Loathly Ladies’ Lessons: Negotiating Structures of Gender In “The Tale of Florent”, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” And “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle”

Gower’s “Tale of Florent”, Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” and the anonymous romance “The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle” are three late-medieval English texts that repeatedly confront their male protagonists with the problem of female desire, asking them, at each crucial stage of plot development, to acknowledge women’s sovereignty in both the senses of “autonomy” and “power”. It might seem that in so doing they express a critical view of established period ideas of appropriate gender roles. However, a closer look at the individual plot configurations in which the theme is explored in these texts shows a more complex set of attitudes at play; ultimately, they reveal the tensions among the various hierarchies of women’s (and men’s) positions which the culture sustains. At the same time, their account of a contestation of sovereignty between genders develops into a commentary on other kinds of social hierarchy, other concepts of control. Finally, the texts also negotiate the limits of the generic framework in which they operate and of the value system which it embodies.