SOURCE: Treharne, Elaine. “The Stereotype Confirmed? Chaucer's Wife of Bath.” In Writing Gender and Genre in Medieval Literature: Approaches to Old and Middle English Texts, edited by Elaine Treharne, pp. 93-115. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002.

In the following essay, Treharne contends that in The Wife of Bath's Prologue, Chaucer reinforces many misconceptions of women's ability to manipulate and claim language.

‘I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man’(1) 

Introduction: Methods of Analysis

This essay will focus on one of the most memorable English literary characters: Chaucer's Wife of Bath. I shall be taking a primarily sociolinguistic approach in interpreting her: drawing out interactions between language and gender, language and power that are as relevant now as they always have been in male-female relations, and in engendering and maintaining the powerful ideologies that drive both the social construction of identity and academic discourses of character and morality...