What Women Want? Mimesis and Gender in Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue" and "Tale."
- Author / Editor
- McTaggert, Anne.
What Women Want? Mimesis and Gender in Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Prologue" and "Tale."
- Published
- Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis and Culture 19 (2012): 41-67.
- Description
- Reassesses gender violence in WBPT in terms of René Girard's theory of mimesis that complicates surface oppositions and suggests that we can read the Wife of Bath as parallel to the rapist-knight rather than to the loathly lady. The mirroring of desire in WBPT occludes distinctions between mastery and sovereignty in Alisoun's "quiting" of Jankyn and in the lady's offer of "governance" to the knight, representing a kind of "grace," even though the competitiveness of the tale-telling contest is reaffirmed.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale