Paper #1 Assignment

English 2643

Paper #1: Women Defamed and Defended

“You say that just as worms destroy a tree,

A wife destroys her husband, you have found;

This, they well know who to wives have been bound” (The Wife of Bath’s Prologue)

INTRO: The difficulty of reading older literature, particularly anything from the Middle Ages, is that we have so little documentary evidence from the authors themselves. Therefore, we often don’t know what their intentions were when writing works about women, chivalry, marriage, and questionable sexual relations. The majority of non-fiction writing from this period defames women, warning of the danger of these ‘daughters of Eve’ toward virtuous Englishmen. Yet literature is rarely just an instruction manual, and can be read subjectively, meaning it could not only justify a Medieval reader’s misogyny, but also attack it outright.

PROMPT: Based on the handout I gave you in class showing writers Defending and Defaming women, where would you place our two poets? Since both poets are writing stories that gravitate around the theme of women and chivalric behavior, are they satirizing the conventions towards women or the women themselves? Is Gawain yet another ‘emasculated’ alpha male? Is the Wife of Bath a parody of the ‘emancipated’ woman? Or are these works proto-feminist in their refusal to play to stereotypes?How can we find the clues within the writing itself?

REQUIREMENTS: Respond to at least ONE of the sources on the handout, and place that into conversation with BOTH of our books in class (Gawain and Chaucer). QUOTE from each one, and find passages that help you show the poets either agreeing, disagreeing, or expanding some of these views. The poets don’t have to agree with each other, either, since you might find that the Gawain poet is more (or less) enlightened than Chaucer. Also remember that the characters in the stories are not the poets, so how do you read the distinction? Does Chaucer agree with the Wife of Bath? Does the Gawain poet sympathize with Gawain’s diatribe in Fit IV?

Here is the Citation for the quotes in the handout:

Women Defamed and Women Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts. Ed. Alcun Blamires. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

 Page Limit: Optional, but at least more than 2 pages double spaced

Citation: Be sure to cite all quotations in your paper following MLA format

Due: Friday, February 21^st by 5pm [no class that day]