The Book of the Duchess and the Beginnings of Chaucer's Narrative

Abstract

T H HE TRADITION connecting Book of Duchess with death of Blanche of Lancaster, begun by Chaucer and continued in later centuries, has determined most approaches to Chaucer's first narrative. Alceste's listing the Deeth of Blaunche Duchesse among author's works in Legend of Good Women and Man of Law's mentioning a youthful Ceys and Alcione as well as testimony of John Lydgate and others draw attention to historical and social contexts but without clarifying them.1 Interpretation follows in these directions by trying to reconcile poet's seemingly desultory manner with gravity of presumed occasion and to uncover thereby a principle of decorum, if not artistic unity. Yet poem's critical importance, what engages modern reader and literary historian, lies in its being a work of poetic initiation. Much as it may be elegiac and occasional, Book of Duchess stands at threshold of Chaucer's career as a narrative poet; it is at once example and paradigm-his first long poem and his first treatment of aesthetic problems of writing narrative. As such poem attempts to set out a particular mode of vision within limits imposed by topic. If its public and ceremonial purpose is to offer consolation, even consolatory entertainment, to John of Gaunt, its indwelling artistic purpose is to discover a structure for narrative poetry.2 In recent years critics have found such dual purposes common in late medieval poetry, principally through influence of rhetorical tradition on Latin and vernacular literature. Throughout his work, of course, Chaucer handles matters of artistic form and theory treated discursively in arts of poetry and commentaries.3 What occurs in Book of Duchess is a process of aesthetic definition carried on initially in narrative sections that precede dreamer's encounter with Black Knight and extended in speeches of complaint and recollection that comprise actual elegy to Blanche. Linked thematically with elegy, poet's insomnia, his reading tale of Ceyx and Alcyone, and later joining emperor's hunt for hart coevally develop poetic issues. While advancing narrative, these episodes posit an origin for literary imagination and examine