Originary Fantasies and Chaucer's 'Book of the Duchess'
- Author / Editor
- Margherita, Gayle.
Originary Fantasies and Chaucer's 'Book of the Duchess'
- Published
- Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, eds. Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 116-41.
- Description
- Reprinted in Gayle Margherita, The Romance of Origins Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 82-99.
- Freud's notion of fetishism informs this reading of BD, which argues that the narrator identifies with both the female Alcyone and the male Black Knight, revealing a tension between a fear of discursive impotency and the "desire to desire." Margherita reads BD as a preface to TC, wherein "Criseyde inherits the dangerous position of Lady White, becoming the focus of the narrator's--and the poet's--desire to desire.
- Alternative Title
- Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature.
- Romance of Origins:Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Book of the Duchess.
- Troilus and Criseyde.