IN THE BOOK OF THE DUCHESS, White is silent, passive, and vulnerable to interpretation. She is dead. During most of the Clerk's Tale, Griselda cannot speak for herself because of her low social status and her acceptance of Walter's terms for their marriage. Yet through interpretation, she subtly shapes Walter, just as he shapes her. Both women, I have argued, suggest models for the text's interaction with authors and audiences.

In the guise of the Wife of Bath, the text talks louder and longer than it does as White or Griselda. Her subject, ironically, is its silence – its passivity and openness to meanings imposed by readers. The Wife understands what Walter does not: Interpretation shapes meaning, on the literary level, and identity, on the interpersonal level. She explores both of these processes in her discussion of antifeminist texts. On the one hand, these texts distort their sources, and she reveals their self-interestedness. On the other hand, she claims that she has been influenced by being “read” according to these texts; who she is depends upon how she has been seen.

The Wife's insight into these matters, however, does not preclude self-interested blindness about others. She is much more willing to see herself as the shaped text than as the shaping reader, and she uses her sophisticated but partial hermeneutics to escape responsibility for exactly what she claims to want: self-determination.