Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction A Light Thrown upon Darkness: Writing about Medieval British Sexuality
- 1 ‘Open manslaughter and bold bawdry’: Male Sexuality as a Cause of Disruption in Malory's Morte Darthur
- 2 Erotic (Subject) Positions in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale
- 3 Enter the Bedroom: Managing Space for the Erotic in Middle English Romance
- 4 ‘Naked as a nedyll’: The Eroticism of Malory's Elaine
- 5 ‘How love and I togedre met’: Gower, Amans and the Lessons of Venus in the Confessio Amantis
- 6 ‘Bogeysliche as a boye’: Performing Sexuality in William of Palerne
- 7 Fairy Lovers: Sexuality, Order and Narrative in Medieval Romance
- 8 Text as Stone: Desire, Sex, and the Figurative Hermaphrodite in the Ordinal and Compound of Alchemy
- 9 Animality, Sexuality and the Abject in Three of Dunbar's Satirical Poems
- 10 The Awful Passion of Pandarus
- 11 Invisible Woman: Rape as a Chivalric Necessity in Medieval Romance
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
10 - The Awful Passion of Pandarus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction A Light Thrown upon Darkness: Writing about Medieval British Sexuality
- 1 ‘Open manslaughter and bold bawdry’: Male Sexuality as a Cause of Disruption in Malory's Morte Darthur
- 2 Erotic (Subject) Positions in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale
- 3 Enter the Bedroom: Managing Space for the Erotic in Middle English Romance
- 4 ‘Naked as a nedyll’: The Eroticism of Malory's Elaine
- 5 ‘How love and I togedre met’: Gower, Amans and the Lessons of Venus in the Confessio Amantis
- 6 ‘Bogeysliche as a boye’: Performing Sexuality in William of Palerne
- 7 Fairy Lovers: Sexuality, Order and Narrative in Medieval Romance
- 8 Text as Stone: Desire, Sex, and the Figurative Hermaphrodite in the Ordinal and Compound of Alchemy
- 9 Animality, Sexuality and the Abject in Three of Dunbar's Satirical Poems
- 10 The Awful Passion of Pandarus
- 11 Invisible Woman: Rape as a Chivalric Necessity in Medieval Romance
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
There was a time when all good and alert critics, according to E. Talbot Donaldson, were supposed to be in love with the heroine of Troilus and Criseyde. Gretchen Mieszkowski, writing on Donaldson's important and compelling criticism, addresses this oddity:
Is Donaldson's criticism dated? Surely some of it is. When he writes in Chaucer's Poetry that Criseyde ‘has almost all the qualities that men might hope to encounter in their first loves’, I, for one, hear the white-picket-fences of the 1950s translated into a critical position. This is the Donaldson who told graduate students that no woman could understand Troilus and Criseyde because the experience of the poem required falling in love with Criseyde.
Leaving aside Donaldson's apparent dismissal of same-sex attraction, further leaving aside the privilege on display, try replacing ‘falling in love’ with lust, ‘their first loves’ with the first girl who lets them get to fourth base. At that point, we might be nearer to an understanding of Pandarus than most criticism has previously allowed: for the possessiveness of Donaldson is a milder, partly because it is extra-diegetic, form of the possessiveness of Pandarus. Donaldson argues that the reader must ‘skate over’ the scene in which Pandarus visits Criseyde in bed, the morning after she first sleeps with Troilus, otherwise said reader will ‘end up in some very cold, very dark water’.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain , pp. 147 - 160Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014