The Poetics of Experience and Illusion: Ovidian Alter-Egos in the <i>Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale</i>

ABSTRACT This article revises current accounts of the Wife of Bath’s Ovidian genealogy. Rather than seeing her simply as a version of the Ovidian magister amoris (derived most directly from La Vieille in Le Roman de la Rose), it argues that the Wife’s persona actually combines two dialectically opposed Ovidian narrators—one originating in the Ars amatoria and the other in the Amores. These two narrators are associated with two antithetical poetics: a poetics of disillusioned “experience” on the one hand, and a poetics of romantic illusion and fantasy on the other. The article considers the Wife’s marriage to Jankyn, her choice of the romance genre, and her two fraught happy endings in these terms: as problems of readerly desire and fictive practice. It thus seeks to locate the Wife of Bath’s split Ovidian persona at the heart of metafictional conversations running through the Canterbury Tales.