faithful wife and family, despite the atrocities that he inflicts upon them.

Why this digression on Chaucer? Well, the late medieval Scottish poet Gavin Douglas, one of the so-called “Scottish Chaucerians,” claimed that Chaucer was a “friend to women”—a rare advocate in a world of antifeminism. But if we can detect misogyny, or at least ambivalence, in the work of an apparent ally to women in the fourteenth century, then we find ourselves in a very bleak space indeed in our canonical journey.

This series will pick up the journey in 1402, just after Chaucer’s death, with Christine de Pizan, an actual professional writer in the late Middle Ages who was a woman—and no, that’s not really an anachronism in her case—and who wrote quite explicitly about the evils of misogyny. We will consider a number of women in very diverse social and historical contexts who have, in their own ways, addressed these problems: Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Wollstonecraft, Germaine Necker de Staël, Jane Austen, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, and, finally, Simone de Beauvoir—and that is where we will end, in 1949, with the publication of The Second Sex, on the cusp of a new feminist wave.

I don’t yet know how many installments this will take. That will partly depend upon you and your responses. I originally expected my Shakespeare series to take up three posts, but it stretched to five because of the engagement and conversation that it generated. So please comment below. Which of these figures interests you most and why? Do you care to take bets on the number of installments? Disclaimer: I am not advocating for gambling, though I am advocating for more attention to be paid to the shadow canon.

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Alina Kovalchuk on Unsplash

1. I do not claim to have coined the term “shadow canon.” In fact, I recently discovered that there is a Substack with that title, though I think that its focus is different from my meaning here.