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8701690
Hewitt, Kathleen Maida
CHAUCER’S LITERARY DREAMS: ALLEGORIES OF ORIGIN
University of California, Davis Ph.D. 1986
University
Microfilms
International
300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106
Copyright 1986
by
Hewitt, Kathleen Maida
All Rights Reserved
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Chaucer's Literary Dreams*
Allegories of Origin
By
KATHLEEN MAIDA HEWITT
A.B. (Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts) 1968
M.A, (University of California, Davis) 1980
DISSERTATION
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
in
English
in the
GRADUATE DIVISION
of the
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
DAVIS
Approved*
G
Committee in Charge
1986
1
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Copyright by
KATHLEEN MAIDA HEWITT
1986
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PREFACE
General studies of Chaucer's early dream-poems— the
Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, and the Parliament of
Fowls— have traditionally combined close textual analysis
with careful reference to the poems' literary-historical
background and source materials. One problem with this com
bined approach is that sometimes basic critical assumptions
about the process of poetic influence remain unquestioned,
and as a result interpretations emerge that lack a
thoroughly examined critical base. In this dissertation,
by separating a purely textual, ahistorical reading of each
poem from a reading of the poem as the product of its sources,
I attempt to demonstrate that, because these separate an
alyses corroborate each other's findings, my interpretations
are both critically and historically sound.
In the first, introductory chapter to the dissertation,
I set forth the theoretical basis of my reading of these poems
as allegories of poetic origin. I contend that Chaucer's
early dream-poems may be read as iritegumental allegories in
the tradition of the Chartrian poets of twelfth-century
France. In support of this contention, I turn to several
twentieth-century philosophical and literary-critical systems
that provide instructive analogues to the Chartrian schema of
cosmic correspondences between the registers of nature, man,
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and poetry.
Of course, these contemporary theories discard or
deconstruct the notion of a transcendental source and
guarantor of meaning (that is, "God" for the Middle Ages)
which is as central to the order of the Chartrian Platonic
cosmos as it is to the more general medieval world view. As
a result, the speculations of modern theory on questions of
poetic origin lack the final closure that the Chartrian poets
find in their allegorical cosmos. Modern theory alone there
fore is not a sufficient analytical tool in dealing with
Chaucer's early dream-poems. Only the questions these poems
ask are "modern"; their answers are not.
In each of these poems, the mirroring structure of the
Chartrian poetical cosmos serves as a literary-philosophical
background to an examination of the processes of poetic
genesis. But at the same time, Chaucer's early poems rely
upon the closure of the Chartrian cosmos, its ground in a
Logos that exists outside the realms of time and change, to
correct or gloss the metaphysically unsettling direction that
the narrator's investigations take in each work— away from
unity and toward multiplicity as the source of poetry. By
using allied modern critical insights in analysing these
poems, while still maintaining a sense of the poems’ literary
and historical integrity, I aim in this dissertation both to
illuminate critical issues in Chaucer's texts and to estab
lish an accessible and secure theoretical foundation for my
own interpretive work.
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I would like to thank the members of my dissertation
committee, Marijane Osborn, Winfried Schleiner, and Thomas
A. Hanzo, for their valuable comments on and criticisms of
my dissertation project. I would also like to thank Philip
W. Damon of the University of California, Berkeley, for
leading a seminar that encouraged me to think critically
about allegory. I am grateful to W. Muller of Johannes
Gutenberg-Universitat Mainz for generously reading the draft
of a part of the manuscript.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
PREFACE
CHAPTER
I. Dreams of Interpretation ................... 1
II. Allegory of Loss: The Book of the Duchess . . 25
III. Unfinished Allegory: The House of Fame . . . 72
IV. Allegory and Difference:
The Parliament of Fowls ............ 139
V. Allegories of O r igin ..................... 18^
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................... 199
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