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Making a Couple of the Beastly Bride and the Hunter Hunted



It is a commonplace when digging into the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale to stress the anachronism of calling Chaucer a feminist. Yet it is also a commonplace to find Chaucer attractive for his play with gender in his book, nowhere better demonstrated than in the reconstitution of various misogynist diatribes into the charismatic Wife of Bath who talks back defiantly to “auctoritee�. If Chaucer is not actually endorsing the strident voice he gives to the Wife, he is certainly making play with textuality, with subjectivity, and with the construction of ideas about sexuality. Despite the fact that the Catholic Chaucer presumably is not using the Wife of Bath to present his own views, he allows her to express radical ideas on gender theory and to tell a tale that demonstrates some of what she has theorized in her Prologue. The motif central to the Wife’s tale (that a shapeshifting hag becomes beautiful once......

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Approximate Word Count: 1724
Approximate Pages: 7 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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