Gendering Discourse in the Canterbury Tales

Description: By representing the narrator of CT first as a disembodied authority and then as a storyteller in the pilgrimage game, Chaucer explores the parameters of voice, gender, and authority. The perception of gender in speech is shown to be a social construct, rather than grammatical or linguistic. Associating discourse with gender, either masculine or feminine, diminishes its validity by exposing it to the criticism of the addressee or the reader.