barthes

The literary work : Geoffrey Chaucer’s tale The Wife of Bath’s Tale
The method : The symbolic code by Roland Barthes.

Symbolic code is linked to theme (of literary a work). It consists of pairings related to the most basic binary polarities-male and female, night and day, and so on. These are the structures of contrasted elements which structuralists see as fundamental to the human way of perceiving and organizing reality.

In this analysis, we try to look at the contrasts found in the text and relate them to the broader system.