Watery Places

 

Perhaps the best-known character in Chaucer--her name at least will ring a bell for most of my readers--is the Wife of Bath.  But I cannot proceed much further and get to the actual aqueous subject of my essay without a brief philological preparation.   “Wife” in modern English is a noun of relationship, referring to the female partner in the marriage of a man and a woman.  In earlier English wif meant woman more generally, but  by Chaucer’s time it often had the relational meaning that it has now.  In modern German, “my man” still means “my husband.”  For Chaucer, however, think “the woman from Bath.”  The Wife of Bath, Alison by name, is actually a widow, but she has a long marital history.  Bath is of course a place name, an ancient town in southwest England.  Not far away is another beautiful town, Wells.  From the natural springs in the location the ancient Romans built an elaborate watering place, in later centuries a kind of resort where people “took the waters,” thought to be healthy and indeed medicinal.  In modern times visiting Bath was often a luxurious amusement of the affluent, as we can see in several well-known English novels.  Chaucer, a very clever writer, makes much of her watery associations.

 

Chaucer evidently connected her in his mind, and therefore in ours, with another aqueous literary character—namely, the anonymous “woman at the well” in the fourth chapter of John’s gospel. The connection is not some subtlety invented by me.  You cannot miss it.  Certainly, the Wife of Bath herself doesn’t miss it.  It was basic to Chaucer’s plan.  Jesus, tired from walking all morning, sits down to rest at a well-known watering hole, namely Jacob’s Well.  (We are not certain of the location of this well, but the ancient Semitic legend was that it had been dug by the patriarch Jacob.)  As he sat there, a Samaritan woman came to fetch water, and the two entered into one of history’s more interesting recorded conversations.  Her Samaritan identity is of significance, for as she says, Jews are supposed to avoid Samaritans.  A slightly transgressive air hovers over the scene.  Like the Wife of Bath the Samaritan woman, it turns out, has had four husbands and was now living in concubinage with a fifth man.  So here we have a biblical model, or perhaps the better word is “type”, of the much-married medieval milliner from Bath.  Jesus asks the woman to give him a drink, as he has no cup of his own.  Then he says: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.”

When compared with Chaucer’s, my interest in place names will probably seem rather conventional or eccentric; but I have my own little agenda.  I have been making frequent journeys to visit Joan in her rehabilitation facility in a place called Stonebridge.  The journey is short, but it begins in one county (Mercer) and ends in a second (Somerset). About half of the trip is on a road running parallel to the south bank of the little Millstone River.  The road is naturally called River Road.  That set me to thinking about all the topographic names one encounters that reflect their watery origins.  Growing up in Arkansas, the nearest “big city” was Springfield, now the third largest city in Missouri.  I’ll wager there’s at least one Springfield in every state of the Union.  At least two of them (MA and IL) played major roles in our national history.

 

The obvious need of human beings to drink water and to irrigate edible crops of course explains the ubiquity of these watery names, but there are interesting nuances in, for example, the idea of sacred wells and medicinal springs.  There is justice in the linkage of water with origins to be found in the word source.  The word spa is of uncertain etymology, but took on a generally medical aura in the nineteenth century.  Some watering holes have been of high social prestige.  You could soak up some class while you were in the drink.  The German sister of English bath is bad, as in the various European Badens, including conspicuously Baden Baden.  I’ve never seen that place, but I have visited it a dozen times in novels.  Anyway, a bad is a good thing.  The name "Karlovy Vary" comes from Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, who founded the city in the 14th century.  I don’t know quite how the Carlsbad Caverns of New Mexico got named, but imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  Carlsbad was the principal aqueous resort in central Europe.  That place was named in honor of a fourteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor.  Strange continuities with Middle Ages show up with a surprising frequency in America, though we seldom notice them.

 

Now and then I find myself pursuing a topic that reminds me just how young our country is.  I live in Mercer County, N.J.; Joan is in rehab in contiguous Somerset County.  Mercer County is named after one of our local heroes, General Hugh Mercer, a Scottish physician killed at the Battle of Princeton in 1777.  Somerset County is named after a beautiful county in England’s south-west.  In England there would be a thick, minutely detailed county history I could turn to.  Shortly before Queen Victoria’s death (1901) scholars launched a gigantic project, still underway (commonly known as the Victoria County Histories) that goes into great detail concerning every mud puddle in the land.  The volumes vary somewhat in quality, but they all are nearly fantastic in their ambition and detail. Ordinarily in one of its volumes you get to Magna Carta only in the third volume, or on about page 1308.  American local history is usually the work of dedicated amateurs or partisan family members and varies enormously in completeness and detail.  In America we still need another two or three centuries for local historians to find their feet.  I can but hope to God they get them.

 

As to the watery content of our literature, the cataracts are too overwhelming even to contemplate.  I do not have primarily in mind “sea stories,” whether that sea be wine-red, ashen, or slatey gray.  I have in mind potable drink.  There is the paradox of the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink”.  There is the yet starker realism of Kipling in “Gunga Din,” a poem about the native “water boy” serving a British imperial army regiment in battle:

 

You may talk o’ gin and beer   

When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,   

An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;

But when it comes to slaughter   

You will do your work on water,

An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.   

 

In our own literary moment, in which some writers think no paragraph is complete unless it features the f-word as at least three different parts of speech, it may be difficult to appreciate how artfully transgressive that bloomin’  was!