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Body and Awareness as Reflected in the Wife of Bath: A Historical Study Based on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

The Wife of Bath is one of the best known and most remarkable of Chaucer's characters in the Canterbury Tales. What makes her so distinct and different from all others is not the story she retells to the audience but her awareness of her own body, as clearly manifested in the Prologue of her tale. In this article we highlight some of the aspects of this awareness in order to elicit an answer to the question in what way awareness based on bodily experience has changed over the centuries, or whether it has changed at all. First some of the Wife's characteristic ideas, attitudes and feelings will be pointed out and then illustrated with selected quotations from the text. Second we will elaborate on the main features of her body awareness as they determine her as a self-conscious agent within society and compare them to those of modern women within Western culture. In this context, concerning the matter of sexuality, we will refer to Marcuse's philosophical essay 'Eros and Civilization', based on Freud's theory.

love, sexuality, self-awareness, society, Marcuse, Freud

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