WoB critics Flashcards
‘The Wife of Bath’s tale is referred technically as an exemplum, a story that illustrates an intellectual idea’
Roberts
‘Her digression entices us into the tale’
Paradise
sees the Wife as an early feminist striving for autonomy in an oppressive patriarchal society
Marshall Leicester
‘A rich widow was considered to be a match to, or more desirable than, a match with a virgin of property’
Carruthers
Through the Tale Chaucer is able to raise the issues of rape, class superiority, physical beauty, masculine superiority and construction of choice, all in order to question older social vales and to propose contemporary ideas which are more appreciative of women and their rights’
Haskell
‘Sex not only secures money and land for the Wife of Bath, but it also gives her power’
Tucker
‘the Wife’s story heretically disrupts sacred medieval hierarchy by giving women maistrie over men
Brown and Egge
‘The wife takes delight in seizing the clerical prerogative of assigning meaning to authoritative texts’
Bisson
‘Animal imagery is in fact used almost entirely to refer to women…Animals traditionally symbolise a lack of reason’
Tasioulas
WoB as a middle-class woman challenging traditional authority held by the church and the notion of inherited nobility
Marxist
WoB as a victim of an early sexual experience (married at 12)
Psychoanalytical
WoB as a merchant, a woman who understands the growing capitalist economic system in which she exists, increases her wealth, and commodifies aspects of her life
Marxist
