Tied in <i>Lusty Leese</i>: Animalization and Agency in <i>Troilus and Criseyde</i>

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is a tale fraught with ambiguity, and particularly so concerning issues of gender, agency, and free will. Critical readings often focus on depicting TC as Chaucer’s didactic portrayal of a flawed and transitory humanity, with Troilus’s death and transcendence taken as the primary lens through which to seek final meaning in the poem. However, I argue that Chaucer’s use of natural tropes, vocabulary, and artistry also reveal that the poem, before it reaches its transcendental ending, indicts not only the mortal world at large but more specifically the at-times misogynist conventions of the genre itself. Specifically, contrasting Criseyde’s self-perception against the starker realities of her social position reveals that while she imagines herself as “unteyd in lusty leese” (II.752), it is an illusory agency which collapses in the face of the real lusty leese—the masculine master narrative which strips away her agency in service of a “hunt” fraught with violence. In this paper I therefore look especially at the vocabulary of lusty leese and muwe employed by both Criseyde and the narrator. This wording, combined with the subversive use of both traditional and inverted natural tropes (especially the love-as-hunting trope) reveals that Criseyde’s estat, despite her belief that it grants her independence, necessarily circumscribes her into a role that the genre has predetermined: that of a female love-object who may only exercise illusory agency when it serves the pleasure of the over-arching masculine narrative. Through this paper I hope to explore ways that Criseyde may be included in conversations on natural and philosophical elements of Troilus and Criseyde.