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| Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence. By Marilynn Desmond. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii + 206. 37 illustrations. $20.95. Marilynn Desmond's Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence opens with an unlikely discussion of sadomasochism, but her real interest in this book is wife-beating. Like this opening sentence, she surprises her readers as she grounds her analysis of rhetorical traditions, erotic discourses, and Chaucerian texts, because "the scandal generated by S/M effectively obscures the everyday violences that work to organize gender and sexuality" (p. 4). Rather than make a catalogue of literary beatings and their medieval justifications, or a series of complaints about the matter, Desmond historicizes this violence to show how it is produced as the signifier of heterosexual desire in the late classical and medieval West.
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