is not? By calling her “adverse” Troilus clearly shows once again his misunderstanding. Fortune is neither adverse or good. She merely spins her wheel. As Pandarus points out, joy will surely come again if you just wait for her wheel to turn again.Where does Criseyde fall in all of this? Is she representative of Fortune in Chaucer’s work? Salemi seems to think there are grounds for such an association, although he admits it would be difficult to maintain. He says that Pandarus’s role “as an advisor who tells Troilus about how to deal with a certain woman reinforces the suggested affinity of Criseyde with Fortune” (214). The narrator also makes the association of Criseyde with Fortune in the Prologue to Book IV. The narrator tells the reader that Fortune “From Troilus she gan hire brighte face…And on hire whiel she sette up Diomede” (IV, 8, 10). What Fortune has done is exactly what Criseyde will do. While this is a plausible argument on the surface, Criseyde does not seem so much to serve as Fortune but to understand her better than most. She has a firm grasp on the inconstancy of Fortune. Indeed, when Chaucer introduces her, the reader is struck by the fact that she does not blame Fortune for her sorrows. She is widowed, abandoned by her father and has had to throw herself at the feet of another in order to save herself. Even in the end, she merely bewails “the bitterness of worldly joys” (Jefferson, 126). She knows they can not bring happiness. And what is billed as her faithlessness to Troilus in Book V merely shows the acceptance of the hand she has been dealt by Fortune. The narrator says in Book V, “Retornying in hire soule ay up and downThe wordes of this sodeyn Diomede,His grete estat, and perel of the town,And that she was allone and hadde nedeOf frendes help; and thus bygan to bredeThe cause whi, the sothe for to tell,That she took fully pu...
