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What I found was a completely different telling of the story.
The version I found the most often was that of King Midas' barber being unable to keep the secret of his ears. He digs a hole in the ground and spills the secret and the hills then echo the secret back loudly so that everyone hears it. The wikipedia page for King Midas has this version and this retelling for children also has the version with the barber.
Another version I found, which seems to be from a German retelling, has King Midas being the one unable to keep his secret. You can read about this here.
So why does the WOB tell this story the way she does? It could be that there are different versions floating around at the time Chaucer is writing and this version is the one he is familiar with.
However, I believe he purposely chose this telling. Chaucer chose to attribute to Ovid, this story of the wife betraying Midas' secret. Ovid's version is one that has the barber. Chaucer would have known Ovid's stories and would have known what version he used.
Chaucer
would have known Ovid's stories and would have known what version he used.
Chaucer chose to change this through the WOB. He is telling us about the WOB
by doing this.
We
know that WOB is a well learned woman. She knows her bible, and she also
continually references other literary works. However, with this, she is
discredited. This change of the story makes me wonder whether the rest of her
references were correct. I find myself wanting to go back and look at
everything she said and fact-check everything.
Chaucer
uses this story to discredit the WOB and in doing so, I start to wonder if
maybe Chaucer is not as proto-feminist in his portrayal with the WOB as I thought.
If she is wrong here, and could be wrong otherwise, she does not sound educated
but instead she sounds as though she’s good at appearing educated. She sounds
like a fool.
Maybe
Chaucer uses this change in the story to say something else about the WOB. Does
anyone else have any ideas?
This goes hand-in-hand with Andrew's post about the WoB and her use of scripture. She picks and chooses only parts of scripture in defense of her actions and words. However, she intentionally abandons the rest of the passage as the rest would not support her. I think we are looking at the same issue here. The story has been chosen as a means of illustrating a wife's shortcomings, but it is not, as you point out, entirely accurate. This appears as another case of Chaucer manipulating a story (in this case it's mythology) to prove a point. This manipulation makes the WoB appear to be half educated and incorrect, which could be interpreted as bad as being wholly uneducated. You're right though, this situation makes it difficult to read the WoB as a feminist piece.
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