Contemplating Finitude: Animals in The Book of the Duchess
Dr. Christopher Roman
Kent State University at Tuscarawas
In the Book of the Duchess animals usher the narrator further and further into the dream world (birds-deer-dog-deer). Animals become agents of revelation in Duchess; their power is to usher the narrator into various dreamscapes and become the pursued, revealing the nature of love and loss. When the object of the discussion between the narrator and the Black Knight is finally enunciated, the hunt ends. The narrator wakes and becomes fully human again, (i.e. cut off from the animal) in the process losing his ability to understand animals and the logic they are masters of (the dreamscape).
In this way, dream visions are a different language that the animal controls—in the dream vision, the human is more aware of the animal, more a part of their assemblage, their meaning making. The narrator (and Chaucer) attempts to make sense, order, and make legible the dream, but in the process reveals his stumblings, dead ends, and questions. As the discussion progresses the animal in its recognizable, anatomical form is erased, and it is revealed to the reader that the object of their discussion is not only the lady Whyte, but also the nature of grief and loss. As Cary Wolfe argued in a recent PMLA article, a critical animals studies influenced by Derrida “questions the structure of the ‘auto-’ (as autonomy, as agency, as authority over one’s autobiography) of humanist subjectivity by riveting our attention on the embodied finitude that we share with nonhuman animals, a finitude that it has been the business of humanism to largely disavow.”[1] The story, the agency of the narrative, is under question as we progress (we wonder: why is the narrator so thick; is it because he has no control over the dream logic?). This “embodied finitude” is also present in the hunt for the deer, however, The Book of the Duchess erases that embodied hunt in order to hunt for the abstract, the object of the discussion, the lost body.
What critical animal studies reveals, then, about The Book of the Duchess is how very necessary the animal is to that discussion of finitude. In consideration of the narrator’s confusion, his need to ask “where is she now?” (1298), we reflect on the separation of the lived body from its death. And how else for Chaucer to explore these issues than in a narrative that lacks logical sense? To think humanistically, logically, only allows us grief and only in a way that may seem appropriate, normal. However, the dreamscape reveals that this grief, this loss, like the “hert,” escapes the human. Karl Steel, writing on the “15 Days” apocalyptic tradition argues that “it is the very notion of ‘what follows death’ that distinguishes human from animal death: humans leap over death’s chasm to experience eternal terror or eventual felicity on the other side; only animals fall in.”[2] Counter to that tradition, however, Chaucer creates a situation where the human and the non-human fall in. Faced with that outcome, his outlet for despair is to call off the hunt, awake from the dream.
This paper addresses the aspect of the collection concerned with philosophical and theological implications of animal agency. In considering the death and grief that The Book of the Duchess presents to us, the animal is necessary in understanding its structure (the dream language), its subject matter (the finitude of the body), and the theological question of the afterlife (the disappearing hart, the awakening dreamer). The animal causes a reconsideration of death.
[1] Cary Wolfe, “‘Human, All Too Human’: ‘Animal Studies’ and the Humanities” PMLA 124.2 (2009): 571.
[2] Karl Steel, “Woofing and Weeping with Animals in the Last Days,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 1.1 (2010): 189.