Memorialization in white: Chaucerian topology and the defaute of subjectivity

Abstract

This essay argues that the Middle English defaute, signifying both lack and loss, characterizes the work of mourning in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess. Crucial to memorialization are the interplays between the poem’s articulations of toponyms and its figurations of ‘White’ as simultaneously a deceased body of feminine beauty and a virtual map of courtliness. For the survivor, recollection and writing are acts of consolation through the non-linear and non-geometric topology of time and space.