“The Loathly Lady,” or what do women want most?

Wendy Steiner, Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, created a comic opera called The Loathly Lady in an effort to “[step] out of the university into the worlds of politics and the arts.” The plot is based on Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” with bits of allusions to Jane Austen, Sigmund Freud, and Virginia Woolf just to name a few. A 7-minute pilot animation is available to watch on her homepage, and the detailed production notes can be found in her article published in Profession (2008). The animation in itself could be a nice introduction to Chaucer’s work for students in class. (It takes a while, about 5 minutes, to download the animation, but it is worth waiting.)