Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of English, 2012.
This dissertation examines the narrative landscapes of Middle English
Ricardian political poetry in light of the split between creation and reception of these
literary environments. Environmental descriptions are significant and nuanced
political statements in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and William
Langland. These authors do not use environment as background or mere scenery
because perception of environment is highly political, based upon temporal and
cultural distinctions. This dissertation argues that medieval authors seek to focus
audience attention upon the figure of the sovereign via textual depictions of the realm.
Covert political criticism is activated through the latent cultural power of forests,
rivers, and agricultural spaces like fields and gardens. In contrast to these bounded
and regulated places, the wilderness serves as an a priori state of political disorder
that demonstrates, through its own fluidity and uncontrollable nature, the inherent
stability of place. The first chapter of the project argues that the forests of Chaucer’s
Prologue and Tale of the Manciple create coherence by cuing audiences to read the
story as a political critique of unruly sovereigns. The second chapter argues that
Gower’s use of the River Thames in the Ricardian Prologue of the Confessio Amantis
infuses the work with uniquely English political qualities that the Lancastrian
recensions of the poem lack. The third chapter examines the rarely-studied agrarian
dream vista in Mum and the Sothsegger, arguing that the fields which open the vision deliberately problematize a reading of the vision’s bee fable as an uncritical allegory
of good kingship. The fourth chapter discusses the wilderness of Piers Plowman,
arguing that the poem utilizes wilderness as a complex space of political disorder
which is deliberately set outside sovereign control. This space is created to be
destroyed by civilization. The inability of the wilderness to be defined and controlled
as a place generates the narrative motion which the dream vision requires to move
Will along his path of discovery. The civilized places of forest, river, and field draw
power from the wilderness, establishing the wilderness as a space perpetually beyond
sovereign control and thus deeply desirable yet always frightening.
Environment; Geoffrey Chaucer; John Gower; Landscape; Mum and the Sothsegger; William Langland; Medieval; Political; Forest; River; Agriculture; Wilderness
