LAUSR

ABSTRACT This article reconsiders the strategy - often seen by scholars as obtuse or subservient - of the Poet-Dreamer in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, and shows how a playful yet masterful irony which Chaucer’s Poet applies to his sources in the proem is carried over into the dream and his conversation, as the Dreamer, with the Knight. The Poet’s jocular dismissiveness towards traditional and authoritative texts serves, in the proem, to prioritize what Rita Copeland calls ‘vernacularity’ (1991: 179) and is used as an ‘agent of rhetorical invention’ (1991: 185). In the dream sequence, Chaucer brings the same irony to bear upon the discourse of the Knight. The Knight, too, begins to redefine his relation to the shaping discourses of tradition. After analysing how the langue d’amors and clichés of courtly discourse have shaped his perceptions of his dead love, he comes to realize that in order to do justice to her, he must see her clearly, for himself, and for who she was, in terms that express her individuality: he must cast off the classical-courtly norms, and his descriptions of a generic lady which characterize his discourse at the start of the dream. Critical awareness of the dulling conventionality of the langue d’amors and of tradition is a liberation, therefore – for both the Poet and for the mourning Knight. In The Book of the Duchess, the former achieves poetic ‘auctoritas’ over his material, the latter the healing that comes with self-expression.