David Fine

“Upon His Anvelt Up and Doun”: Projecting Masculinity in the Book of the Duchess 

 The man in black’s reference to hammers and anvils welds the Book of the Duchess directly to one of its French sources, Alan de Lille’s Plaint of Nature.  This paper argues that the association of hammers and anvils with poetic creation shows sexuality itself to be constructed in and through language; poetry—rather than nature—secures stable gendered positions. Through close textual analysis, I show how thePlaint of Nature disrupts the quotidian association of sexuality with nature and moves sexuality instead to Genius’ orthographic jurisdiction. This move witnesses a radical destabilization in gender and sexuality, since sex in the Plaint of Nature is not a natural category but a linguistic one. When the Book of the Duchess references the hammers and anvils of the Plaint, it makes explicit the work poetry does in ordering desire. If the textual precedes the sexual, as it does in the Plaint of Nature, then poetry plays a definitive role in the construction of gender and sexuality.  It is for this reason that I read the Book of the Duchess’ imaginative poetic projections as engendering the dreamer’s proper masculinity.  Through the dream sequence, the narrator’s “sorwful imaginacioun” engages the right poetically projected images. He learns, through these projections, how to love “kindely.”  In both the Book of the Duchess and the Plaint of Nature, it is only in our dreams that love comes naturally; the “ageynes kynde” becomes such through the projections and pretensions of the text.    
 

David Fine received his BA from the University of Scranton, where he studied philosophy, English, and theology.  He is currently a student in the MA program at Lehigh University.  His research interests include British modernism, queer and feminist theory, and psychoanalysis.  He has projected these concerns onto medieval literature.