“My First Matere I Wil Yow Telle”: Visual Impact in the Book of the Duchess

Abstract

B eginning with a broken metamorphosis, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess attempts to resolve the scandal of gender’s visuality through its relational construction of a memorial poetics. In the Ovidian story, metamorphosis saves Alcyone from suicide; this transformation revives her and reifies her husband, changing both into sea birds. 1 Chaucer’s rendition sees Alcyone dead within three days of the return of her husband’s body. Mortality, along with its ultimate proof, death, is more visible in Chaucer’s poem than in his sources. 2 Chaucer’s treatment of the Ceyx and Alcyone narrative thus reveals a suspicion of superficial visions that is relevant to the larger composition to which it belongs. This account, like the Black and White story it presages, is a tangible arrangement of differences that are narrative, visual, and topographic. 3 Because gender difference is staked on degrees of visual distance in the Book of the Duchess , this chapter addresses the spatial arrangement of perspective across its aesthetic, religious, scientific, and philosophical contexts. The process of spatial arrangement is more relational than linear in the poem itself, so the argument of this chapter will follow the poem’s meandering path in order to address the artistic, religious, and intellectual controversies that Chaucer finesses through his creation of a powerful feminine image. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.