Chaucer Dream Visions

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Dream visions ‘offer an insight into life in this world rather than information about the other world’ (A. C. Spearing)

As JoAnna Mink and Jane Ward mention in their study, Joinings and Disjoinings: The Significance of Marital Status in Literature, ‘Chaucer invites each of us to come out of our locked chambers and, through the transforming ministrations of literature, to face even the darkest truth about life.’ The experience of dreaming, then, allows the author to present ideas from his world in the medium of the dream, and, therefore, to press his thoughts on various themes and issues onto the dream-narrator. Jane Beal affirms that the ‘allegorical or abstract figures that appeared in these dream visions allowed poets to represent virtues, vices, and emotions as dramatic actors interacting within the dreamer.’ These are often portrayed through the figure of authority, introduced as a way for the dreamer to explore the topic that the author has decided to pursue. This allows the dream-guide to aid the
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The authority figures within Pearl and, to a lesser extent, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess are devices by which

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