Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and the Danger of Masculine Interiority

Abstract

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is deeply suspicious of the idea of a fully independent interior self. With his depiction of Trojan men, Chaucer critiques the fourteenth-century aristocracy’s increasing interest in interiority, particularly the courtly love rhetoric associated with the court of Richard II. He suggests that the court's obsession with interiority is a way for powerful men to ignore the destructive public consequences of their political authority. One of the hallmarks of masculinity in the poem is a refusal to recognize the political implications of what appear to be merely internal desires. Through sustained attention to the rhetoric of interiority and repeated allusions to Ovid’s story of Philomela, Chaucer reveals to his court audience that such a separation between public and private is illusory.

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