Chaucer's Feminine Subjects: Figures Of Desire In The Canterbury Tales (the New Middle Ages)

This book demonstrates how poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theory can serve to clarify structures of identity and economies of desire in medieval texts. This study shows how contemporary theory can serve to clarify structures of identity and economies of desire in medieval texts. Bringing the resources of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theory to bear on Chaucer's tales about women, this book addresses those registers of the Canterbury project that remain major concerns for recent feminist theory: the specificity of feminine desire, the cultural articulation of gender, the logic of sacrifice as a cultural ideal, the structure of misogyny and domestic violence. This book maps out the ways in which Chaucer's rhetoric is not merely an element of style or an instrument of persuasion but the very matrix for the representation of de-centered subjectivity Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Introduction: Chaucer’s Feminine Subjects: Feminism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis....Pages 1-23 Figures of Desire in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale....Pages 25-57 The Rhetoric of Desire in The Franklin’s Tale....Pages 59-80 The Martyr’s Purpose: The Rhetoric of Disavowal in The Clerk’s Tale....Pages 81-107 Chaucer’s Wolf: Exemplary Violence in The Physician’s Tale....Pages 109-129 Afterword: A Question of Politics....Pages 131-143 Back Matter....Pages 145-200 Cover 1 Title 8 Copyright 9 Dedication 10 Contents 12 Acknowledgments 14 Introduction: Chaucer’s Feminine Subjects: Feminism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis 16 1. Figures of Desire in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale 39 2. The Rhetoric of Desire in The Franklin’s Tale 72 3. The Martyr’s Purpose: The Rhetoric of Disavowal in The Clerk’s Tale 94 4. Chaucer’s Wolf: Exemplary Violence in The Physician’s Tale 121 Afterword: A Question of Politics 142 Notes 155 Works Cited 188 Index 204