Delaney, Sheila. “Sexual Economics, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, and The Book of Margery Kempe.” Minnesota Review, fall, no. 5, 1975, pp. 104-115.
Delaney compares and contrasts Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Margery Kempe to make a Feminist and Marxist argument on “sexual economics; i.e.” how both women use a patriarchal, capitalistic system to their own advantage, and how both are ultimately victimized by this system. Delaney begins by analyzing the Wife of Bath, claiming that she shows “acute awareness” of using sexual relations and marriage as a capitalistic venture to gain wealth (104). Though the Wife of Bath is able to benefit from an understanding and control of her own sexual economics, she must work within a very narrow system of choices women have to accumulate wealth. Delaney transitions to her analysis of Margery Kempe. Like the Wife of Bath, Margery is able to use sexual economics to manipulate her husband into an agreement that benefits her, this time through the refusal of consensual sex to her husband and the leverage of her own wealth. Unlike the Wife of Bath, who must base herself to gain wealth, Margery is able to invert the power relationship because of the deterioration of Feudalism and the rise of the merchant class, of which Margery is a part. Though she is able to pay her husband’s debts and leverage her wealth to power, this does not mean that Margery Kempe is able to transcend the Patriarchy, claims Delaney. More than once, Delaney reminds us that Margery Kempe is terrified of losing her wealth and therefore any protection from physical and sexualized violence from strangers, a common experience for women of low status who act outside accepted social norms. Delaney notes that Margery must endure being raped by her husband and that rape is a form of theft; though she can accumulate wealth and start businesses, Margery is not in control of her own bodily sovereignty. Using Marx’s analysis of religion as a way to take control of one’s life when oppressed economically, Delaney claims that Margery Kempe turns to religion as a means to assert “ownership of herself” when the social contract of the time makes this very difficult, if not impossible (114).
-Ted Conover
