Fair Welcome and the Temple of Priapus: Speakers and Readers as Autoeroticists and Voyeurs in The Romance of the Rose and Chaicer's The Parlaiment of Fowls

Prominent among the themes of the 13 th-century poem The Romance of the Rose is that of voyeurism. Denied physical possession of the rose, the speaker is nevertheless " very pleased to be able to stay so close to the rose that [he] could have touched it. " (Romance 43) The sexual undertones of the rose become more blunt later in the poem: in his second close contact with the rose the speaker describes how much " more beautiful and redder " it is than before (52); by the end of the poem he has " shaken the bud " and " scattered a little seed there […] probing its very depths, " at this point moving beyond voyeurism to euphemized yet obvious sexual contact. (334) The striking sexual overtones, in effect, imbue the Romance with an element of pornography. Given Geoffrey Chaucer's literary indebtedness to The Romance of the Rose, it is unsurprising that he draws on this same voyeuristic theme in his dream poetry. However, his agile imagination interrogates these themes rather than parroting them, taking them in a less idealized direction than does the Romance. The temple of Priapus in The Parliament of Fowls is dim, close and tawdry, not a shrine of desire, but of desire frustrated. This less rosy vision of sexuality is complicated by the fact that Chaucer's speaker is also a voyeur, gazing upon the half-naked body of Venus, and that he chooses to share the experience of his spying with the reader. The sharing of voyeuristic experiences in fact underlies much of both poems' treatments of sexuality; in effect (because the speakers have chosen to share their private glimpses of sex and nudity) they implicate the reader in the experience. That is, such scenes, which could be 2 handled by allusion, are really for the reader's benefit rather than the speaker's. In this light, Chaucer's decision to make the temple of Priapus so uncomfortable suggests a commentary on the medieval literary practice of what is effectively pornography. His motive, as I will show, is his interest in interpersonal relationships rather than courtly autoeroticism. Chaucer is attempting to move away from the mirror of Narcissus, so to speak, to a more interpersonal kind of narrative, and in so doing uses the concept of voyeurism as a tool to manipulate and instruct the reader. Such autoeroticism as Chaucer questions is part and parcel of …