Dark Chaucer: An Assortment ed. by Myra Seaman, Eileen Joy, and Nicola Masciandaro (review)

This book is experimental, staging different ways of responding to Chaucer. While some contributions are mini-versions of fairly traditional scholarly essays, others use rhyme, refrains, and word-association; weave together different stories; or juxtapose Chaucerian texts with modern pornography or with more canonical modern literature. Beginning with a “poetic preface” (by Gary J. Shipley) that describes each essay in a short, poetic paragraph, Dark Chaucer is an idiosyncratic series of meditations on moments or scenes in Chaucer that speak to the dark side of life. They are “essays” in the sense of essaying something, trying something out.

The assortment is connected by the theme of darkness. The book aims to move away from comic, playful aspects of Chaucer and from the idea of resolution in Chaucer’s work, and instead focuses on “small black pearls” (Joy and Masciandaro), dark moments in Chaucer’s writings. A theme that recurs over and over again is Chaucer’s interest in the liminal space between life and death: reanimated corpses; bodies that won’t die when they should; sleeping, dream-like, death-like states. Lisa Weston focuses on zombies and The Prioress’s Tale; Masciandaro on Cecilia’s three-day half-death in The Second Nun’s Tale; Ruth Evans and Myra Seaman on The Book of the Duchess and its uncanny bodies. As one might expect in a book about dark Chaucer, gender is also a recurrent theme, as authors explore some of the most disturbing female figures, abused women subjected to violence such as Constance, Virginia, Cecilia, and Dorigen. Several essays circle around art and artifice. Elaine Treharne, for instance, writes about the focus on artifice in The Physician’s Tale, connecting this to what she terms Chaucer’s “hagioclasm,” arguing that the tale challenges and breaks the genre of hagiography. Myra Seaman interestingly compares The Book of the Duchess to Sir Orfeo, analyzing how both texts interrogate the relationship between art and mortality.

The collection is dedicated to Lee Patterson, but the greatest influence on the essays as a whole is Aranye Fradenburg, whose work on psychoanalysis and sacrifice permeates many of the essays. Indeed, the fact that two such different critics both gravitate toward the darkness in Chaucer in various ways indicates the potential within this theme. Many of the essays are interested in psychoanalytical and specifically Lacanian and post-Freudian approaches, but the theoretical scope is wide. One essay (by Thomas White) focuses on manuscript layout and reading practices; another on the reception of Chaucer by African-American poets at the turn of the twentieth century (Candace Barrington). Several essays engage with ecocriticism and animal theory, and some of the most memorable insights in the collection come from these perspectives: Travis Neel and Andrew Richmond discuss the crow as a crow, rather than as a figure for the court poet; Brantley Bryant discusses the destruction of the grove in The Knight’s Tale and the horror of the light itself as an example of “dark counter-thinking” (27); J. Allan Mitchell sensitively explores the lithic imagery of The Franklin’s Tale. Often-neglected texts are brought to the fore in this collection: Leigh Harrison’s essay focuses on “The Former Age,” and fabliaux are sidelined in favor of the much less discussed tales such as The Second Nun’s Tale, The Physician’s Tale, and The Tale of Sir Thopas.

The diversity of the essays makes the book an assortment in many ways. While some essays are imbued with scholarship, others analyze texts without showing knowledge of the critical field at all. Others do not aim to be critical essays in this sense, but instead explore themes in creative ways. Lisa Schamess’s essay begins with an associative prologue inspired by Beckett; Hannah Priest takes us through different versions of the Constance story and of connected stories, focusing on the theme of retelling through cloth and tapestry, as woman...