Abstract
In Chap. 7 Gust presents an in-depth examination of the Chauceroticism found in Troilus and Criseyde, which is rendered through Chaucer’s suggestive use of the “cloak of language.” This complex narrative puts on microcosmic display the kaleidoscopic vision of medieval eroticism that is seen in Chaucer’s entire poetic oeuvre, and is shown to be full of pornographic possibility in several key moments—especially in the central Third Book of the poem. Gust shows that the text’s voyeuristic imaginary offers the audience a new sexual configuration that simultaneously diverges from and enhances the erotic vision of Chaucer’s fabliaux. In the evocative lovemaking of the consummation scene, Chaucer presents the reader with the ultimate example of pornographic joissance in the Middle English literary corpus.
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Notes
- 1.
George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1956), p. 109.
- 2.
These are the words of David Wallace in his introduction to the poem titled “Chaucer’s Continental Inheritance: The Early Poems and Troilus and Criseyde,” in The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed. Biotani and Mann, p. 29 [19–37].
- 3.
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 196. For Lewis, it is Chaucer’s “concreteness” in displaying this love that is most remarkable, the way in which the poet powerfully depicts “the purifying complexities of the real world” and the vivid passion of the two lovers, because “Lust is more abstract than logic” and its “ardours and dejections” are incredibly challenging to represent effectively in writing.
- 4.
See Robert Edwards, “Pandarus’s ‘Unthrift’ and the Problem of Desire in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde“Subgit to alle Poesye”: Essays in Criticism, ed. R.A. Shoaf (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), p. 85 [74–87].
- 5.
I borrow phrasing here from John Hermann, who comments that “Troilus and Criseyde offers an exploration of the pleasures of sexuality as well as a warning against its dangers. These two levels do not co-exist harmoniously, but conflict. To attempt to reduce the force of either is to reduce its poetic force. And to refuse certainty in the face of the text’s contradictions is perhaps not so much a reason for anxiety as for joy.” John Hermann, “Gesture and Seduction in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde“Subgit to alle Poesye”, ed. Shoaf, p. 160 [138–160].
- 6.
The Parson’s Tale, X.1085.
- 7.
See Larry Scanlon, “Sweet Persuasion: The Subject of Fortune in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde“Subgit to alle Poesye”, ed. Shoaf, p. 219 [211–223].
- 8.
These bracketed phrases are Braddy’s in “Chaucer—Realism or Obscenity?,” The Arlington Quarterly 2.1(1969): 133 [121–138].
- 9.
These general observations about Troilus are drawn from Barry Windeatt’s Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troius and Criseyde (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 138, 169–170.
- 10.
Donald Howard, “Literature and Sexuality: Book III of Chaucer’s Troilus,” The Massachusetts Review 8.3 (1967): 456 [442–456].
- 11.
Taylor, “Reading the Dirty Bits,” p. 282. For the sake of clarification, iconolagnia is a term typically used to designate sexual arousal from pictures or visual imagery of nudes in particular.
- 12.
Taylor, “Reading the Dirty Bits,” pp. 282–283.
- 13.
As Peter Heidtmann noted some time ago, “our interpretation of the whole of Troilus and Criseyde ultimately depends on our understanding of Chaucer’s view of love” as the poet has juxtaposed key types of love and especially shown us the “great variety in the manifestations” of earthly love. See Peter Heidtmann, “Sex and Salvation in Troilus and Criseyde,” The Chaucer Review 2.4 (1968): 246 [246–253].
- 14.
John Pitcher, Chaucer’s Feminine Subjects: Figures of Desire in the Canterbury Tales (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 4.
- 15.
Jessica Rosenfeld, “The Doubled Joys of Troilus and Criseyde,” in The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Catherine E. Légl and Stephen J. Milner (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 39, 40 [39–59].
- 16.
Jessica Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love After Aristotle (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 6, 136.
- 17.
Here, I am playing with the title of Andrew Taylor’s intriguing article, cited above.
- 18.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.1, 3, 15, 16.
- 19.
These observations are drawn from Evan Carton’s “Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus’ Bed and Chaucer’s Art,” PMLA 94.1 (1979): 53 [47–61].
- 20.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.5, 22–23, 30.
- 21.
As Davis Taylor comments, “In the Prohemium to Book III … Venus is described both as the divine force of life itself, the ‘vapour eterne’ which is normally associated with the Holy Spirit, and immediately afterwards as the sexual force behind the amorous exploits of Jove. The explicit sexuality in this second passage is clearly added by Chaucer to the original in Boccaccio, and the addition shows the energy of the Prohemium, how it brings together the spiritual and the physical under Venus.” See Davis Taylor, “The Terms of Love: A Study of Troilus’s Style,” Speculum 51.1 (1976): 78 [69–90].
- 22.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.17, 18.
- 23.
Charles A. Owen, Jr., “Mimetic Form in the Central Love Scene of Troilus and Criseyde,” Modern Philology 67.2 (1969): 125 [125–132].
- 24.
On these points, see Owen, Jr., “Mimetic Form in the Central Love Scene of Troilus and Criseyde,” pp. 127, 129, 132.
- 25.
Carolyn Dinshaw, “Reading Like a Man: The Critics, the Narrator, Troilus, and Pandarus,” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: “Subgit to alle Poesye”, ed. Shoaf, p. 58 [47–73]. This essay originally appeared in Dinshaw’s masterful study Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
- 26.
To illustrate this persistent stance of reportatio, cf. such passages as: Troilus and Criseyde 1.393–399, 2.12–19, 3.1322–1336, and 5.1786–1798.
- 27.
Cf. Laura D. Kellogg, Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s Cressida (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), p. 63. Carton adds that As the story progresses, it also becomes clear that “The narrator’s disclaimers of control and responsibility, like Pandarus’ equivalent self-extrications, are the increasingly desperate evasions of a character who recognizes his deep complicity in a series of events that features seduction and culminates in betrayal”; See Carton, “Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus’ Bed and Chaucer’s Art,” p. 49.
- 28.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1331–1332.
- 29.
Dinshaw, “Reading Like a Man,” p. 61.
- 30.
E.T. Donaldson, “Criseide and Her Narrator,” in Speaking of Chaucer (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1970), pp. 67, 68 [65–83].
- 31.
See Dinshaw, “Reading Like a Man,” p. 48.
- 32.
Dinshaw, “Reading Like a Man,” pp. 49, 54.
- 33.
Donaldson, “Four Women of Style,” pp. 53, 54, 55.
- 34.
Donaldson, “Four Women of Style,” p. 57.
- 35.
Dinshaw, “Reading Like a Man,” p. 54.
- 36.
To review my use of these terms, see the discussion of erotica and pornography in the Introduction, where I define and distinguish the two forms and emphasize that it is the author’s intent, his/her desire to give satisfaction (of whatever kind) that specifically characterizes pornography. Both forms are about love, desire, and even sex—but pornography aims to affect the reader through a realistic presentation of sexual activity that will, in turn, provide some kind of pleasure.
- 37.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.71–72.
- 38.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.82, 85–86.
- 39.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.115, 117–119.
- 40.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.151–154.
- 41.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.159–161.
- 42.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.170–172.
- 43.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.176–179.
- 44.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.186–187.
- 45.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.353–357.
- 46.
According to the MED the adjective “lusty,” on the other hand, apparently was usually used in its positive sense (meaning pleasant, enjoyable, or full of vigor), while its sexual connotations were secondary (amorous, ardent, or pleasure-loving). In the passage in question, however, “lusti” is used as a noun, meant to designate those “beloved persons” who give pleasure or consolation.
- 47.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.196, 3.202–203.
- 48.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.243–245, 249–250.
- 49.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.265–266, 282–286. In an echo of The Manciple’s Tale, Pandarus also stresses “That ‘firste vertu is to kepe tonge’” and “Have al this thyng that I have seyd in mynde,/ And kep the clos, and be now of good cheere” (3.294, 331–332).
- 50.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.274–277.
- 51.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.397–403.
- 52.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.407–413.
- 53.
Ruth Mazo Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 14, 32, 33, 44, 48, 62, 63.
- 54.
It is perhaps worth noting that the poetics of prostitution is also clearly evident in Book IV, when Calkas begins to barter for Criseyde and the men in power discuss “Th’eschaunge of hire” and commodify her in the most literal way, despite Hector’s protestations that “she nys no prisonere” and proclamation that “We usen here no wommen for to selle.” (Troilus and Criseyde, 4.160, 179, 182). Yet the fact is that Criseyde is essentially peddled like a slave—or, indeed, a whore—and the decision of parliament stands, with even Hector himself relatively powerless in the context of this decision.
- 55.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.425–427.
- 56.
Cf. Ross, Chaucer’s Bawdy, p. 158.
- 57.
The very first usage of “plesaunce” is found in the opening Proem in Book I, where the narrator uses the term not long before mentioning that he will be speaking “Of Troilus in lovynge of Criseyde” (1.55). In full, this passage offers a call for the audience to pray that God will send lovers the power to please their ladies, which will be pleasureful to the god of Love (“That God hem graunte ay good perseveraunce,/ And sende hem myght hire ladies so to plese/ That it to Love be worship and plesaunce” (1.44–46)).
- 58.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.440–441.
- 59.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.442–448.
- 60.
Katie Walter, “Books and Bodies: Ethics, Exemplarity, and the ‘Boistous’ in Medieval English Writings,” New Medieval Literatures 14 (2012): 102, 103 [95–125].
- 61.
See Gertz, “The Descriptio in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” p. 157.
- 62.
See Carton, “Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus’ Bed and Chaucer’s Art,” p. 49.
- 63.
Kellogg, Boccaccio’s and Chaucer’s Cressida, p. 75.
- 64.
I borrow from Sheila Delany here, who sees Chaucer as circumventing romance conventions “in the service of a Christian ideology which had already begun to crumble under the weight of history.” While I agree with the tenor of her position and others like it, I prefer to see Chaucer’s “subversiveness” in a different light, a perspective more open to the potential for pornographic suggestion. See Sheila Delany, “Techniques of Alienation in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde“Subgit to alle Poesye”, ed. Shoaf, p. 45 [29–46].
- 65.
See Condren, “Transcendent Metaphor or Banal Reality: Three Chaucerian Dilemmas,” p. 251.
- 66.
In reality, there is intercourse in a number of chivalric romances, but most often this sexual action is elided and not really detailed in any substantial way. Furthermore, a case could be made that in the English metrical romances, and Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, there is even less mention of intercourse than in the French tradition.
- 67.
The first quotation is taken from Sylvia Federico’s “Chaucer and the Masculinity of Historicism,” Medieval Feminist Forum 43.1 (2007): 72 [72–76]. The second reference is from J. Allan Mitchell’s “Romancing Ethics in Boethius, Chaucer, and Levinas: Fortune, Moral Luck, and Erotic Adventure,” Comparative Literature 57.2 (2005): 111 [101–116].
- 68.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.402, 419–420. It is interesting to note that the last word of this passage is used frequently throughout the poem, and during the Renaissance to “die” could connote having an orgasm. There has been some debate as to whether the same is true in Middle English, and in this case I would tend to argue against a sexualized suggestion. Ross discussed these possibilities years ago in Chaucer’s Bawdy, pp. 76–78.
- 69.
Gregory Sadlek, “Love, Labor, and Sloth in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” Chaucer Review 26.4 (1992): 351 [350–368].
- 70.
On these points see Derek Brewer, “Troilus’s ‘Gentil’ Manhood,” in Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Peter G. Beidler (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 241–243 [237–252]. I have “Americanized” the spelling of these passages.
- 71.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.167, 184–187. In this scene the poet also describes “so many a lusty knyght,/ So many a lady fressh and mayden bright” (1.165–166), using phrasing that heightens the erotics of the verse.
- 72.
To review some of the primary theories about the male gaze, as proffered by Laura Mulvey and others, see my brief discussion in Chap. 5.
- 73.
See Holly Crocker, “How the Woman Makes the Man: Chaucer’s Reciprocal Fictions in Troilus and Criseyde,” in New Perspectives on Criseyde, ed. Cindy Vitto and Marcia Smith Marzec (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2004), p. 145 [139–164].
- 74.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.101–105.
- 75.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.115, 122–123.
- 76.
See Robert S. Sturges, “The State of Exception and Sovereign Masculinity in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Men and Masculinities in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith Marzec (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2008), p. 35.
- 77.
As Sturges notes, “claims of sovereign power are truly gendered in Chaucer’s Troy” and Criseyde’s lack of social authority “can be understood in terms of a biopolitical sovereignty” since the “cultural imaginary” created for this city is typically based on the notion that “only masculinity can lay claim to real sovereignty.” See Sturges, “The State of Exception and Sovereign Masculinity in Troilus and Criseyde,” pp. 32, 36.
- 78.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.181, 182, 171–175.
- 79.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.281–287.
- 80.
Sun Hee Kim Gertz comments that “Displaying Criseyde in set pieces throughout the romance registers how fixed structures, such as the traditional descriptio, cannot contain the ambiguous, while concomitantly suggesting her metaliterary function as materia, the object of the lover’s desire as well as of the poet’s creative urge.” See Sun Hee Kim Gertz, “The Descriptio in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” Papers on Language and Literature 35.2 (1999): 150 [141–166].
- 81.
Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, p. 164.
- 82.
Kathryn Jacobs, “Mate or Mother: Positioning Criseyde among Chaucer’s Widows,” in New Perspectives on Criseyde, ed. Cindy L. Vitto and Marcia Smith Marzec (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 2004), p. 71 [59–73].
- 83.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1. 285–287.
- 84.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.288–294.
- 85.
See Robert R. Edwards, “Pandarus’s ‘Unthrift’ and the Problem of Desire in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: “Subgit to Alle Poesye”, ed. Shoaf, p. 80 [74–87].
- 86.
In Chap. 2, I have offered a brief overview of key elements of medieval optical theory as they relate to the Chaucerian works under consideration in this book. Intromission was the prevailing view of many medieval thinkers whereby vision is understood as arising from something (usually a ray) effectively entering the eye representative of the object itself (rather than “extromission,” when the eye emits a kind of ray that falls onto the visual object).
- 87.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.268–277.
- 88.
See Sturges, “Visual Pleasure and La Vita nuova: Lacan, Mulvey, and Dante,” pp. 96, 97.
- 89.
See Sturges, “Visual Pleasure and La Vita nuova: Lacan, Mulvey, and Dante,” p. 98.
- 90.
Miriam Moore, “Troilus’s Mirror: Vision and Desire in Troilus and Criseyde,” Medieval Perspectives 14 (1999): 153 [152–165]. Moore adds that in Chaucer’s rendering of this scene a specific emphasis is placed “on the eye and heart,” as the author “draws attention to the question of vision by representing the process of seeing and being seen with greater scientific detail than did Boccaccio.”
- 91.
Sarah Stanbury, The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), p. 106; and “The Lover’s Gaze in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: “Subgit to Alle Poesye”, ed. Shoaf, p. 226 [224–238]. Stanbury adds that In Book I, “Chaucer details the process by which Troilus falls in love with Criseyde in explicitly visual terms” and utilizes “a familiar conceit in medieval erotic poetry: the lover’s gaze that penetrates as an arrow or visual ray, usually through the eye, to wound the heart.” In addition, “With Troilus’s gaze Chaucer takes up the familiar trope of the lover’s gaze that pierces the eye to wound the heart but reverses it to exploit the illusion that Troilus’s gaze has agency over its object, piercing Criseyde rather than himself” (The Visual Object of Desire, p. 108; “The Lover’s Gaze,” p. 226).
- 92.
Sarah Stanbury, “The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 143 [141–158].
- 93.
These points are taking from A.C. Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love Narratives (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1993), pp. 132, 136.
- 94.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.295–298.
- 95.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.325–327.
- 96.
Cf. Moore, “Troilus’s Mirror,” p. 160.
- 97.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.362–365.
- 98.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.366, 372, 386.
- 99.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1. 442–443, 448–449. The last two lines here are separated by a stanza break.
- 100.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.958, 1042, 1043.
- 101.
See Cindy Vitto and Marcia Smith Marzec, “Criseyde as Codependent: A New Approach to an Old Enigma,” in New Perspectives on Criseyde, pp. 182, 186 [181–206].
- 102.
Gretchen Mieszkowski, “Chaucer’s Much Loved Criseyde,” The Chaucer Review 26.2 (1991): 109, 112 [109–132]. Mieszkowski also states that “The most famous medieval English heroine and the most extravagantly admired woman in all of English literature has no strength, courage, determination, or selfhood. She agrees instead of deciding, submits instead of controlling, and is so insubstantial that at times she seems to be more nearly a mirage than a person” and also adds that “She has no personal substance and no projects of her own; she never chooses and acts or sets goals and tries to reach those goals. She responds to the men around her and mirrors them, but she is not someone herself.”
- 103.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.633, 634, 637.
- 104.
Donaldson discusses this passage on pages 65–67 of “Criseide and Her Narrator” (in Speaking of Chaucer), and Sturges also comments on the eroticization of Troilus’s body in his political reading of “The State of Exception and Sovereign Masculinity in Troilus and Criseyde,” p. 37.
- 105.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.647–648.
- 106.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.649–651.
- 107.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2. 673–675, 679.
- 108.
Troilus and Criseyde, 778–779.
- 109.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2. 705–707.
- 110.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.746–749.
- 111.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.728, 750, 752, 754.
- 112.
Sarah Stanbury, “The Lover’s Gaze in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: “Subgit to Alle Poesye”, p. 234.
- 113.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.1266–1268. These lines include a stanza break.
- 114.
See Troilus and Criseyde, 2.1009–1022.
- 115.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.1256–1260.
- 116.
Sarah Stanbury, “The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 150 [141–158].
- 117.
Sarah Stanbury, “The Lover’s Gaze in Troilus and Criseyde,” in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: “Subgit to Alle Poesye”, p. 237. Stanbury also comments that Criseyde’s “position as a spectator” is “vastly more complex than the scene immediately suggests” because her gaze in this moment “participates in and is in part constructed by the gaze of a crowd that even seems masculinized by its exteriorized positioning, outdoors, jostling in the world while she looks out from a feminized interior space.”
- 118.
Holly Crocker, Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood, pp. 11, 12.
- 119.
Michael Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts of Love (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994), pp. 39, 40.
- 120.
See Jean Jost, “Intersecting the Ideal and the Real, Chivalry and Rape, Respect and Dishonor: The Problematics of Sexual Relationships in Troilus and Criseyde, Athelston, and Sir Tristrem,” in Sexuality in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Times, ed. Albrecht Classen (NY/Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 608–609 [599–632].
- 121.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1.973, 980, 994, 996.
- 122.
The various phrasings quoted in this paragraph are taken from Windeatt’s Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde, pp. 161, 170, 171.
- 123.
On these points, see Carol Heffernan, Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2009), pp. 101, 108.
- 124.
To quote Muscatine, Chaucer “expands the poem in the direction of the bourgeois tradition” by introducing a figure whose “action and colloquial idiom represent him as a paragon of practical attainments.” See additional points by Muscatine in Chaucer and the French Tradition, pp. 139, 140, 146.
- 125.
Dinshaw, “Reading Like a Man,” pp. 64–65. As Dinshaw notes, throughout the first three books of the poem, Pandarus’s self-interest and pleasure are clearly evident in his persistent references to the affair that use the first person plural possessive adjective: he gladly discusses “oure joie” and his actions, like the narrator’s act of writing, provide their own “erotic satisfactions. [They keep] him physically active, breathless, and sweaty [as he] moves back and forth between the two lovers… Both of these mediating acts, pandering and translating, are substitutes for amorous action—Pandarus and the narrator are both, by their own admission, unsuccessful in love—and both activities yield vicarious pleasures.”
- 126.
Gretchen Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 2, 4.
- 127.
Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus, p. 8.
- 128.
Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus, pp. 137, 139.
- 129.
Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus, p. 142.
- 130.
Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus, pp. 143, 146, 147.
- 131.
Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus, p. 159.
- 132.
Jean E. Jost, “Intersecting the Ideal and the Real, Chivalry and Rape, Respect and Dishonor,” pp. 611, 612. I also draw phrasing here from Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus, p. 148. Michael Modarelli hesitates to take such a harsh view of Pandarus, instead emphasizing the ambiguities of language and plot that mean that “no character can read him properly” or assuredly, because “Chaucer deliberately conceals matters of his and his characters’ ‘entente’” and, depending on the reader, the go-between’s actions have the “ability to either repel us” or draw us in. In a reading that Jost might view as an interpretive cop-out when it comes to the scene in question, Modarelli concludes that “Pandarus’s role, that is, the function he serves for each individual, comprises a range of variables. And we, the readers of the poem, connect our own socio-cultural attitudes and beliefs to the nexus, Pandarus, and let the understanding commence.” See Michael Modarelli, “Pandarus’s ‘Grete Emprise’: Narration and Subjectivity in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” English Studies 89.4 (2008): 411, 412 [403–414].
- 133.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.111–112.
- 134.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.221–222.
- 135.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.235–237.
- 136.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.247–250.
- 137.
It comes as no surprise that there are, in fact, several more lines with sexual insinuations as the conversation continues (both before and after Troilus is revealed as the man who “so loveth the” (2.319)). Pandarus takes care to assert that “trist alwey ye shal me fynde trewe” (2.306), but he also pressures Criseyde repeatedly (by saying, for example, “But if ye late hym deyen, I wol sterve” (2.323)). In addition, he stretches the truth, assuring her that Troilus’s yearnings are innocent enough (“That trewe man, that noble gentil knyght,/That naught desireth but youre frendly cheere”) while contending that he is not tricking her in any way (“think wel that this is no gaude”; Troilus and Criseyde, 2.331–332, 351.
- 138.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.352–357.
- 139.
The go-between’s insinuations are hard to miss when he concludes that “Certein, best is/ That ye hym love ayeyn for his lovynge,/ As love for love is skilful guerdonynge” and then fetishizes (her) beauty in a passage where he concludes “therfore er that age the devoure,/ Go love” (Troilus and Criseyde, 2.390–392, 395–396). Before, he also states, in essence, that he cannot force her to act on his entreaty but he does feel strongly that she must at least “make hym bettre chiere” (2.360) and should “stynte his woo” (2.383).
- 140.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.465–468, 475–476. It is not wholly clear, but the first of these passages appears to be a continuation of Criseyde’s inner thoughts before she outwardly declares her decision to her uncle.
- 141.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.477–480.
- 142.
On these points, see Knapp, “Criseyde’s Beauty: Chaucer and Aesthetics,” in New Perspectives on Criseyde, ed. Vitto and Marzec, pp. 242, 243, 245 [231–254].
- 143.
Troilus and Criseyde, 2.1131–1134.
- 144.
Laura Hodges, “Sartorial Signs in Troilus and Criseyde,” Chaucer Review 35.3 (2001): 231 [223–250].
- 145.
Due to length constraints I cannot address them in depth, but it is worth noting that the love letter written by Troilus will shortly thereafter be returned in kind by Criseyde, who is also influenced (or controlled) by the guiding light of Pandarus. On one hand, these passionate letters are reminiscent of those exchanged by Damyan and May in The Merchant’s Tale (as discussed in Chap. 4). On the other hand, the controlling spirit of Pandarus ultimately means that these erotically charged epistles offer a slightly different form of what I have previously termed the “poetics of prostitution.” The letters between the lovers heighten their desire for one other, and illustrate the poet’s careful crafting of desire itself. Hence, Criseyde blushes at the prospect of writing her response—“Therwith al rosy hewed tho wex she”—while Troilus eventually receives her epistolary response and “gan to desiren moore/ Thanne he did erst” and his hopes and yearnings increase because “Thorugh more wode or col., the more fir,/ Right so encreese hope, of what it be,/ Therwith ful ofte encresseth ek desir” (Troilus and Criseyde, 2.1198, 1332–1334, 1339–1340). In turn, due to the power of the cloak of language, it may be that these letters simultaneously tantalize the voyeuristic audience that eagerly awaits the consummation to come.
- 146.
See Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur, p. 122.
- 147.
See Stanbury, “The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde,” p. 142.
- 148.
Here, I draw on Heffernan, Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio, p. 113; and Stanbury, “The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde,” p. 142. The details in question include Troilus hiding in a closet, Criseyde’s female companions bedding down in the middle chamber, and the go-between’s secretive arrival through a conveniently placed trapdoor.
- 149.
See Stanbury, “The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde,” pp. 152. Stanbury describes Pandarus as a “Fabricator of a space centrally inhabited by women [who] in effect creates of his house a complexly articulated body.”
- 150.
Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur, pp. 126, 129. Interestingly enough, Spearing claims that Chaucer omits the notion in Boccaccio’s Filostrato that Criseida overtly makes “the Ovidian point that secrecy heightens the intensity of desire” (125). This is a debatable assertion, but if accurate it supports the idea that Chaucer is offering a different perspective on the voyeur’s gaze and, in turn, a variant view on sex, desire, and the physical spaces of the Middle English poem. For reference, in making his case regarding Chaucer’s audience, Spearing cites R.F. Green’s article “Women in Chaucer’s Audience” (from The Chaucer Review 18 (1984): 146–154), as well as Chris Given-Wilson’s The Royal Household and the King’s Affinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
- 151.
Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus, pp. 165, 166.
- 152.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.557–558, 580–581.
- 153.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.554–555, 565–567.
- 154.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.654–662.
- 155.
Of course, Pandarus has taken care to ensure that his niece will lie in her own chamber, while her female companions sleep elsewhere: the narrator notes that “whan that she was in the closet leyd,/ And alle hir wommen forth by ordinaunce/ Abedde weren,” taking respite “out of the chaumber” in a separate room (3.675, 687–689).
- 156.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.697–704.
- 157.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.708–710.
- 158.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.736–737.
- 159.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.741–742.
- 160.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.760–761, 763–765. There is a stanza break in the second passage.
- 161.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.780–781,788–789.
- 162.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.879, 893–894.
- 163.
Ross, Chaucer’s Bawdy, pp. 195–196.
- 164.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.913–915.
- 165.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.948–952.
- 166.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.970–973.
- 167.
Some influential examples of scholarship that take the “pro-sex” viewpoint include: Varda Burstyn, ed., Women Against Censorship (Vancouver: Douglas and MacIntyre, 1985); Gail Chester and Julienne Dickey, eds., Feminism and Censorship: The Current Debate (London: Prism Press, 1988); Ronald Dworkin, “Women and Pornography,” New York Review of Books, 21 October 1993; and Lori Gruen and George Panichas, eds., Sex, Morality, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1997).
- 168.
In outlining the “pro-sex” feminist counter-perspective, I am especially drawing on Julia Long’s Anti-porn: The Resurgence of Anti-Pornogrpahy Feminism (London: Zed Books, 2012), pp. 70, 81, 90, 96, 100. I also borrow from the online version of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (on “Pornography and Censorship”), as well as Carmine Sarracino and Kevin M. Scott’s The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What it Means, and Where We Go From Here (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), pp. 183, 186.
- 169.
On the subject of the Women on Top pornographic magazine, and its better-known kindred publication One for Girls, see Clarissa Smith’s study One for the Girls! The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women’s Porn (Bristol: Intellect Ltd., 2007).
- 170.
See Margaret Grebowicz, Why Internet Porn Matters (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013), p. 14.
- 171.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.978–980.
- 172.
In terms of a kind of cinematic/directorial control, there is an interesting connection to be made between this scene and the consummation of the marriage between January and May in The Merchant’s Tale. In my discussion of this scene in Chap. 5, I emphasize that the poet/narrator effectively makes us (the reader) aware of the production of the sex scene, as he draws us in and invites us to experience the disgusting action from the viewpoint of the young bride in particular.
- 173.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.988–989, 993–994.
- 174.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1084–1085.
- 175.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1090–1092.
- 176.
As Josephine Koster puts it, Criseyde has found herself “in a compromising situation: the tryst, however, is a threesome instead of a twosome. It is not just the man lying in bed with the lady reclining to take him in her arms; Pandarus injects himself into the space as well, peeking behind the covers, poking his niece, and pushing them both to declare their feelings and finally consummate their affair.” See Koster, “Privetee, Habitus, and Proximity,” p. 86.
- 177.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1137–1140.
- 178.
It is worth recalling here that, early in the poem, the tenor of Pandarus’s encouragement of Troilus quickly turns from tender care to manipulative pressuring, as he challenges Troilus to snap out of his funk by effectively questioning his manhood and awareness: “What! Slombrestow as in a litargie?/ Or artow lik an asse to the harpe,/ That hereth sown whan men the strynges plye,/ But in his mynde of that no melodie/ May sinken hym to gladen, for that he/ So dul ys of his bestialite?” See Troilus and Criseyde, 1.730–735.
- 179.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1126–1127.
- 180.
See, for example, the following essays from the recent collection Men and Masculinities in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Tison Pugh and Marcia Smith (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2008): Gretchen Mieszkowski, “Revisiting Troilus’s Faint,” pp. 43–57 and Angela Jane Weisl, “‘A Mannes Game’,” pp. 115–131.
- 181.
Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus, p. 170.
- 182.
Mieszkowski, “Chaucer’s Much Loved Criseyde,” p. 123.
- 183.
See Mieszkowski, “Chaucer’s Much Loved Criseyde,” p. 115. In response to Troilus’s behavior in this scene, Jost states that his “halting and embarrassed manner is a most effective lure—he appears non-threatening, genuine, vulnerable to her, non-aggressive”; see Jost, “Intersecting the Ideal and the Real, Chivalry and Rape, Respect and Dishonor,” p. 617.
- 184.
As I am hoping to show in regards to this climactic scene, I disagree with Mieszkowski’s view of Criseyde as weak and passive; in the text cited in the previous note, she contends that “Chaucer systematically subtracts all volition from Boccaccio’s Criseida. His new Criseyde agrees, responds, goes along, and accepts, but she plays no active part in arranging the consummation of the love affair.” In fairness, her role in “arranging the consummation” is limited and debatable—but when the time comes, she takes control and acts upon Troilus, guiding him into the wonders of sex.
- 185.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1116–1121.
- 186.
On these points, see Jean Jost, “The Performative Criseyde: Self-Conscious Dramaturgy,” in New Perspectives on Criseyde, ed. Vitto and Marzec, pp. 211, 212, 230 [207–230].
- 187.
See Mieszkowski, “Chaucer’s Much Loved Criseyde,” p. 111.
- 188.
See Carton, “Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus’ Bed and Chaucer’s Art,” p. 53.
- 189.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1124–1125.
- 190.
On these points I draw phrasing from Howard, “Literature and Sexuality: Book III of Chaucer’s Troilus,” The Massachusetts Review 8.3 (1967): 448, 449.
- 191.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1166, 1168–1169.
- 192.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1184–1187.
- 193.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1188–1190.
- 194.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1205, 1207–1208.
- 195.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1219–1221, 1224–1225.
- 196.
Carton, “Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus’s Bed and Chaucer’s Art,” p. 56.
- 197.
Cf. Owen, Jr., “Mimetic Form in the Central Love Scene of Troilus and Criseyde,” p. 126.
- 198.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1229–1253.
- 199.
Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur, pp. 132, 133,136.
- 200.
As Muscatine comments about the scene, “The poem’s stretch between the idealized and the practical in sentiment and action is drawn to its farthest limits in this sequence” as “the scene (and by and large, the poem) operates under neither the exclusive assumptions of romantic convention, nor under those of naturalism, but rather under both at once. The result, then, is a double view of the same situation.” See Chaucer and the French Tradition, p. 153.
- 201.
See Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus, p. 167.
- 202.
Rosenfeld, “The Doubled Joys of Troilus and Criseyde,” pp. 39, 40. She later adds that “when the lovers are finally joined together, the narrator asks his audience to consider erotic happiness in the terms of clerkly discourse” and also deliberately places “his words in the context of moral philosophy” (p. 135).
- 203.
John M. Hill, “The Countervailing Aesthetic of Joy in Troilus and Criseyde,” The Chaucer Review 39.3 (2005): 282 [280–297].
- 204.
Rosenfeld, “The Doubled Joys of Troilus and Criseyde,” p. 49.
- 205.
Hill, “The Countervailing Aesthetic of Joy in Troilus and Criseyde,” p. 293.
- 206.
See Mieszkowski, “Chaucer’s Much Loved Criseyde,” p. 110.
- 207.
On these points, see Amanda Hopkins, “‘Wordy vnthur wede’: Clothing, Nakedness and the Erotic in some Romances of Medieval Britain,” in The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Hopkins and James, pp. 62, 63 [53–70].
- 208.
See Hodges, “Sartorial Signs in Troilus and Criseyde,” p. 233.
- 209.
Dinshaw, “Reading Like a Man,” p. 65.
- 210.
Here I draw from Spearing, The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love Narratives, p. 133; and also Spearing, “The Medieval Poet as Voyeur,” p. 71.
- 211.
Carton, “Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus’s Bed and Chaucer’s Art,” p. 56.
- 212.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1310–1316.
- 213.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3. 1324–1336.
- 214.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1535–1547.
- 215.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1352–1353, 1359–1365.
- 216.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1673–1665. In Chaucer’s Bawdy, Ross says that the connotation of “have an orgasm” is “possible, but not at all probable” in the Troilus (p. 61).
- 217.
Troilus and Criseyde, 1678–1679, 82–84, 87–94.
- 218.
With the proliferation of sex in mind, is noteworthy that coitus is also depicted later in the poem. Specifically, Book IV eventually gives the audience (at least) one more momentary glimpse into the lovers’ ardor abed, as the poet describes the couple:Verse
Verse queynt with hope, and therwith hem bitwene Bigan for joie th’amorouse daunce; And as the briddes, whanne the sonne is shene, Deliten in hire song in leves grene, Right so the wordes that they spake yfeere Delited hem, and made hire hertes clere. (4.1429–1435)
In fact, another round of love-making appears to end the fourth book, when “after that they long ypleyned hadde,/ And ofte ykist, and streite in armes folde,/ The day gan rise, and Troilus hym cladde,/ And rewfullich his lady gan byholde” (4.1688–1691). - 219.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1557–1561.
- 220.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1565–1566. I borrow ideas here from Koster, “Privitee, Habitus, and Proximity,” p. 88.
- 221.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1569–1570.
- 222.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1571, 1574–1575.
- 223.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1576–1582.
- 224.
Carton, “Complicity and Responsibility in Pandarus’ Bed and Chaucer’s Art,” p. 57.
- 225.
Mieszkowski, Medieval Go-Betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus, p. 173.
- 226.
I draw here from Spearing’s two studies with the same title: The Medieval Poet as Voyeur: Looking and Listening in Medieval Love Narratives, p. 136 and “The Medieval Poet as Voyeur,” p. 72; I also take phrasing from Stanbury, “The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde,” pp. 155, 156, 157.
- 227.
Cf. T.A. Stroud, “The Palinode, the Narrator, and Pandarus’s Alleged Incest,” The Chaucer Review 27.1 (1992): 23 [16–30].
- 228.
Troilus and Criseyde, 3.1819–1820.
- 229.
These references to C.S. Lewis were first offered in the first paragraph of this chapter. See note 3 above.
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Gust, G.W. (2018). “Swych feste it joye was to sene”: On the Pornographic Possibilities of Troilus and Criseyde. In: Chaucerotics. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89746-2_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89746-2_7
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-319-89746-2
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