SOURCE: Cox, Catherine S. “Holy Erotica and the Virgin Word: Promiscuous Glossing in The Wife of Bath's Prologue.¹” Exemplaria 5, no. 1 (March 1993): 207-37.

In the following essay, Cox explores the sexual connotations of the term “glossing,” highlights the double entendres in The Wife of Bath's Prologue, and investigates the link between sexual fulfillment and control of language. Cox maintains that although the Wife of Bath seeks to fight the patriarchal system, her lack of feminine discourse forces her to use male definitions, and ultimately she is unsuccessful in self-definition.

Although the Wife of Bath, in her Prologue, argues in a quasi-feminist voice for the validity of her own experience and authority,² her narrative seems ambiguously—and ambivalently—both feminist and anti-feminist.³ This sense of the narrative becomes clearer when we consider the Wife to be a textual “feminine”⁴ representation, one constructed within the parameters of “masculine” discourse and articulated...