Strategies of Silence in the Wife of Bath's Recital

Description: Also published in Sheila Delany, Medieval Literary Politics: Shapes of Ideology (University of Manchester Press, 1990), pp. 112-29.; Explores WBT as the monologue of a "male courtier-poet voicing certain values of the culture inscribed in him." The poet's silences--his suppresion of the full text of the Wife's citations, of significant information concerning her life, and of the masculine voice behind the question of what a woman wants--subvert the Wife's apparent subversion of those cultural values, revealing instead the "experience and desires of the poet," his society, and his critics.