http://turtlehaus.com/2009/01/26/author-interview-amanda-ackroyd-part-i/ Stories and how we tell them, through words, pictures, spaces... Wed, 03 Feb 2010 11:36:23 -0800 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.3 hourly 1 http://turtlehaus.com/2009/01/26/author-interview-amanda-ackroyd-part-i/comment-page-1/#comment-1351 David Day Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:10:39 +0000 http://turtlehaus.com/?p=443#comment-1351 I was pretty impressed by the story. The spirit of Vindice of The Revenger's Tragedy and other Jacobean protagonists (De Flores, Bosola...) was alive again in feminist form. I especially liked the idea of fitting up the corpse with a dud cheque for Eternity. Good, too, was the shape of the narrative. Pitched into a staggering beginning and immediately, correspondingly, hearing the coolly compelling voice of the vengeful wife (don't you Italians say that revenge is a dish best tasted cold?), the reader is taken into the emotional logic of the process and has to give assent to what folllows, red dress and all. Voice is the major persuasive factor. I now know from which of Chaucer's tales Amanda took her cue. A major theme in The Wife of Bath's Prologue and The Tale of the Wife of Bath is lack of harmony between husband and wife. For example, Chaucer's character, the Wife, gets to blows with one of her several husbands. He aggressively and cynically believes that wives are not to be trusted and so spends much of the night underlining that belief by bending her ear with learned examples of female faithlessness. In fact, as in the Amanda tale the wife is bullied, though not in a comparably sinister way. Anyhow, eventually, the wife tells us "I with my fist so took him on the cheke That in our fyr he fil bakward adoun" Amanda's wife, though, deals out the more lethal revenge of the two: she simply lets her dearest one die in the farmyard. Both Amanda and Chaucer signal the loud dangerousness of their respective wives by dressing them in red. Chaucer refers to the Wife of Bath's "gaye scarlet gytes". I was pretty impressed by the story. The spirit of Vindice of The Revenger’s Tragedy and other Jacobean protagonists (De Flores, Bosola…) was alive again in feminist form.
I especially liked the idea of fitting up the corpse with a dud cheque for Eternity. Good, too, was the shape of the narrative. Pitched into a staggering beginning and immediately, correspondingly, hearing the coolly compelling voice of the vengeful wife (don’t you Italians say that revenge is a dish best tasted cold?), the reader is taken into the emotional logic of the process and has to give assent to what folllows, red dress and all. Voice is the major persuasive factor.
I now know from which of Chaucer’s tales Amanda took her cue.
A major theme in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and The Tale of the Wife of Bath is lack of harmony between husband and wife. For example, Chaucer’s character, the Wife, gets to blows with one of her several husbands. He aggressively and cynically believes that wives are not to be trusted and so spends much of the night underlining that belief by bending her ear with learned examples of female faithlessness. In fact, as in the Amanda tale the wife is bullied, though not in a comparably sinister way. Anyhow, eventually, the wife tells us
“I with my fist so took him on the cheke
That in our fyr he fil bakward adoun”
Amanda’s wife, though, deals out the more lethal revenge of the two: she simply lets her dearest one die in the farmyard.
Both Amanda and Chaucer signal the loud dangerousness of their respective wives by dressing them in red. Chaucer refers to the Wife of Bath’s “gaye scarlet gytes”.

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