Chaucer's Wife of Midas Reconsidered: Oppositions and Poetic Judgment in the Wife of Bath's Tale

Abstract

By the sheer vitality of her personality and the defiant aggressivity of her temperament, Chaucer's Wife of Bath has recently attracted a variety of critical assessments that emphasize her capacity to conduct an original argument along the lines of a "gendered" vocabulary, as much as they make of her a significant emblem of social protest that typifes an individual, or subjective, reaction to social and literary convention. Other approaches suggest that the Wife has a point of view that merits a unique kind of critical attention, somewhat different from what can be attributed to Chaucer's other moral or social dissidents (male or female). However, in this article, I wish to return to a somewhat more traditional, if unresolved, critical problem, which addresses the nature of Chaucer's poetic attitude toward the quality of poetic statement sustained by one of his most brilliant personae.