Analysis Of Disability In Wife Of Bath And Somonour By Geoffrey Chaucer

Denouncing Disability and Exploring the Autonomy of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Somonour Geoffrey Chaucer’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales exposes the predicament of being perceived as disabled/deformed in the medieval world. Considering the motley group is travelling to St. Thomas a Becket’s shrine at Canterbury Cathedral, it comes as no surprise that the pilgrims suffer an assortment of ailments, of which they yearn to be free, which supports the medical model of disability. The Wife of Bath, owner of a successful cloth-making business, is deaf in one ear, due to a beating from one of her dead husbands, of whom there are many. This physical disability aside, Chaucer also effectively disables her with the social failings of pride

A raging skin infection covers his face, which strikes fear in his community, despite his every effort to control it with all manner of potions. As a process server for the local ecclesiastical court system, the Somonour gets no relief from prying eyes, or hardened hearts. Whether a disease he picked up from enjoying the company of strumpets, consumption of an alkaline-rich diet, or merely an outward symptom of his fraudulent business practices, the author never reveals. Unable to enjoy even the sexuality bestowed upon the Wife of Bath, the Somonour has only his food and business to comfort him. At least he has the diversion of his legal studies and the sins of the townsfolk to amuse him, iterating his piteous existence among those who are fully experiencing life, and paying the fines for doing so. In his General Prologue descriptions of the Wife of Bath and the Somonour, Geoffrey Chaucer both undermines and supports the presumptions of disability, enabling the text to take a neutral stance on a complex and divisive

Human life long has been defined along binary assumptions, such as good and evil, which occupy distinct and opposing forms, one of which often has a negatively assigned cultural value. The term disability, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “lack of ability… incapacity; weakness” appears to exist solely as an antonym for “ability,” described as “suitableness; aptitude.” In short, the word alone carries with it stigma that challenges “social, cultural, and political dimensions” of a population, states Rachel Adams et al. in Keywords for Disability Studies. Curiously, even disability studies have a binary model of organization, the social and the medical. The former states that disability occurs not due to impairment, but societal organization. However, the medical model defines disability “in terms of individual impairments to be corrected and cured,” explains Adams et al. Chaucer’s pilgrims seek the martyr who “holpen whan that they were seeke,” clearly demonstrating a desire for the aforementioned and elusive cure, which emphasizes the medicalization of disability in the narrative. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, a richly developed character, has a complex introduction in the author’s General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, despite, or perhaps, due to her