272 Chaucer, Geoffrey
contest. This framing device allows Chaucer (ca.
1342–1400) to bring together storytellers from all
walks of life and thereby to explore different points
of view and various forms of cultural expression.
Among the storytellers, who are introduced by vivid
and detailed sketches in what has become known as
the “General Prologue,” are representatives of the
emerging middle classes and of the three traditional
medieval “estates” (nobility, clergy, and peasantry),
and the text has been related to the popular medi-
eval genre of the estates satire (wherein society is
examined according to its hierarchies). Significantly,
however, it differs from this in that the various sto-
rytellers are not only types but also individuals. In
fact, the dramatic tension between the storytellers,
acted out in the prologue as well as in the dialogues
that link the individual tales, contributes as much to
the enthralling overall effect of the Canterbury Tales
as the structural tension between the various genres
Chaucer experiments with, among them romance,
fabliau, sermon, and moral treatise.
Annette Kern-Stähler
Gender in The Canterbury Tales
Over the past two decades, gender issues have
become increasingly central to literary criticism
on Chaucer. Among the reasons why The Can-
terbury Tales has proven fertile ground for gender
approaches is the diversity of the storytellers, a situa-
tion that offers multiple constructions of masculinity
and femininity. As the narrator acutely observes, “[d]
iverse folk diversely they seyde” (1.3,857). Signifi-
cantly, the voices of women (albeit doubly filtered
by the male narrator and the male poet), who in the
dominant medieval discourse were encouraged to be
silent, are included in the storytelling.
With its numerous, often conflicting, voices, The
Canterbury Tales lays open the tensions within medi-
eval gender discourse. Thus, the reciprocity in male-
female relationships posited in “The Franklin’s Tale”
(“Wommen, of kynde, desiren libertee, / And nat to
been constreyned as a thral; / And so doon men, if I
sooth seyen shal” [5.768–770]) offers an alternative
to the wifely obedience propagated in “The Clerk’s
Tale,” in which Griselidis patiently submits to her
husband’s will (“Ye been oure lord; dooth with youre
owene thyng / Right as yow list; axeth no reed at
me” [4.652–653]). Chaucer’s gender constructions
have been shown to be closely connected with genre.
Thus, the desirable woman in the fabliau told by the
Miller, the animal-like Alisoun with her flirtatious
eye (“likerous ye” [1.3,244]), is an antithesis to the
desirable woman in “The Knight’s Tale,” who, in
line with the courtly love tradition of romance, is
worshipped from a distance (1.1,074ff.).
Arguably the greatest challenge to the dominant
discourse surrounding femininity is “The Wife of
Bath’s Prologue,” in which antifeminist and anti-
matrimonial arguments and commonplaces that cir-
culated widely in the Middle Ages are put into the
mouth of a woman who pits her own “experience”
against the bookish “auctoritee” of the clerks (3.1)
and who twists the misogynous texts read to her by
her fifth husband, the Oxford clerk Jenkyn, to serve
her own purposes. It cannot be denied, however, that
the Wife of Bath, boasting of the female powers to
deceive and to lie (“half so boldely kan ther no man
/ Swere and lyen, as a womman kan” [3.227–228]),
endorses the antifeminist stereotypes assembled in
Jenkyn’s “Book of wikked wyves” (3.685) In fact,
inflicting “peyne” and “wo” on her husband (3.384),
she embodies what this book warns against. While
this has dented the image of Chaucer as “women’s
friend,” “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” is widely
praised for revealing the ways in which gender is a
social construction, not a fixed, inborn trait. Refer-
ring to the Aesopian fable of the painting of the
lion, in which a lion suggests to a painter that his
picture of a man killing a lion would look differ-
ent if painted by the lion, the Wife of Bath draws
attention to the point of view from which gender is
constructed: “Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?
/ By God, if women hadde writen stories, / As cler-
kes han withinne hire oratories, / They wolde han
writen of men moore wikkednesse / Than al the
mark of Adam may redresse” (3.692–696).
The category of masculinity in The Canterbury
Tales shows that the notion prevalent in our day—
that gender and gender identity are flexible and
negotiable and that gender positions may be taken
up by someone of either sex—is part of Chaucer’s
construction of gender. While women are some-
times masculinized in The Canterbury Tales, as when
Donegild in “The Man of Law’s Tale” is said to