Queer Pandarus? Silence and sexual ambiguity in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

Tison Pugh. Philological Quarterly. Iowa City: Winter 2001.Vol. 80, Iss. 1;  pg. 17, 19 pgs

Abstract (Document Summary)

Pugh discusses Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde," asserting that Pandarus may be read as queer. He demonstrates that the text refuses to disallow a queer reading of the friendship between Pandarus and Troilus.

Full Text (6855   words)

Copyright University of Iowa Winter 2001

INTRODUCTION

Is Pandarus queer? From the outset of this essay, I freely admit that I have no absolutely conclusive evidence to support an argument that he is queer, if by "queer" one means "homosexual."1 In this essay, I uncover no smoking gun to convince the critic resistant to my assertion that Pandarus may be read as queer, but, nonetheless, I find sufficient moments of ambiguity in the text which allow me to feel comfortable with such a conclusion. Certainly, the friendship between Pandarus and Troilus is overtly homosocial; scholarship has yet to address, however, whether their relationship can be read as subtextually queer as well. I explore this issue here, although my objective is not to prove that Pandarus loves Troilus in a sexual manner. I will argue neither that the text presents them as lovers nor that their homosocial relationship must be read as homo-erotic. Rather, my goal is to demonstrate that the text refuses to disallow a queer reading of their friendship. In this project, I follow Allen Frantzen's lead in foregoing a move to establish sexual identities for medieval people in preference of describing "`same-sex love' and `same-sex relations' that range from sexual intercourse to expression of non-sexual affection" (1).2 Obviously, Pandarus and Troilus do not have sex, yet a great deal of male affection characterizes their intense friendship. Criticism has been remarkably silent on the sexual undertones of their friendship since Beryl Rowland's suggestion in 1969 that Pandarus represents a bisexual pimp,3 and I would like to re-examine Pandarus's character from the vantage point gained from the last thirty years of feminist and queer scholarship.

The question of whom or what Pandarus desires provides the basis of this investigation. Troilus and Criseyde does not explicitly present Pandarus and Troilus as lovers, but desire-both homosocial and queer-remains firmly in the background of their relationship. As Carolyn Dinshaw notes, "Pandarus's activity ... provides its own erotic satisfactions. It keeps him physically active, breathless, and sweaty: he leaps, he perspires, he moves back and forth between the two lovers" (Shoaf 65). A queer reading of Pandarus and Troilus's friendship offers explanatory force for Pandarus's erotic energy and the ways in which it directs the action of Chaucer's plot: his activities in some manner address his own desires, as well as Troilus's.

To unravel the queer complexities of Pandarus's desires, I first address the question of heteronormative analysis and undermine a "straight" reading of Pandarus through the destabilizing force of medieval conceptions of gender and sexuality. Following this attempt to defamiliarize Pandarus as a straight male to the reader, I probe the multiple layers of Pandarus's speeches and silences which make possible a queer reading of the character. Reading both what Pandarus says and what he doesn't say, we see that Pandarus both speaks and keeps silent about his desires; despite these frequent allusions to his desires, they nevertheless remain occluded from full view. Feminist scholarship has taught readers to pay close attention to the ways in which textual silences paradoxically speak, and Pandarus's silences at key moments in the text compel the reader to participate in the construction of his character. Following this analysis, I briefly examine the queerness of Pandarus's gaze in which he brings a level of sexual satisfaction to himself through the staging of scenes designed for his pleasure. In conclusion, I analyze what Pandarus gains through his pandering of Troilus and what Chaucer gains by having the pander proceed so queerly. Ultimately, Pandarus's queer friendship, like Criseyde's love and all other earthly things, fails Troilus; this failure, however, provides the impetus for Troilus's apotheosis and subsequent realization of the utter futility of all earthly endeavors.

THE RICARDIAN AFFINITY AND HETERONORMATIVE ASSUMPTIONS

Male-to-male relationships were a matter of concern in the 1380s, given the latent homosocial and homo-erotic problems associated with Richard's affinity (his concentric circles of male friends and advisors).4 Anxieties over homosocial relations would seem almost inevitable in a society so strongly organized around male affinity in which the question of how to police the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable forms of male closeness becomes a problem. My argument that Chaucer depicts the relationship between a queer advisor and a young nobleman finds a contemporary parallel when we remember that Richard II was accused of being led astray by "obscene intimacies" with his advisors. We thus have evidence of a contemporary homosocial relationship with possible sexual undertones, a relationship of which Chaucer would have known through his political career. As Michael Hanrahan documents,

Thomas Walsingham unmistakably establishes the sexual threat posed by Richard's favorites. During his account of Robert de Vere's royal appointment to the Duke of Ireland in 1386, Walsingham describes Richard and de Vere, the king's closest friend and confidante, as sharing "obscene intimacies" ("familiaritatis obscoenae"), an attack that implies that unmentionable vice, sodomy. Adam of Usk will later record a more overt reference to Richard's sodomy, when he includes the king's "sodomies" ("sodomica") among the causes of Richard's deposition. The charge of sodomy was never officially brought against Richard, but its occurrence in these Lancasterian chronicles betray the political agenda behind the allegations, namely, Richard's unfitness for rule. (235)

The parallel between the relationships of Richard II and Robert de Vere and of Troilus and Pandarus, then, is that the nobleman is led astray by a close alliance with a non-heteronormative friend.5 Obviously, such fears as were aroused by the relationship between Richard II and de Vere are not depicted in Troilus and Criseyde, no character ever accuses Pandarus of improperly influencing Troilus. Nevertheless, we see in the relationships between Richard and de Vere and Troilus and Pandarus that de Vere and Pandarus have a great deal of influence over their friends and that this influence contains strong hints of sexuality. The Chronicles record the fear of de Vere's queerness, and a similar queerness appears latent in Chaucer's depiction of Pandarus.6

Throughout the text, Pandarus's actions stress his desire to help Troilus in his romance with Criseyde, but the motivations behind this desire remain unspoken. However, both through his relationships with Troilus and Criseyde and through the pandering he carries out between them, Pandarus's unspoken objectives and desires are also addressed. The question, consequently, that needs to be asked concerns the object (or objects) of Pandarus's desire: who or what does Pandarus desire? How do his actions for Troilus and Criseyde reflect his own personal objectives? Certainly, Pandarus repeatedly speaks of his relationship with Troilus in terms of love, declaring, for example, that "if evere love or trouthe / Hath ben, or is, bitwixen the and me, / Ne do thow nevere swich a crueltee / To hiden fro thi frend so gret a care!" (1. 584-87) .7 Pandarus refers to the love and truth that exists between Troilus and himself, and their relationship is thus revealed to be predicated upon deep emotional ties and openness.

To suggest that such a declaration is indicative of queer rather than homosocial love would be fatuous to many readers because nothing in the passage has specifically sexual connotations. However, this critical assumption is based upon a heteronormative bias which first sees relationships between men as asexual rather than as sexual; furthermore, as is well known, this contemporary outlook does not reflect the complexity of classical or medieval views of homo-eroticism, male friendship, and sodomy. In this period, in contrast to contemporary constructions of sexuality, homosexuality and heterosexuality were not viewed as binaries. In a world in which both heterosexual and queer sex were acts but did not construe identity, same-sex activities were extolled in some discourses while reviled in others. Furthermore, the positive depictions of same-sex sexuality in classical sources provided medieval England with a view of homo-eroticism which differed intrinsically from concurrent moral and legal considerations of the topic.

Thus, within this intricate network of the possibilities for malemale friendships, the critic who assumes that a homosocial friendship is necessarily asexual is not considering the vast complexity of the classical world's views of same-sex relationships and the ways in which these views affected the medieval era. When one reads in a medieval text of love between men in a classical setting, modern heteronormative judgments should be suspended; in order to assess better how medieval beliefs were assimilating and modifying classical ones, the current construction of the homosexual/heterosexual binary must be dismissed. As Stephen Jaeger observes of male-male relationships in the medieval world, "[Homosexuality] did not exist and using it thrusts an alien set of values onto a sensibility which is delicate and wants reconstruction on its own terms" (26). Furthermore, if homosexuality did not exist as a core truth of identity in the medieval period, as it is often used today, neither did heterosexuality. Consequently, I ask the reader to take on a new perspective: what happens to our vision of Pandarus if we read these declarations of love as queer rather than as necessarily asexual? How do other moments of the text begin to metamorphose queerly? Certainly, I cannot agree with Robert Levine that "Pandarus himself has no apparent sexual needs, unless they be the perverse ones detected by a minority of readers" (464). Pandarus mentions his affections repeatedly, so we should believe him that they do indeed exist. If that point is granted, then what are the "perverse" desires Levine appears determined not to see?

PANDARUS AND QUEER SILENCE

If we grant such an opening into our analysis-that the love Pandarus speaks of may carry queer undertones-certain passages of the text begin to appear decidedly homo-erotic. The secretive nature of Pandarus's love reinforces the poem's demand for conjecture. Through the textual lacunae in which so little information is offered about Pandarus's paramour, the reader is invited to create for him/herself the identity of Pandarus's love. When Pandarus declares that, despite his own love-sickness, he will advise Troilus in matters of love, he refuses to divulge the identity of his beloved: "I love oon best, and that me smerteth sore; / And yet, peraunter, kan I reden the / And nat myself; repreve me na more" (1. 667-69). We know that Pandarus loves and that he feels lovesick for his beloved, but no information is provided to tell the reader who this person is. Later in the poem, the stanza which most specifically addresses Pandarus's own lovesickness tells nothing about the object of Pandarus's desire, about exactly whom he loves:

That Pandarus, for al his wise speche,

Felt ek his part of loves shotes keene,

That, koude he nevere so wel of lovyng preche,

It made his hewe a-day ful ofte greene.

So shop it that hyrn fil that day a teene

In love, for which in wo to bedde he wente,

And made, er it was day, ful many a wente.

(2. 57-63)

This intriguing moment of textual silence offers the reader a void which can be filled only by her/himself. Through what is spoken and what is not spoken, a text creates meaning, but silence is just as important as speech to the formation of readerly interpretation. As Pierre Macherey declares, "By speech, silence becomes the centre and principle of expression, its vanishing point. Speech eventually has nothing more to tell us: we investigate the silence, for it is the silence that is doing the speaking" (23). The silences of Troilus and Criseyde, through their refusal to address in detail the heterosexual when one might expect it, afford one the opportunity to find the queer. Pandarus's speeches hint at answers, but the answers never come due to the accompanying silences.

By concentrating his energies on Troilus's needs in love, Pandarus deflects attention from his own problems. He positions himself as Troilus's confidant through their mutual predicaments in love, yet he convinces Troilus to share all the details of his (Troilus's) love while withholding all the details about his own:

"Men seyn, `to wrecche is consolacioun

To have another felawe in hys peyne.'

That owghte wel ben oure opynyoun,

For bothe thow and I of love we pleyne.

So ful of sorwe am I, Both for to seyne,

That certeinly namore harde grace

May sine on me, for-why ther is no space."

(1. 708-714)

Pandarus claims his right to know Troilus's secrets because they both suffer from the cruelties of love, yet he then shifts his argument away from a mutual sharing of sorrows. The initial lines of this stanza suggest that they should reveal their hardships to each other in order to ameliorate their respective situations. The closing lines of the stanza foreclose any interest Troilus might have in Pandarus's love when Pandarus abruptly changes his attitude about their mutual plight and focuses exclusively on Troilus's love-sickness and thus directs any attention away from himself. Indeed, when Troilus offers to return Pandarus's favors and to help his friend with his problems in love ("Now blisful Venus helpe, er that I sterve, / Of the, Pandare, I mowe som thank deserve" [1. 1014-15]), Pandarus refuses such assistance: "For Goddes love, I bidde the a boone: / So lat m'alone, and it shal be thi beste" [1. 1027-28]).

Troilus also questions Pandarus about his friend's past sexual history. Attempting to convince Pandarus that he (Troilus) can never forget Criseyde, Troilus shoots forth queries which touch upon the many mysteries of Pandarus's sexuality:

"But tel me now, syn that the thynketh so light

To changen so in love ay to and fro,

Whi hastow nat don bisily thi myght

To chaungen hire that cloth the al thi wo?

Whi nyltow lete hire fro thyn herte go?

Whi nyltow love an other lady swete,

That may thyn herte setten in quiete?"

(4. 484-90)

Troilus then redirects his attentions to his own problems in love, and the questions remain unanswered. That Chaucer leaves these questions so intriguingly open in the text demands the reader's engagement in answering them. In his refusal to answer his own authorial questions, Chaucer invites the reader to create Pandarus according to his or her individual desires. Certainly, this passage tells us that Troilus thinks Pandarus's love is a woman, but no definitive information-a name or a blazon of her beauty-- tells us that Troilus is correct in thinking Pandarus's love is a woman.

Such moments of silence which allow openings for queer interpretations occur with astounding and confounding frequency throughout the text. When Pandarus tells Criseyde about his love, again in extremely couched and coded terms, he quickly changes the subject and begins to joke with her:

"Nece, I have so gret a pyne

For love, that everich other day I faste-"

And gan his beste japes forth to caste,

And made hire so to laughe at his folye,

That she for laughter wende for to dye.

(2. 1165-69)

As Richard Green notes of this passage, "We may assume that Pandarus regards his love affair as a convenient social fiction, maintained with the style that befits a nobleman" (208). Why do Pandarus and Criseyde laugh when he confesses such great pain unless it is based upon an amusing social fiction readily known to be such? Obviously, the many jokes and pleasantries divert Criseyde's attention from pursuing the subject at hand. Laughing so hard at his antics, she asks no more questions about his love interest. Pandarus's goal appears to be to change the subject so that he saves himself from revealing the queer object of his affections.

Yet another moment which offers the opportunity to read Pandarus as queer appears when he assures Troilus that, if the young knight shares with him the identity of his secret love, Pandarus will not steal her away from Troilus. Pandarus promises that he would never do such a thing:

"If God wol, thow art nat agast of me

Lest I wolde of thi lady the bygyle!

Thow woost thyself whom that I love, parde,

As I best kan, gon sithen longe while.

And sith thow woost I do it for no wyle,

And sith I am he that thow trustest moost,

Tel me somwhat, syn al my wo chow woost."

(1. 715-21)

At this point, it again appears that Pandarus's love is nothing more than a convenient social fiction. Again he mentions a love, supposedly someone Troilus knows, but again we find no clue to this person's identity. Why does Chaucer tell us that Troilus knows who Pandarus loves but does not give the information to the reader? Furthermore, Pandarus's statement that he would not cheat Troilus of his love reveals at least the possibility that Pandarus is not interested in women sexually. More and more queer possibilities appear as Pandarus adumbrates a person who does not exist-at least this person does not exist for the reader who can never know him or her-in order to win his friend's confidence. In fact, the very idea that Pandarus would have a lover is treated as a joke. When he meets Criseyde to begin wooing her for Troilus, Criseyde says, "Uncle ... youre maistresse is nat here" (2. 98). This statement is a joke, as evidenced by their subsequent laughter: "With that thei gonnen laughe" (2. 99). The joke makes more sense if we see it as a nodding reference to this mythical mistress, the mistress who protects Pandarus's open secret of queer desire, the mistress who the reader is never, ever allowed to meet.

My argument that Chaucer's use of textual silence demands that the reader participate in the construction of Pandarus's character is a recurrent one in Chaucerian criticism. Although this time the argument is directed to a queer interpretation of Pandarus, it should nevertheless ring familiar to a scholarly audience familiar with Chaucerian criticism based upon this controversial passage:

I passe al that which chargeth nought to seye.

What! Gof foryaf his deth, and she al so

Foryaf, and with here uncle gan to pleye,

For other cause was ther noon than so.

But of this thing right to the effect to go:

Whan tyme was, horn til here hous she wente,

And Pandarus hath fully his entente.

(3. 1576-82)

Chaucer hints ever so slightly that Pandarus and Criseyde sleep together in this passage, and critics have responded that this passage makes the reader complicit in the process of creating the text's meaning.8 For example, Louise Fradenburg argues that this passage "might be read, but I would argue could never definitely be read, as Pandarus's incestuous dalliance with Criseyde. . . . Chaucer's poem indeed treads the finest of lines between the perception of the occlusion of violence and the desire to participate in it" (101-2). I find that Chaucer pursues the same strategy with Pandarus's sexuality: it is so opaque, so polymorphous and contradictory that the reader must participate in its construction rather than passively accept it. A reader desiring to find queer possibilities in Pandarus, like the reader who sees incest between Pandarus and Criseyde, can do so precisely because the text refuses to forbid such a reading.

Complementing Pandarus's speeches and silences about his mysterious love are his rhetorical tropes which reveal an unspoken desire for Troilus. Through the juxtaposition of contrasting entities in which unlike persons or things complement one another, Pandarus creates unities of supposedly oppositional forces. For example, Pandarus declares both that "A fool may ek a wisman ofte gide" and "A wheston is no kervying instrument, / But yet it maketh sharppe kervying tolis" (1. 630-32). He then summarizes his thoughts about the relationship between contraries:

"By his contrairie is every thyng declared.

For how myghte evere swetnesse han ben knowe

To him that nevere tasted bitternesse? ...

Eke whit by blak, by shame ek worthinesse,

Ech set by other, more for other semeth,

As men may se, and so the wyse it demeth."

(1. 637-39, 42-44)

For Pandarus, an entity is both recognized and improved through contact with its contrast: the bitter exposes the sweet, the white makes explicit the black, shame complements worthiness. The context of this statement is crucial to its queer meaning, as Troilus has just stated that Pandarus could not assist him in the cure of his own love-sickness because Pandarus "koudest nevere in love thiselven wisse. / How devel maistow brynge me to blisse?" (1. 622-23). Thus, in response to Troilus's predicament with a love affair that is presented as courtly and, therefore, heteronormative, Pandarus speaks about the need for contrasts in order to know better the identity of an entity. The corollary to this maxim, in light of Pandarus's preceding descriptions of his friendship with Troilus in terms of love, is that in order to understand fully the heterosexual in relation to Troilus and Criseyde, same-sex desire must also be addressed. The homosocial relationship which is addressed textually prior to the heterosexual one permits the heterosexual bond to be known; according to Pandarus's reasoning, heterosexuality is declared through its relationship to same-sex desire and vice versa.9

Interestingly, both Pandarus and Troilus speak of their relationship in terms of contrasts which they use to represent the wholeness of their friendship. Pandarus declares that "for trewe or fals report, / In wrong and right iloved the al my lyve" (1. 593-94). Through true and false, wrong and right, Pandarus's love for Troilus is constant. Similarly, Troilus explains how deeply Pandarus affects the totality of his own life:

Tho Troilus gan doun on knees to falle, And Pandare in his armes hente fast ...

"Now, Pandare, I kan na more seye,

But, thow wis, thow woost, thow maist, thow art al!

Mi lif, my deth, hol in thyn hond I leye.

Help now!" Quod he, "Yis, by my trowthe, I shal."

(1. 1044-45, 51-54)

The sum of Troilus's existence-his life and his death-is within Pandarus's power. As Elaine Tuttle Hansen notes, "[t]he homoerotic cast to this scene is intensified not so much when Troilus embraces Pandarus as when he speaks words to Pandarus that are elsewhere directed to the lady, laying his life in Pandarus's hands and seeking his mercy" (154). The conflation of oppositions makes possible a queer reading: through Troilus's employment of speech traditionally directed to a female for a dialogue with a male, the queer thematics of the poem are evident through the erasure of sexual polarities. Pandarus is addressed as a female, and, consequently, gender divisions become obscured, thus destabilizing the contemporary western division of heterosexual and homosexual. Furthermore, the contraries which the two characters employ in the descriptions of their relationship metonymically point to the necessity for the synthesis of oppositions which Pandarus highlights earlier. Their friendship is, therefore, the incarnation of Pandarus's ideals. The queer possibilities of this passage are in its references to a wholeness of which same-sex desire-in identifying and affirming heterosexuality-is a vital part.

The relationship between Troilus and Criseyde itself serves as yet another locus where Pandarus inserts his own desires to form a unified whole. Certainly, Pandarus sees himself included in the sating of desire which Troilus and Criseyde's relationship promises. In a statement of triangulated desire which Eve Sedgwick herself would approve, Pandarus openly declares the gratification available to him through Troilus and Criseyde's affair:

"Wherfore I am, and wol ben, ay redy

To peyne me to do yow this servyse;

For bothe yow to plese thus hope I

Herafterward; for ye ben bothe wyse,

And konne it counseil kepe in swych a wyse

That no man shal the wiser of it be;

And so we may ben Bladed al-le thre."

(1. 988-94)

Beginning with a promise to advance Troilus's love, Pandarus concludes that all three will be "gladed" by the affair. The triangulation of this desire both obscures its queer possibilities and makes them possible. Queerly, determinedly, Pandarus obfuscates and reveals his desires through the pandering he performs.

Pandarus's goal is not merely to assist Troilus to win Criseyde's love, but to stress his queer role in the process. Pandarus does not let Troilus forget that it is through his actions that Troilus succeeds:

"And have it brought to swich plit as thow woost,

So that thorugh me thow stondest now in weye

To farm wel; I sey it for no bost,

And wostow whi? For shame it is to seye:

For the have I bigonne a gamen pleye

Which that I nevere do shal eft for other,

Although he were a thousand fold my brother."

(3. 246-52)

Through Pandarus, Troilus finds sexual satisfaction; the panderer renders himself indispensable to his friend, guaranteeing his place in the young knight's affections. And since Pandarus's own affections are so intimately intermingled with Troilus's, we sense that the love between Troilus and Criseyde serves as a proxy for Pandarus's paradoxically unified and triangulated love for Troilus.

PANDARUS's GAZE

If Pandarus's silence and speech reveal a queer desire for Troilus, so too does his gaze. Pandarus deftly orchestrates both Troilus's and his own gazes so that he can create an outlet for his queer affection. In "The Voyeur and the Private Life in Troilus and Criseyde," Sarah Stanbury argues that Troilus's and Criseyde's gazes ultimately reflect back upon themselves as viewers whereas Pandarus's gaze is able to construct the reality of the poem:

[Pandarus's] gaze is utterly unlike the gazes of Troilus and of Criseyde in books I and 2 that collapse space to send the view back on the altered body of the perceiver. Pandarus's gaze seems to have no body, or rather to proceed from such a position of power that he is master of his own fabrications. (153)

However, Stanbury does not address how Pandarus constructs the visual relationship between Troilus and himself; her heteronormative analysis fails to consider that the gaze can be directed between men, too. I contend that Pandarus's desire for Troilus is manifest in the scenes in which he directs how, when, and where Troilus looks.

Although Pandarus is creating a scene in which Troilus will look upon Criseyde, he explicitly instructs Troilus to pay more attention to him than to Criseyde when the knight passes below her window:

"And thow shalt fynde us, if I may, sittynge

At some wyndow, into the strete lokynge.

And if the list, than maystow us salue;

And upon me make thow thi countenaunce."

(2. 1014-17)

Since, as Stanbury argues, both Troilus's and Criseyde's gazes affect themselves more than the person upon whom they are looking, Pandarus's construction of Troilus's gaze suggests that he is preparing the knight to succumb to the power of his own gaze. By having Troilus look at him in a highly artificial setting that the pander himself creates, Pandarus fashions an opportunity for himself to be the spectacle of Troilus's gaze and, thus, to have Troilus's gaze construct him (Pandarus) as the object of Troilus's desire. As Troilus looked on Criseyde and physically felt the effect of his stare, as Criseyde sees Troilus and feels drunk with pleasure, Pandarus recreates Troilus's gaze with himself as its object to create the same physical effect for himself.

Pandarus's plan comes to fruition when Troilus passes beneath Criseyde's window as she and he watch. Importantly, Pandarus observes Troilus first: "Pandare hym aspide / And seyde, `Nece, ysee who comth here ride!" (2. 1252-53). Thus, Pandarus is more attuned to, in large part because he directs, Troilus's actions. However, what is most significant in this passage is the effect that Troilus's gaze has both on Criseyde and on Pandarus. Chaucer narrates that Troilus looks only at Pandarus, not Criseyde: "And up his look debonairly he caste, / And bekked on Pandare, and forth he paste" (2. 1259-60). The narrator then reports that "To God hope I, she hath now kaught a thorn, / She shal nat pulle it out this nexte wyke" (2. 1272-73). Although the narrator only hopes that Criseyde has been appropriately affected by Troilus's gaze, he describes definitively how Pandarus reacts to Troilus's stare: "Pandare, which that stood him faste by, / Felte iren hoot" (2. 1275-76). Why does Pandarus feel "iren hoot" here if he does not participate at all in the sexual energy of the scene? Pandarus's "iren hoot" reaction to Troilus suggests strongly both that the pander creates an outlet for his queer desire through his construction of Troilus's gaze and that he finds a level of sexual gratification through the process." Throughout Troilus and Criseyde, the gaze provides both the creation of and the satisfaction of desire; Pandarus's queer gaze fits just such a pattern of scopophilic pleasure.

CONCLUSION

What are Pandarus's goals through his queer pandering, if my argument is correct? He does not win Troilus's love in a sexual manner, but he does gain Troilus's dependence upon him. The narrator reports that "to Pandare alwey was [Troilus's] recours / And pitously gan ay tyl him to pleyne, / And hym bisoughte of reed and som socours" (2. 1352-54). This passage highlights Pandarus's objective, the queer benefits of his pandering for himself. The closeness, the proximity, the real intimacy which Pandarus and Troilus share emerges in a scene of great beauty in which the two spend the night together side by side:

And Pandarus, as faste as he may dryve,

To Troilus tho com, as lyne right,

And on a paillet al that glade nyght

By Troilus he lay, with mery there,

To tale; and wel was hem they were yfeere.

(3. 227-31)

Chaucer focuses his attention on Pandarus's reaction to this tableau. The narrator describes his "mery chere" as Troilus sleeps peacefully nearby. Homosocial togetherness, as evidenced in the narrator's report that "wel was hem they were yfeere," creates a picture-perfect vision of male love and friendship.

If we remember Pandarus's construction of Troilus's garden dream in which Troilus supposedly confesses his love for Criseyde (2. 514-22), we see that this dream comes true, not as a scene between Troilus and Criseyde, but between Troilus and Pandarus:

And by the hond ful ofte [Troilus] wolde take

This Pandarus, and into gardyn lede,

And swich a feste and swich a proces make

Hym of Criseyde, and of hire wommanhede,

And of hire beaute, that withouten drede

It was an hevene his wordes for to here;

And thanne he wolde synge in this manere.

(3. 1737-43)

This passage introduces Troilus's song, but, curiously, Troilus's song is rather asexual; no description of Criseyde appears, despite the promise of the lines quoted above. It appears that Pandarus delights in his trips to the garden with Troilus, journeys of togetherness where Criseyde is promised, yet never appears. A muted homo-eroticism adorns this scene in which the two men while away the hours together in a blissful garden of love. Queer love need not entail queer sex, and possibly scenes such as these are the only outlets Pandarus finds to express his affections.

What does Chaucer gain from depicting Pandarus's polymorphous sexuality? Troilus learns a lesson about the ephemerality of human love, that in the bliss of the eighth sphere, "What nedeth feynede loves for to seke?" (5. 1848). Just like Criseyde's love, Pandarus's intense friendship, in the end, offers little solace, little comfort, little love. That Pandarus's affections bear with them elements of sexual desire adumbrates Troilus's rejection of all incarnations of human and physical love. As Leah Freiwald observes, "because it ironically parallels the love affair . . . the friendship of Troilus and Pandarus adds a further dimension to Chaucer's theme of the frailty and vanity of earth-bound affection" (129). Uncovering the sexual undercurrent to Troilus and Pandarus's friendship thus allows us to see fully Chaucer's dismissal of the earthly in favor of the eternal.

In light of Ricardian anxieties over queer homosocial bonds and their impact upon the king's affinity, Chaucer's oblique gestures toward a similar such relationship highlight yet another example of his famous slipperiness, his shadowy adumbration of but seldom direct engagement with contemporary political issues. Thus, it is necessary to look below the surface of the text for the full picture of sexuality which emerges. In his reading of the Pardoner's Tale, Steven Kruger concludes that

reading texts like the Pardoner's Tale as part of a process of writing queers (and women and Jews) back into the Middle Ages, we can begin to understand the ways in which a dominant medieval European culture-self-defined as Christian, heterosexual, masculinist-depended for its self-definition upon a rigorous writing-out of Judaism and Islam, of women's experience, of the sexually other. (139)

Both writing in Pandarus's queerness and writing it out through the heightened subtextual quality of its presence, Chaucer's sexually ambiguous panderer unsettles gender categories and sexual roles. Such a destablizing gesture may in the end function to privilege the heterosexual romance between Troilus and Criseyde which is at the heart of the narrative, but it nonetheless provides yet another example of the ways in which medieval sexuality refuses to adhere to our modern constructions of gender and sexuality.

In conclusion, I find that the abundance of subtextual allusions to queer desire in Troilus and Criseyde highlights the openness of the text itself. Consequently, whether Pandarus desires to be lovers with Troilus almost becomes a moot point. What is significant is that the poem does not refuse the possibility of a queer interpretation of the characters' friendship Through Chaucer's decision not to restrain the queer, the poem offers a gay subjectivity the opportunity to read queerly an often heteronormatively interpreted text. And to those who dismiss this argument entirely, I lay down a friendly challenge: prove that Pandarus is heterosexual. Chaucer's silences will prove such a task only too difficult, as the lover whom Pandarus promises never emerges to confirm or deny any readerly suspicions.

University of Central Florida