CHAUCER AND AESTHETICS

by David Raybin and Susanna Fein

When I say that beauty has been banished, I do not mean that beau-
tiful things have themselves been banished, for the humanities are
made up of beautiful poems, stories, paintings, sketches, sculpture,
film, essays, debates, and it is this that every day draws us to them. I
mean something much more modest: that conversation about the
beauty of these things has been banished, so that we coinhabit the
space of these objects (even putting them inside us, learning them
by heart, carrying one wedged at all times between the upper arm
and the breast, placing as many as possible into our bookbags) yet
speak about their beauty only in whispers.
Elaine Scarry1

[P]oetry, as a form of “literature,” exploits potentialities in lan-

guage, especially metaphorical potentialities, that are not exploited
by other forms of discourse. Words in poetry, in the way they are
chosen and arranged, have a wider range of possible meanings
than they have in ordinary discourse, and not in any way confined
to denotation; the language is richer, more suggestive, more elu-
sive, more open; meaning can be dwelt upon, and fresh meanings
can emerge in the process of rereading, already there but newly
discovered.
Derek Pearsall2

When as a poet in his twenties Geoffrey Chaucer composed the Book of

the Duchess, he inaugurated what we now regard as his authorial career by
declaring in his distanced narrative voice that “sorwful ymagynacioun /
Ys alway hooly in my mynde” (14–15).3 Distinct from memory (which fos-
ters history) and reason (which grounds philosophy), imagination was
for the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance the quintessential poetic
faculty. In this word one may read Chaucer as claiming for himself a mind

THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2005.

Copyright © 2005 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
226 THE CHAUCER REVIEW

so steeped in the poetic faculty that he thinks of nothing else. Alternatively,

one may read him as asserting for this faculty something so profound as
to be spiritual. Some readers, drawn to an artist who “exploits potential-
ities in language,” will see both meanings.
Regardless of one’s interpretive choice, one finds a poet whose artistry
is daringly self-aware. Early in the Book of the Duchess the narrator aligns
himself with other poets, when he turns to a book in which

were written fables

That clerkes had in olde tyme,
And other poetes, put in rime
To rede and for to be in minde.
(52–55)
And he does so at poem’s end, when he announces his intention to
record his dream in verse:

“I wol, be processe of tyme,

Fonde to put this sweven in ryme
As I kan best.”
(1331–33)
The Book of the Duchess may be seen as Chaucer’s attempt to fashion an
English poetic diction to match that of the continental writers whose ver-
nacular translations and romances he has been reading.4
The language of poetry, Pearsall contends, differs from ordinary dis-
course in that it “is richer, more suggestive, more elusive, more open.”
Such a statement challenges the claim, made by ideological critique, that
imaginative literature does not possess value distinct unto itself. It is alto-
gether fitting, in our “post”-postmodern critical climate, that the study
of aesthetics be renewed with vigor and intensity. Recent books such as
Piero Boitani’s The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (1989),
Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), George Levine’s
Aesthetics and Ideology (1994), Warren Ginsberg’s Dante’s Aesthetic of Being
(2000), John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas’s The New Aestheticism (2003),
Christopher Butler’s Pleasure and the Arts (2004), and Frank Kermode’s
Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon (2004) testify to a willingness
among critics to delineate the distinguishing characteristics of literary
language alongside matters of ethics, ideology, and social theory.5 It is
particularly appropriate to see such conversation resume in Chaucer stud-
ies because of this poet’s sustained self-representation as a writer con-
cerned with the artistic possibilities of language.
 DAVID RAYBIN AND SUSANNA FEIN 227

A short passage in the Book of the Duchess conveys Chaucer’s portrayal

of an entrenched aesthetic sensibility. The narrator has been awakened
by the “noyse and swetnesse” (297) of a multitude of small birds. The
birds’ natural noise is a sound neither harsh nor random, but rather the
lovely, pleasing “swetnesse” of a congregation of artists, each voicing its
separate part in a harmonious song:

[They] songe, everych in hys wyse,

The moste solempne servise
By noote that ever man, y trowe,
Had herd, for some of hem song lowe,
Som high, and al of oon acord.
(301–5)
Not content merely with reporting the presence of music, the narrator
analyzes it: some birds sing high, others low, all in harmony; their voices
surpass the excellence of the finest instrument or melody; no bird feigns
to sing or restrains a voice, as all seek ingenious notes. In this music’s
“acord . . . mete” (316) the narrator discerns a natural spirituality: it rep-
resents a “moste solempne servise” and “a thyng of heven” (308). Such
harmonious accord in nature reflects Albertus Magnus’s definition of a
transcendental beauty that, because it exists in form irrespective of inten-
tionality, lies outside the sphere of human influence:
it is the nature of universal beauty to demand that there be mutual
proportions among all things and their elements and principles,
and that they should be resplendent with the clarity of form.6

Hearing what is beautiful, Chaucer’s dream persona is transfixed.

Cultural relativists remind us to be as wary as were fourteenth-century
logicians of essentialist claims for a universal Platonic ideal. Still, it is hard
not to see an idealized concept of Beauty at play in the Book of the Duchess.
The narrator, represented initially on the brink of death, recovers
because White’s beauty, materially lost yet exquisitely recalled, causes him
to apprehend a being of such sublime perfection that this apprehension
may restore health. Eventually, by replicating her beauty in language, the
poet confers new life to White as an enduring icon. “Beauty,” Scarry says,
“brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs
of it, or describe it to other people.”7 Despite White’s earthly death, the
Beauty of her person shines in artistic revivification.
Such a reading is, to be sure, formalist. Recognizing the resilience of
both popular and scholarly interest in the aesthetics of artistic endeavor
in the face of antiformalist critique, Marxist critic Eagleton contends that
228 THE CHAUCER REVIEW

this tenacity derives from the vagueness with which scholars apply the ter-
minology of aesthetics:
if the aesthetic returns with such persistence, it is partly because
of a certain indeterminacy of definition which allows it to figure
in a varied span of preoccupations: freedom and legality, spon-
taneity and necessity, self-determination, autonomy, particularity
and universality, along with several others.8

Eagleton recognizes here the relevance of the concept to a wide variety

of interests and agendas such that aesthetics does not always stand alone
in literary study but is often articulated as an aesthetic of something, some
other realm of people, society, history, language, or value immanent in
a literary work. Some of the essays in this issue reflect this practice, and
their contributions to our understanding of Chaucer’s method illustrate
the usefulness of a fluid definition. Even so, one need not attribute the
resiliency of aesthetics to lexical indeterminacy. On the contrary, a per-
ceiver-based definition of work of art, such as that proposed by the behav-
iorist critic Morse Peckham, can explain the nearly universal interest in
the aesthetics of art objects without recourse to essentialism or vagary.
Peckham proposes that a “work of art is any perceptual field which an
individual uses as an occasion for playing the role of art perceiver” (68).9
This definition explains the utility of the concept art to both the pro-
ducer/artist, who creates an object so that its expression may be per-
ceived (whether by others or, in some cases, solely by the artist himself),
and the consumer/evaluator, who on recognizing the perceptual field
decides whether and in what ways to respond to the object.
The Book of the Duchess functions not only as a paean to White’s beauty—
which of course it is, and for which Chaucer may hope to gain some
reward—but also, and primarily, as a poem, an aesthetic object offered up
by its creator to the evaluation of those who encounter it. Chaucer encour-
ages his audience to recognize that they are encountering an art-object
when he enshrines his evocation of White’s beauty in a set of established
and easily recognizable forms (dream vision, elegy, consolation) borrowed
from his French contemporaries, and when he deploys linguistic cues
instantly recognizable as poetic (rhyme, vocabulary, distinctive meter). He
thus creates a narrative context that instructs his audience that they have
entered an art-space of a particular kind: an elegiac dream vision in verse.
Expecting by virtue of the context to encounter “art”—indeed, the poet’s
audience have entered that space precisely so that they may encounter
Chaucer’s art—the audience necessarily evaluates the poem’s aesthetic
success: is it beautiful or otherwise fitting? The Book of the Duchess was likely
composed for John of Gaunt to mark the installation of a monument com-
 DAVID RAYBIN AND SUSANNA FEIN 229

memorating his wife’s death.10 It is easy to imagine an original court-based

audience of multilingual nobles and colleagues who approached the
poem with a curiosity as to how Chaucer might fashion an English verse
that matched the solemnity of the occasion and the elegance of French
models. Subsequent readers have approached the poem as art for its
more-than-six-hundred-year-old history.
The Book of the Duchess represents the extant beginning of Chaucer’s
efforts to achieve aesthetic effect in narrative verse, an effort that con-
tinued to the final months of his life, culminating in the final poems of
the Canterbury Tales. The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, in which Chaucer fash-
ions poetry from the technical jargon of alchemy, figures the poet’s art
as turning gross matter into silver and gold. Such is his master’s skill, the
Yeoman claims,

That al this ground on which we been ridyng,

Til that we come to Caunterbury toun,
He koude al clene turnen up-so-doun,
And pave it al of silver and of gold.
(VIII 623–26)
If what is figured here is Chaucer’s own making of poetry, this represen-
tation of the artist as alchemist may be read as a daring expression of con-
fidence in his abilities.11
Meanwhile, commentators frequently read the Manciple’s Tale as
Chaucer’s self-conscious enactment of putting down his pen, that is, as a
farewell to poetry somewhat like Shakespeare’s gracious parting in The
Tempest.12 Whether or not Chaucer composed other poetic tales after
completing the Manciple’s Tale, its placement, affirmed in all complete
manuscripts, indicates that he chose to have it be read last of all his
poems.13 And here, notably, Chaucer returns to the avian imagery inau-
gurated in the Book of the Duchess and featured later in the House of Fame,
the Parliament of Fowls, and the opening sentence of the Canterbury Tales.
In this deployment, however, the poet abjures poetry. Figured as the
Apollonian god of music and reason, the poet breaks his bow and instru-
ments, bereaves his bird of song, abandons his muse, condemns speech,
and, returning to his own person, surrenders poetic art in favor of the
devout prose of the Parson’s Tale and the self-referential “I” of the
Retraction. Although negatively expressed, Chaucer’s evocation of the aes-
thetic is every bit as emphatic here as in the Book of the Duchess. Such pro-
nouncements frame the contours of his life in art.

In this special issue of The Chaucer Review we intend to bring the crow
back from exile, re-”blanched,” that is, to recollect what Scarry calls our
230 THE CHAUCER REVIEW

“conversation about the beauty of these things” and speak again about
the aesthetics of Chaucer’s art. The articles in this issue treat a variety of
Chaucer’s compositions, and they suggest therein both the broad sweep
of the poet’s aesthetic vision and the fluid critical environment in which
we may now renew and forge definitions of aesthetic practice.14 The first
two essays theorize Chaucer’s aesthetic as intrinsic to his cultural
moment. Warren Ginsberg contends that even as aesthetics was in the
Middle Ages “sine nomine,” that is, an unnamed discipline, aesthetic prin-
ciples held powerful sway in people’s thinking: “aesthetic receptivity was,”
as he puts it, “a general habit of mind.” Developing “a re-theorized aes-
thetic” that comes to grips with this way of thinking is not an abandon-
ment of modern historicist theory, but a crucial step toward finding a
historicism that fully appreciates cultural difference. Such an aesthetic
might “sponsor new ways of paying attention to poetics and rhetoric, new
modes of reading the verbal texture and specific use of language in a
work in conjunction with the civic and social forces that shaped its pro-
duction and conditioned its effects.”
Peggy A. Knapp reads Chaucer against the background of the charges
of “class elitism, antihistoricism, and social uselessness” that have been
directed against proponents of aesthetic theory. Acknowledging that art
is fashioned and encountered by people with culturally bound interests—
ideology is part and parcel of human thought—Knapp uses Kant to argue
that there is a space “for temporarily suspending those interests,” and
that a fully historicized understanding of Chaucer requires direct
encounter with his aesthetic. In the absence of such encounter, “one risks
sacrificing the pleasures of the sensible . . . in the hurry to judge the intel-
ligibility of the fiction’s address to its society.”
The remaining essays explore the aesthetic governing particular
Chaucerian texts. Deborah Horowitz postulates an “aesthetic of perme-
ability” operating in the Book of the Duchess. “Permeability,” as Horowitz
uses the term, refers to writing that foregrounds its fluidity and the trans-
parency of its different modes. Thus the narrative “I” of the Book of the
Duchess (the “lens” through which the poetic vision is transmitted) vari-
ously represents a knowing poet, a dreaming narrator, Ovid’s Alcyone,
Juno’s messenger, the dead king Seys, John of Gaunt, a symbolic knight
in black, the deceased White, all of these severally or in unison. This
interpenetration of reference points is replicated in Chaucer’s treatment
of his sources and in his articulation of the narrative’s self-consciously
male gaze. Constantly in flux, resistant to definitive interpretation, the
Book of the Duchess is the product of an aesthetic that defuses all efforts to
fix its endless permeability.
John M. Hill looks to a generally disregarded example of Chaucer’s
aesthetic, the articulation of intense earthly joy in the central scenes of
 DAVID RAYBIN AND SUSANNA FEIN 231

Troilus. He finds in Chaucer a theory of beauty that posits the lyrical por-
trayal of the lovers’ experience as the crux of the romance and its
humane center. Hill argues against critics who dismiss, disparage, or dis-
regard what is “special” in the couple’s joy, for it is in that worldly sensi-
bility, presented in the second half of Book III, that “Chaucer poses the
maximum of good and beauty that he can glimpse by means of an aes-
thetic seriously and ethically extended.” Theirs is a pagan love, but to
minimize the import of the lovers’ feelings because they lack Christian
faith is to overlook Chaucer’s articulation of an exquisite experience that
is thoroughly adult and wholly free of doctrinal disapprobation.
From Hill’s depiction of an intimate, “countervailing aesthetic of joy,”
we turn to Karla Taylor’s analysis of a “socio-semantic” aesthetic formed
from the public discourse of a bilingual nation. She contrasts the differ-
ing plays of language to be found in the Shipman’s Tale and the Tale of
Melibee and demonstrates that “a linguistic aesthetic need not deny his-
tory or historical particularization.” The two tales betray opposing bilin-
gual “stylistic signatures” that give “semantic aesthetic form” to the kinds
of social situations they address. In the Shipman’s Tale Chaucer’s puns
splinter the audience into groups conditioned by their linguistic facility.
In the Tale of Melibee doublets bring together a wide audience of disparate
speakers. In this recasting of linguistic usage, Chaucer “transforms the
ethical into the political” and effectively remakes civic life by “a reshaping
of civic language.”
Ann W. Astell’s concluding essay reads the sequence of the Manciple’s
Tale, the Parson’s Tale, and the Retraction as Chaucer’s assertion of an anti-
sacrificial aesthetic that defines his literary career. The Manciple’s Tale per-
forms a sacrificial scapegoating of the truth-teller crow, who, standing in
for all the quarrelsome pilgrims who have favored conflict over commu-
nity, is silenced and thrown to the Devil. By this display, the Manciple,
final representative of the antagonistic company, “would silence the
poet.” But Chaucer keeps speaking, and his “poetic staging of the mythic
rejection of truth in the Manciple’s Tale” makes possible “the equally
poetic assent to truth in the Parson’s Tale.” The Retraction that concludes
Chaucer’s life and oeuvre thus articulates an anti-Nietzschean aesthetics
that, contrary to what is implied in the dominant critiques of aesthetic
theory, asserts its author’s full acceptance of social and ethical responsi-
bility. As Astell persuasively argues, Chaucer’s is “an ethical aesthetics and
an aesthetic ethics.”
The anthropologically disposed aesthetician Ellen Dissanayake argues
for a “species-centered view of art” that recognizes that “a behavior of art
is universal and essential . . . a biologically endowed proclivity of every
human being.” Indeed, “the aesthetic is not something added to us,
learned or acquired like speaking a second language or riding a horse,
232 THE CHAUCER REVIEW

but in large measure is the way we are, Homo aestheticus, stained through
and through.”15 As we continue to negotiate aesthetic sensibilities, local
and global, in Chaucer’s writing, we may appreciate more accurately the
accomplishment that has led centuries of readers to find it so moving, so
meaningful, and so alluringly beautiful.

Eastern Illinois University

Charleston, Illinois
cfdbr@eiu.edu

Kent State University

Kent, Ohio
sfein@kent.edu

1. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, N.J., 1999), 57.
2. Derek Pearsall, “Towards a Poetic of Chaucerian Narrative,” in Drama, Narrative,
and Poetry in the Canterbury Tales, ed. Wendy Harding (Toulouse, 2003), 99–112, at 100.
3. All quotations of Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd
edn. (Boston, 1987).
4. See, for example, Elizabeth Salter: “Chaucer’s choice of English for his literary lan-
guage is . . . likely to have been inspired by a desire to emulate those famous traditions of
France, Burgundy, and Italy, where royal and ducal patronage was already encouraging
both translation of Latin works into the vernacular, and the collection of libraries strongly
vernacular in emphasis” (Fourteenth-Century English Poetry: Contexts and Readings [Oxford,
1983],122–23).
5. Piero Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature (Cambridge, Eng.,
1989); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990); George Levine, ed.,
Aesthetics and Ideology (New Brunswick, N.J., 1994); Warren Ginsberg, Dante’s Aesthetics of
Being (Ann Arbor, Mich., 2000); John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, eds., The New
Aestheticism (Manchester, 2003); Christopher Butler, Pleasure and the Arts (Oxford, 2004);
and Frank Kermode, Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon, ed. Robert Alter (Oxford,
2004) . See also Seth Lerer’s comment in “The Endurance of Formalism in Middle English
Studies,” Literature Compass 1 (2003): 1–13, at 3: “Formalist analysis in medieval literary
study needs to be reclaimed from its New Critical close reading, but it also needs to be
seen as the place where aesthetics and ideology may come together.” The article may be
accessed on-line at www.literature-compass.com.
6. Albertus Magnus, De Pulcho et Bono, in St. Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, ed.
Roberto Busa, 7 vols. (Stuttgart, 1980), 7:43–47; qtd. in Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the
Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven, Conn., 1986), 25.
7. Scarry, On Beauty, 3.
8. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 3. Jeff Dolven offers a working definition of aesthetic
criticism based on three characteristics: (1) “a concern with structure, . . . closure, or
organic form . . . how semantics and other organizing principles of language . . . relate to
one another in particular cases”; (2) “an emphasis on the affective response of readers,
their pleasures and tastes, and how the text interacts with them”; and (3) “evaluation: dis-
tinguishing successful works of art from texts that are of merely symptomatic interest”
(“Shakespeare and the New Aestheticism,” Literary Imagination 5 [2003]: 95–109, at 96).
9. Morse Peckham, Man’s Rage for Chaos: Biology, Behavior, and the Arts (New York,
1967), 68.
10. Phillipa Hardman argues that the reference to “this eight year” in line 37 of BD
reflects the completion in 1376 of a double tomb commissioned by John of Gaunt to com-
memorate Blanche of Lancaster and himself (“The Book of the Duchess as a Memorial
 DAVID RAYBIN AND SUSANNA FEIN 233

Monument,” Chaucer Review 28 (1994): 205–15, at 206–7). She acknowledges that “[t]here
is no documentation to support suggestions that the poem was formally presented or
recited to John of Gaunt on any particular occasion” (207).
11. See David Raybin, “‘And Pave It Al of Silver and of Gold’: The Human Artistry of
The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” in Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales,
ed. Susanna Greer Fein, David Raybin, and Peter C. Braeger (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1991),
189–212, at 192–93.
12. See, for example, James Dean, “Dismantling the Canterbury Book,” PMLA 100
(1985): 746–62.
13. Stephen D. Powell, “Game Over: Defragmenting the End of the Canterbury Tales,”
Chaucer Review 37 (2002): 40–58.
14. Recent meetings of the New Chaucer Society have recognized a rediscovered
interest in the “appreciation or criticism of the beautiful.” The 2000 Congress in London
featured a session organized by Warren Ginsberg on “Chaucer and the Aesthetic:
Redefinitions, Reclamations,” along with a seminar on “Chaucer and Aesthetics” organized
by Krista Sue-Lo Twu. For the 2002 Congress in Boulder, Peggy Knapp and Stephen Knight
organized a panel treating “Chaucerian Aesthetics: Theory, Practice, Pleasure.” Some of
the essays in this issue are derived from work introduced at these panels.
15. Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (Seattle, 1995),
11, xix. Dissanayake reports “three indications . . . that a species trait (like parenting, sex,
or art) has evolved. . . . The first is . . . that it ‘feels good,’ and so people are positively
inclined to doing it. The second is that people spend a great deal of time and effort doing
it. Frivolous pastimes that take energy and time from useful activity are not selected-for,
particularly in large numbers of the population, which leads to the third criterion, uni-
versality” (33).