Desire in the Canterbury Tales: Sovereignty and Mastery Between the Wife and Clerk
- Author / Editor
- Scala, Elizabeth.
Desire in the Canterbury Tales: Sovereignty and Mastery Between the Wife and Clerk
- Published
- Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 81-108.
- Description
- In Lacanian terms, WBT and ClT reveal "what each speaker seems most desperate to deny." Ideas of sovereignty ("self-determination"), mastery ("control over another"), and the desires they help to constitute are parallel in the Tales. So are the representations of the "powerful mobility" of the loathly lady and Griselda, evident in their transformations. The endings of WBT and ClT (including the "Envoy" to ClT) reveal how the narrators "recoil" from their Tales and from the "structure of desire underwriting them."
- Chaucer Subjects
- Clerk and His Tale
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale