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Geoffrey Chaucer frequently displays keen interest in questions of female agency and responsibility by rendering his female characters at key moments in silences, deferred answers, absences, and unexpected submissiveness.1 Chaucer's interest in these moments is not to portray these female figures as merely passive recipients either of the forces that construct women in texts, or of our own critical constructions. Rather, at these crucial junctures where the tale requires but does not fully enable us to construct an interpretation, the poet invites us critically to examine the ideological and discursive assumptions and limitations imposed on the act of interpreting these figures in the textual traditions the poet incorporates into his works. Indeed, Chaucer's incompletely interpretable women-who often play the central, generative role in configuring the action and the very character of his poetic narratives-allow Chaucer's readers to think through the interpretive possibilities and problems that inhere in the processes by which a culture conceptualizes agency, accountability, and justice. Thereby, Chaucer, as we might expect, also broaches some of the larger possibilities and problems with the act of interpretation itself. In his more serious tales the poet frequently sets his women in urgent, dramatic predicaments in order to pose for his readers his interpretive and meta-interpretive questions. For instance, in his careful use of the public silence of Emelye-in contrast to the desires expressed in her prayer-in The Knight's Tale or in the astonishing, disturbing patience of Griselda in The Clerk's Tale-a feature the poet, almost exaggerates-Chaucer shines a bright spotlight on the potent anxiety that emerges from the tale's inquiry into what a woman can or will do, an inquiry conducted in these figures' silences or, as illustrated in Troilus and Criseyde, in their absences. Yet he explores in such situations not only the power that women wield as objects of desire, but also the kind of agency that becomes available to them through, for example, their power to defer making the choice that would fix them in the structures of accountability and, therefore, of interpretation, that typically govern such literary females-as we see in the formel's deferred response in The Parliament of Fowles or, as I have examined elsewhere, in Dorigen's deferral of submission (to death or adultery) through narrative in The Franklin's...