The Wife of Bath’s Sexual Poetics and Politics of Food and Drink

Abstract

In contrast to the predominant misogynistic discourse of medieval English society, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales is renowned for her arguments in favor of sexuality and female authority, which depicts her as a woman who was years ahead of her time. Chaucer uses food and drink imagery to have the Wife of Bath contest the patriarchal impositions on sexuality in the prologue to “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”. Accordingly, this article aims to analyze how the Wife of Bath makes use of this imagery, which forms her sexual poetics and politics, in order to subvert the Nurturing Mother image. Therefore, this article will, in the first part, analyze the Wife of Bath’s use of food and drink imagery through a discussion of how Chaucer undermines the social and religious implications to encode the Wife of Bath’s arguments for sexuality. In the second part, based on the Wife’s use of such imagery, Chaucer’s presentation of the Wife of Bath as a sexual nurturer will be analyzed as a reflection of her subversion of the Nurturing Mother image. Hence, the article aims to contribute to the discussions on the gendered conception of food, food production, and food consumption in the Middle Ages.

Keywords

• Chaucer
• The Wife of Bath
• Sexuality
• Food and Drink Imagery
• Nurturing Mother

Supporting Institution

No

Ethical Statement

N/A

Thanks

No

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