What does the Woman want? Transformations in Zadie Smith’s The Wife of Willesden

Abstract

Zadie Smith’s play The Wife of Willesden (2021) retells Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale from The Canterbury Tales. As the play is not yet available in Hungarian, among the goals of this study is the presentation of Smith’s writing style to the Hungarian reading public. In the introduction to her play, Smith self-reflexively recounts the birth of the adaptation: its arousal from misunderstanding a Twitter post and poor airport Wi-Fi connection during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the present study, I focus on how Chaucer’s original story is transformed in Smith’s text, its adaptation to the social conditions of our life. The fourteenth-century location is transferred to the modern-day Kilburn district of London, where Alvita tells her story in a pub, rethinking her relationship with herself and men, her identity, with a focus on what a woman (could) want(s) in life and the role of a woman in the institution of marriage. The play has received mixed critical reviews, and this study also reflects on the different critical interpretations.