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Alison's Incapacity and Poetic Instability in the Wife of Bath's Tale

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Susan Crane
Susan Crane*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey
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Abstract

Chaucer's Wife of Bath longs to counter the assertion of antifeminist satire that women's authority over men is noxious and undeserved. At first it seems that for her tale she chooses romance as the genre that can imagine a worthy sovereignty of secular women, yet she undermines romantic elevation by frequently returning to satiric stances. The generic mixing in her tale signals that romance is inadequate to her argument and indeed that no conventional discourse sustains women's sovereignty. Alison attempts to reach beyond the discourses available to her by destabilizing gender, genre, and gentillesse in her narration, intimating that these categories are flexible and open to new meanings.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 102 , Issue 1 , January 1987 , pp. 20 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1987

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