Carole Koepke Brown combines structural analysis with psychoanalysis to highlight the knight’s gradual psychological rehabilitation in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale. To set up her argument, Brown points out how Chaucer uses “alternating parallelism or step parallelism” to create texture and repetition in the tale (20). Every major event has a mirroring event. For example, the knight rapes the mayde in the beginning, but the hag forces intimacy on the knight at the end. Brown argues that with each repetition, the knight’s experience becomes “progressively deeper and increasingly personal” (20). With that structural framework in place, Brown examines the knight’s rehabilitation process in each set of parallel events from a psychoanalytical point of view. Brown calls this steady process “the cognitive restructuring of his inner world” as he “[becomes] more reflective and [eschews] violent self-gratification” (24). Brown continually points to the queen and the hag as the primary facilitators—his therapists, as it were—in the knight’s quest to overcome his sexual and emotional impulsivity.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25095957
-- Amanda Fetters
