(EN)COUNTERING DEATH: DEFENSES AGAINST MORTALITY IN FIVE LATE MEDIEVAL/EARLY MODERN LITERARY TEXTS A dissertation submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Matthew Clive Horn May 2010 Dissertation written by Matthew Clive Horn B.A. Bob Jones University, 1996 M.A. Bob Jones University, 1998 PhD Kent State University, 2010 Approved by _________________________________, Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Susanna Greer Fein, Professor of English _________________________________, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Vera J. Camden, Professor of English _________________________________, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Ronald Corthell, Professor of English _________________________________, Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee David Odell-Scott, Professor of Philosophy Accepted by _________________________________, Chair, Department of English Ronald Corthell _________________________________, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences Timothy Moerland ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………iv INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………..1 CHAPTER ONE — Book of the Duchess Writing Grief and Surviving Death in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess……….20 CHAPTER TWO — Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation Imagining a Good Death: Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort and the Dynamics of the Pubic Gaze…………………………………………..51 CHAPTER THREE — Pericles, Prince of Tyre To Death and Back Again: Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Forms of Life in the Family……………………………………………………89 CHAPTER FOUR — Devotions upon Emergent Occasions John Donne, Godly Inscription, and Permanency of the Self in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.............................................................120 CHAPTER FIVE — Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding, Eternal Death, and the Assurance of the Elect Community’s Approving Gaze………………………..145 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………...172 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………...182 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To my committee, Drs Ronald Cortell, Vera Camden, and David Odell-Scott, for their good will toward this project, thanks. To my director, Dr Susanna Fein, whose tireless energies caused me to do better than I would have, many thanks. To my mother and father, and to my wife Alica and my children Chloe and Clive, whose support, laughter, and love make it all worthwhile in the end, a boundless sea of thanks. iv Introduction This study will examine the role that death itself or some figural form of death plays in the development of protagonists who meet the following three conditions: (1) they are placed in a position where they must experience a type of death; (2) they eventually move away from this close conjunction with death, returning back into a world where their main business at hand is that of living; and (3) their experience either takes place in a text of high literary quality or is eventually recorded in such a text. As these protagonists finally pull away from their experiences with death, they assume postures toward life that are informed by this event. It is possible that the subsequent posture will be one of deep confusion and existential concern. On the other hand, if the protagonists frame the experience so that it becomes a reflective exercise that teaches how to meet with death in ways that add meaning, purpose, and quality to life, then their final posture toward the experience can be a positive, profitable one. In every case that I will examine, the experience of meeting death and then of moving away from it involves an encounter with death that gives rise to a person’s attempts to counter the spectacle. It is these acts of countering that I want to examine. My guiding hypothesis is that the protagonists who successfully counter death do so by assuming a position of authority concerning the ultimate form of the encounter. In essence, they become authors of their own material representation (a book, a poem, etc.) of the event. 1 2 The framing of this material representation is guided by a certain hermeneutic that not only allows them to read the event profitably but also gives them the means and confidence to interpret and counter death in future possible meetings. This basic hypothesis is grounded in the assumption that the successful countering activity is in fact an act of primordial creativity, or a matrix of life-giving energy that brings form and order to the unformed and chaotic. By this energy, the persons who ultimately benefit from their experience are able to sustain a balance between encountering death and countering it, and when the ordeal is over, this balanced tension results in the formation or creation of a new life, or at least a new take on life. The Five Texts The literary texts I will examine are Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess (c. 1368), Thomas More’s A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation (1534), William Shakespeare’s Pericles (c. 1608), John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), and John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding (1666). Each of these books lends itself to a study on defenses against death. In Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, the narrator is so sick and under such discomfiture and malaise that he fears imminent death. To induce sleep, he reads the classical tale of Seys and Alcyone, in which Seys dies while on a voyage but appears in Alcyone’s dream as an animated corpse who informs her of his death. The story causes a deathlike sleep to come upon the narrator, and he has a dream wherein he sees himself meeting and conversing with a black knight, who is mourning the death of his own beloved. The black knight is a figure for the narrator’s own sickness, but in its 3 otherness as a figuration, this character allows the narrator to observe death from a healthy distance. The narrator awakes from this dream, feels himself to have a renewed vigor, and begins to pen the poem recounting the event. More’s A Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation was written while the author was in prison, sentenced to death. It is a fictive dialogue between a Hungarian named Vincent and his uncle Antonio concerning the spiritual art of self-comfort in spite of the imminent approach of the deadly marauding Turks, by whom Hungary is sure to be captured and pillaged, the Hungarians exiled or killed. There is enough material in Dialogue of Comfort to justify approaching the work not only as a piece showcasing psychological defenses against death (much space is given over to justifying suicide, to describing the horrors of physical pain and torture, and to making jokes and jests meant to offset the terror), but also as an autobiographical piece, in which Antonio’s figure parallels the actual More. By the end of the book, both Antonio and Vincent have talked themselves into agreeing that a physical death is nothing to be feared, especially for the Catholic faithful who can expect a rich welcome into Heaven. Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre has in it very little of the autobiographical (if any at all). Yet without doubt it has enough material to offer various ways to approach this issue of encountering and countering death. Pericles has an ability to keep death away from a body politic. He prevents Tyre, his own city, from becoming enmeshed in an unhealthy liaison with a deadly tyrant, and he saves a neighboring city from famine by sailing ships full of grain into its harbor. But when death confronts him in the apparent loss of his daughter Marina, Pericles slips into a psychological paralysis, losing his 4 speech and his will to live. Marina is, in fact, still alive. She, too, counters death, preserving herself as an individual: she escapes from an assassin, then from murderous pirates, and finally from a life of prostitution, which the play portrays as a living death. Marina counters death with dialogue, and it is with words that she finally revives Pericles from his stupor. In his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions John Donne records and interprets his recent serious sickness, a sickness he thought would end in his death. Donne’s hermeneutic is based on his idea of “the three books”: the Book of Life, wherein the names of the elect have been entered; the Book of Creation, which is a semantic field of created things that await interpretation; and the Book of the Scriptures, which provides the illuminating key by which to interpret the Book of Creation. The many typographical and bibliographical references in Devotions suggest that Donne looks at death as a sort of book in itself, and that he counters it by simply re-setting its type and re-writing its conclusion. Death is a God-ordained process for Donne. As such, every aspect and experience of a created being has meaning, even death. By writing the Devotions, Donne makes sense of the experience and shows how such an experience is profitable for a Christian. He turns what is initially a frightening, destructive experience into a productive, beneficial one that offers eternal reward instead of eternal annihilation. Finally, in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners John Bunyan assumes almost from the beginning that he is outside of God’s favor. That is, Bunyan thinks he is damned by God to suffer the torments of hell. The theology Bunyan embraces would have led him to see himself, in this condition, as being spiritually dead already, even as he lives in his 5 body. Consequently, he has to engage himself in an epic struggle to become spiritually alive. To accomplish this goal, he appropriates the life-giving power of the inspired biblical word. Throughout his narrative Bunyan fashions himself as being attacked, almost literally, by living words, words from the Scriptures that fly into his mind in order to confirm of his state of death or to bring signs of a new life forming within him. As these living words eventually bring Bunyan into a state of grace, a newfound sense of authority in words also awakens in Bunyan.