An Unfulfilled Subversion of Phallocentric Authority: The Wife of Bath’s “Wikked” Speech and Experience

Abstract

An Unfulfilled Subversion of Phallocentric Authority: The Wife of Bath’s “Wikked” Speech and ExperienceKim, Kyoung-Sook This essay provides a feminist rereading of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, interpreting the Wife of Bath as a resisting subject in that she speaks of women’s stories from women’s perspective, challenging her fifth husband Jankyn’s book or written discourse of male authority. In other words, this article examines the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” as a kind of selfrepresentation of the Wife of Bath against phallocentrism. The “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” can be read as a kind of “counterdiscourse” to “undermine” and “expose” male authority as “fragile” to be thwarted; at the same time, the Wife’s “oral” discourse corrects the distortions and omissions of women in written discourse. In this process of correcting, the Wife also redefines the nature of authority itself using her experience and speech. However, the Wife of Bath’s selfrepresentation, is a kind of limited subversion since it is transcribed by the masculine pen. The problematic ending of the Tale, in which the crone transforms herself from an old and ugly hag into a young and beautiful wife, resists any seamless interpretation of the Wife as the embodiment of female subjectivity, undoing her subversion of male authority throughout the prologue. Thus, the “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” can be seen as an unfulfilled subversion of phallocentric authority by female discourse.