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"Rowned She a Pistel": National Institutions and Identities According to Chaucer's Wife of Bath
- Author(s):
- Susan M. Nakley (see profile)
- Date:
- 2015
- Group(s):
- CLCS Arthurian, CLCS Medieval, LLC Chaucer, LLC Middle English
- Subject(s):
- Sovereignty, National characteristics, Nationalism, Social classes, Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400, Magic
- Item Type:
- Article
- Tag(s):
- anachronism, Vernacular, Arthurian, National identity, Class, Gender, Chaucer, Medieval romance
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6V698B9H
- Abstract:
- This article analyzes the politics of anachronism in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. It argues that the Wife of Bath counters the Man of Law’s descending model of sovereignty and regulation of feminine agency with a powerful heroine who wields ascending sovereignty. The Old Wife lives in her Arthurian present and its English future simultaneously by engaging in fairy magic and translating Dante’s fourteenth-century wisdom into English to extend expectations of love, continuity, and solidarity beyond the biological family, the nuclear nation, to the English nation, a political and cultural family. The moral of her story is that national sovereignty depends on intermediate institutions like the household and gossip as well as upon the common English folk who participate in them. Here, nations like marriages presuppose their own perpetual endurance yet require periodic renegotiation of sovereignty to continue as legitimate hierarchies.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Published as:
- Journal article
- Status:
- Published
- Last Updated:
- 5 years ago
- License:
- All Rights Reserved
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