Words of the Wounded: Traumatic Grief and Narrative Therapy in Middle English Dream Visions.
- Author/Editor
- Yee, Pamela M.
- Title
- Words of the Wounded: Traumatic Grief and Narrative Therapy in Middle English Dream Visions.
- Published
- Yee, Pamela M. "Words of the Wounded: Traumatic Grief and Narrative Therapy in Middle English Dream Visions." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Rochester, 2022. Dissertation Abstracts International 84.04(E). Fully available online via https://urresearch.rochester.edu/.
- Review
- Yee's study draws on modern approaches to dealing with traumatic grief, particularly those of Judith Lewis Herman (1992) and Rita Charon (2006), using them to reconsider "the genre of three fourteenth-century Middle English dream visions, reframing them as illness narrative. Examining John Gower's "Confessio Amantis," "Pearl," and Chaucer's "Book of Duchess," it asks: What is at stake when we rethink these canonical poems as stories about health and illness?" (ix). "At stake" here is not the dream vision genre at large--where the staging of grief is neither a necessary nor intrinsic concern--but what can be learned from and about the three poems when the analytical discourse is psychological grief therapy rather than philosophical consolation or confessional absolution. Yee's approach is fruitful, yielding some broad generalizations as well as particular observations about the poems. She analyzes the protagonists of the works as patients and their interlocutors as doctors, assessing the role of narrative in treating traumatic grief, "imaginative sympathy" (ix) as a therapeutic device, and the "success or failure" (x) of the therapy depicted. A general concern is "Christian confession as a medieval model that reflects key tenets of illness narratives and modern therapy" (26), evidence for Yee that confession is "a premodern basis for talk therapy" (30), despite significant differences between the etiologies of forgiving sin and curing illness, differences which Yee attributes to underlying differences between medieval and modern understandings of cognition. More particularly, Yee's readings of the individual poems find or reveal some surprising, provocative emphases. Reading the frame of CA as Amans' "pathography" (passim), she finds Genius to be an "inattentive physician, one who is too set upon a standard course of treatment to listen to the needs of his patient," while Amans, in his responses to Genius, "shows more awareness and initiative than previous scholarship has allowed" (50). The revelation late in the CA that Amans is the elderly John Gower, Yee argues, also reveals the deeper truth that the protagonist suffers, not only from lovesickness (here a form of grief), but also from memory disruption and dissociation. At the end of the CA, Venus leads Amans to enact "an experiential pedagogy, one that is more interactive than Genius' more traditional, sermonizing didacticism" (111), allowing Amans to "face the truth of his forgotten identity" (115), experience an "inverted rebirth" (124), and ultimately, produce the pathography that Yee finds in the CA itself. The confessional/therapeutic frame of CA is Yee's primary focus, rather than individual tales, but she integrates her discussion of the Tale of Constantine and Sylvester, an examination previously published in South Atlantic Review (2015). In Yee's readings, the "Pearl"-maiden is even less successful than is Genius as a therapist; Chaucer's dreamer in BD, more successful than either. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]
- Date
- 2022
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis