Zadie Smith’s latest offering is a bit of a departure for a woman best known as a novelist. The Wife of Willesden is a dramatic adaptation/translation (from Chaucerian to North Weezian) of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Unlike Chaucer’s version, Smith’s includes an introduction where she provides an origin story which, like all origin stories of the 2020s, involves the Covid-19 pandemic. Brent won the bid to be London’s Borough of Culture for 2020 and the organizer contacted Zadie Smith to see if she would be up to making a contribution. Somehow, people on Twitter got it in their heads she had agreed to write a play and that social media misunderstanding exerted a pressure that converted a fiction into a fact. However, like everything else in 2020, the play’s premiere had to be delayed and, of course, it wasn’t until 2023 that we in North America saw the publication of the script.
The Wife of Willesden is remarkably faithful—the play, that is, not necessarily the woman at the centre of the play. Smith follows Chaucer, writing ten syllable lines in rhyming couplets, eschewing “high” verse, opting instead for the “low” speech of ordinary people. In Chaucer’s day, that meant writing in middle English. In Smith’s presentation, we get a mashup of North Weezy, Jamaican patois, cockney, even posh. And the rhyming couplets sometimes give the lines a rap feel (one of Zadie Smith’s brothers is a well known rapper).
Despite the leap across seven hundred years of linguistic evolution, it would be unfair (to Chaucer) to call this an update. There is a remarkable freshness to the concerns expressed by Chaucer’s Alyson and Smith has the good sense to leave them more or less untouched as they find new life in her Alvita. That’s not to say she doesn’t offer contextual tweaks. For example, we have this exchange between Alvita and her fifth husband, a Scottish student half her age named Ryan:
The real reason I tore that page out his book,
And he box mi left ear wid a right hook:
See, he quoted from this book night and day
It was his Bible.HUSBAND RYAN
My gospels, I’d say,
Of Saints Farrell, Moxon, Peterson, Strauss –ALVITA
(Like this was a joke to bring down the house.)HUSBAND RYAN
It’s made of some books I’ve put together,
Twelve Rules of Life; The Myth of Male Power;
The Game; something called The Woman Racket.ALVITA
(Some mental crap he got off the Internet . . . )
Just as Alyson tore a page from her fifth husband’s book and became deaf in one ear when he struck her, so with Alvita. She confronts the misogyny of Ryan’s idols—yes, that’s Jordan Peterson she’s talking about—and although she takes a beating for it, she gains concessions. I suppose we can take from this the disturbing lesson that while context changes, seven hundred years has done nothing to change the underlying fact of misogyny. No doubt Zadie Smith herself will take a beating in the press for calling out Jordon Peterson and his ilk for their behaviour, but when we attend to Chaucer’s own litany of ancient women-hating writers, hearkening back another thousand years before his time, it’s easy to see how tired and clichéd and how unoriginal is today’s crop of idiots. Nearly two millennia have passed and these men haven’t a single fresh thought to offer us.
It would be easy to throw up one’s hands and say that there is nothing new under the sun. But that’s not true. There is one thing new under the sun. In Chaucer’s day, the only way women could challenge the idiots was through fictional characters crafted by intermediary allies. In Zadie Smith’s day, women at least have the power—the “auctorite”—to craft characters in their own right and to give them voice without reliance on the contingent empathy of interpolating men.
As for the Tale itself, again, Zadie Smith is remarkably faithful to the Chaucerian account, shifting the outward circumstances (Maroon Town, Jamaica in the 1720s) but preserving the essential bits of the story. A soldier rapes a girl, but before the courts can pronounce a sentence, Queen Nanny intervenes and begs the court to release the soldier on his own recognizance. She charges the soldier with a quest and gives him a year to perform it. He must search for an answer to her question—what do women desire most?—and if, at the end of the year, he can deliver a satisfactory answer, then he will be spared his sentence. The soldier searches high and low without success but, just as his time is about to expire, he meets an ugly old woman who says she will give him his answer if he promises to do the next thing she asks. He agrees to her terms, so she gives him the answer he seeks:
They want their husbands to consent, freely;
To submit to their wives’ wills – which should be
Natural in love; for we submit to love.
…
To keep power, and have no man above
Them – all women want this.
And then the ugly old woman delivers her request.
As with the Prologue, the Tale is remarkably portable and speaks to our present #MeToo moment. Or at least it did until Covid-19 threw a monkey wrench into the works. I find it helpful to observe that the Tale unfolds against the backdrop of judicial proceedings, and judge-made law is necessarily contextual. A decision on one set of facts is portable only to the extent that a new set of facts lines up with the set of facts that gave rise to the decision in the first place. This is the foundation of case law. We can think of stories by analogy to case law. An ancient story is relevant to the present context only to the extent that present circumstances echo those of the original story. As Zadie Smith reworked Chaucer’s account, she no doubt had in mind the likes of Harvey Weinstein and Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, any of whom could have served as a stand-in for her soldier. However, a global pandemic blindsided us all and has done something odd to the circumstances that receive The Wife of Willesden’s Tale.
An account that calls for the personal and bodily autonomy of women is birthed into a world that repeals Roe v. Wade. Meanwhile, women toss the usual mantra of Second Wave Feminism on its head—My Body, My Choice—to bolster anti-vax conspiracy theories. Almost overnight, the terms we thought reflected a broad consensus have flipped their valence. In Zadie Smith’s home, things are likewise topsy turvy. Westminster has denied the SNP’s autonomy to set its own policies regarding the bodily autonomy of people who identify as transgendered. And Suella Braverman has effectively declared war on refugee bodies.
What has changed in our context is not the broad sweep of our circumstances. As ever, that is pocked with hatred and misogyny. No. The change today is in the language used to give expression to that hatred and misogyny. The usual words we have used to characterize our experience have been defanged or turned in upon themselves. We look then to people like Zadie Smith, who are playful and inventive with their words, to come up with fresh ways to describe how it is we free ourselves from the shackles of words that have been oiled in falsehoods.
See other Nouspique posts on Zadie Smith:
Positioning Zadie Smith’s NW in Space and Time – June 7, 2022
Zadie Smith’s Reliance on Negative Capability in Feel Free – May 17, 2022
Zadie Smith and Intimations of “Real Suffering” – July 30, 2020
Swing Time, by Zadie Smith – June 3, 2020