The Disparities in Coping With Grief Between the Dreamer and the Man in Black Nivedita Nimmagadda College

Throughout The Book of the Duchess, we are urged to tackle the question of whether the Dreamer or the Man in Black is the more hopeless lover. While both the Man in Black and the Dreamer are hopeless lovers, the Man in Black is closer to acceptance than the Dreamer which makes the Dreamer the more hopeless lover of the two. At the start of the poem, the Dreamer mentions “I holde it be a sickness / That I have suffered this eight yere / And yet y bote is never the nere / For ther is phisicien but oon, / That may me hele, but that is doon / Passe we iver until efte” (36-41). Even though the Dreamer appears to emphasize his apathy, we quickly see that the sorrows of the Dreamer have manifested themselves into the physical attributes of a “hopeless lover”. The Dreamer never elaborates on his eight-year sickness and instead treats it as a tangent to the original narrative of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Approaching the root cause of the Dreamer’s melancholy seems to trigger the Dreamer’s fight or flight response as he begins to resort to storytelling and eventually, dreaming about a stranger in order to avoid talking about his true feelings.

The defense mechanism of avoiding his own sorrow is employed by the Dreamer acts as an anchor...