Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

meet the human demand for philosophy „concealed within the poetic veil‟” (2). The conclusion to draw
then, is that Chaucer intends to present Boethius‟ philosophical concepts to the masses in a more accessible
way; here, by virtue of poetry. Through his employment of key concepts from the Consolation, Chaucer
creates a marriage between the philosophical and chivalric genres. By doing so, he is able to create an
antidote to the problematic genre of chivalric romance, which is predominantly concerned with unrealistic
and irrational portrayals of love, nobility, and gender roles. With a Boethian treatment, Troilus and Criseyde
ultimately serves as Chaucer‟s own “consolation” to his Medieval audience.
But it is not Chaucer‟s primary aim merely to translate concepts from a philosophical text into poetry
nor to parrot themes from the Consolation in his protagonists. On the contrary, Chaucer‟s agenda seems to
be to demonstrate the personal inconsistencies and moral failures of the protagonists to invert, rather than
parallel, Boethian ideals and themes from the Consolation, a program that ultimately illustrates the chivalric
ethos as a fundamentally flawed paradigm. The way in which Chaucer deploys these inversions
demonstrates the problematic nature of the autonomous male figures involved in courtly love as well as the
hopeless female figures subjected to the expectations of romance. Troilus, the flawed hero, is unable to
overcome his earthly woes but is ultimately redeemed through his death and, subsequently, his
comprehension of the errors of his worldly ways. Pandarus, the puppeteer, has only one goal throughout
the majority of the poem, which is to aid Troilus in achieving the conquest of Criseyde. He does not fulfill
his position as physician to Troilus, and Chaucer‟s depiction of Pandarus emphasizes the lack of
responsibility that male figures possess, a limited self-perception meant to forward the male cause at the
cost of the female subject‟s dignity.
Criseyde, however, achieves a certain kind of redemption through the Boethian model because she
attempts to adhere to the principles of pragmatism laid out in the Consolation; indeed, she is the only
character who possesses any semblance of a moral core, which helps to establish and lend credibility to her
pragmatic voice in the narrative. Regardless of her moral aspirations, however, Criseyde is ultimately
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