| 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. Chaucer's allusion to the anti-sodomitical dream vision gives further evidence to the suspicion, postulated by Steven Kruger, that the Book of the Duchess gives us a vision of disordered desire and unstable gender identification. Chaucer's reference to Alan not only troubles gender, however; it also reveals, I will suggest, language's radical failure to mean resolutely. Language proves just as indeterminate and non-procreative as sex. As such, this paper argues that the hammer-and-anvil metaphor transfers deviance from non-procreative sexuality to linguistics. On my reading, textual representations of medieval sexual practice do not unfailingly serve repressive theological discourses of cloister and confessional; rather, it becomes apparent that, within medieval thinking, language is structured like a sex act. The medieval subject fails to reproduce seamlessly the Word in words: the speaking self is thereby always-already unnatural. Sexual norms, then, become a symptom of humankind's alienation from God and the natural order. The "contra naturam" thus facilitates Alan's and Chaucer's larger meditation on the fallibility of poetics and the nature of medieval subjectivity. An examination of affect becomes here central, because the failure of sex and text provokes embodied anxieties. In this way, my argument enters into current discussions of acute interest to feminist and queer theories of emotion. In the end, the hammer and anvil prove the radical impossibility of purely procreative sex and text. |
