THE ANIMAL IN ALLEGORY39For he hadde founde a corn lay in the yerd.
Real he was, he was namoore aferd;
He fethered Pertelote twenty tyme,
And trad as ofte, er that it was pryme.
He looketh as it were a grym leoun,
And on his toos he rometh up and doun,
Hym deigned nat to sette his foot to grounde.
He chukketh whan he hath a corn yfounde,
And to hym rennen thanne hise wyves alle.
Thus roial as a prince is in an halle,
Leve I this Chauntecleer in his pasture,
And after wol I telle his aventure.
(3160–86)That Pertelote’s physical beauty should produce for Chauntecleer tran-
scendence of fear, error-filled rhetoric, and sexual desire reflects a thor-
ough mixing of human and animal. Chauntecleer’s sudden capitulation
to Pertelote shows that the learning reflected in his lengthy discourse on
dreams is virtually meaningless in the face of physical desire. It does not
matter whether his hilarious mistranslation of the misogynist Latin
phrase is deliberate or not; in either case he is driven by the power of his
desire. Sex, a driving force of the human-animal world, triumphs over
death (or fear of it). Chauntecleer’s sexual desire is framed by details that
force us to regard him again as an animal—the sexiness of Pertelote’s
red eyelids, the narrowness of their perch as an impediment to sex, his
clucking, and of course his twentyfold “feathering” of Pertelote—even
as we accept that his actions seem human enough. The confusion of ani-
mal and man reaches a kind of climax in the way his manly pride at his
sexual prowess makes him appear both as a “grym leoun” and a “prince.”
There is no clear allegorical meaning here, no other being or idea that
Chauntecleer represents; he is a kind of virtual being, both entirely ani-
mal and entirely human. Indeed, the only allegorical reading that makes
any sense here is the one that the host understands—that Chauntecleer’s
sexual mastery reflects the narrator’s own desire, probably for the prior-
ess, before whom he presumably must always have to suppress animal