Happy Wife, Happy Life: Pauline Marriage in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Tale
This article asserts continuity of purpose between The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale through the Pauline marital paradigm of mutual submission. The apparent incongruity between the Wife’s diatribe against expectations of wifely submission in the Prologue and her Tale’s subsequent depiction of a r...
| Published in: | Christianity & literature |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Johns Hopkins University Press
2024
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| In: |
Christianity & literature
Year: 2024, Volume: 73, Issue: 1, Pages: 1-13 |
| Further subjects: | B
Wife of Bath
B St. Paul B Marriage B Geoffrey Chaucer |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article asserts continuity of purpose between The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale through the Pauline marital paradigm of mutual submission. The apparent incongruity between the Wife’s diatribe against expectations of wifely submission in the Prologue and her Tale’s subsequent depiction of a reformed rapist knight who eventually finds himself happily married to a beautiful, submissive wife has long produced scholarly consternation. I argue that the Prologue and Tale work together to reveal the inevitable outcome of imposing gender hierarchies in marriage and a means of recovering a Pauline marriage paradigm focused on service rather than power. |
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| ISSN: | 2056-5666 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Christianity & literature
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1353/chy.2024.a925051 |