Seeing through the Veil: Optical Theory and Medieval Allegory by Suzanne Conklin Akbari

Author:Suzanne Conklin Akbari [Akbari, Suzanne Conklin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SCI075000, LIT011000
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2004-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

CHAUCER’S DREAM VISIONS

In 1981 David Aers concluded an article with a footnote appealing for greater attention to the philosophical milieu which undoubtedly, if only indirectly, informed Chaucer’s writings.1 Since then, several attempts have been made to answer his challenge, most notably by Kathryn Lynch.2 Recent interpretations of Chaucer’s writings have even begun to take into account not only the significance of contemporary changes in philosophical thought but also writings on faculty psychology and perception current in the fourteenth century. Because many of these interpretations centre on a single work by Chaucer, it is possible to come away from them with the impression that his use of faculty psychology appears in essentially the same form throughout his works.3 Even those studies that consider several of Chaucer’s works tend to assume that his presentation of vision and knowledge remains static.4 I would argue instead that there is a distinct progression in Chaucer’s use of faculty psychology, particularly in his use of vision as a metaphor for knowing.5 In several of his early works, especially the Book of the Duchess and the life of St Cecilia which formed the basis of the Second Nun’s Tale (and, of course, Boece), Chaucer represents vision as the highest of the senses, one which accurately conveys reality, seamlessly mediating between the seer and the object. In these works, Chaucer follows the Platonic extramission theory of vision, where the eye emits a fiery beam by means of which the soul knows the object. Thus Blanche the Duchess, for example, both sees by means of light and gives off light: she sees clearly, and she radiates clarity upon those who look at her.

In his subsequent allegories, however, the Parlement of Fowls and the House of Fame, Chaucer abandons vision as a potential mediator between subject and object, and instead turns to the role of hearing. This shift is, without a doubt, related to Chaucer’s movement away from French poetic models after he gained access to the Italian poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio during the late 1370s. The conventions of idealized beauty so central to the Book of the Duchess came to be subordinated to a more complex exploration of how knowledge is mediated through the other senses and, especially, through language. While in the Book of the Duchess Chaucer uses the Platonic extramission theory of vision found in his French poetic models, in the House of Fame he draws upon the perspectivist theory of the multiplication of species to illustrate how sound is transmitted, a theory which by the late fourteenth century could be found in a wide variety of texts. Chaucer’s increasingly sophisticated treatment of sense perception is accompanied by changes in how he depicts the process of how language signifies meaning, and results in his abandonment of the genre of allegory after his three major dream visions and – in a last nod to the power of allegory – the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, usually dated to 1386–7, shortly before he composed the Canterbury Tales.

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