Chaucer's Maiden's Head: The Physician's Tale and the Poetics of Virginity
- Author / Editor
- Bloch, R. Howard.
Chaucer's Maiden's Head: The Physician's Tale and the Poetics of Virginity
- Published
- Qui Parle 2 (1988): 22-45; Representations 28 (1989): 113-34.
- Description
- Explicates Virginia's death by reference to patristic definitions of virginity as the desired ideal veiled in substance, a state inevitably transgressed by the gaze. By extension, the ideal that virginity implies is destroyed by its articulation. In praising Virginia, Chaucer exposes her to the reader's gaze, suggesting the poet's complicity in the violence of rape.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Physician and His Tale.