Hearing Chaucer Out: The Art of Persuasion in the 'Wife of Bath's Tale'

Description: Uses WBT to exemplify Chaucer's combination of narrative devices characteristic of the rhetoric of oral persuasion: plot combined with exemplary materials and "direct statement" of theme or moral directive. WBT concerns human willfulness, evident in the rape of the maiden, concern with female desire, digressions from the plot, and the loathly lady's pillow lecture on gentilesse. If readers imagine themselves as part of the "gestalt" of an oral audience they can recognize the unified nature of the tale.