The female rebellion through language: A critical discourse analysis of the wife of Bath's prologue and tale

Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales delineates every facet of medieval society, providing readers with a social, economic and political panorama of his times. The depiction of gender roles of the late 14th-century English society in the text is specifically distinguished, entwined with the social norms and expectations. Within the text, which consists of 24 tales along with the characters' prologues, men are generally associated with authority, knowledge, self-confidence and physical strength, women, by contrast, are more identified with modesty, weakness, submission and motherhood. The narrative in general terms reflects the restricted agency of women, which emerged as a defining feature in medieval times, notorious for misogyny, with the influence of Christianity. The portrait and the tale of the Wife of Bath, acknowledged as a feminist icon of literature, radically subverts the traditional gender roles, putting medieval women in a secondary position. The Wife of Bath offers a critical examination of the disparities between the sexes. She opposes medieval gender norms and patriarchal hegemony by defending women's authority in marriage and offering fresh perspectives on religious narratives from a female point of view. This unconventional and rebellious illustration of the Wife of Bath has been widely studied in a literary sense within feminist literature, but it has not been examined in a linguistic sense. This study aims to fill this huge gap by analysing The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale through critical discourse analysis (CDA). By qualitative analysis of the texts in line with CDA, the study reveals how the Wife of Bath's linguistic and rhetorical structures deconstruct the medieval gender conventions and religious sources assigning women an inferior position away from authority. As an interdisciplinary study, the thesis aims to contribute to both linguistics and literature studies by its findings on medieval gender roles as they are depicted in the language and discourse of a feminist literary icon, which also sheds light on current gender studies.