What Women Want?: Mimesis and Gender in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale

Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 19:41-67 (2012)
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Abstract

But nathelees, syn I knowe youre delit, / I shal fulfille youre worldly appetit.1 Chaucer’s Wife of Bath centers on a wonderfully fruitful paradox: she claims for women and for herself the right to “maistrie” and “sovereynetee” in marriage, but she does so by articulating the discourse imparted to her by the “auctoritee” of anti-feminism.2 Indeed, this paradoxical challenge to and reiteration of anti-feminist ideas has left Chaucer’s readers debating for decades which way the irony cuts: is the Wife to be understood as a proto-feminist, or is she merely “a delightful buffoon inadvertently lampooning herself for the ironic pleasure of a knowing, male audience”?3 How we choose to answer this question ..

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