designed to insult one of his fellow pilgrims, and when entire tales are designed to offend fellow pilgrims.
Verbal aggression occurs on all these levels and sometimes even crosses narrative levels when one of the pilgrim narrators makes a character say something. The Canterbury Tales have a complex structure of a frame with embedded tales, and many of the tales have further narratives embedded within them.
This paper investigates the various forms of verbal aggression in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The article concludes with the assertion that Barfoot's novel is best regarded as a feminist quest, much like Margaret Atwood's canonical novel, Surfacing. The article identifies and analyzes the many instances of subversion in the narrative, demonstrating how narrative devices such as temporal dislocation, hypodiegesis, recurrent imagery, and lexical cohesion serve to characterize the narrator's journey as a courageous quest after self-actualization. The author of the article maintains that Gaining Ground deserves much greater critical acclaim. In its depiction of a disassociated, perhaps even rebarbative female narrator, in a narrative described in one contemporary review as "an expression of selfishness in women's libration," the novel incurred, and still incurs, antipathetic responses, which, the article, argues, have tended to deflect from its undoubted stylistic merits. It initially considers some of the reasons why Joan Barfoot's Gaining Ground, published in 1978, has attracted scant academic attention, suggesting that it suffered from the feminist backlash prevalent in the late seventies in North America. This article explores, from a feminist perspective, a critically neglected work of Canadian fiction, drawing from the disciplines of narratology and literary linguistics in its argument.
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