Abstract
Medieval writings about women are notoriously polarized in that they reduce women to two extremes, either angels or monsters. This thesis, therefore, considers how Chaucer confronts the problematic late-medieval representation of women in Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, and attempts to show how Chaucer successfully avoids the same stereotypical representation by creating characters that are able to go beyond the traditional gender representation. Chapter one argues that since Chaucer finds the portrayal of women in his society to be problematic, he situates Alisoun within the late-middle bourgeois society in order to make Alisoun an individual whose complexity and difference render it impossible to reduce her to the essentialist representation of women by any written “auctoritee” (III.1). Chapter two argues that Alisoun’s tale is a wish-fulfillment fantasy that serves to correct traditional gender representation, in Alisoun’s society. By comparing John Gower’s standard romance, “The Tale of Florent,” with Alisoun’s distorted Arthurian theme, we can clearly see how Alisoun’s Tale is an anti-romance that turns traditional gender roles upside down. What Chaucer shows us at the end of both Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale is that only by overthrowing the traditional gender representation can new gender relationship based on mutual love and surrender rather than control and dominance be brought about. Marital harmony, in other words, can be achieved only after gender hierarchy that so much characterizes traditional gender representation is done away with.