Only Words: Cursing and the Authority of Language in Chaucer's Friar's Tale

Author / Editor
Godfrey, Mary F.

Title
Only Words: Cursing and the Authority of Language in Chaucer's Friar's Tale

Published
Exemplaria 10 (1998): 307-28.

Description
Psychoanalytic argument that the old woman's curses are pivotal to the workings of hostility, manipulation, and eroticism in FrT. The summoner, the devil, and the woman reenact a patriarchal version of the Oedipal scenario, disrupted by the woman's appropriation of masculine discourse in her own defense.

Chaucer Subjects
Friar and His Tale.