Chaucer Critics Flashcards
Fradenburg.
Explains how romance and fantasy is ideas as a…
…means of escaping from the problems of the real world
Lee Patterson.
Views the prologue and tale as an attack of male…
…supremacy and female subordination. Wife uses wifehood to her own advantage
Finke.
The wife’s assumed childlessness could be ‘symbolic of the…
…barrenness of her life, of her single-minded pursuit of profit
Tucker.
The wob is an exceptionally strong woman who takes…
…full advantage of the power of her sexuality
Tucker.
Her greatest unhappiness comes in moments…
….when her power and maistrie is being threatened
Smith.
The wob embodies a number of negative female characteristics…
…stupidity, arrogance and deceitfulness
Gregory.
It is the wife’s masks of love that…
…gains her all that she desires
Williams.
The wife reduces human love…
…and sex to business transactions
Moore.
Overcharged most of his persons with whims and absurdities…
…for which, the circumstances they are engaged in afford but a very dissproportionate vent
Leicester.
Alison is an early feminist striving for autonomy…
…is an oppressive patriarchal society
Kinnes.
It is chaucer’s characters who…
….are more memorable than their tales
Hebron.
We might see the wife as sacrificing…
…her femininity in pursuit of a feminist cause
Fradenburg.
We must assume the wife of bath is based…
…on one or more real women
Smith.
For the wife of bath, money, sex and marriage…
…are all interlinked and none can exist without the other
Finlayson.
She’s made sex into a metaphorical financial obligation…
…in marriage: the husbands copulation is paying off his debt to his wife
Gestsdottir.
In her prologue, the wife argues that…
…there are always two sides to every story
Gestadottir.
Women: captives of the…
…patriarchal world
Gestsdottir.
Her prologue may be seen as a confession…
….where she confesses her sins but furthermore defends them
Pardon says: o ye wommen be ye subgets…
…to you’re housbande
Gestsdottir.
The wife is not afraid to voice her knowledge of misogyny…
…in her society, and is not afraid to revolt against patriarchy
Gestsdottir.
The rapist knight becomes the victim of…
…oppression just as the maiden was a victim of his rape
Gestsdottir.
Her motivation in life is to change patriarchy…
…or at least demonstrate the same effect of women’s oppression
Gestsdottir.
Her tale demonstrates the conflict between the…
….sexes and that surrendering authority to a woman can be rewarding for men
Gestsdottir.
The wife has through her many marriages learned that marriage is…
…established on money and the one who has control over economic assets is the one who has sovereignty
Gestsdottir.
The wife’s prologue centres on how…
….the sexes relate
Gestsdottir.
Religion had such a power in the 14th century….
…that it influenced the prevailing attitude to appropriate gender roles
Gestsdottir.
Her actions, behaviour and beliefs…
…are not suitable for a woman of her time
Day.
He was a believer seeking…
…to affect change
Day.
Chaucer is implying that the higher up in the heirarchy….
…the church official, the more likely he is to be corrupt
Day.
Enables Chaucer to ‘frame a work that revealed and implicitly condemned….
….the corrupt practices of many church officials with impunity
Day.
Chaucer was not criticising the entire institution…
…of the Catholic Church but merely some of its officials
Day.
These characters are corrupt church officials revealing their true natures….
…and their greed by taking their advantage of the common folk they are bound to serve
Day.
S/f by creating a rivalry between the two…
…he adds comic relief to a harsh view of corrupt church officials
Day.
The summoner is compared to the lowest members of society…
…and also the lowest of the otherworldly creatures, a fiend from hell
Day.
Chaucer’s frustration at an institution…
…that was no longer functioning in the best interest of the people
Kitteridge.
The wife had stood forth as an opponent of the orthodox view of subordination…
…in marriage, as the upholder of a heretical doctrine, and as the exultant practicer of what she preached
Kitteridge.
In this act of chaucer’s human comedy, we have found…
…that the wife of bath is in a very real sense, the dominant figure
Kitteridge.
She had garnished her sermon with scraps of…
…holy writ and rags and tatters of erudition
Kitteridge.
The wife’s discourse is not malicious…
…she is too jovial to be ill-natured
Kitteridge.
Clerks are always…
….satirising women
Tucker.
The wife of bath presents a woman’s perspective…
…on the institution of marriage
Tucker.
The wife of baths prologue presents her experience of…
…marriage as an economic exchange of sex for wealth
Tucker.
Her greatest unhappiness lies in moments…
….where her power of maistrie is threatened
Tucker.
The commodification of sex within marriage…
…allows the wife of bath to retain control over her husbands
Tucker.
The wife’s descriptions of her first three husbands are filled with…
…language that creates a correlation between sex and money
Tucker.
Sex if a form of…
…payment within marriage
Tucker.
The wife wouldn’t take the trouble…
…to please her husbands sexually unless it was for some profit
Tucker.
The wife is no victim, rather she is a perpetrator…
…Leicester views the wife as a victim of the commodification of sex in marriage
Tucker.
The distinction between good and bad comes…
…from the level of power each man grants her
Tucker.
The wife celebrates female freedom…
….and sovereignty in marriage
Tucker.
Each served his purpose by helping…
….her fain wealth and status
Smith.
The wife’s only true power…
…is her sexuality
Joyner.
The wife argues against traditional doctrine…
…And against authority as a whole
Croft.
Her readiness to admit sin…
…and delight in it is central to her humorous nature
Blake.
Her intention lies beneath…
…sarcasm and a purposefully derogatory invective
Mann.
In the unending war of the sexes…
…the wife refuses to accept the subordinate position
Mann.
disguise is microcosmically represented in the tale…
….to exploit the large-scale falsity of nobility in the 1300s
Ally.
The wife is both unintelligent…
…and morally corrupt
Brodie.
The use of sex and marriage is necessary because they are….
…the only methods available to women in such an oppressive time
Aers.
Chaucer is satirising the system which would have forced…
…young women to trade sex for economic security with old husbands
Barr.
Her misunderstandings show her female ignorance. She attempts to talk….
…with female experience but uses a male voice of authority as she quotes all male texts
Hansen.
The wife remains mans creation and chaucer’s tactics to…
…contradict, reinforce all the stereotypical medieval ideas about women as cruel, emotional and sexually voracious
Aers.
Chaucer works over ruling ideas, conventional….
…pieties and the unexamined norms of official culture in a way that subjects them to processes of criticism
Gilbert.
One side of the loathy lady manifests as an optimal threat…
…to masculinity, the other as a dark embodiment of female frustration and fear
Hansen.
Their sudden reconciliation suggests ‘the persistence of those…
…self-indulging hopes of reconciliation that battered wives so often express
Mann.
Argues her tirade is simultaneously a demonstration…
…of female bullying and of salutary witness to male oppression
Mann.
Chaucer ‘gives the old stereotype a new twist by showing that…
…anti-feminist literature produces the angry woman that is purports only to describe
Winney.
From misunderstanding biblical texts ‘she has overthrown the prohibitive morality…
…of the medieval church and supplanted her own pragmatic doctrine on the ruins
Patterson.
Historical reality of medieval life for women. Uses…
…wifehood to own advantage. Attacks male supremacy and female subordination. Niether accepts marriage as a dehumanising institution not rebels against it
Carruthers.
The practical bourgeois wife clearly contradicted the idealised image…
…of the subservient wife held up as a model by gentility and the church
