The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions

Author / Editor
Carruthers, Mary J.

Title
The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions

Published
PMLA 94 (1979): 209-22.

Description
Alisoun has learned through experience that her marital happiness depends upon practical economic control rather than on surrender to the ideals of feminine subservience espoused by authorities. Her tale parodies these authorities in its mock-idealistic reversal of emphasis from masculine to feminine discourse.
Reprinted with an "Afterword," in Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature (Routledge, 1994), 22-53.

Chaucer Subjects
Wife of Bath and Her Tale.