Literal and Figurative in The Book of the Duchess

Literal and Figurative in The Book ofthe Duchess A. C. Spearing Cambridge University In my book Md,evalD,eam·Poetry,' I wamnually conmn,d with dreams and poems considered as forms of fiction and with the dream poem considered as an attempt to make a place for fiction in the medieval world. That attempt was necessary because, in medieval thought, fiction tended to collapse into feigning, stories to be reduced to lies. The Book ofthe Duchess was Chaucer's earliest attempt to use the ambiguous status of the dream, as irresponsible fantasy and as vision of truth, as a means of defending poetic fiction; and, if the idea had occurred to me in time, I think I would have arguedin my book that there the dream incorporated in the Ovidian narrative that precedes Chaucer's dream offers a striking paradigm for the use Chaucer himself was later to make of dreams. Juno orders Morpheus to send Alcyone a dream about her husband. The dream has its origins in the darkness and silence of the Cave of Sleep; it rises, as we would say, from the unconscious mind. It is only a fiction: Alcyone seems to see her husband, but Chaucer makes it as clear as Ovid did that she really sees a "dreynte body" (ED 195),2 a corpse animated by art. And yet what the dream image tells her is true; the dream is a fiction which nevertheless reveals the truth, and in this way it offers a model for the general defense of fiction as Chaucer was to undertake it in this and other dream poems. But there is another way of thinking about poetry which is going to concern me today, and which seems to have been commoner in the Middle Ages. This is to see poetry not as fiction but as eloquence or figurative discourse, to define it, that is, as a form of language marked by certain features of style. This conception of poetry has an equally distinguished ancestry, in rhetorical treatises, and in the Middle Ages it is embodied in 1 Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 1976. 2 QuotationsfromChaucerarefromF. N. Robinson, ed., The Works ofGeoffrey Chaucer, 2d ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1957). 165 RECONSTRUCTING CHAUCER many of the artes poeticae, which are interested not in the relation of poetry to truth but in its existence as a texture oftropes and figures.(Of course, these two conceptions of poetry, as fiction and as figurative dis­ course, are not entirely separate. One large class of figures is that repre­ sented by metaphor; extended metaphor is allegory, and allegory can be regarded as a form of fiction. It will be recalled that the defense offiction offered by Petrarch in his coronation oration and by Boccaccio in his De genea!ogia is precisely that it is allegorical.) Fifty years ago Benjamin Harrison showed what a substantial overlap there was between the precepts of the artespoeticae and the practice of the courtly vernacular poetry that provided the sources and models for The Book ofthe Duchess.3 It should be added that within the system of courtly assumptions that formed the framework of Chaucer's earliest poetry there was the closest possible con­ nection between love, nobility of birth, and poetic eloquence. It was taken for granted that the subject matter of poetry was love; that love poetry could be written only out of "sentement" or "felynge," the personal experience oflove; and that such experience was attainable only by those of gentle birth. Chaucer's Squire, as seen by the Franklin, is the ideal embodiment of this connection: he isgenttJby birth andbehavior, and, as the Franklin puts it(F 676-78): So feelyngly thou spekest, sire, I allow the! As to my doom, ther is noon that is heere Of eloquence that shal be thy peere.... And yet, if such poetry was to be truly eloquent, it would be governed by a paradox: it would be a way of expressing the "sentement" which was its source, but also a way of not expressing it. The "sentement," the love experience, resists expression. As the Franklin says about Aurelius, the Squire's counterpart in his own tale, he had loved Dorigen for...