Re-Telling Chaucer in Zadie Smith’s Wife of Willesden

Abstract

This paper studies the co-articulation of the transhistorical issues of gender, race, and sex in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale and Zadie Smith’s debut play, The Wife of Willesden. It argues that despite an over 600-year gap, the medieval text and its recent adaptation invoke similar forms of sexual assault and feminine abuse while undermining analogous abstractions and ideological conjectures of anti- feminism: Jamaican-born Londoner Alvita and her medieval foil Alisoun of Bath uncover the ingrained myths of Western phallocentrism and wittily discredit its claims. This paper also examines Smith’s generic and cultural remodelling of the source text and the linguistic and aesthetic interventions she uses to shift a canonical medieval all-white text to a contemporary globalized and transnational London.