McTaggart, Anne. “What Women Want? Mimesis and Gender in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale.” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, vol. 19, 2012, pp. 41–67. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/ctn.2012.0000.
René Girard’s understanding of mediated/mimetic desire acts as the foundation of Anne McTaggart’s argument that Chaucer’s Wife of Bath character relays her anti-feminist arguments and acts on her desire through imitation and appropriation (44). The Wife’s desire, as she takes the role as the aggressor in the relationships with her husbands, is parallel to that of the Knight’s desires and actions in her tale; the Prologue and Tale cross gender boundaries to become gendered inversions of one another. In this relationship between teller and constructed character, a model-rivalry begins in which competition provokes violence that undifferentiates the model from the rival and, in this case, the storyteller from the character. McTaggart demonstrates Alisoun’s use of mimicry and root in mimetic desire in both the Prologue and the Tale; for instance, in the Wife’s claim of her husbands’ anti-feminist debates (ie. “Thou seyst”) to negate their positions and then admits her claims are “al... fals” (WBP 382) divulges a performance of what she believes auctoritee to be. Her performance of acting as auctoritee gives her the upper hand, but, as with the Knight in her tale, both aggressors go through shame (ie. the verbal and physical abuse of Alisoun’s fifth marriage, the Knight’s forced submission to his “loathly lady”) and the opportunity of grace that require repentance, mimetic appropriation, in order to find resolution.
--Hannah Nagy
