Making Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess": Textuality and Reception by Jamie C. Fumo (review)

This is the first comprehensive study of Chaucer's first major work, The Book of the Duchess. Until now, the poem has been the subject of only one major scholarly study, James Wimsatt's 1968 Chaucer and the French Love Poets: The Literary Background of the "Book of the Duchess," which focuses on its literary sources. The Book of the Duchess may be the least examined of Chaucer's dream visions because of its roots in submission and service, both personal and literary. Not only is this narrative dream vision heavily invested in its French sources, it is also rooted in historical events and figures, with the Man in Black, whom the melancholy dreamer encounters after falling asleep over a volume of Ovid, identified as John of Gaunt, and the young wife that he mourns Blanche of Lancaster, who died of the plague in 1368. The poem illustrates Chaucer and his wife, Philippa's, deep personal investment in and service to this branch of the royal family.

Jamie C. Fumo's project here is to take into account not only the literary sources of The Book of the Duchess but also its reception and dissemination, including its place in current Chaucer studies. Making Chaucer's "Book of the Duchess" includes chapters on critical trends in the interpretation of the poem, especially in relation to the production of the text as a book (putting the "book" back into The Book of the Duchess). The "Making" in the title thus refers to Chaucer's own, active and self-conscious "making" of the book, as well as its ongoing construction as a literary artifact. Fumo makes The Book of the Duchess relevant to twenty-first-century studies by highlighting its investments in active processes of reading and rereading, interpretation and reinterpretation, multilingual and polyglot cultures, and the fluidity of the self and of constructions of identity and reality.

Chapter 1 provides a valuable overview of scholarly discussions of the work, illustrating how scholars "made" The Book of the Duchess. It ranges from the dismissive responses by early Chaucerians such as J. M. Manly, who scoffed at its "thin prettiness," reflecting the prevailing Victorian opinion of the text as marginal and derivative, to George Lyman Kittredge's acknowledgment of the poem's elegiac power, and twentieth-century scholars' emphasis on its originary status, in terms of its expression of authorial identity and English literature coming into its own as a literary language. This chapter includes discussions of dating and the poem's historical occasion, the process of composition and evidence of authorial revision, and the poem's generic investments in elegy, the French dit amoreux, and the dream vision.

Chapter 2 pursues the subject of scholarly discussion of the poem by looking closely at the key interpretative issues of concern in contemporary critical discussion of the poem: miscommunication, consolation and Boethianism, gender and grief, illness narratives, and interlingualism. These interpretative issues all resonate with broader critical issues in the field of literary studies. The miscommunication between the Dreamer and the Man in Black, for example, represents a drama of thwarted communication and misinterpretation that speaks to the broader theoretical issues raised by deconstruction. The discourses of insomnia, fainting, and melancholy, not to mention the devastation wrought by the Black Death, speak similarly to current critical interests in the body, illness, and medicine. The question of the poem's relationship to its French sources is especially pertinent to theoretical topics of intertextuality, translation, and cultural hybridity.

While the previous two chapters are admirable in their ability to synthesize broad critical trends and histories, Chapter 3 provides, instead, an original and exciting thesis about the text's inscription of its own textuality through Chaucer's vocabulary of "making" and the "book," and self-consciousness about reading and writing. Chaucer's representation of acts of writing in The Book of the Duchess links the volume of Ovid that Chaucer as narrator...