@article{article_1116651, title={Speaking of Sickness and Healing in Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess}, journal={Cankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences}, volume={16}, pages={1–14}, year={2022}, DOI={10.47777/cankujhss.1116651}, author={Reis, Huriye}, keywords={Chaucer, Book of the Duchess, dream poetry, sickness and healing, Black Death}, abstract={Chaucer’s dream poems are curative narratives which to a large extent engage with the narrator’s problems as an aspiring writer as problems to be remedied by the dream authorities so that the narrator can become a good writer. Indeed, the idea of a disease and possible ways of curing it are central to Chaucer’s first dream narrative, the Book of the Duchess. The Book of the Duchess introduces a narrator who identifies his condition as a sickness of a long time and continues with a search for curative alternatives for his sleeplesness in a story of loss and grief. The narrator’s dream narrative presents a story of the death of a beloved and grief of the surviving partner. In its engagement with sickness and frustration caused by lack of healing prospects the Book of the Duchess echoes its originary occasion, the Black Death, as it represents a persistent state of sickness similar to the one caused by the Black Death. Although the possibilities of healing are there to be considered, they are problematic and difficult to realize. This paper argues that along with its consolatory dialectics that foregrounds the curative role of the poem, the Book of the Duchess develops and centralizes a poetics of sickness that undermines the possibilities of healing in its presentation of characters as unhealthy people facing death because of an illness resistant to existing forms of treatment.}, number={1}, publisher={Cankaya University}