The Wife of Bath and the Clerk
- Author / Editor
- Axelrod, Steven
The Wife of Bath and the Clerk
- Published
- Annuale Mediaevale 15 (1974): 109-24.
- Description
- Critiques George Lyman Kittredge's notion of a feud between the Wife of Bath and the Clerk as "aesthetically displeasing," and argues instead that their tension is essentially jocular, a result of the Wife's hope that she can entice the Clerk. The Clerk's intellectual standoffishness attracts the Wife, and their interactions reflect the motif of sexual attraction recurrent in the CT while varying its pattern of professional antagonism.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale
- Clerk and His Tale