Elegy in Crisis: Experimental Forms and the Influence of the Cult of the Dead in Middle-English Dream-Vision Elegies

This doctoral dissertation is a study of two late Middle-English dream-vision poems that demonstrates the utility of the generic category of elegy in reading Pearl and the Book of the Duchess. It is my argument that elegy is a form that offers a literary context to the pathological nature of grief in these poems that is otherwise illegible in their historical context. In the study, I define elegy as a mode that resists the consolation, a textual form that tends towards a completed mourning. Ultimately the thesis demonstrates that we can perceive an acute generic difference between the representations of mourning in consolation and elegy in these two poems. In the first chapter I demonstrate that the ubiquity of socio-religious forms of morally corrective mourning in the fourteenth century was conducive to the consolation form. Following on from this, I show how the period’s strong preference for a consolatory approach to mourning through a popular belief in Purgatory occasions new literary experimentations in vernacular languages that sought to subvert and redefine the consolation tradition. This experimentation in forms of textual mourning is epitomised by the elegiac qualities of Pearl and the Book of the Duchess, making them excellent subjects for the study of elegiac genre given their obvious resistance to the pervasive consolatory ideology of their time. In chapter two, I argue that Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess stands as a resistant and secularising monument to suffering that avoids Christian consolation and explores the ambivalence of mourning. In chapter three, I read the recursive poetic structure of Pearl as a similar resistance to the definitive resolutions of the consolation. I conclude the dissertation by reflecting on the similarities between these two poems in their vernacular and oneiric forms and posit the ways in which the reading of these poems as elegy sharpens our definition of the genre more generally.