The Wife of Willesden is set in twenty-first century, multicultural north London. With its references to “Time’s up,” twerking, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and owning your privilege, it has a contemporary feel. But it is also closely based on a fourteenth-century poem, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale,” part of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Zadie Smith even uses a poetic form as she brilliantly adapts and plays with his text.
Born in the early 1340s, Chaucer lived in the century of the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, and the Great Revolt of 1381. A customs officer, diplomat, MP, and poet, he was himself a London boy, born and brought up on the banks of the Thames. There, he learnt multiple languages and was closely involved in the international trade that brought spices and fabrics all the way from Indonesia to London and took English wool all over the known world. Medieval London was very different to modern London—but both are multilingual, cosmopolitan locales.
Chaucer’s most famous poem—The Canterbury Tales—assembles a group of people in a London pub (the Tabard Inn), on the south bank of the Thames. These people are going on a pilgrimage to Canterbury, and they decide to travel together, telling stories to pass the time. One of the great messages of the poem is that we should listen to diverse voices, not only the perspectives of those who are in power. Everyone has a story to tell.
The bulk of The Canterbury Tales were written after about 1387 and throughout the 1390s, when Chaucer was in his mid-forties to mid-fifties. This was a time of upheaval in England and in Chaucer’s own life. In the middle and late 1380s there was a power struggle between Richard II and the nobility, and some of the king’s handpicked favorites were executed or fled. Chaucer (who worked for the King in the customs house) effaced himself at around this time, and moved from central London to the Greenwich area. He gave up some of his royal grants and lived more quietly for a time, presumably burying himself in his writing, while holding jobs that involved, for instance, overseeing the buildings at the Tower of London. He probably rode over to Southwark from Greenwich to perform poems such as “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” in the real Tabard Inn, before a city audience of women and men, whilst also sending tales to his friends who read them in smaller groups. His tales would generally have been read aloud and discussed. Chaucer had been widowed in 1387 after a marriage of over 20 years, although the marriage seems to have involved quite a lot of separate living arrangements. Chaucer’s wife had always earned her own money; his first employer was a woman; and he knew many powerful women, both at court and in the city.
As Chaucer moved from his earlier poetry to The Canterbury Tales, he increasingly focused on writing about ethics, and on creating female characters that offered wise advice and good counsel. Chaucer’s most famous character was a woman named Alison, better known as the Wife of Bath (renamed by Smith as Alvita, the Wife of Willesden). Female characters in medieval literature were more usually princesses or virginal damsels; nuns or saints; witches or prostitutes. But the Wife of Bath was different—she was a middle-class, middle-aged, sexually active woman.
In her Prologue, she talks in great detail about her sexual history with her five husbands, and her experience of domestic violence and abuse. She also rails against the male-authored canon of literature, saying that if women had had the chance to write stories literary history would look very different. She then tells her tale—a story about rape, transformation, and redemption. Alison of Bath immediately caused a stir. Chaucer himself treated her differently from his other characters, mentioning her in other Canterbury Tales, and in completely separate poems, as if she were a “real” author. Across the centuries, she has fired the imaginations of hundreds of authors from around the world.
Those authors have often attempted to put Alison in her place. Alexander Pope, for instance, writing in the early eighteenth century, tried to make her a less shocking character: he completely cut out swathes of her Prologue, including a section about what genitals are for, Alison’s declaration that she has the best quoniam (c*nt), her comment that she has the mark of Mars in a private place, and her statement that she has sex evening and morning with her husbands.
More recently, Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian art-house director, depicted her as a monstrous and unappealing man-killer in his 1976 film about The Canterbury Tales. In his version, having sex with her is what kills her fourth husband, and her fifth husband cannot get an erection when faced with her terrifying sexuality.
In the last twenty years there have been many more sympathetic portrayals of the Wife of Bath. Many new interpretations of the Wife of Bath, and of The Canterbury Tales as a whole, have come from postcolonial contexts.
The Wife of Willesden is a far more complete and ambitious engagement with the Wife of Bath than most previous adaptations. Zadie Smith translates—or transposes—the whole Prologue and Tale into a new setting.
It is really striking that some of the problems that Chaucer wrote about in the fourteenth century—such as the pernicious effect of influential misogynist books or the reality of domestic abuse—have not gone away.
But Smith’s Alvita, like Chaucer’s Alison, has a voice that demands that we listen to what she has to say. That voice is powerful, unreliable, self-interested, funny, contradictory, loud, and vital. Alison of Bath continues to fascinate writers and audiences today just as much as she did in the 1390s. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer emphasised that “diverse” people would always interpret tales “diversely.” Alison’s and Alvita’s tales demand that we think for ourselves about their complexities: there are no easy answers to the problems they raise.
Marion Turner is The J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Language and Literature at The University of Oxford, and the author of The Wife of Bath: A Biography (Princeton, 2023) and Chaucer: A European Life(Princeton, 2019).
Image:
Jessica Murrain (“Author”) in The Wife of Willesden: Marc Brenner.
Critically acclaimed and multi award-winning best-selling author Zadie Smith transforms an excerpt from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales into the unbelievable—and unforgettable.
