Rhetorical Ductus in Chaucerian Ekphrasis

Western University Scholarship@Western Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 4-11-2016 12:00 AM Rhetorical Ductus in Chaucerian Ekphrasis Emily Laura Pez The University of Western Ontario Supervisor Dr. Richard Moll The University of Western Ontario Graduate Program in English A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree in Doctor of Philosophy © Emily Laura Pez 2016 Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Pez, Emily Laura, "Rhetorical Ductus in Chaucerian Ekphrasis" (2016). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 3656. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/3656 This Dissertation/Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by Scholarship@Western. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Western. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Abstract My thesis investigates how the rhetorical device of ekphrasis functions in the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ekphrasis, as a detailed description of a work of visual art, figures prominently in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame, and The Knight’s Tale. Drawing upon the theories of the medieval arts of memory and particularly the work of Mary Carruthers on this subject, my thesis argues that Chaucer’s ekphrases incorporate memory techniques, which connect the ekphrases integrally to the texts in which they are found. Chaucer’s early uses of ekphrasis in The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls guide the audience’s interpretation and therefore contribute to the ductus, defined by Carruthers as the text’s “overall direction” (“Concept” 196). In the case of The House of Fame, descriptions of visual art not only guide interpretation but also alter the text’s ductus by directing the narrative through a more fully developed use of architectural memory structures. In The Knight’s Tale, Chaucer’s latest use of ekphrasis, the descriptions of the three oratories alter the text’s ductus through their participation in a narrative sequence that especially enforces mutual recollections among the parts that share the same location. Chaucer’s ekphrases also respond to medieval aesthetic ideals of variety as a source of harmony and pleasure. Chaucer’s engagement with these ideals and with Boethian links among aesthetic, social, and cosmic harmony differentiates his ekphrases from classical examples. I last consider Chaucer’s developing use of ekphrasis in relation to John Lydgate’s Temple of Glas, which has an ekphrasis that acknowledges its own debt to Chaucer. Lydgate’s integral connection of his ekphrasis to his narrative through memory techniques reveals his understanding of later developments in Chaucer’s use of ekphrasis. ii My findings advance knowledge by challenging theories of ekphrasis as a static disengagement from the world of the text and advocating its more active involvement. Keywords: Geoffrey Chaucer, ekphrasis, ductus, image, John Lydgate, aesthetic theory, and harmony. iii Acknowledgments I am very thankful to Dr. Richard Moll, my supervisor, for his unwavering dedication, his outstanding feedback, and his encouragement during the preparation of my thesis. I am also very thankful to Dr. Russell Poole, my second reader, for his initial inspiration of the project and for his continued encouragement and excellent advice. Both Richard’s and Russell’s rigorous scholarship, wisdom, and commitment to their students have been truly inspiring and invaluable to my work. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It was also supported by a Western Graduate Research Scholarship at the University of Western Ontario. I am indebted to the Western Libraries staff for their diligent help with finding all of the materials I needed to complete the project. Special thanks to my beloved family for supporting my ambitions my whole life and for enabling me to pursue them. iv Table of Contents Abstract and Keywords ii Acknowledgments iv Table of Contents v Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Ekphrasis Modelling Consolation in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess 34 Chapter 2: The Ekphrastic Pathway through Chaucer’s The Parliament of Fowls 72 Chapter 3: Ekphrastic Truths in Chaucer’s The House of Fame 110 Chapter 4: Ekphrastic Conveyance of Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale 157 Chapter 5: The Temple of Glas: Lydgate’s Ekphrastic Reaction to Chaucer 211 Conclusion 253 Works Cited 258 Vita 285 v 1 Introduction Painted walls figure prominently in three of Geoffrey Chaucer’s four dream visions and in the Knight’s Tale, the first of his Canterbury Tales. The Book of the Duchess (BD) includes a painted (and glazed) bedroom, while the Parliament of Fowls (PF), the House of Fame (HF), and the Knight’s Tale (KnT) all describe decorated temple walls. They are the four major examples of Chaucer’s use of the rhetorical device of ekphrasis, or the description of visual art in literature. Few critics have systematically discussed Chaucer’s use of ekphrasis. Many treat ekphrasis as digression that serves a decorative purpose. As the work of Mary Carruthers on medieval arts of memory shows, however, medieval ekphrasis often involved descriptions of artifacts with painted stories that engaged the audience’s memory and meditation on themes in a text. Other critics have regarded Chaucer’s use of ekphrasis simply as a continuation of classical uses of the trope, but as Carruthers has shown, medieval aesthetic ideals differed from the antique. In the Middle Ages, variety was a greater source of both pleasure and harmony than uniformity. Chaucer’s ekphrases reveal the influence of the medieval arts of memory and of medieval aesthetic ideals in their presentation of themes central to the rest of the texts in which they are embedded. To begin, I will examine a dominant critical view that ekphrasis was ornamental as opposed to functional and show that this view opposes medieval treatments of ekphrasis. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön has perpetuated modern readings of ekphrasis as decorative and non-contributory to the action of a poem (Scott 308). These readings are related to Lessing’s binaries between time and space, associated with literature and visual art, respectively (Lessing 120). Lessing reasons that because 2 language deals with actions, and actions occur consecutively, then poetry is bound to time (116), while painting, which deals with “bodies,” can only show actions and the succession of time through actions’ effects on bodies (102). Lessing generally calls poetic descriptions “tedious,” because they halt narrative when, because of the nature of language, they represent consecutively what could be seen simultaneously in a picture (126). Lessing, however, lauds Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield, as opposed to Virgil’s description of Aeneas’ shield, because Homer narrates the process of its creation and thus does not stall the narrative, while Virgil describes Aeneas’ shield in its already- completed state (126). Lessing laments that the description of Aeneas’ shield “is, in consequence, really an interpolation, solely designed to flatter the national pride of the Roman people. It is a foreign stream turned by the poet into his main river to make the latter more stirring” (128). Through the influence of Charles Sears Baldwin, Lessing’s sense of the uselessness of ekphrasis still manifests itself in modern textual criticism. Baldwin discusses ekphrasis as a source of amplification according to the style of rhetoric inherited by the Second Sophistic (17).1 Baldwin distinguishes the sophists’ use of amplification from Cicero’s and Quintilian’s uses of amplification (17); for the sophists, it was “often purely decorative” because “[i]nstead of marking a stage of progress, it often merely dwells on a picture,” as opposed to Cicero and Quintilian, who “practised [it] as a means to oral clearness” (Baldwin 17). Baldwin states that the “two essential vices” he finds with ekphrasis as a source of amplification, as a result of the Sophistic 1 The Second Sophistic of rhetoric belonged to “the renaissance of Greek ideals of art and life which begins in the second century after Christ and lasts in the West until about the middle of the fourth century” (Curtius 68). 3 influence, are that “it was extraneous” and thus did not contribute to sequential narrative and that “it habitually generalized and rapidly became conventional” (18-19). Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova (PN) (c. 1200), however, which “[a]lmost immediately . was accepted as the definitive synthesis of rhetoric and poetics, of theory and practice” (Camargo, “Tria sunt” 949), promotes different standards. Geoffrey classifies description as a technique of amplification, but he does not argue for description for the sake of length and decoration: cum sit lata, sit ipsa Laeta: pari forma speciosa sit et spatiosa. In celebri forma faciat res nubere verbis. Si cibus esse velit et plena refectio mentis, Ne sit curta nimis brevitas vel trita vetustas. (PN 555-59) (although the path of description is wide, let it also be wise, let it be both lengthy and lovely. See that the words with due ceremony are wedded to the subject. If description is to be the food and ample refreshment of the mind, avoid too curt a brevity as well as trite conventionality; Nims 35) Therefore, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, whom Baldwin associates with sophistic rhetorical influence (189),2 argues that words be carefully-considered so as to be functional and prevent conventionality.3 2 Baldwin states, “Geoffrey’s poetic . is mainly the rhetoric of dilation. The sophistic of the ancient encomium, walking the schools once more, is now called Poetria” (189). 3 Ernest Gallo states that Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria regarded neither “brevity” nor “expansion” “as an end in itself” (190).

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