Many literary critics throughout the years have labelled the Wife of Bath, the ‘gap-toothed (23)’ character of The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, a feminist. She is strong-willed and dominant woman who gets what she wants when she wants it. A feminist reading concerned with the representations of women in literature: as entities ignored or misread from a patriarchal perspective that alternatively erased or denigrated them, or else sympathised with them as fragile objects in need of chivalrous protection. This description as a whole does not represent the Wife of Bath or prove her to be a feminist but she can be seen as ‘entities ignored or misread from a patriarchal perspective that alternatively erased or denigrated them…’

            Critics differ widely in their views. Some view her as a realistic figure expressive of the role of women in medieval society, others as a comic female grotesque, affirming traditional and misogynistic views of ‘women’. Elsewhere she is read as subversive or alternatively, as a victim unable to escape indoctrination by patristic teaching.

            The Wife of Bath seems to offer a personal and directly related insight into the history of the abuse and suppression of women. Right from the start of her Prologue, she asserts her livid experience over the authority of the written word. Equally, she presents us with another technique from masculine discourse in the sequence marked by the repeated ‘thou seyst’ or its equivalent; ‘’you say we do this,’ she says, ‘and so we do that.’’ Here, as she describes women’s unacceptable behaviour, the Wife shows how she conforms to the exact picture of anti-feminism she is attempting to negate. So, the Wife of Bath both denies and exemplifies a construction of the feminine, based on patristic and theological commentaries, authored by the likes of Theophrastus, St Jerome, and Walter Map – those same written, anti-feminists tracts that Jankyn cites.

            The figure of the Wife of bath is produced by and within those same texts that construct her as an anti-feminist stereotype, yet brings into play all that they try to condemn and silence: female pleasure in bodies, in sex, or joy in physical activities like singing, or walking out, or chatting. In this way, she resists written claims to containment and definition, but can only do so by offering a monologue, an oral version of jankyn’s texts bound in one volume with which her struggle begins.

            Written transmission of words carries authority for it fixes discourse, often offering a single answer or world view. This is a system traditionally categorised as masculine. In contrast, oral stories are dramatic, ripe for adaptation and reinvention. They implicitly invite audience participation or informal response and thus are productive of dialogue, a discourse that is multiple and rebelliously feminine.

The repressed feminine is expressed through a range of sounds that cannot properly be written down. Inextricably connected to gluttony and sexual licence, its predominant quality is purely oral. This is the medium through which the Wife of Bath is constructed.

In the Prologue, the Wife of Bath seems to bring her own body into play. As we have seen, she offers us its history and tells of its bodily and sexual ness. She is one of the flesh, associated with excess of the body and with noise. Hers is, then, an unruly material body, feminine according to anti-feminist thought and, hence, subordinate to the medieval masculine with its ‘higher’ order of mind, rationality, and spirit. Hers is the repressed feminine at the heart of us all, undisciplined and non-scriptable sound and body, at once denigrated and powerfully subversive.