The Canterbury Tales, by Geofrey Chaucer, from the Perspective of Bakhtinian Carnival: The Wife of Bath and the Subversion of Female Gender through the Profanation of Biblical Discourse

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the character Alison, the wife of Bath, in Geofrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. To do this, based on Bakhtin (1984a, 1984b), especially from the perspective of carnivalization, together with Butler’s theory of gender performativity (1988, 1999), we intend to show how this character carnivalistically subverts certain biblical texts relating to the role of women in marriage. Thus, for the purposes of this study, we have taken the Wife of Bath’s prologue from Chaucer’s work, because in it she constructs her polemical more explicitly and the comic relationship with the Bible at the same time. From this analysis, we conclude that Bath’s wife, in a carnivalized way, performs the feminine gender in the middle of the medieval period, showing herself to be subversive of the stereotypes of the time by profaning certain biblical guidelines, from both the Old and New Testaments, regarding what it means to be a woman and a wife.