Illusion and Reality: Psychological Truth in Chaucer's Portrait of January

Abstract

It is a frequent error of Chaucer criticism, and by now a well-documented one, to speak of the illusory world of the Canterbury pilgrimage as if it were a part of the fourteenth-century reality. Chaucer hardly ever draws attention to the distinction between the two, and even if the reader is alert enough to remember that the tales, set as they are in the dramatic context of the pilgrimage and being often fantastic or unusual, are illusions, he is less likely to keep it in mind about the pilgrimage itself. Furthermore, Chaucer's characters and their actions, whether in the pilgrimage or in the tales, often possess a psychological reality with the power to delude the reader on an unconscious level.