Being A Woman In The Books: Chaucer And The Problem With The Discourse Of Women In Medieval English Literature

The relationship between women and literature in medieval English literature is a relationship that stresses the powerlessness of women in literature. Women find themselves represented in the books because of the wrongs they have committed and literature is often a means of creating negative images of women. Chaucer is concerned with the place of women in books and he examines in this context the role of literature and books as discursive practices. Thus particularly in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women Chaucer questions the truths literature develops about women. This paper argues that Chaucer’s questionings reveal that the patriarchal discourse of women developed by medieval English literature cannot be trusted because as a discourse it is produced by the power/knowledge that women lack. Chaucer’s treatment of the mechanics of literary representation shows that the knowledge about women is produced by a literature that serves the interests of the dominant and it produces knowledge about women who lack the power to construct or re-construct the truth promoted by literature. It is this problematic that underlies the objections of the Wife of Bath and the God of Love to the truth presented by literature about women.