Chaucer's Failure with Women: The Inadequacy of Criseyde
- Author / Editor
- Corrigan, Matthew.
Chaucer's Failure with Women: The Inadequacy of Criseyde
- Published
- Western Humanities Review 23 (1969): 107-20.
- Description
- Describes Chaucer's depictions of Criseyde and the Wife of Bath as "marred" by unconscious "psychic blinders" of his male-dominated age, each lacking a "life all her own." Alison is one of Chaucer's "great comic actors," but not psychically a woman, lacking a "feminine point of view." Similarly "fabricated from a male point of view," Criseyde lacks a feminine "psychic superstructure," her infidelity left unexplained; she suffers in comparison with Shakespeare's more dramatic and more fully realized Cressida.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Troilus and Criseyde
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations