The Rhetoric of Rape and the Politics of Gender in the Wife of Bath's Tale and the 1382 Statute of Rapes

Abstract

This article reads the representation of rape in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale in light of the renegotiation of laws governing raptus in late-fourteenth-century England, a juridical reform that began with a case concerning a nobleman's daughter in 1380 and culminated in the 1382 Statute of Rapes. This statutory reform sought to protect patriarchal control of female sexuality and to punish women for autonomous marriage choice, but it did so with a surprisingly insistent rhetorical focus on the harms of rape as a violation of women's bodies and wills. This article argues that Chaucer, through the Wife of Bath, explores the paradoxical cultural consequences of this rhetoric of rape to expose the risks of appealing to gender difference as an interpretive framework. Engaging the complex relationship among representation, desire, and the politics of gender in legal discourses of raptus, the Tale imagines new possibilities for bodies and desires not marked by the violence of gender, even as it registers the social realities of gendered violence.