The Wife of Bath Critics

Alisoun
1. 'maimed by the barrage of anti-feminist doctrine she has endured’ – Elaine Tuttle Hansen
2. ‘no more or less than a projection of collective male fear’ – Elaine Tuttle Hansen
3. ‘psychologically realistic woman’ Elaine Tuttle Hansen
4. ‘she speaks with an authority usually denied her sex’ Gail Ashton
5. ‘in modern parlence all that she asks is to do her thing, and she asks that others do the same’ Bernard S Levy
6. ‘the wife, for all her appealing spontaneity, is underneath a somewhat unhappy soul.’ Charles Koban
7. she is presented 'specifically as a wife' and not 'an independent person' - Lee Paterson
8. 'Alisoun uses the language of medieval misogyny to describe herself as a nightmare of the male imagination' - Lee Paterson
9. 'does not want social or political change' - Lee Paterson
10. 'Capitalist entrapraneur' - Mary Carruthers
11. 'phallocentric' representation of women - Elaine Hansen
Sex/Power
1. ‘When the wife achieves mastery over the husband ... she has also sapped his virility’ Bernard S Levy
2. ‘Carnal understanding’ - Robertson
3. 'reducing what is potentialiy the most intimate of human relations to a struggle over property' - Lee Paterson
4. her husbands are 'so many interchangeable commodities' - Laurie Finke
5. 'the brutality of rape vanishes without a trace/' as it is displaced into 'ritual and game' - Laurie Finke
6. 'she regards her own sexuality as a commodity' - Louise Fradenburg
7. 'self deluding hopes of reconciliation that battered wives so often express' - Elaine Hansen
8. 'barters her body' Laurie Finke
Form/Structure
1. ‘her tone is coarse and garrulous, and there is little evidence of that sort of delicate poetic beauty which some critics have professed to find in the Tale itself’ Tony Slade
2. ‘Chaucer himself leaves some comic doubt as to the real motivation[of the Knight for giving in] Tony Slade
3. ‘I find it impossible to read the tale ... without imagining myself as part of the gestalt of the poet engaged with his audience’ Charles Koban
4. ‘The sermon has a functional ambiguity’ Charles Koban
5. 'we are held captive by the spell of [the Lady's] poetry, and at the conclusion of the speech are not surprised to find that the speaker is of wondrous beauty' R K Root
6. '[The knight} is willing to accept anything to stop the flow of talk’ Tony Slade
7. performance as a 'complicated and provocative off tot eh males in her audiince' Lee Paterson
8. 'virtual woman whose very existence is determined by the chaucerian texts she is made to tell' - Leicester
9. 'they are not spoken in her voice or outside her voice; they are her voice' - Leicester
10. 'she attacks, impersonates and parodies the words and voices that seek to control her' - Elaine Hansen
Morality
1. ‘Tolerant sexual irony’ Tony Slade
2. ‘In the Wife's eyes it is the domination of the man over the woman which is the knight's real offence’ Tony Slade
3. 'sterility symbolic of the barrenness of her life' - Laurie Finke
4. 'The word gentillesse itself is class-marked' - Laurie Finke
5. The wife transforms 'aristocratic ideology in which virtue is heritable ... by constructing a counter ideology in which virtue can only be known by its deeds' Laurie Finke
6. 'point of view that could endanger her spiritual life, and the spiritual life of her audience' - Louse Fradenburg
7. 'focus of the attention on his need for sympathy and education, not on his invisible victim and her needs' - Elaine Hansen
Religion
1. The knight is ‘yielding to the illusion that sin, symbolized by the ugly old hag, is attractive, though it is actually ugly’ - Bernard S Levy
2. she 'utterly reverses the spirit of St Paul's teaching' - Lee Paterson

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The Wife of Bath Critics

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