Chaucer, the Dreamer
What is a dream? The question can be answered two ways. The first being that a dream is the subconscious stories that the brain tells itself while in REM sleep. The second being that a dream is one’s goals, his or her aspirations for his or her life. The father of modern English literature, Geoffrey Chaucer, was a dreamer, in both sense of the word. He was a man from modest upbringings who eventually lived a life with respect from the kings and courts of his time. Over the course of his life he dabbled in different occupations, finding the most recognition from his talent in writing. Through his poems it is obvious to see that Chaucer was both a dreamer in the sense that he had a lavish imagination and a dreamer of bigger and better things for his life. The aspects of Chaucer as the dreamer are found in his original pieces, the Book of the Duchess and the House of Fame.
Chaucer’s early poetry followed the Romance of the Rose and started with a dream of Chaucer’s in which he entered a world where the mythological, biblical, and historical realms all resided in one place. By going into a dream Chaucer was able to lose restraints that the ‘real’ world put on him as well as hide behind the idea that it was ‘just a dream.’ There was a freedom his poems gained because, “Objectivity has its home in the waking life. Dreams welcome unreason” (Hacking 245). His dreams allowed him to meet up with characters from mythology without being called a heretic or blasphemous in a time of strong Catholic presence in the world. He was not saying that he believed any of these characters to be alive, but rather he was just dreaming of the myths and histories of people from a long dead civilization, a civilization that was still highly revered in his time. The dream made it safe, and references to a higher God continued that idea of safety. Another way that Chaucer used the dream sequence to ‘stay safe’ was by telling the story of the death of Blanche as a dream where her real name is never used, neither is John of Gaunt’s. The knight and his lost lady are meant as symbols for the real couple, but having them as ‘just characters in a dream’ kept Chaucer somewhat safe had the poem been ill received. The dream sequence allowed Chaucer to criticize and analyze the world around him, from high ranking officials to his own rise to fame, in a manner that was less than offensive, and normal for his time. Later in his career, when he started working on the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer still kept with the idea of a tale within a tale; that is to say, it wasn’t a story about his life but rather about stories that other people told each other. The framework of literature was not as it is today, where one speaks as though what they tell of is real, but rather it was written as stories not to be believed as entirely true, though moral and social insights are to be had from hearing what was being said.
The telling of dreams was not a new fade to Chaucer’s era, but rather a common habit of mankind throughout history. Chaucer, as a writer seems to bring up a lot of classical references both from history and mythology, so it would be safe to assume that he was aware of the way that the ancient Greeks felt about dreams. Essentially, they thought that some dreams were significant and other were just silly, and the important ones were the ones in which a dreamer experienced the gods, “The significant dreams have some objective character, and help foretell the future. But the insignificant dreams mean nothing; they merely reflect personal concerns of the dreamer. In a significant dream a god, or goddess, or some other significant other, stands at the head of the dreamer, and the dream is enacted by this other, who speaks to the dreamer” (Hacking 249). This point seems to be vital to understanding Chaucer as a writer and his views on the dream sequence that he invoked, that is, that he always had at least one Greek deity, as well as referenced to God the Father, in his dream sequences, meaning that he believed them to be serious and wanted others to take them in such a way.
One of the major placed in history that holds stories of dreams is in fact the Bible, and Chaucer uses this idea to give himself and his stories credibility. His questioning of the source of dreams at the beginning of the House of Fame reminds readers of the different stories of the Bible in which dreams are used by God to transmit important messages. The most important message arguably being when Joseph is approached in his sleep and told that his bride to be is with child, but not just any child, the Holy Child. Joseph’s acceptance of the dream as being a reality, as a true message of God, saved Mary from a most certain death that should have become a woman who was pregnant before her wedding night. Chaucer uses the House of Fame to ask the hard questions and go by faith, like Joseph did, to the answers, “Chaucer's dream-tellings are full of philosophical speculation-said to be strongly influenced by Boethius-about the nature of truth and objectivity. What can one believe? The senses? Dreams? (A question posed within a dream?) Books? Revelation? Books in dreams? Written-down revelations that are dreamt? Revelations gained by reading a book in a dream?” (Hacking 250). Chaucer even has references to the idea of Joseph and dream interpretation, ideas that he borrowed from peers of his, “After learning from Machaut the trick of making extended comparisons . . . it seems that Chaucer set about with youthful unrestraint, gleefully tying together the tails of exempla, one after another. So he proceeds: The dream was so mysterious that not even Joseph nor Macrobius could have explained it . . . The husband's grief could not be alleviated by Ovid, Orpheus, Daedalus, Hypocrates, or Galen” (Harrison 435). Stories older than that though are found in the Bible, like the Book of Daniel which is almost entirely concerned with dreams (Hacking 249). Daniels stories are possibly, “derived from a much older Sumerian tradition that starts around 4200 years ago. Dreams played a central role in Sumerian civilization . . . If there is some truth in this account, then Daniel, the most dream-filled book of the Hebrew Bible, may in part be an attempt to establish authority by recalling an ancient tradition in which the place of the dream is central to its significance” (Hacking 249). If the Bible borrowed story telling to give itself authority then it only makes sense that Chaucer was borrowing the dream sequence for the same reason, he wanted respect and people to listen, something that he later would no longer need to follow when he wrote his Canterbury Tales.
It is this strong tradition of telling dreams that probably influenced Chaucer to explore expressing himself poetically through a dream sequence, “The reliance on Ovid, Guillaume de Lorris, Guillaume de Machaut, and Jean Froissart shows a reading of their poetry not simply for motifs but for a range of aesthetic possibilities. The borrowings of diction and incidents point toward Chaucer's critical understanding of his predecessors and his preconceiving their works within his own” (Edwards 190). When comparing Chaucer to his predecessors, especially the book The Romance of the Rose, it is obvious that Chaucer was borrowing much of what was written before him, but with his own personal flair that made it special and timeless. All of his poems are written following the dream sequence except for his masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, in which he took the ‘road less traveled by’ and showed his true genius and skill as an artist of words. His career started out as a dream to make a name for himself by using the dream sequence, and ended with him soaring about his contemporaries and becoming the father of the English literary tradition.
When Chaucer first started writing, the device of the dream sequence was a major poetic form and it is only natural that Chaucer started his career following it. It can only be imagined that he had big ideas for what he would write and dreams about how people would receive him. Though Chaucer did borrow his style and stories from other writers of his time at the start of his career it can only be said that as he realized his own talent he was able to become more brazen and daring, qualities that lead him to stray from the dream sequence and write the Canterbury Tales in his own unique way, finally releasing the voice that was apparent all along.
Works Cited
Edwards, Robert. "The Book of the Duchess and the Beginnings of Chaucer's Narrative." New Literary History. 13.2 (1982): 189-204.
Hacking, Ian. "Dreams in Place." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 59.3 (2001): 245-260.
Harrison, Benjamin. "Medieval Rhetoric in the Book of the Duchesse." PMLA. 49.2 (1934): 428- 442.
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