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CHAPTER 4 Sely Dido and the Chaucerian Gaze For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops or bargain with his tenants, SirJohn would sit, in broad daylight, reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming—or what strange intoxication was it that he drew from books! Life was rough, cheerless, and disappointing. A whole year of days would pass fruitlessly in dreary business, like dashes of rain on the window pane. . . . But Lydgate's poems or Chaucer's,like amirror in which figures move brightly, silently, compactly, showed him the very skies, fields, and people whom he knew, but rounded and complete. Instead of waiting listlessly for news from London orpiecing out from his mother's gossip some country tragedy of love and jealousy, here, in a few pages, the whole story was laid before him. And then as he rode or sat at table he would remember some description or saying which bore upon the present moment and fixed it, or some string of words would charm him, and putting aside the pressure of the moment, he would hasten home to sit in his chair and learn the end of the story.1 Virginia Woolf C haucer's narrators frequently exhibit an intense self-consciousness about their scribal roles; in this regard, they manifest some of the attributes evident in the scnptor-role adopted by the narrator of the Roman d'Eneas. In the dream visions especially, Chaucer's narrators meditate obsessively on the relationship between reading and writing, thereby thematizing the act ofreading. In addition, these narrators explicitly present themselves as readers of classical Latin texts, texts whose authors and titles they often name. Chaucer himself appears to have been well acquainted with poets such as Virgil and Ovid as Latin auctoies mediated by commentaries and pedagogical practices. Most likely, he would have known a commentary tradition on Virgil's Aeneid such as that of Servius, as well as the sort of Ovidian commentary on Heroides 7 that reads Dido as an exemplum of stultus amans.2 Although his pedagogical experience of Virgil's Aeneid might mirror that of the schoolboy discussed in chapter 2, his intense engagement with Ovid's texts, particularly the Heroides, throughout his poetic career appears to have been a 128 Sely Dido and the Chaucerian Gaze formative reading experience for his subject positions as a poet.3 In the dream visions, the Chaucerian narrator characteristically foregrounds the reading of classical texts as significant pre-texts for vernacular narratives. Chaucer's Dido appears exclusively in the context of the dream visions as part of the narrator's encounter with the alterity of classical texts and traditions. She is never invoked in the Troilus or the Canterbury Tales (beyond the summary of the Legends that appears in the Prologue to the Man of Law's Tale).4 Dido's presence in Chaucerian narrative appears to derive from his narrator's self-conscious contact with Virgil and Ovid. Nonetheless, Chaucer was demonstrably acquainted with the medieval Dido as she appears in vernacular texts, particularly in the Roman de la Rose and the Commedia, perhaps as well in Machaut's Jugement dou roy de Navarre or the Histoire ancienne jusqu'a Cesar.5 Chaucer was also very likely to have known the historical version of Dido's story from Boccaccio's Latin texts.6 Since Chaucer's narrators are often much less generous about citing medieval pre-texts than citing the auctores, the vernacular intertextualities of Chaucer's Dido must be seen in relation to his narrators' subject positions as readers and the tasks they explicitly undertake in narrating Dido's story. In the House of Fame 1 and the "Legend of Dido," the Chaucerian narrator in each explores the relationship between authorial positions he adopts as reader and translator, respectively, and the textualized desire he encounters in the figure of Dido. Since the "Legend of Dido" effectively revises the representation of Dido in House of Fame 1, these two texts, taken together, provide a composite portrait of Chaucer's Dido and Chaucer's responses to the interpretive difficulties she posed for the late medieval reader. House of Fame 3: "The Fame of Pius Eneas"000 In the passage from her essay "The Fastens and Chaucer," quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Virginia Woolf vividly imagines John Paston...

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