Resisting Allegory: Interpretive Delirium in Spenser's Faerie Queene 9780823285655

Citation preview

R e s i s t i n g A l l e g o ry

Resisting Allegory Interpretive Delirium in Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Harry Berger, Jr. Edited by

David Lee Miller

fordham university press New York 2020

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

Contents

Editor’s Introduction Introduction: On Texts and Countertexts

vii 1

Book One The Legend of Holinesse 1.

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1: Ethics, Gender, and Oppositional Reading in the Spenserian Text

17

Book Two The Legend of Temperaunce 2. 3.

Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene Wring Out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001

103 143

Book Three The Legend of Chastity 4. 5.

Resisting Translation: Britomart in Book 3 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser’s Gardens of Adonis Acknowledgments Notes Index

173 211 245 247 289

Editor’s Introduction David Lee Miller

Sixty-two years ago Spenser criticism woke up to the Berger alarm. It was 1957. Benny Goodman was old hat, but the New Criticism was in full swing. The New Critics didn’t think much of Spenser, though, and while there was plenty of good work filling the pages of scholarly journals, most of it was rather old-fashioned: A. S. P. Woodhouse’s “Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene” was still recent (and controversial). Once “conspic uous irrelevance” had fastened itself like a burr under the saddle of Spenser criticism, there would be no going back. Over the next three decades, Harry Berger, Jr., would publish sixty strikingly original and enduringly influential essays on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell, Milton, Plato, Alberti, Virgil, Dante, Da Vinci, Pico della Mirandola, Vermeer, Beowulf, Erasmus, More, Theocritus, the concept of cultural change, the theory of periodization, and the poetry of Robert Frost. A number of these were gathered into a pair of volumes issued in 1988 by the University of California Press: Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, edited by John P. Lynch, and Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics, with an introduction by Louis A. Montrose. Side by side on the shelf those two big books stand like pillars for a vii

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monument to critical intelligence, but that is the wrong image. Berger is no less restless in revising previous arguments than he is prolific in spinning new ones. In fact, he was just getting started. A dozen books later, on topics as various as Rembrandt, “structural misanthropology,” caterpillars, courtesy books, and Christian nudes, readers may be forgiven for feeling as if they have encountered not a monument but a whirlwind. Not long after the appearance of Revisionary Play, Harry embarked on what we can now recognize as the third stage in his career-long engagement with Spenser: a series of seven essays published between 1991 and 2005 that revisit Books 1–3 of The Faerie Queene. Taken together, these essays develop both a comprehensive interpretation of the 1590 text and a finely crafted theory explaining and justifying a method of reading against the allegorical grain. Three essays on Book 1 have been revised and incorporated into the first chapter of Resisting Allegory, which now offers a full-dress reading of the Legend of Holinesse. Four more essays, two each on Books 2 and 3 of the poem, are reprinted here. They include “Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene,” a landmark of Spenser criticism that first appeared in English Literary Renaissance in 1991 and set the table for the work to come. Clearly these essays were always parts of a single project. Together they add force and momentum to the argument launched in their various debut appearances. That argument is still timely. Berger’s work has always aged well: Essays from the early ’60s appear in the 1988 collection with no loss of pertinence. Unlike much practical criticism from that era, they are still intellectually bracing, demanding the reader’s full concentrated attention. The essays in this volume are just as tightly wound, and perhaps this is one reason much Spenser criticism that has appeared since the journal articles were published has not reckoned with their careful readings and arguments—ironically, given the scrupulous attention Berger himself tenders to the criticism he reads. The publication of Resisting Allegory offers us another chance to take stock. • Three features of the work gathered here especially stand out. First, the work represents a remarkable rereading and synthesis of the modern critical tradition. Throughout these essays Berger is actively engaged with the work of critics across three generations. By this I don’t mean that his footnotes are mini-bibliographies, but that he quotes, criticizes, adjusts, and assimilates the work of major critics from C. S. Lewis and Northrop Frye through William Nelson, Paul Alpers, A. Bartlett Giamatti, John Webster, Michael Murrin, Donald Cheney, and Richard Lanham to A. Leigh

Editor’s Introduction

ix

DeNeef, Stephen Greenblatt, John N. King, Maureen Quilligan, Lauren Silberman, Jonathan Goldberg, Arthur Kinney, David Norbrook, Louis Montrose, Susanne Wofford, and Linda Gregerson. Jeff Dolven remarks on this aspect of Berger’s work in “Harry Berger’s Intellectual Community”: “More than any other critic I know, he builds his arguments out of encounters with the thinking of other members of his guild, our guild.”1 Berger comments in “Narrative as Rhetoric” that the convergence of critical arguments he is orchestrating suggests the emergence of a consensus, and together these essays powerfully advance that claim. It is by no means a neutral or easy synthesis: The argument carries a sharp polemical edge that cuts against the practice of much historicist and cultural criticism. It’s also distinctively American, for although Berger does cite a few English critics, much English and Irish criticism has pursued the cultural studies agenda targeted by Berger’s main line of argument. But the American Spenser Berger has constructed by rereading both the poem and the critical tradition will demand that future interpreters, no matter their provenance, method, or allegiance, come to term with its arguments. One reason this collection deserves attention is that its assumptions and procedures are so carefully articulated. This is the second feature that stands out clearly. Berger is as brilliant and assimilative a theorist as he is an interpreter. Beginning with the introduction, which lays out in a few bold, elegant strokes the theory and method that inform the argument, Berger offers a remarkable reflection on critical method. For all that theory seems to have been the rage in academic criticism during the late twentieth century, there are not many books on Spenser that interweave a sustained and inventive interpretive practice with a lucid and equally sustained reflection on questions of method. It is this combined emphasis that allows Berger to incorporate so much of the critical tradition into his own argument without simply amalgamating incompatible approaches: He is actively sorting, evaluating, and disentangling critical arguments even as he acknowledges their achievements with unfailing generosity. The third remarkable feature of this collection is the brilliance of the critical readings Berger develops. He has been among the most perceptive and original commentators on The Faerie Queene, and indeed on almost all of Spenser’s poetry, since his first book appeared. Generally acknowledged as at once a forerunner of, an inspiration for, and a leading participant in the “Renaissance” of Spenser studies during the 1960s, Berger has never stopped reading and rereading both the poetry and its most persuasive critics. The essays in this volume, written and published after Revisionary Play appeared, represent a powerful new turn, a challenging reinvention

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of his own, and everyone else’s, critical practice by the leading Spenser critic of our time. In responding to this work, we don’t have to start from scratch. In essays that appeared together in the 2009 volume A Touch More Rare, Judith Anderson, Katherine Eggert, and Catherine Gimelli Martin engaged directly and at length with “Wring Out the Old” and “Narrative as Rhetoric.”2 I take up their arguments here to advance the conversation these chapters should occasion. Anderson begins with Harry’s claim in “Wring Out the Old” that “Acrasia is the objectification of male hysteria,” remarking that although this pointed ideological critique is true so far as it goes, “Where misogyny is brilliantly exposed and rejected, I’m worried that androcentrism might still be alive and well, and indeed, reinstated” (78). Accordingly, she sets out to find “the mark of something female” (80) persisting within both the Bower and the traditional, misogynistic male discourses that dominate there. The argument reaches its high point in Anderson’s commentary on the two descriptions of Acrasia, and in particular on the second, at 2.12.77–78. In a moment that strikes me as unusual in her criticism, Anderson responds to the beauty of the verse simply by describing the “sense of wondrous pleasure” it evokes and the disorientation this pleasure causes: If I affirm that the erotic appeal of both stanzas is subtle, complex, seductive, and enveloping, I’m not sure what this says about Acrasia’s gender or about my own implication in male discourse or even whether such discourse can remain pristinely male once it involves me. I frankly believe, however, that the appeal of these stanzas exceeds sharply defined barriers of gender and other rational determinants. More simply put, I experience some kind of exhilaration or wonder in and at these lines, whatever their origin. (88)

Anderson goes on to gloss this effect by way of Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Ground of the Image, with its modes of “participation and contagion” (89). This move from confessional candor to theoretical precision is, in my view, as good as criticism gets. It is a perfect example of the quality Ayesha Ramachandran ascribes to Anderson’s work in a recent review essay: In [Anderson’s] approach, there lurks a powerful response to Rita Felski’s call “to imagine a form of post-critical reading that does not look behind the text—for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives—but in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible.”3

Editor’s Introduction

xi

In other words, Anderson’s response to Berger is powerful and exemplary because it finds a way not just beyond wall-to-wall male discourse, but also beyond wall-to-wall ideological critique. Within Judith Anderson’s learned, rigorous, and insightful body of work, this essay stands out for me because it is so playful, affectionate, even self-revealing, and these qualities clearly come forward in response to Harry both personally and critically—they are part of what his own work “unfurls, calls forth, makes possible” in the critic who matches him joke for joke, insight for critical insight. Harry’s affective responses to the text are on display throughout his commentary in the exuberance and hilarity that mark its style; Anderson brings off an impressive balancing act in responding generously to these qualities even while catching the master off guard. Katherine Eggert’s “Harry Berger’s Genius: Porting Pleasure in the Bower of Bliss” might seem at first to be diametrically opposed to Anderson’s emphasis on pleasure, and there are certainly differences: Where the pleasure Anderson describes “exceeds sharply defined barriers of gender,” Eggert is seeking in the poem “a point of entry for a feminine poetics” (103). She begins this readerly quest with a counterintuitive but intriguing reading of the Bower’s Genius as “anhedonic” (101): What does it mean to port pleasure? Astonishingly, it turns out not to mean either to experience pleasure or to convey it to another person, because this first Genius of the poem does neither. If “to port” is “to carry,” then this Genius is all about vehicularity; his porting merely carries pleasure, it does not transmit pleasure, and thus the vehicle of Genius drives us to no tenor, not even one preposterously far away. (95)

As with Anderson’s recourse to Nancy on the theory of the image, Eggert here is insisting on the poetic surface divorced from meaning, although to dif ferent effect. Genius’s “porting” in her account becomes Guyon’s “passing”: “Passing forth allows him to pass by and pass up” (99). But this anhedonic mode yields finally to a very Acrasian subversive motion and subversive thought . . . : one where the eye wanders on the surface of things and never seeks an Idea to go with that perceived Image, and where that wandering eye is enough to hint—just hint—at an alternative poetics, one that Patricia Parker, drawing from Valéry, associates with a “delaying of [metaphor’s] movement towards meaning or object.”4

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This recasting of deferral as sweet reluctant amorous delay offers a mode of pleasure that has traditionally been gendered feminine, as it is in the passage I am echoing from Paradise Lost. The similarity to Anderson’s essay is instructive, for it is her own quest to discover “the mark of something female” in the text that leads finally, in her account, to a form of pleasure that exceeds gender categories even as it “contaminates” the aesthetic with the erotic. One wonders whether Eggert’s reading of the Bower might lead to a similar conclusion, and in an important sense, it does. As readers, we get there through a version of the “reverse jump cut” (101) Eggert notices in Guyon’s and the Palmer’s double-approach to the Bower (they arrive in stanza 42 and again in stanza 69). Turning back from this 2009 essay to “Spenser’s Ravishment: Rape and Rapture in The Faerie Queene” (2000) we find the same critic arguing that The Faerie Queene . . . if only intermittently, hints at poetry as a vehicle for rapture, a suffusion of delight that suspends the quest and admits a multiplicity of both erotic and epistemological pleasures. This rapture is felt, I want to demonstrate, by female as well as male characters in the poem, and specifically in scenes that a number of Spenser critics have identified as allegories of the writing and/or reading of poetry.5

Rereading this provocative account of pleasure in the poem, I can’t help thinking that the next step should be to consider—with Anderson à la Nancy and Felski—the pleasures of the poem, most especially in the Bower. Catherine Gimelli Martin offers a different kind of resistance in her reading of “Narrative as Rhetoric.” It is an ambitious critique, one that addresses both the theoretical argument of this important essay and its close reading of the Phedon episode in canto 4 of The Faerie Queene, Book 2. It is also, so far as I am aware, the only full-scale effort to address the method and theory central to this volume. The argument Martin puts forward is indeed shrewd: Why must revisionary reading proceed only in one direction, toward irony, self-parody, and “subversion”; why might not the mixed modes of allegory and oral narrative sophisticate without canceling the moral lessons that Spenser’s “Letter to Ralegh” claims that The Faerie Queene teaches? (151)

I am not sure that the essays collected here offer an answer to this question. Surely, it is not coincidental that the values informing Harry’s readings of Spenser happen to be those of late-twentieth-century academic liberalism.

Editor’s Introduction

xiii

To suggest that a question has not been answered is not, however, to assume that it can’t be. After all, no critical practice can operate outside of ideology; a critic without a point of view is a critic not worth reading. Berger’s answer is, as ever, to point to the text: “Here,” he implicitly says, “is where I see the values of feminism (for instance) coming into play. Here is how they operate in the text.” And, to her credit, that is where Martin engages him, opposing his reading of the Phedon episode with her own. She tackles Berger’s reading head on, maintaining that “not even the closest of close readings suggests that Phedon’s tale is self-exculpatory” (152). The evidence she offers in support of this counterclaim suggests that Berger may have overstated his case, but there is surely a strong element of self-exculpation in the tale. I point to the text: With hart then throbbing, and with watry eyes, Fayre Sir (qd. he) what man can shun the hap, That hidden lyes unwares him to surpryse? Misfortune waites aduantage to entrap The man most wary in her whelming lap, So me weake wretch, of many weakest wretch, Vnweeting, and vnware of such mishap, She brought to mischiefe through her guilful trech, Where this same wicked villein did me wandring ketch. (4.17) It was a faithlesse Squire, that was the sourse Of all my sorrow, and of these sad teares. (4.18.1–2)

Phedon points first at the female personification Fortuna (Miss Fortune) and then at his false friend, but the text that displays these evasions points back at him. Martin’s close readings display some of the special pleading she finds in Berger, for example when she paraphrases “the Palmer’s belated advice to Phedon” as “root out ‘love’ entirely if it grows from ‘filth’ or lust” (154). The stanza in question is well known as a rhetorical tour de force: Wrath, gealosie, griefe, loue do thus expell: Wrath is a fire, and gealosie a weede, Griefe is a flood, and loue a monster fell; The fire of sparkes, the weede of little seede, The flood of drops, the Monster filth did breede: But sparks, seed, drops, and filth do thus delay;

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The sparks soone quench, the springing seed outweed, The drops dry vp, and filth wipe cleane away: So shall wrath, gealosy, griefe, loue die and decay. (4.35)

The stanza is difficult because it combines the tight patterning of the clauses with inversions of syntax: “[D]o thus expell” and “do thus delay” govern and direct the rhetoric as imperatives. There is no exculpatory “if”: The Palmer simply says that love is a monster bred of filth, and the passage rightly figures as a prime exhibit for the gynophobia Berger and others attribute to Temperance as it is represented in the narrative. One final example. Near the end of her essay, Martin refers to Guyon’s combat with Furor, “a monster who immediately overthrows himself in combat with a truly temperate knight, Sir Guyon” (2.4.8). Again, I point to the text: His rude assault and rugged handeling Straunge seemed to the knight, that aye with foe In fayre defence and goodly menaging Of armes was wont to fight, yet nathemoe Was he abashed now not fighting so, But more enfierced through his currish play, Him sternly grypt, and hailing to and fro, To ouerthrow him strongly did assay, But ouerthrew him selfe vnwares, and lower lay.

Spenser is famous for scenes in which combatants become indistinguishable, so the mistake is pardonable, but it is indeed simply a mistake. The subject of the verbs after line 2 is uniformly “the knight,” and it is Guyon who overthrows himself in combat with Furor. To read the stanza otherwise makes nonsense of the encounter, which ends with the Palmer’s warning to Guyon that Furor “is not, ah, he is not such a foe, / As steele can wound, or strength can ouerthroe” (10.4–5). It would be going too far, I think, to read Guyon here as a figure for the critic, wrestling with Harry only to overthrow herself. Martin’s essay is too appreciative, too honorific, even, to be characterized as combative, and Harry’s response—if we had it—would be a model of courteous conversation. I cite all three essays discussed here as model responses to Berger in the hope that they may inspire further, equally serious and respectful, critical engagements with work that is too important to ignore. In an essay published in 2006, I ended a sampling of modern criticism on the 1590 Faerie Queene with an appraisal of the essays collected here:

Editor’s Introduction

xv

Berger’s latest essays on The Faerie Queene I–III, gathered into a forthcoming book from Fordham University Press, bring the present account to its close. . . . I conclude with Berger not only because he was a harbinger of (and a major figure in) the Spenser renaissance of the 1960s, but also because he has never stopped intensely reading and rereading the poem and its critics, citing generously from and arguing shrewdly with peers and predecessors as well as younger scholars. The result is a half-century of work that in my judgment comprises the most sustained and impressive body of commentary in the history of Spenser criticism.6

Publication of Resisting Allegory may have been delayed, but it offers a fitting close to a distinguished and utterly distinctive body of work. In that close, may Spenser criticism find many new beginnings.

R e s i s t i n g A l l e g o ry

Introduction

On Texts and Countertexts Language speaks to us about the ways we speak the language. —a. leigh deneef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor

Spenser is a delirious poet. He can’t plough straight. What he builds is shiftier, twistier, than anything dreamed up or put down by M. C. Escher. I began thinking and writing about “The Faerie Queene” in the early 1950s, and that poem has never let me go because it has never let me in, has kept me digging outside its crooked walls for five decades in a responsive delirium of interpretation, mucking about at the al­ exandrine foot of the castle, furrowed by its aura, looking for the unlikely wicket, the machicolated flicker of light, the unraveled end of a Phaedrian lifeline winding through secret passages toward the Transcendence and toward the moment when finally I might give myself to be stigmatized not (as I already well know) by the beams of that Transcendence but by the harrowing teeth of its Judgment, its Proscription, for it will ask me why I dared presume and it will proclaim where I went wrong and how I, unworthy to be there, must find my way back out or be forever lost in its sandy bowels. I am The Faerie Queene’s Joseph K. But what follows is not my testimony, not my confession, only the delirium momentarily straitened and re­ duced to its method before it releases itself into the obliquity of example. . . . Interpretive practices are polarized by the tension between two orienta­ tions, two differently accented modes of sign use put into play by speakers 1

2

Harry Berger, Jr.

and auditors, or by writers and readers, or by the bodies of signification they mutually produce. On the one hand, there is a “set” toward the mes­ sage, the story, whatever is being referred to or talked and written about. This includes a set toward the communicative transaction between sender and receiver—includes, that is, not merely the informational context but also the rhetorical form of the content. On the other hand, there is a set toward the production of meaning and toward the content of the form, and this includes a set toward the possi­ bility that the text may generate a message about the message. Let’s pro­ visionally distinguish these two sets by calling the first one innocent reading and the second one suspicious reading. Let’s imagine that between them they polarize a continuum, a differential field of reading. And let’s give this continuum the form of an interpretive shut tle.1 To ride the shut­ tle is to weave a fabric and pattern of reading that responds differentially to the pressures from each pole. The two poles— one oriented toward the message and the other toward messages about the message—may be correlated to the two­level structure of the sign: First, the sign is coupled to a referent; then, within the sign, the signifier or verbal expression is coupled to the signified, the expres­ sion’s content, or sense, or meaning. Imagine the standard form of the dic­ tionary entry. The first word in the entry occupies the place of the term being defined and thereby becomes the signifier. The words that follow it define its meaning (or its grammatical use in the case of function words like prepositions) and thus become its signified, or range of signifieds. Together, the signifier and the signified constitute the sign. The sign is the whole dictionary entry; it is the defined word. Notice that the referent of the sign is not the same as its signified, but exists at a dif ferent level. Normally the sign doesn’t refer to itself or its parts. Within the sign, the signified designates or marks out a particular range of referents. But there are no referents in the dictionary when it isn’t in use. I said “designates or marks out,” not “indicates or points out.” The referent has to be marked out, distinguished by language, before the sign can be used to point it out. Considered strictly as a signifying code, a sys­ tem of signifiers and signifieds, language makes reference possible but it doesn’t refer. Only language users, sign users, refer. For the sign to refer to the thing for which it stands, it has to be picked up by a sign user and pointed at the thing. Pointing the sign at the thing—which could of course be another sign— is an act of reference that converts the thing into a referent. I use the ex­ pressions “point to” and “point at” to dramatize the notion that referring

Introduction: On Texts and Countertexts

3

is an act, something sign users do. Thus if a sign is “everything that, on the grounds of a previously established convention, can be taken as something standing for something else,” the “something else” is its referent.2 Signs refer only when language users point them at things outside the signs they use. I note in passing that although signs normally don’t signify their signifiers and signifieds, they can be made to do so, just as things normally positioned as referents can be made to signify their signs. The explanation I just gave is based on lexical interactions. Even there, you can glimpse the potential for complexity in the fact that one signifier can have many signifieds and one signified can couple with many signifiers. But when we go beyond the lexical and sentential levels, problems and com­ plications multiply. For example, since reference involves sign users, the study of reference necessarily implicates the study of self­reference. This inevitably leads to the study of transactional relations between and among sign users.3 And as Teresa de Lauretis insists, the study of sign use includes the study of “the materiality and the historicity of the subject itself”—the study of “a subject touched by the practice of signs, . . . physically impli­ cated or bodily engaged in the production of meaning, representation, and self representation,” and therefore, as she reminds us, the study of a gen­ dered subject.4 Another problem is posed by the tendency to syncopate the two pairs of terms, signifier/signified and sign/referent. The reasoning here is that since both the signifier and the sign can be said to signify, why can’t the signifier be coupled to the referent, and if it can, what’s the point of distin­ guishing between signified and referent? Many interpreters make do with only the terms signifier and signified. For example, the distinction between signified and referent is often elided out in cultural critique and decon­ struction. But at the same time, something else also tends to get elided: the distinction between what language does and what language users do. Granted that we interpreters always look at examples of language use— never at language pure and simple, but at discourse or language in use (dic­ tionaries are products of discourse)—we can still uncouple the language from the language user. That is, we can distinguish what the users do with their language, what they mean by it, what they see and hear in it, from what their language says, does, and means regardless of what users say, do, mean, and read or hear. Parallel to the distinction between innocent and suspicious reading is a distinction between documentary and mischievous sign use. I call sign use documentary when the objects constructed by the desire or decision to focus on sign/referent relations tend to be scenes of instruction and persuasion,

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Harry Berger, Jr.

sources of evidence, purveyors of doctrine, instruments of knowledge and doxa, producers of docility—in a word, documents. In the documentary mode signs are used and represented in a way that directs attention beyond them to their referents, a way that either doesn’t invite or even actively resists any effort to explore the activity going on within the signs them­ selves. When deployed in normal communication, signs are expected to be as inconspicuous as good servants in showing you the way to their ref­ erents. But in mischievous sign use, the signs either fail to be good servants and disturb you by getting in your way or else they behave like seditious servants who act up and get in your face. Both innocent reading and documentary sign use fix on sign/referent relations. Innocent reading is what we all do as ordinary readers in the street. Suspicious reading and mischievous sign use fix on signifier/signified relations. Readers and other sign users may shuttle back and forth between these two positions or activities, and it is to mark their movements that I introduce the terms textualization and detextualization. To textualize is to shift attention from the documentary mode focused on sign/referent rela­ tions to the suspicious mode focused on signifier/signified relations. Textualization names an activity in which attention is redirected from a particular set of sign/referent relations to relations and interactions of various kinds between the signifiers and signifieds in that set. I use the word “text” to designate the product of this textualizing ac­ tivity, and I use “textuality” to designate its appearance. Mieke Bal defines “text” in a similar way—as the product of “a mode of reading” that allows for “a continuous shaping and reshaping of sign events.” She opposes this mode to the “realist” mode of “reading for a content . . . modeled on real­ ity at the expense of awareness of the signifying system of which the work is constructed.”5 Under this definition, “text” differs both from actual writ­ ing, the script that represents words, and from the messages transparently conveyed by the writing. Whatever invites or is produced by interpretation, whatever looks like it wants to be or has been interpreted, whatever we decide we want to in­ terpret, assumes the status of text. The category thus includes any kind of writing and, more generally, any kind of sign system. It includes the goings­on among the semiotic, phonological, prosodic, lexical, rhetorical, and grammatical registers of the signifying context. It includes the effects of dif ferent media or channels on those events.6 And it doesn’t exclude the way all these interactions affect and modify the act of reference. The text produced by suspicious reading or mischievous sign use will always be a

Introduction: On Texts and Countertexts

5

comment on the message, on the reference, and on the apparent intention­ ality (vouloirdire) of the writing. The problem is to try to determine where this comment comes from, the writing, the reader, or some combination of both. For if there is mis­ chievously opaque writing that invites textualization, mustn’t there be mis­ chievously transparent writing that actively and knowingly resists it? And shouldn’t we also allow for the oppositional writing that represents the re­ sistance to textualization in an ironic or parodic mode of critique? If to textualize is to redirect attention from sign/referent relations to the various kinds of interplay between signifiers and signifieds, then to reverse this operation is to detextualize. On the one hand, textualization provision­ ally dethrones the sign/referent relations and puts them in brackets in order to free up the seditious particles bouncing about and colliding cra­ zily within the nucleus of the sign. On the other hand, detextualization places the product of textualization in brackets, restores the transparency of the sign, and reestablishes the hegemony of the referent. But it doesn’t restore documentary innocence. Rather, it produces an imitation or simu­ lacrum of the document. Detextualizing enacts or stages a defense against textualization, and for this reason I call its product a countertext. Countertexts come in many forms. Books can be countertexts; textbooks definitely are. The Bible is the site of continual documentary and coun­ tertextual struggle. The body and cosmos are major cultural countertexts. Within and between them is an array of supporting countertexts that in­ cludes genders, lineages, ethnicities, rituals, religions, governments, and the variety of institutional discourses investigated by Foucault and others. These compose into the detextualized frame of reference—into the world­ view or framework or dominant ideology in terms of which acts of refer­ ence are shaped, encouraged, and validated or violated. Whenever textualization burrows into what Jean­François Lyotard calls “the universe of the phrase,”7 it does so within this detextualized framework. The texts it produces are always relative to some par tic u lar state or aspect of the framework. To be more precise, they’re relative to two states of the frame­ work: One is the context of the current state of documentary culture, and the other is the context of the current state of interpretive discourse and practice. It may be the pleasure or jouissance of the textualizing act that produces the familiar paranoia of interpretation. Anyone who spends time moving back and forth across the interpretive shut tle between innocence and sus­ picion, or between documentarity and mischief, is liable to suspect that

6

Harry Berger, Jr.

since all documents may enact the defense against interpretation, all may be countertexts in disguise. Riding the shut tle produces doubt not only about the givenness and closure of the sign/referent linkage but also about the innocence of the documentary standpoint that privileges them. Countertextuality has a long history. We all know that one picture is worth a thousand words. Or at least we’ve heard that; we’ve been told it since the early middle ages, when visual images were called the bible of the illiterate, who could look at them while they were hearing ritual and homiletic speech acts. In his famous vindication of images, Gregory the Great (c. 540–604) writes that “the picture is for simple men what writing is for those who can read, because those who cannot read see and learn from the picture the model they should follow. Thus pictures are above all for the instruc­ tion of the people.” Some seven centuries later, around 1285, William Durand uses Gregory’s dictum to introduce a discussion of church pic­ tures: “What writing supplies to him who can read, a picture supplies to him who is unlearned and can only look. Because they who are unin­ structed thus see what they ought to follow: and things are read, though letters be unknown.” A little later Durand again cites Gregory on the value of pictures: Paintings appear to move the mind more than [written] descriptions: for deeds are placed before the eyes in paintings, and so appear to be actually going on. But in [written] descriptions, the deed is done as it were by hearsay: which affects the mind less when recalled to memory. Thus it is that in churches we pay less reverence to books than to images and pictures.

Notice that this is more tendentious than the preceding statement, which only vindicates images as a kind of stopgap, a second­best if not a last re­ sort. This formulation implies on the contrary that even if you can read words you’ll get more out of “reading” pictures. The instruction will be more effective because more affecting. The indoctrination will be more thorough, will go deeper, because the medium of instruction is more vivid and immediate. Here we slide into other familiar places: the discourse of paragone, the comparison of visual, verbal, and auditory arts: the discourse that grew up around Horace’s ut pictura poesis; the Reformation project of getting the power of interpretation out of the clutches, and out of the spaces, of Catholic ritual and my thology. My point about the tendentious statement is that it is a theory of inter­ pretation. To be more precise, it is a theory of disinterpretation, for if one

Introduction: On Texts and Countertexts

7

picture is worth a thousand words, then a thousand words are reducible to one picture. On this theory the best method of reading involves looking through the language at the referent, that is, reading as if visualizing. The theory brings to bear an injunction against suspicious reading and mischie­ vous writing. It is a form of censorship that aims to discourage the textualiz­ ing activity.8 Another version of this theory seems to invite interpretation by the promise of hidden meaning that it withholds from all who do not have the key. In his important study of iconoclasm in the English Reformation, Ernest Gilman observes that the Renaissance’s “odd fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphs” instances a conception of the visual image as concealing a language. . . . The Egyptian priests had preserved their arcane wisdom in ideograms. . . . Here was “a mute and symbolic language of ideas” (Valeriano) at once more universal and indelible than other tongues, and more directly expressive of divine wisdom than written language. In the hieroglyphic image, meaning presented itself purely and instanta­ neously in the lexicon of things—in rebus rather than in verbis— without the mediation of words.9

This involves a more explicitly elitist rationale than that of the Gregorian mode, but the goal is the same. As Plato had shown in the Phaedrus and the Timaeus, the pictographic writing of the Egyptians differed from the more democratic alphabetic writing that represented oral speech in that the interpretation of hieroglyphics was restricted to the priesthood.10 Gilman also discusses the example of George Sandys, whose frontis­ piece to his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is followed by a brief poem called “The Minde of the Frontispeece, And Argument of this Worke,” a poem that not only clarifies the allegory but further suggests by its title that the frontispiece is itself the image of a “Minde,” of the integral idea of the Metamorphoses now unfolding into the sequential “Argument” of Sandys’s text. On the same principle, Sandys ex­ plains in a preface “To the Reader” that he has “contracted the substance of every Booke” of Ovid’s poem “into as many Figures,” each figure condensing all the fables to be told in that book into what Ficino would call “one complete image.” So the illustration to Book 3 . . . shows Actaeon, Narcissus, Semele, Tiresias, and so on, the narrative in which they will be positioned linearly for the reader here contracted beforehand into a display inviting the reader to apprehend

8

Harry Berger, Jr.

at a glance the whole network of their interrelationships. (Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, 18)

Here again, in this preemptive strike, one picture reductively preinterprets one thousand words. Visual representation and condensation impose a countertextual defense against seditious democratic reading— against the jouissance that Ovid’s textual play invites. The countertextual effects of stylized rhetoric in song, dance, political oratory, and other forms of ritualized communication have been studied in detail and persuasively analyzed by the anthropologist Maurice Bloch, who did his field work in Madagascar. From this study he draws the conclusion that “you cannot argue with a song.”11 He claims that “rea­ soned contradiction or argument . . . is . . . reduced or ruled out” by the formalized—or, as he calls it, the “arthritic”— character of ritual com­ munication, whether in religious or political contexts. “As a result the communication of ritual is protected by its form from challenge, rapid modification, or evaluation.”12 Stylized expression produces a sense of inevitability in the receivers as well as the senders of ritualized messages. And the messages tend to be traditional in content as well as in form. Bloch notes that the “speeches of elders at the beginning of a ritual are identical to the speeches of elders in political councils.” Both share the same re­ strictive syntactical, lexical, and rhetorical features. Both employ the same restrictively traditional body of content. Both are “referred to . . . as ‘speaking the words of the ancestors.’ ”13 Some kinds of communication, then, seem to resist textualization. Far from sending out invitations to close reading, they preemptively direct you beyond the interactions going on within and among their signs. They in­ vite you to look through the language by constructing the reader as an auditor or spectator who reads as if listening to speech or as if visualizing events, objects, places. They aspire to the status of a document, a picture, a speech, or a song. Other kinds of communication invite you to look at the language or into it, and thus to read as if textualizing. Still others in­ vite you to do both. They generate cognitive dissonance by sending out incompatible invitations. You can, of course, decide to textualize any writing, whether or not it sends out invitations. You are not bound by the dictates and blandishments of documentary and mischievous sign use because you’re free to deploy at least three dif ferent fictions of reading, fictions that are marked by dif fer­ ent degrees of innocence and suspicion. You can imagine yourself reading as if listening to a speech, debate, conversation, or story. You can imagine

9

Introduction: On Texts and Countertexts

yourself reading as if visualizing a picture, play, film, or sequence of events (as in a historical narrative). You can imagine yourself reading as if perusing—that is, producing and constructing— a text. I call these fictions of reading because reading is always reading­as­if, which is only to repeat the tired and politically correct (but still correct) opinion that reading is a socially constructed practice, a convention, like the writing that reproduces and represents it. It is through these fictions or conventions that I now turn to examine the cognitive dissonance produced by Edmund Spenser in Books 1–3 of The Faerie Queene. • I discovered years ago that if you try to read the long flowing mellifluous line of Spenser’s alexandrine stanzas to students, it is like music to their ears— but music to sleep by. For older generations, though— critics like C. S. Lewis, writing before there was TV— Spenser knew how to tell a story, how to appeal to the child in every reader, how to conjure up com­ pelling visual effects, how to use sonority and spectacle to deliver a stern moral message. This is why Milton thought Spenser was “a better teacher than Aquinas.” More recent critics still follow the Lewis line. But in the 1970s John Webster came up with what I think is a much more interest ing account of these effects.14 Webster argues that Spenser’s poem invites a conflicted mode of reading. On the one hand, the looseness of construction, the fluency of line, the lulling proliferation of merely formal epithets, the ritualistic use of narrative as well as rhetorical formulas, the redundancy and interlace of narrative patterns— all these work together to encourage readers to respond as if they were an audience that “expects and appreci­ ates only what is possible under the conditions of oral per for mance,” which means an audience that doesn’t have “time to reflect, to go back and re­read,” an audience, as Lewis might say, of youngsters around a fire listening to an old codger decanting the wisdom of the elders.15 But on the other hand, Webster continues, while the narrator of The Faerie Queene uses rhythmic and pictorial effects to induce readers to “assume the oral mode, the poem as a written work . . . makes just the opposite demand, asking us to [slow down and wake up, to] read closely, to follow ambiguities, to appreciate verbal play.” And Webster goes on to show that when “we ‘read’ the poem as well as ‘listen’ to it, we continually find that its language can reveal surprisingly intricate insights into the poem’s allegory.”16

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Harry Berger, Jr.

In fact, we find more than that. We find that even as the poem seems to promote storytelling, it represents it critically. Spenser’s poetry targets the moral and political values embedded not only in the allegory and narra­ tive but also in the very mode of communication. When you slow down and resist the fluency of Spenser’s music, when you start looking at what happens within and among the signs—in a word, when you textualize— the text you produce develops a critique not only of the storytelling mode and of its picture­making narrative but also of its moral allegory. It repre­ sents them as elements of a prime­time pacifier. But if The Faerie Queene pretends to resist textualization, it does so conspicuously enough, and mis­ chievously enough, to arouse the reader’s suspicion. If you find John Webster’s story persuasive, then you’ll agree that The Faerie Queene dramatizes a clash between two representations of reading, reading as if listening and reading as if textualizing. And since the oral­ formulaic devices that invite you to read as if listening to a story contrib­ ute to the strings of generalized and discontinuous descriptions by which the story is made vivid, those devices also contribute to an effect of refer­ ence. They do this by inviting you to visualize or pictorialize or cinematize as you pretend to listen. In other words, they construct the reader as an auditor and spectator who’s invited to look through the language and imag­ ine the referent, whether it is an event, a place, or an agent. But over against that, the poem directs attention to what Joel Fineman once called “the lan­ guageness of [its] language.” It does weird things with words that make you question the resistance to textualizing, make you conscious of the messages conveyed by the allegorically charged stories it pretends to visualize and refer to. To suggest what this approach involves, let’s glance briefly at two no­ table characterizations of The Faerie Queene written in the 1970s and 1980s. Northrop Frye argues that Spenser “kidnapped” erotic and chivalric for­ mulas, and made them serve an apocalyptic discourse expressing the reli­ gious and social ideals of the Reformation state, while Stephen Greenblatt argues that the kidnapper placed those formulas in the ser vice of the Queen’s colonialist discourse in order to guarantee that “reality as given by [Tudor] ideology” would remain unchallenged within the poem.17 These characterizations are not wrong; each describes a message the poem com­ municates. It is the message that is “wrong,” that is, offered to the reader as a target of textual critique. Frye and Greenblatt don’t sufficiently attend to textual effects that em­ bed the kidnapped formulas in a climate of reflexive parody typical of ro­ mance. One such effect is picked out by Jonathan Goldberg when he

Introduction: On Texts and Countertexts

11

observes that the text “stumbles across a most unlikely and yet undeniable source for The Faerie Queene,” Chaucer’s Sir Thopas: “It is one of the won­ ders of The Faerie Queene that it can relocate— and dislocate—itself in this way.” Spenser’s poem “is so fully the rewriting of epic and romance . . . that it establishes a literary space that is located, in its play of text against text, on the deadpan side of parody.”18 I want to hold this thought against the subsequent course of Goldberg’s brilliant deconstructive account of the way the poem fashions a reader “ed­ ucated in frustration” (29). The shadow of tiny Sir Thopas’s dream and pursuit of his “elf­queene” beneath the figure of “that most noble Briton Prince” in search of Tanaquill/Gloriana says it all. It cues the informed reader to recall how Englished romance has already been reduced to the butt of Harry Bailly’s displeasure. Any poem intent on renovating the genre would have to acknowledge and live with that prior deflation. It may be that the values of romance are being conspicuously reinflated for a more congenial readership than fourteenth­century bourgeois inn­ keeper bullies. But it may also be that the reinflation is dogged by its Chau­ cerian shadow. Does The Faerie Queene preemptively wear Sir Thopas as a deadpan parody of itself, a kind of cuirass or bullet­proof vest? Its meta­ romantic climate distorts Northrop Frye’s kidnapped formulas in a man­ ner that’s calculated to contaminate the integrity of the Reformation argument. The result is that “reality as given by ideology” is continuously posed, deposed, and exposed as a countertext. So, for example, because the poem fuses the Christian quest for identity with the chivalric quest for manhood, the spiritual dangers connected with the loss of faith and joy in the quest get dramatized predominantly as sexual dangers. Book 1 is expressly about the male protagonist’s pursuit of holiness, or wholeness, a pursuit figured as the desire, quest, and espousal of the true faith. Textual perusal interrogates this theme. In Chapter 2 I discuss the religious problematic of male identity in Book 1 in terms of the produc­ tion of misautia, self­hatred, and of autophobia, which I define as fear of and flight from oneself, the fear, desire, or hatred of one’s own hatred, desire, and fear. In that discussion I try to show how, as Redcrosse’s errantry declines into errancy, autophobia and misautia are displaced to— and productive of—misogynist and gynophobic idols of feminized truth and falsehood. This process of displacement exposes the quest motif to the logic of castration. To read textually is to note how complicities have been allegorically po­ liced and conspicuously redistributed in a way that prompts the reader to resist the redistribution, or at least to notice it. Resistance entails shifting

12

Harry Berger, Jr.

the power of deception (or “hy pocrisy”) from personifications of evil agency to the self­dividing process by which the protagonist, torn be­ tween desire and conscience, labors to install himself in self­blinding structures of bad faith. The textual energy of Book 1 thus springs from its resistance to the conjunction of the antipapist and misogynist discourses it represents. Implicit in this resistance is a critique of the idolatrous con­ vention of personifying evil in wicked scapegoats. This is a critique of nar­ rative bad faith that extends its reach to all forms of idolatry, positive as well as negative, Protestant as well as Catholic. As the example of Acrasia in Book 2 shows, the countertext presents a conspicuously reductive visu­ alization—a narrative caricature—of a more complex set of meanings. Book 2 is countertextually about temperance as a discourse of self­ control and self­knowledge, a classicizing discourse that kidnaps Chris­ tian formulas to validate its ideal of heroic masculinity, integrity, and autonomy. Textually it is about the reliance of that ideal on gynophobia, which the discourse of temperance mobilizes as both a displacement of the specter of autophobia and a defense against that specter. For autophobia would result from the discovery that the injunction to self­knowledge is an instrument for securing and sustaining self­misrecognition. The root of all evil in Book 2 is the witch, Acrasia. Some sixty years ago I castigated “her” as a demonic allegorist. Today I find myself castigat­ ing that castigation by replacing “demonic” with “demonized”: Acrasia, I now believe, is textually represented as the objectification of male hys­ teria, and her femaleness is like that of a male in drag. The discourse of temperance demonizes Acrasia by activating the principle of specular tau­ tology. This is the principle that the evil the discourse constructs and rep­ resents is always displaced from itself and blamed on the evil it constructs and represents. The textual critique of temperance represents this process of displacement and undoes it. Book 3 is explicitly about chastity and the pursuit of true love in the context of marriage and imperial dynasty. Goldberg has powerfully argued that this pursuit and context center on the woman’s “acceptance of the ma­ ternal role,” and therefore on her acceptance of the sexual and wifely roles.19 The desire of the chaste virgin is aroused under patriarchal aus­ pices, and her power is exalted as essential to the translation of empire and the orderly transmission of dynastic rule. The chaste virgins of Book 3 ex­ perience birth­giving fantasies, show maternal solicitude for the injured and oppressed, demonstrate unswerving loyalty to their lovers, and sacri­ fice their own interests in the performance of altruistic acts. These are all intimations of self­transcendence, imitations or anticipations of what has

Introduction: On Texts and Countertexts

13

to be surrendered—virginity, autonomy, and power—in the transition to motherhood. Inscribed in the sexual, wifely, and maternal roles are both a promise of fulfillment and a threat of impairment. In textual perspective, this threat metastasizes in the traces of a perva­ sive fantasy dispersed throughout the book: the fantasy of matrophobia that structurally complements the positive emphasis on maternal and virginal power. Matrophobia underlies the fears and desires of female as well as male figures, and it takes a variety of forms. It includes the fear of the possible consequences of entering into sexual and wifely relations—fear, therefore, of the power of fathers and of the institutional bondage of marriage (“wed­ lock”) that transfers father power to husbands. “Fear of self­impairment”20 and of disempowerment are registered not only in totalizing fantasies of maternal power and pleasure but also in the idyllic figures of conjunction that—as Goldberg has shown—maintain the integrity of the mother/ daughter bond: the virgin mother, the maternal virgin, the mothering lover, the erotic mother. On the other side, the Great Mother becomes the Terrible Mother, foul Mother Night, or an Acrasian Venus textualized as the projection of the male fear of being overwhelmed, emasculated, infantilized by erotic ma­ ternalism or maternal eroticism. Gynophobic discourse registers its appre­ hension in narrative and rhetorical efforts to contain those imaginary female forces. A conflicted reading of containment strategies emerges from each of the first three books. Each participates in those strategies and sup­ ports them in its mimesis of traditional androcentric and gynophobic dis­ courses. But as mimesis shifts to mimicry and parody, each book generates a critique of the motives informing androcentrism and gynophobia.

chapter 1

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1: Ethics, Gender, and Oppositional Reading in the Spenserian Text One of the lessons Spenser learned from Chaucer . . . is how to treat a source, . . . that is, how to imbibe its spirit without being stagnated by its letter. . . . Throughout The Faerie Queene, Spenser sought the traces of truth and the sources of inspiration not in an unmediated self but in the cumulative expression of the inward mind inscribed in the human past and present in human records, in human words and texts, from the beginning. —judith anderson, “ ‘Myn auctour’: Spenser’s Enabling Fiction and Eumnestes’ ‘immortal scrine,’ ” in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, edited by George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey

The Faerie Queene is overwhelmingly a poem about male desire. Its females are the figures of male imagination. . . . If the male poet strategically exhibits and thus distances himself from erotic patterns he judges to be entrapping or abusive, does he necessarily weaken the foundational structures of male prerogative? —linda gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic

Woven through the text of The Faerie Queene the varicolored threads of traditional discourses form a citational and anthological interlace that lend Spenser’s poem a fusty splendor. They include not only the biblical, Virgilian, Ovidian, Galfridian, and Hermetic (Neoplatonic)—the “typo­ logical matrices” picked out by Angus Fletcher—but also the Petrarchan, the Chaucerian, the chivalric, the courtly, the goliardic, and the pastoral.1 My thesis in these chapters on Books 1 through 3 is that the interlace as a whole is invested with a common property: All the discourses that compose it are critically represented as ideological strategies for defending or legiti­ mating male dominance and desire, and for justifying the instrumental 17

18

Book One: The Legend of Holinesse

functions of woman in the patriarchal mode of reproduction. The object of the Spenserian critique of these discourses is the logic of the phallus, which I have elsewhere compared to the logic of Pinocchio’s nose: The more he lies, the bigger it grows; the bigger the phallus grows, the more it lies. In short, this is the logic of castration.2 I’m afraid, however, that it may be a tactical error to begin a study of the Book of Holinesse by introducing so anomalous a concept.3 It may be considered tendentious, anachronistic, offensively “hip.” Therefore, out of respect for such considerations, or accusations, I shift to a more traditional metaphor, one that depicts the discursive interlace as an “archive” in a pas­ sage brilliantly discussed by David Lee Miller: Spenser’s image for his textual source, the “everlasting scryne” from which his Muse lays out ancient scrolls that tell of Arthur’s quest, is a synecdoche for what we might call the “archive.” Located as we eventually learn in Eumnestes’ chamber, it represents for Spenser the commemorative power itself, sole basis and guarantee for the ongoing “translation” of Western imperial culture. As synecdoche, this image attributes a distinctly global unity to the scattered hoards of docu­ ments found, purchased, transported, translated, reread and other wise recovered during the late medieval and early modern explosion of translatio studii in Western Europe. The “gentleman or noble person” Spenser seeks to fashion pursues an ego ideal that would integrate the imperial self with an encyclopedia of its culture’s symbolic paradigms, from literary genres to chronicle histories, from legal fictions to theological doctrines.4

Book 1 situates itself in literary and cultural history not only by its ge­ nealogical reconstruction of this archive—“genealogical” in Nietz sche’s sense of the term. It also represents and negotiates with the forces of two discursive traditions that intersect within the archival field it has con­ structed: the discourses of national epic and of chivalric romance. Per­ haps, since I am following the letter if not always the spirit of Miller’s brilliant dialectical analysis of “epistemological romance,” it would be bet­ ter to say that Book 1 situates itself ambivalently both within and against that archival field. On the one hand, it reforms the archive to an idealized and integrated fiction of Christian imperium that introjects “a powerful cul­ tural demand for truth” (81). In accordance with the “Protestant doctrine of ‘inner light’ ” it represents the truth or “troth” of the Christian subject at once as “a condition to be achieved . . . and a principle latent within him” (93)—written on the heart but obscured by sin. But on the other hand, the

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1

19

textual resources of the poem are mobilized to register the cost of such introjection and to interrogate a particular strategy for coping with and diminishing that cost: the strategy of displacing guilt or blame from male self to female other. This is a profile of the interpretation I propose to unpack, and it is gen­ erated from the methodological premise outlined in my introduction: The poem elicits a divided reading practice in which reading­as­if­perusing is set in opposition to two other lectorial fictions, reading­as­if­listening and reading­as­if­visualizing. The first produces a critique and the latter two a defense of the polemical Reformation discourse that drives the allegori­ cal narrative. A major target of textual opposition is the reliance of that narrative on a misogynist discourse of gender. It may seem illogical to speak of a critique as oppositional and to call the narrative it opposes a counter­ text. But I choose this nomenclature because I want to emphasize the re­ pressive function made conspicuous by the blatant use of pictorializing and prosodic devices that police the textual invitation “to read closely, to fol­ low ambiguities, to appreciate verbal play.”5 To the reader who accepts this invitation, the narrative is a countertext in the sense that it appears to in­ hibit textualization. However much contemporary critics disagree in their interpretations and evaluations, their views are—with few exceptions— dominated by a strong tendency to elide the mischievous interplay of text with counter­ text and base their judgments solely on the latter. This practice may of course take a variety of forms. In one, the Reformation narrative is taken straight and differentiated with reference to its place in literary and intel­ lectual history. A. C. Hamilton’s classic study of analogies between The Faerie Queene and Piers Plowman is a case in point. While showing how both poems reveal “the same Christian vision drawn from Scripture and presented in a common language of allegory,” Hamilton finds a distinguish­ ing mark in the greater intensity of the Redcrosse Knight’s encounter with Despair: “The difference is to be explained by the Reformation through which the forces of Thought, Wit, Study, Clergy, and even Scripture are ranged on the side of Despair while man’s individual conscience is bur­ dened by a greater awareness of his depravity under the judgment of God.” 6 More recently, several accounts of Spenser’s Protestantism have focused on the politics of iconoclasm. John King’s is one of the more traditional but also one of the odder performances in this vein: “In line with the impro­ visational strategy of ‘displacement and absorption’ of prohibited ritual and imagery that the Protestant Tudors employed to supplant the Church of Rome, Spenser fills generic space emptied by iconoclastic destruction

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Book One: The Legend of Holinesse

with figures that praise Queen Elizabeth as a religious leader.”7 This is odd because even as King expressly borrows Stephen Greenblatt’s concep­ tions, he ignores the trenchant critique of Spenser generated by Green­ blatt and others in the politically oriented climate that produced New Historicism.8 Greenblatt assumes that The Faerie Queene promotes a regiocentric dis­ course of epic and imperium, and he condemns the poem and its author for their endorsement of Elizabethan colonialism. King shares the assump­ tion but blandly ignores the criticism: Book I of The Faerie Queene assimilates the formulaic concerns of romantic epic within the larger system of Christian epic, which supplies a higher view of the heroism, power, and glory that inhere in the magnificence of Arthur and Gloriana. Spenser’s fusion of a romance knight and a Protestant hero in the character of Redcross puts into sharp contrast the traditional association of heroism with military victory versus the sacrifice entailed by Christian heroism.9

What King describes approvingly as “a higher view” is inseparable in his account from the regiocentrism Greenblatt deplores. Yet despite their di­ vergent assessments both critics start from the premise that they are re­ sponding to the poem’s true or “intended” meaning and message. Since, on the contrary, I think both respond to a narrative the poem critically positions as a countertext, I find more resonance in Greenblatt’s view. At least his condemnation, as I will try to demonstrate, was anticipated by the poem. To get in touch with that anticipation, however, requires a more sus­ picious and intensive reading, a more sustained and skeptical appreciation of textual mischief, than King undertakes or Greenblatt has room for in his chapter on Spenser. The same holds true for the critic who, among those loosely associated with New Historicism, has argued most trenchantly against the position that Spenser’s regiocentrism is unqualified. In Richard Helgerson’s view, “The Faerie Queene expresses much ambivalence concerning the strongly centralized monarchic order that was to a large degree the very enabling condition of its existence,” but “it entertains no similar doubts concerning the aristocratic myth of natural inborn superiority. . . . Spenser’s Gothic image of England stands against the rationalizing tendencies of the mod­ ern state.”10 Helgerson is concerned with “the politics of chivalric ro­ mance,”11 and he arrives at his view by relating the aesthetics of literary form directly to sociopolitical phenomena:

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1

21

The militant aristocratic autonomy figured by the knight errant was potentially upsetting to reborn classicism, to civic humanism, to bourgeois commercialism, to royal absolutism. (50) The canons of honor and the canons of romance were rapidly suc­ cumbing . . . to a new, more powerfully statist conception of moral obligation, a conception that found support in the unity and verisi­ militude of classical literary form. (52) Spenser’s image of chivalric multiplicity . . . represents a form of political organization in which the private initiative . . . of individual aristocratic champions plays an exceptionally large part. (54)

However compelling this coordination of aesthetic with political parameters is, however sensitive to the demands of historicization, it remains unsub­ stantiated and merely assertive because the discussion is not accompanied by any examples of close reading. The result is that a dense intertextual and citational network is bypassed, so that if, as I suggest above, Spenser’s poem situates itself in literary and cultural history by negotiating with the dis­ courses of national epic and chivalric romance, Helgerson’s reading de­ prives us of access to that negotiation. Better access is provided by Donald Cheney in two brief comments that sum up more than a hundred pages of close interpretation, and that are, in my opinion, still unparalleled: Spenser borrows from the Italians the concept of an ironic projection of human impulses into a simplified world of chivalric values as a means both of demonstrating the inadequacy of those values when naively formulated and of suggesting the extent to which the contra­ dictions inherent in those values may, in the long run, be their most valuable asset, since they lead back to illuminate the dialectical process operative in the unsimplified world of poet and reader. And it is toward such a repudiation of “naive allegory” that Spenser’s technique of “symbolic parody” is directed. . . . [One] of the most important respects in which Spenser changes his sources is that he uses them as allusions: the images of past epics are presented as part of the landscape of his poem.12

Cheney’s “naïve allegory” and “symbolic parody” are progenitors of what I am calling the countertext and the text, respectively. If we transfer his insight from the discourse of romance to the discourse of Christian epic, we discover that “the ironic evaluation of the chivalric ethic” Spenser found

22

Book One: The Legend of Holinesse

in Ariosto13 may also extend to the Protestant ethic in Book 1, especially since the Christian “theme of man’s fall and restoration” is committed to a chivalric vehicle that entangles this theme in worldly and erotic desires. The words I just quoted are those of A. C. Hamilton, and I read them lit­ erally: Book 1 is about man’s fall, and restoration, not about woman’s. When we take this disjunction into account, the picture changes, for then we have to consider that if Book 1 represents the quest of Christian identity as a quest of chivalric manhood, it does so in a manner that prob­ lematizes both of these quests. I’ll now explore this thesis in terms of the following three premises: The problem engaged by the quest of identity is that of narcissism; the problem engaged by the quest of manhood is that of gynophobia and misogyny; the convergence of these two into a single problem is the target of the text’s ironic evaluation. By “narcissism” in this context I mean simply “the impossible effort of the subject to reunite with himself in his own objectified image . . . within the register of representation,” and the consequent “alternation between self­deprecation and pretension.”14 One aim of many traditional strategies of identification is to construct subjectivity as an agency that’s continuously called upon to give an ac­ count of itself to itself as well as to others. It internalizes this challenge by a dialectical procedure. First it arouses the desire to resist the cultural discourses of inscription (the discourse of Family Values, for example). Then it arouses the desire to resist that resistance and voluntarily to com­ plete the work of inscription that “society” began but left unfinished. The objective of continuous challenge is continuous dissatisfaction with self­representation. This unhappiness is narcissism, and Joan Copjec’s Lacanian account of narcissism well describes that objective in its Christian form: Narcissism consists in the belief that one’s own being exceeds the imperfections of its image. Narcissism . . . seeks the self beyond the self­image, with which the subject constantly finds fault and in which it constantly fails to recognize itself. What one loves in one’s image is something more than the image. . . . Thus is narcissism the source of the malevolence with which the subject regards its image, the aggressiv­ ity it unleashes on all its own representations. And thus does the subject come into being as a transgression of, rather than in confor­ mity to, the law. It is not the law, but the fault in the law— the desire that the law cannot ultimately conceal— that is assumed by the subject as its own.15

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1

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In Christian discourse, the meaning of the phrase “the fault in the law” is best glossed by St. Paul’s “I had not known sin but for the law,” which may be unpacked as follows: What I desired and did wasn’t sinful in my eyes until the law told me it was; the new knowledge simultaneously intensifies guilt and intensifies desire by making the once accessible fruit forbidden and thus more tempting; the law arouses resistance to itself and punishes as it arouses; this double effect makes me feel more unworthy, sinful, and helpless to overrule the contrary “law of the members.” Thus it drives me to resist my resistance— drives me beyond myself and beyond the law toward the violence of grace that alone can shatter and transform and re­ deem both.16 Christian discourse is—to give it an Althusserian acronym—an ICA: an Ideological Cultural Apparatus for the production of narcissism, of au­ tophobia and misautia. It aims to install in the subject an initial and some­ times lasting effect of self­deprecation, insufficiency, even self­loathing. It actively cultivates the self­division, the psychomachia, latent in the very structure of subjectivity as an agency that apprehends itself and is present to itself only through historically delimited forms of mediation and repre­ sentation. It induces the sinner to seek identification with “the self beyond the self­image” in the forms of self­transcendence sanctioned by the Church and God.17 Book 1 of The Faerie Queene tells the story of this quest by trans­ lating it into a chivalric fairy tale, but it takes advantage of that vehicle to give its version of the quest a particular spin that raises questions about the ethics of vehiculation, that is, about the ethical and political commit­ ments that are latent in the conventions of representation. In what follows, I’ll isolate three areas of concern for discussion, as follows. 1. Readers are often struck by something dogged, desperate, and pride­ ful in the series of conspicuously wrong moves that propel Redcrosse from the malaise hinted at in the opening stanzas of canto 1 through the joy­ lessness he can subdue but not destroy in cantos 4–5 to the onset of de­ spair in canto 9. This pattern conforms to the logic of Christian narcissism sketched out above. Yet there is a general tendency in the criticism to take for granted the contribution of guilty conscience to the poem’s episodic structure and sequence, and to attribute Redcrosse’s wrong moves or er­ rors to his naïveté, which is variously justified by appealing to his inexpe­ rience, to the duplicity and hiddenness of the forces of evil, and to the emphasis on the obvious difference between the limited kinds of evidence available to a fictional character and the kinds available only to the reader. 2. The focus on naïveté responds to an important feature of the story, namely, its gestures toward depicting Redcrosse as callow and impulsive.

24

Book One: The Legend of Holinesse

“A fresh unproved knight” was what Una was looking for after his many predecessors “for want of faith, or guilt of sin” fell prey to the dragon (7.45, 47). The narrative encourages this reading by locating “the source of the malevolence with which the subject,” Redcrosse, comes to regard his im­ age not in his own failures but rather in the demonized personifications he confronts in his travels. Because these powers of darkness beguile and victimize him, he has to be saved from his own frailty and folly. The story thus gives aid and com­ fort to readers who want to attribute his problems not merely to his in­ nocence and passivity but also to the generic sinfulness and passibility of the fallible human creature. Yet the text of the poem also suggests a dif­ ferent interpretive emphasis: It plants clues to the effects of guilty self­ representation on the protagonist’s actions and the shape of the narrative. These two interpretive emphases are incompatible, and the question is whether the incompatibility is to be charged to the poet’s naïveté and in­ experience or appreciated as the effect of a text that knowingly and guilt­ ily takes responsibility for it. 3. In Book 1 the Christian quest for identity converges with the chival­ ric quest for manhood. Spiritual dangers connected with the loss of faith are dramatized predominantly as sexual dangers. The major role played by the wicked witch Duessa imparts a misogynist skew to the hero’s self­ hatred so that what leads him to despair is represented in largely gyno­ phobic terms. It seems obvious that these terms can only reinforce the emphasis on the protagonist as naïve victim. The poem’s diegetic agency—its narrative and narrator—is thus marked as a discursive articulation of male fantasy. The result is that the interpre­ tation implied by the narrative emphasis on the wicked witch and her fool­ ish victim is contested by the textual “voice” that impersonates that diegetic agency. This encourages the reader to redistribute complicities in a way that shifts much of the power of deception (or “hy pocrisy”) from personi­ fications of evil agency to the self­dividing process by which Redcrosse, torn between desire and conscience, tries—but ultimately fails—to install himself in the self­blinding structures of bad faith. Implicit in this failure is a critique of the idolatrous convention of personifying evil in wicked scapegoats, a critique of narrative bad faith that I shall return to later. Before moving on, I’d like to give a very brief sample of the kinds of reasons critics bring up in support of the naïveté thesis. Donald Cheney, for example, argues that the “pattern of Book I stresses the repetition of scenes in which . . . [Redcrosse] overcomes a clear and present threat only to fall prey to a hidden danger,” and this pattern highlights “the youth and

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1

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naivete” of a figure “ludicrously unprepared to read images that are im­ mediately recognizable to the narrator and the reader” (35). According to Maureen Quilligan, Redcrosse is naïve about language and “too naively trusts to the evidence of his senses” (Language, 36, 110). Cheney and Quilligan both connect this defect to his being beguiled by Archimago’s bed scene and Duessa’s beauty: “[H]e can vanquish a clearly labeled Sans Foy . . . but at the same time uncritically accepts Duessa,” who “seems to him no scarlet lady but an irresistible object of admiration” (Cheney, 35). William Nelson develops a more forceful version of this view while countering a prevalent interpretation that made “of the Legend of Holinesse . . . a kind of bildungsroman, a story of education by experience.”18 Nelson insists that Redcrosse learns nothing from experience. He is prone to sin because he is human, and the poem shows that even the “righteous Christian” will make mistakes, will “stumble,” will be “seduced by false­ hood” outside him, will be misled by “Duessa’s evil ways.” Of course, since he is “one of the chosen,” he will be saved, and the story makes much of “the unremitting struggle of the chosen Christian against sin and confu­ sion and self­doubt, stumbling constantly in the darkness, rescued as of­ ten by grace” (174–77). Readers are encouraged to pick up on this emphasis and examine it. It is what “gives the story of the Red Cross Knight its Protestant cast” (Nel­ son, 174). But these indications are textually interrogated by Spenser’s cri­ tique of the narrative tendency toward idolatrous scapegoating, and this critique opens the way to an alternative reading, which is that from the moment of his flight from Una in canto 2 Redcrosse seems less to struggle against than actively to pursue “sin and confusion and self­doubt.” It is the continuously sustained conflict between these alternatives of flight and pursuit that gives the poem its power and complexity. The passage that leads to this flight offers the poem’s most direct dramatization of interior conflict and shows how misogynist discourse is brought into play to pro­ vide a bad­faith resolution of that conflict. This dramatization is developed through intricate syntactical, lexical, and rhetorical devices. Let’s look at the lines that describe Redcrosse’s awakening from the erotic dream in which a sprite “schooled privily” by Archimago impersonates Una: In this great passion of unwonted lust, Or wonted feare of doing ought amis, He started up, as seeming to mistrust Some secret ill, or hidden foe of his. (1.49)19

26

Book One: The Legend of Holinesse

The correlation of “unwonted” with “wonted” suggests that what is now aroused is previously repressed “lust,” so that the moment of doubt that follows is at least partly self­directed. But the ominous vagueness of the last two lines indicates not only general apprehensiveness but also mistrust of something in Una. The conveniently lascivious apparition of Una that meets his waking eyes allows him to confirm the displacement of mistrust. His response to the apparition is nevertheless Redcrosse’s finest moment in the poem. He seems to make an impressive recovery from the initial assault of the “dreame of loves and lustfull play, / That nigh his manly hart did melt away” (1.4 7). While he is still dreaming, the narrator intervenes as censor to show both the dreamer and the reader the prudent way to handle the difficulty, namely, to keep in mind the normative distinction between good and bad girls, marriageable royal virgins and whores, that the dream perversely overrides in making Una the object of the dreamer’s “unwonted lust”: Her, whom he waking evermore did weene To be the chastest flowre, that ay did spring On earthly braunch, the daughter of a king, Now a loose Leman to vile ser vice bound: And eke the Graces seemed all to sing, Hymen io Hymen, dauncing all around, Whilst freshest Flora her with Yvie girlond crownd. (1.48)

Since this is a nuptial fantasy we can see why, in addition to his “wonted feare of doing ought amis,” the cause of his waking mistrust of “Some se­ cret ill, or hidden foe” might be not only the desire of “wanton blis and wicked joy” the dream has just aroused but also the possibility that she, for whom he was prepared to “shed his blood” (1.55) and whose hand he might receive from the king (if he didn’t shed too much of it) was not the prize she seemed. She should repel erotic advances, but she was making them and trying to overcome rather than reinforce his fear of doing ought amiss. She had let him down. Surely then his first response—“he thought have slaine her”—is justifi­ able. But he immediately backs off and shows his true mettle: Though he remains suspicious, he reassures her of his love and loyalty, and persuades her to go back to bed. This places him in the enviable position of the up­ right but clement judge, the object of desire, the chivalrous consoler who wields both moral and sexual power and can afford to be magnanimous, can afford to feel sorry for the poor lovelorn wretch: “Much griev’d to thinke that gentle Dame so light” (1.55). If nice girls are the ones who don’t

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1

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go all the way, he can take pride in having kept her nice, and kept alive the chance for them to go on together. What makes the episode most interest ing is that its rhetoric casts doubt both on the completeness of Redcrosse’s recovery from “unwonted lust” and on the success with which he manages to persuade himself that in his prudence and magnanimity he has really risen above it all. The following lines convey the ambivalence that will continue to divide and perplex him: All cleane dismayd to see so uncouth sight, And halfe enraged at her shamelesse guise, He thought have slaine her in his fierce despight: But hasty heat tempring with sufferance wise, He stayde his hand, and gan himselfe advise To prove his sense, and tempt her faigned truth. (1.50)

It is the absolute duplicity of the final line that explains why he was only half enraged, and why he subsequently responds to the spectral scene of copulation the way he does. At the beginning of canto 2 Archimago takes his two “Sprights,” the apparition of Una and the bearer of the erotic dream from Morpheus, and transforms the bearer into the figure of a young squire who had “in loves and lusty­hed / His wanton dayes . . . ever loosely led, / Without regard of armes and dreaded fight” (2.3). He places the two “lovers” in a “secret bed . . . to joy in vaine delight” and then rushes off to rouse Redcrosse, chortling “Come see, where your false Lady doth her honour staine” (2.4). Redcrosse “suddenly up start / With sword in hand” and followed “the old man . . . into a secret part, / Where that false couple” were tightly wrapped in intercourse, Which when he saw, he burnt with gealous fire, The eye of reason was with rage yblent, And would have slaine them in his furious ire, But hardly was restreined of that aged sire. Returning to his bed in torment great, And bitter anguish of his guiltie sight, He could not rest, but did his stout heart eat, And wast his inward gall with deepe despight, Yrkesome of life, and too long lingring night. (2.5–6)

At the crack of dawn he and the Dwarf “away do fly” and Redcrosse is once again “pricking on the plaine” astride his “angry steede”: “his light­foot

28

Book One: The Legend of Holinesse

steede, / Pricked with wrath and fiery fierce disdaine” (2.8). After the three­ stanza digression describing Archimago and his metamorphosis into the semblance of “his late beguiled guest” (2.11), the narrative returns to the “true Saint George . . . wandred far away, / Still flying from his thoughts and gealous feare; / Will was his guide, and griefe led him astray” (2.12). In recalling the improbable tableau of the opening scene—Redcrosse spurring his horse while Una somehow rides “beside” him on her “palfrey slow” (1.4)—his departure actualizes the strain already apparent in that original image of togetherness, and it also externalizes the movement of psychic self­evasion first adumbrated in 1.49–50. It does so, tellingly, in lan­ guage that fuses his flight from Una with his flight from himself. At 1.50 “He thought have slaine her” but at 2.5 he directs his lethal impulse at “them,” and the sequence of clauses quoted above suggests that in enact­ ing the forbidden fantasy the two “lovers” half tempt him to wish himself in the squire’s place. That this wish is an important part of what he wants to slay and run from is emphasized by the repetition of “gealous” and by the odd expres­ sion “guiltie sight,” the ambivalence of which is concisely expressed in Hamilton’s gloss: “The guilty sight he has seen, though his own sight is also guilty” (45).20 “Gealous feare” hovers between fear of and submission to “gealous fire,” between the fear/desire of the aroused sexuality that tempts Redcrosse to violate his trust, and fear of Una’s sexuality, which threatens his manhood in every conceivable way: It not only jeopardizes his chance to kill a dragon and become a hero but also puts him in danger of being vamped, corrupted, emasculated, cheated on, disempowered. The ambivalence is resolved in a rhetorical sequence that associates the resolution with Archimago’s donning the semblance of Redcrosse. The statement that in flying from his thoughts and jealous fear he is being led astray implies a moral judgment: He should confront them, acknowledge them, and deal with them. The emotions that lead him astray—will and grief along with “wrath and fiery fierce disdaine”— are those that mark the displacement or redirection of his animus from himself to Una. He is re­ solved to represent himself to himself as victimized by Una’s infidelity (fly­ ing from her = turning against her), to blind himself to his own “guiltie sight,” and to blame her for his “unwonted lust” and sinful desire of “vaine delight.” She deserves to be abandoned. This gives him permission to go off on his own—to prick away at his own angry pace— and satisfy his desire “[t]o prove his puissance in battell brave / Upon his foe, and his new force to learne” (1.3). The foe turns out to be a personification of infidelity accompanied by a fresh replacement

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1

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for the false Una. The new force he is about to “learne” ironically includes that of the “unwonted lust” from which (or from the perception of which) he fled. The conquest of Sansfoy and Duessa may thus, in this context, be read as the victim’s justified revenge. Redcrosse’s attitude anticipates King Lear’s “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning”: I have been bad, but Una has been worse, and since, as the line break emphasizes, I am a man, I shall have my revenges. The conquest confirms his abandonment of the adven­ ture granted by Gloriana and of the Christian identity and obligation the armor symbolizes. With Duessa he warms to the role of chivalric romancer and, sliding from errantry to errancy, becomes an adventurer rather than a quester. To repair the offense against his manhood, he does his best to be bad, and I think the mixture of admiration, envy, and reproof that spices up the contemporary idiom, “ You’re bad!,” perfectly catches the spirit conveyed by the text—the spirit in which the knight, guided by will and led astray by grief, assaults Sansfoy and reassures Duessa with courtly double­talk. But there are dif ferent ways to be and feel bad. Since the victim’s for­ mula, “more sinned against than sinning,” acknowledges some sinning on the victim’s part, it parries an implied accusation with “what I did to them was not as bad as what they did to me.”21 The guilt this defense betrays opens up another wound and signals the operation of another discourse, one that reverses the victim’s formula. “More sinning than sinned against” encodes the confessional logic of the sinner’s discourse.22 To turn the revenger’s discourse in upon oneself is to want to be pun­ ished, to solicit the judgment one feels one deserves, or—what may be more painful and threatening—to be forgiven. One can punish oneself more eas­ ily than one can forgive oneself. Forgiveness must be at least partly con­ ferred by others, and it carries with it all the dangers of the gift. Since one can’t forgive oneself, the sinner’s discourse can solicit only self­retribution. The sinner’s secret quest and fearful desire is—in the words of Shake­ speare’s Edgar’s Poor Tom—“to course his own shadow for a traitor.” This may lead him to hurt those he loves as a way of hurting himself, or to cultivate distrust and disesteem, or to seek punishment at the hands of others—which may tempt him to resume the victim’s discourse and direct his aggression outward, thereby deepening the inward wound. This account of the discursive dialectic may profile an interpretation more congenial to the text of Shakespeare than that of Spenser. But I think it’s fair to say that an interplay of ethical discourses in which the traces of the sinner’s discourse figure so largely can be—indeed, has been— situated

30

Book One: The Legend of Holinesse

in the broader context of sociocultural changes in early modern Europe. Intensifying the pressure of the sinner’s discourse in the economy of self­ representation is an obvious aim and effect of the reforms initiated by Luther and Calvin. It is an effect, if not an aim, of the changes in “the history of manners”—the internalization of social control—traced in the wonderful work of Norbert Elias.23 Elias’s argument, which I give here in Steven Mullaney’s paraphrase, is that “the incorporation of judgmental authority within the self” results in “an expanded threshold of shame and apprehension.”24 Mullaney cites Elias in the course of developing an elegant and more specific thesis about those effects of the Reformation in England that gave new importance to the popular stage, which he describes as “a theater of (self ) apprehension” (132, my italics). The theater adds its force to other media: In conduct books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and from the pulpit, the individual was being exhorted to view him or herself in a new light, to interiorize a judgmental social perspective and turn it upon the self, its actions, motives, weaknesses, and desires, and thus to subject both the social and the psychological self to a form of self­ scrutiny that would eventually produce something like the modern subject. (132)

Richard Helgerson has beautifully detailed the effects of more infor­ mal and pervasive generational influences on the representation of the sinner’s discourse by Spenser’s literary predecessors. Responding to the conflict between the claims of civic humanism and the “rebellious desire” encoded in the Italianate genre of romance, Helgerson argues that these Elizabethan writers dramatized and resolved the conflict defensively by submitting their works and lives to the template of the Prodigal Son pat­ tern: “If these writers . . . condemn themselves, it is because they feel some condemnation is in order. . . . They saw their better selves in a mirror of duty which paternal admonition, schoolmasterly instruction, and govern­ mental propaganda held up to them. Compared to that official better self, the romance­writing other could seem only a prodigal fool.”25 Since the morality of what Helgerson calls “civic humanism” overlaps that of the Protestant ideology I view as the target—not merely the sub­ ject—of Book 1, his description of its antifeminist bias is pertinent: Humanism inhabited the masculine and misogynistic world of school and state; romance “had rather be shut in a lady’s casket than open in a scholar’s study.” In every father the humanist was inclined to see an image of the Heavenly Father; in every young woman a potential Eve;

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1

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in every young man an Adam. Vice in a father or virtue in a woman was a paradox. (42)

As modes of reflexive self­representation—interior dialogues—the ethical discourses have no specific historical provenance, though the fact that our acquaintance with them is confined to graphic evidence may owe to more than the limits of our own access to the past. The discourse of Christian narcissism is differentiated by its construc­ tion of and reliance on the sinner’s discourse, and histories of Christianity often factor into their diachronic patterns its fluctuating relations—at one time marginal, at another central—to the official and institutionally sanc­ tioned discourses of the church. The Lutheran critique of the sacramental and confessional abuses of the sinner’s discourse, and the attempted extri­ cation of it from the “shackles” of Catholic ritual, gave it a new and more flexible life in a variety of media that transgressed the boundaries between sacred and secular authority. Thus we needn’t be surprised to find traces of the discourse in Spenser’s book of holiness, but the question is, given his indirect and allegorical representations of psyche and psychomachia, what are the identifying marks of those traces— before canto 9, that is, where they are obvious? • The marks are evident at the very beginning of canto 1, but evident once again at the micro­interpretive level. I have read the first six stan­ zas countless times, but it wasn’t until I returned to them with the thesis I am now arguing that scintillas from the complex and jarring interplay of perspectives on the protagonist’s uneasy state of mind began to flash from the verbal and imagistic texture of the passage. 26 The broadest hint of uneasiness is delivered by the details of the famously bizarre scene of equitation. Stanzas 1 and 4 transmit a visual message that fails to compute: A gentle knight was pricking on the plaine, Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde, Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine, The cruell markes of many’a bloudy fielde; Yet armes till that time did he never wield: His angry steede did chide his foming bitt, As much disdayning to the curbe to yield: Full jolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt, As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt. (1.1.1)

32

Book One: The Legend of Holinesse

A lovely Ladie rode him faire biside, Upon a lowly Asse more white then snow, Yet she much whiter, but the same did hide Under a vele, that wimpled was full low, And over all a blacke stole she did throw, As one that inly mournd: so was she sad, And heavie sat upon her palfrey slow: Seemd in her heart some hidden care she had, And by her in a line a milke white lambe she lad. (1.1.4)

The second passage could logically have been stanza 2 rather than stanza 4. The two stanzas that mercifully separate them haven’t prevented read­ ers from wondering about that “rode him faire biside,” since Una astride her lowly slow mount and pulling a lamb on a string couldn’t possibly keep up with a rider pricking on the plain. The reader, whose own pace has already been decelerated by odd but unexplained disjunctions in the first three stanzas, virtually comes to a halt at the end of stanza 4. Shifting from the naturalistic to the emblematic reg­ ister in an effort to make sense of the anomalies, and armed with minimal scriptural and iconographic equipment, readers may settle for a few min­ ims of Christian explication— a pastiche of references or allusions to the sacrifice, St. George, St. Paul, St. John, truth, purity, innocence, and spir­ itual warfare. It’s more likely, however, as I suggested above, that readers will move through the emblematic register toward a dramatic perception that the anomalies in the scene of equitation, and in the rhetoric describ­ ing it, symbolize some sort of strain in the image of togetherness. Another detail makes this more vivid, so long as we don’t get mired in its obvious evocation of the horse/rider, passion/reason allegoreme that goes back to Plato’s Phaedrus: “His angry steede did chide his foming bitt, / As much disdayning to the curbe to yield.” Here, five lines after be­ ing told that Redcrosse was spurring the horse, we confront an image of restraint. No wonder the horse is angry: As if undergoing dressage, he is being simultaneously spurred on and reined in. The restive empiric may gallop toward the inference that “[y]et armes till that time did he never wield” tacitly includes the information that “steede till that time did he never ride.” But the rest of us hold back until the description of Una (which lags behind that of the knight) supplies a motive for the contradictory signals that anger the horse. The knight is partly impelled to ride ahead, take off on his own, spurred—as we learn in stanza 3—by the desire to “winne . . . worship” and “prove his puissance in

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1

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battell brave / Upon his foe, and his new force to learne.” Stanza 14 finds him rushing into Error’s den “full of fire and greedy hardiment,” heedless of the attempts by Una and the dwarf to rein him in. Yet at the same time, Una is his passport to glory: He “was bond” to his “great adventure” in the ser vice of her cause. He received this opportunity as a gift from Gloriana in order both “To winne him worship, and her grace to have, / Which of all earthly things he most did crave” (1.3). In stanza 5 his obli­ gation to Una is put more forcefully: To avenge her parents “she had this Knight from far compeld.” He is beholden to Una as well as Gloriana for the chance to play hero and must restrain himself to keep pace with the measure of her needs. A sense of encumbrance, then, is introduced in stanza 4, and it is inten­ sified by the sequence of narrative disclosures. Throughout the first three stanzas we get the impression that the knight is unaccompanied. Though the eventual materialization of the damsel in distress is predictable, the form it takes here is not. She materializes as a clog, to which other clogs are immediately added: the lamb; the agenda of a quest that unfolds in terms that unveil the reason for what seems “hidden care” in Una (1.4) and that justify her claim on Redcrosse (1.5); fi nally, the dwarf who bears “her bag / Of needments at his backe” (1.6). The air of simple humility projected by the image of Una riding on “a lowly Asse” and leading “in a line a milke white lambe” changes when “line” is echoed by “lynage” in stanza 5 and Una turns out to be the heiress to dynastic power. Descended from “an­ cient Kings and Queenes” who had until four years ago (7.44) “all the world in their subjection held,” it seems appropriate that she has the authority to compel the ser vice of “this Knight” from Gloriana. The encumbrances that slow down the knight are thus more than clogs to unimpeded locomotion. They impose psychological claims on him, and by the time we get to the dwarf it may occur to us that the latter’s burden is a metaphoric displacement of those claims. The knight also bears “her bag / Of needments at his backe.” When he leaves Una, her dwarf goes with him, perhaps as a reminder of those needments and as her surrogate: The dwarf is twice instrumental in prying Redcrosse loose from Duessa’s clutches. And in retrospect, even though the lamb metaphorically dissolves into Una at the beginning of stanza 5, I find it hard to resist the idea that the knight’s position may from his standpoint be elucidated by that of the lamb, a figure not only of purity and innocence but also of sacrifice. Una’s power over Redcrosse is the power of the lamb that died to take away the sins of the world, the lamb that died so Redcrosse could be saved. Hers is the power of that gift, and the power is increased by the lamb­like

34

Book One: The Legend of Holinesse

sacrifices that threaten her when Redcrosse’s truancy exposes her to the lion and the lupine Sansloy. And since Una “compeld” her champion from Gloriana and appears more than once as his guide, the figure of Redcrosse as the lamb on the line, a potential “type of Christ,” may be taken to ex­ press her idealized conception of the politics of the quest. But could it also be taken to express his ideal? We begin to understand why he is eager to prick as if unencumbered and why his equine anger may signify not only “native” high spirits, the corage of “greedy hardiment,” but also fretful anxiety to be free of the psy­ chological bag of Una’s needments. And we begin to appreciate the pro­ fundity and broad applicability of the thesis David Miller develops primarily in order to explain the representation of Arthur in the poem but also di­ rects at one point toward Redcrosse: the thesis that the adventure spon­ sored by Gloriana and “compeld” by Una may subject the hero to the logic of castration.27 Yet I’m not convinced that this fully explicates the mean­ ing of the observation that the knight “of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad” (1.2), a sadness more dramatically and specifically attributed to Una, who wore a veil and black stole “[a]s one that inly mournd,” and who “heavie sat upon her palfrey slow” so that it “[s]eemd in heart some hidden care she had” (1.4). Though Una’s sadness is easily accounted for by the trouble back home, something in the frequently repeated locutions expressing narratorial un­ certainty (“As one,” “Seemd”) exceeds that explanation. They stir up a vaguer and more uncanny sense of apprehension. I suspect that I respond that way partly because the tableau of the mourning Una leading her lamb is an emblem that has the same valence as the pietà: proleptic mourning for the lamb she leads to slaughter in order to redeem the world. This suspicion prompts another, about the sadness imputed to Red­ crosse, on whom the reflection of Una’s sadness makes “[a] little glooming light, much like a shade” (1.14). Perhaps his sadness is connected to “wonted feare of doing ought amis” and “mistrust” of “[s]ome secret ill.” That is, I can imagine that the representation of a figure torn between the demand of his obligation to the damsel in distress and the desire to leave her behind in pursuit of glory invites the reader to see in Redcrosse’s self­division the condition for self­doubt and the precondition for guilt. To borrow an Au­ gustinian distinction between fruor and usor basic to the Christian analy­ sis of desire, the hero wants to ride off to enjoy his gift of adventure for his own sake rather than use it for Una’s. I can imagine, furthermore, that whatever Truth Una represents is informed with the knowledge of this clo­ ven desire and its outcome, and that it is something Una mourns for in

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1

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advance. Fi nally, I can imagine that the redundant emphasis on the Sacrifice—the bloody cross on the armor and the symbol of Agnus Dei led by Una—invites readers to put into play their awareness of what it would be like to be placed in Redcrosse’s dilemma. If he were a person, or if we were in his shoes, he or we would begin to feel uneasy about the tug of the amor fruendi, and unworthy both of Gloriana’s boon and of the meaning of the symbol on the armor. We can still feel that way even if we don’t think of Redcrosse as a per­ son. Fear of the characterological fallacy needn’t be any obstruction here, for we encounter a familiar psychomachian configuration of discourses that is a construct of Christian culture, a construct “[w]herein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine.” Redcrosse functions as a placeholder for the reader urged to pick up from textual clues the drama of the sinner’s discourse, the discourse planted and nurtured in the shadow of the cross. The relation of the sinner’s discourse to the Sacrifice is mediated by an­ other powerful discursive pattern. The guilt embedded in the sinner’s discourse is keyed to the installation of the donor’s discourse— the dis­ course of the gift analyzed in Marcel Mauss’s classic study—at the center of Christian ideology and iconography in the Sacrifice, the matchless and therefore terrible deed of Love by which God proclaims, in the words of King Lear, “I gave you all.” The fulfillment of all figures, the paradigm of all imitations, the folly of the Cross establishes the prototype of the exem­ plary Christian subject, the orthopsychic ideal that founds the discourse of Christian narcissism and is “the source of the malevolence with which the subject regards its image, the aggressivity it unleashes on all its own representations.”28 This problematic is introduced in 1.2 with the symbol of the Sacrifice that gives the protagonist his quest name: But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore, The deare remembrance of his dying Lord, For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore, And dead as living ever him ador’d: Upon his shield the like was also scor’d, For soveraine hope, which in his helpe he had: Right faithfull true he was in deede and word, But of his cheere did seeme too solemn sad; Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad.

The formulaic idealization of arms and attitude abstracts and crystallizes the symbolic meaning of the dented armor mentioned in the first stanza

36

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and appropriates that description of the armor as an image of embattled Christianity, an image with synoptic historical force. The image of conflict gets refocused around the cross, or rather around the scriptural discourse of the cross: The “old dints of deepe wounds” that “did remaine” converge with “[t]he deare remembrance” in a way that af­ fects the sense of “deare.”29 The wearer initially dissociated from the ar­ mor by the first adversative construction (“Yet armes till that time did he never wield”) and having suspiciously meaningful trouble with his horse, is miraculously if only momentarily redeemed by the spiritual character conferred on him in stanza 2. Yet this character is itself introduced by a second adversative that seems required to rebut implications left by the pre­ ceding stanza. The tension suggested between horse and rider is smoothed away by the reassuring comment that despite his inexperience “[f]ull jolly knight he seemd.” As if this jaunty image conveys the wrong impression, the next stanza begins by throwing the weight of the cross against it: “But on his brest” in effect curbs and reins in the threatened runaway of secu­ lar romance formulas in order to reassert the higher purpose of Christian chivalry.30 As a rhetorical performance, these stanzas wonderfully dramatize the difficulty of reining in and turning the head of the received formulas that will be harnessed and ridden by the new story. They also dramatize the clash of formulas of divergent and perhaps incompatible discourses. Finally, they dramatize the burden imposed by formulaic expectations not only on the diegetic agency and the reader but also on the protagonist—the bur­ den imposed on him by the necessity to live up to the Sacrifice, the “I gave you all,” inscribed on the armor. The unhappy effect of this burden seems directly linked to the accent on sadness, the possible motivation for which, as I’ve tried to show, is sug­ gested by the representation of self­division in the equitation imagery. I think the reader who returns to the “too solemne sad” line after moving through the first six stanzas is liable to find that the alexandrine coupled to it has a strange ring: “But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad; / Yet nothing did he dread, but ever was ydrad.” The implied contrast between “he seemed sad” and “he was fearless but always feared” increases the force of the latter’s truth­claim: This is a “fact” about the figure being described. The only problem is that it makes no sense following the information that “armes till that time did he never wield.” The alexandrine must therefore be doing some other kind of work be­ sides stating a fact. It could be a literary reflex, the reliance on a formulaic filler: This is what one is expected to say about one’s hero, whether it is

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true or not; the credentials in question are those of the narrative prepar­ ing to undertake the burden of chivalric discourse. The formula could also have a proleptic function: This is the ideal proposed for the hero and if he meets the test he may rightfully claim it as his motto—or as his epitaph. Pushing this a little further, we could say that it is an ideal proposed to anyone preparing to undertake the burden of chivalric errantry; it is an article in the ensemble of chivalric self­representation. These noble or “gentle” possibilities all hover about the alexandrine, en­ hancing the young knight’s image. But in addition to the fact that it is absurd as an indicative statement of “fact,” its relation to its pentameter partner tonally unsettles it. That partner’s “seems” construction projects the sense of diegetic uncertainty I noted above in discussing Una’s sadness, and the abrupt shift from that to a chivalric formula uttered with assertive confidence feels like a defensive response. The triple adversative construction sharpens the feeling. After seven lines that progressively idealize the subject of description, “But of his cheere . . .” interjects a non sequitur calculated to put readers on their guard, and on second reading the sadness becomes a magnet attracting the darker hints scattered through stanzas 1–6. The “Yet . . . but” of the alex­ andrine labors to fend off this uneasiness: Stiff as a seesaw, it protests too much. And it hauls up the wrong target: If he seemed too solemn sad, the couplet tells us, it wasn’t because he feared anything—from others who feared him; what it doesn’t tell us, and we soon discover, is that he may be sad because he dreads some “nothing” in himself. The alexandrine provides a bridge to the next stanza and anticipates an increase in discursive tension when, after the focus on Christian reverence, piety, and spiritual armor, the account of the knight’s mission pays closer attention to the motives behind his presumptive fearlessness: Upon a great adventure he was bond, That greatest Gloriana to him gave, That greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie land, To winne him worship, and her grace to have, Which of all earthly things he most did crave: And ever as he rode, his hart did earne To prove his puissance in battell brave Upon his foe, and his new force to learne; Upon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stearne.

Ser vice to Christ and ser vice to Gloriana (and Una) are connected by the allegorical circuit that passes through Elizabeth and the reformed church,

38

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but here the relations between them are left vague enough to allow for some perplexity. Redcrosse seems more attentive to the values of chivalric der­ ring­do than to those of the Sacrifice. Does ser vice to the “glorious badge” coalesce or conflict with ser vice to the “Glorious Queene”? Is adoration of Christ compatible with his desire to win himself the worship of others? Is his “earthly” craving in apposition to his hope in Christ, as Hamilton asserts (FQ, 30), or in opposition to it? Is it Redcrosse’s adventurous en­ ergy (line 1) or Gloriana’s power of donation (line 2) that controls the in­ finitive expressing his desire in line 4? The implications of the gender shift from Christ to Gloriana trouble the analogy because the “worship” and “grace” of stanza 3 take on courtly/ Petrarchan nuances. Does this affect the meaning of the desire expressed in the last four lines, tilting it toward the need to prove his manhood? And if this is chiefly what occupied him “as he rode,” as he “was pricking on the plaine,” doesn’t it alter the sense of the following lines from an impres­ sion gathered by the narrator to an impression the rider strives to convey: “Full jolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt, / As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt”? He is, that is, self­consciously displaying his credentials. Already, then, the quest of Christian identity and the quest of chival­ ric manhood seem uneasily intertwined. And perhaps this touches on the theme broached by David Miller when he writes of Arthur’s dream that it “recounts the insemination of Arthur’s fantasy by the cultural superego—an insemination which is also, in its negative moment, a cas­ trative humiliation of the narcissistic ego” (119). In dif ferent ways, the dying Lord’s gift of redemption and the Faerie Queene’s gift of adven­ ture make the same demand on the subject who is Christian and male: the demand of “self­transformation in which this subject ‘assumes’ his castration” (Miller, 112). They differ in that castration is associated with autophobia in one discourse whereas in the other it is associated with gynophobia. The tilt from autophobia to gynophobia is symbolically registered in the change of sacrificial symbols from the cross to the lamb. Though the lamb is explicitly used as an image of Una, its role in religious iconogra­ phy allows us to place Una and Redcrosse together under the sign of Agnus Dei. But their togetherness is contingent on his being lamb­like— humble, meek, and pure enough to be willing to be led by her and even if necessary to sacrifice himself for the redemption of her parents and king­ dom. And it soon becomes apparent, as his errancy shakes their together­ ness apart, that she is his guide, his leader, the victim of his disloyalty, and

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1

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yet in an important sense—because she kept faith, enlisted a champion, and led him to the House of Holiness—his savior. That is what the endangered maiden is really for in the discourse of Christian chivalry: She gives the hero his big chance to test and prove him­ self by letting him save her. And since she has been there before (7.45) she knows the chance is fraught with peril, may be doomed to failure, and may cost him his life or (as 7.45 makes clear) his soul. He is the one who needs saving. He is chosen so that he may experience the need for salvation, and after he is “compeld” and falls she saves him so that he may save her. At the end, by endorsing the account in which he shoddily claims to have been Duessa’s victim (12.31–34), she helps preserve both his self­esteem and his blindness to the truth of his errancy. The power of donation and castra­ tion, the emasculating power of “I gave you all,” is vested by Spenser’s text in the almighty humble loving virgin. Their return to togetherness remains clouded by bad faith. • Among the things to which readers might well object in the preceding sec­ tion is the continual recurrence of a cluster of psychoanalytic concepts, mainly Lacanian. They are likely to be viewed with skepticism by those who believe that a more traditional lexicon could do the same interpretive job with less distortion, less anachronism. Why bother, for example, to reach for, indeed to coin, a neologism as pompous as autophobia when good old­fashioned despair is close at hand? Why castration rather than the over­ whelming, disorienting, and momentarily disempowering sense of un­ worthiness produced when the scales drop off and the sinner suddenly sees how much God has given, the Charity of His Sacrifice, and how little he has given back? These are plausible questions, and I now digress to inter­ rogate their validity. Many years ago, in his still valuable chapter on Book l, William Nelson identified a pattern of dynamic interdependence of faith and despair very similar to the one I referred to as the production of narcissism, a pattern generated from the “paradox which associates the desolation of despair with true Christian faith.” Nelson cites Hooker and other contemporaries of Spenser to show that this was “a topic frequently discussed in the reli­ gious literature of Spenser’s time” (Poetry of Spenser 152). After establish­ ing the currency of Book 1’s complex Protestant reading of the Christian experience, he goes on to stress how important it is to this reading that the knight possesses “the whole armor of God” from the very beginning rather than winning it piecemeal through his own efforts during the quest

40

Book One: The Legend of Holinesse

(175). It is, he claims, because Redcrosse “sets out from Cleopolis fully equipped for his ultimate battle with the infernal fiend, clad in the armor of Christianity, upon his shield the red cross, emblem of his hope for sal­ vation,” and accompanied by “Una, his true faith” (157), that he gets into the trouble Nelson describes in his brief references to the Despair and dragon fight episodes: His own sense of divine justice, of divine foreknowledge, of the joylessness and tribulation of earthly things makes him vulnerable to despair; his very Christian ity betrays him to the most fearful of sins, abandonment of his hope for salvation. He is tempted to escape from his consciousness of guilt and his fear of hell by damning himself everlastingly. (152) It is the “whole armour of God” that burns him, and the “helmet of Salvation” that he cannot endure. Faith itself creates despair: “That erst him goodly arm’ d, now most of all him harm’d.” (154)

This pretty clearly describes the psychomachian states that I have been calling misautia and autophobia and it has the advantage of describing them from within the lexicon and ideology of Christian discourse. What then is the point of shifting to an alien terminology, especially since my greek­ ish coinages are conceptually reducible to such plain­English equivalents as self­loathing and self­fear? Part of the answer is that the conceptual machinery Nelson operates can reproduce only the narrow range of interpretations privileged by that lexicon and ideology. It is a machinery designed to collect and display the rich array of authoritative sources that make Spenser’s poetry a repository of traditional moral wisdom, and to demonstrate the complexity— and the rightness—of a “thematic” or “intellectual core” (“the moral nature of man”) to which “the resources of literary expression stand as servants” (vii–viii). Whether Nelson’s ignoring the possibility that those resources might stand in a more challenging and subversive relation to the “core” is the logical consequence or the cause of a method of reading that dutifully obeys this interpretive hierarchy, the practice informed by the method just as dutifully transmits the values of the sociopolitical hierarchy that, in Nelson’s view, the poem participates in and celebrates. The method and the interpretation it produces reflect and reinforce each other, for the aim of Christian discourse is to install itself in culture as a countertext—to represent itself as authoritative teaching or inscription and thus to inhibit the freedom, even the possibility, of interpretation. To cite the distinction John Guillory borrowed from Edward Said and applied to

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Spenser, the aim of much Christian discourse is to represent itself as pos­ sessing the effectual power of a sacred origin rather than the weak and contingent influence of a beginning that is vulnerable to continuous rein­ terpretation.31 The guiding hypothesis Nelson puts forth as a strictly aes­ thetic postulate is therefore unavoidably political at the same time: “The governing principle of Spenser’s poems is intellectual and thematic rather than narrative, dramatic, or symbolic” (vii). This is also the proposition promoted by the poem’s diegetic agency as the principle that should guide the reading of allegorical narrative. But crit­ icism of the last four decades or so has borne out the importance of dis­ obeying this countertextual injunction on the grounds that the text of The Faerie Queene represents itself as reading its allegorical narrative subver­ sively and disobediently, and that it opens up a position for readers to do the same. In opening up that position it in effect demands that the reader find a framework, a perspective, a method, outside the one the poem pu­ tatively privileges, a new or dif ferent perspective elements of which may have been embedded in the old lexicon and ideology— a perspective that may not have been accessible or articulable, a method of writing that may have been responsive either to external constraints (censorship, for ex­ ample) or to internal unconstraints, that is, to the unruly and explosive generativity of language.32 Despite this account of the limits of Nelson’s procedures, I find his com­ pendious paraphrases of the Christian paradoxes explored in Book 1 valu­ able precisely because they pick out areas of structural analogy or overlap between Christian and psychoanalytic representations of what is called psychomachia in the former and splitting or self­division in the latter (as in the narrative observation that Archimago saw his guests “divided into double parts,” not only one sundered from the other but also the hero sun­ dered from himself). The overlap makes clear the possibility that when competing interpretations resist or subvert the dominant discourse they can do so while remaining well within the boundaries of its ideological and linguistic resources, and indeed they can appropriate those resources in a manner that seems to underwrite and preserve its dominance. But the overlap between Christian and psychoanalytic discourses also makes clear the possibility that competing ideological interpretations are logically or structurally linked to competing interpretive protocols. On the one hand, Nelson’s paraphrases are unsupported by any sustained passages of close reading; his practice objectively—whatever he intends—respects and valorizes the Christian injunction against interpretive meddling. On the other hand, several contemporary discourses—new criticism, some

42

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versions of deconstruction, and psychoanalysis— set themselves precisely against that injunction. Deconstructive and psychoanalytic criticism often employ techniques of close reading appropriated from or analogous to those developed by new criticism, but they differ from it in their subversive effort to uncover the motives behind any documentary or countertextual discourse that, like the institution and institutes of Christianity, strives to inhibit or suppress in­ terpretation. Insofar as these motivational critiques use close reading to explicate the rationale behind the inhibition of close reading, they need be neither anachronistic nor purely destructive. Indeed, it might be said that their attitude toward what I referred to above as “the unruly and ex­ plosive generativity of language” is no dif ferent from that of the author of the text of The Faerie Queene. In moving from the countertextual protocol of reading illustrated by Christian discourse and by Nelson’s practice to a more textual protocol, I have at the same time shifted to an apparently anachronistic and arcane set of terms to describe the pathology that Christian discourse analyzes through the use of such concepts as despair, guilt, and self­loathing. What has been gained by a redescription that puts autophobia, misautia, narcis­ sism, and castration into play? A clue to the answer is that the first two terms are influenced by, and intended to allude to, a cluster of Grecisms belonging to current discourses of gender and sexuality— misogyny, misandry, gynophobia, androphobia, homophobia, etc.— and deployed in cultural critiques of the sexist (and classist) norms, values, and practices ascribed to the so­ called Judaeo­ Christian culture dominated by dead white males. The concept of narcissism brings into the foreground questions about the politics and problematics of representation, especially those that focus on the dialectical core of representation, the process of interaction between representing oneself to others and representing oneself to oneself. The concept of castration brings into the foreground questions about the phallocratic, homosocial, “hom(m)o­sexual” (Irigaray), and patriarchal organization of culture and institutions. These revisionary concepts and discourses provide a standpoint outside Judaeo­ Christian discourses and thus make critique possible. Specifically, they show how, for example, Nelson’s passive adoption of the interpretive protocol of Christian dis­ course leads him to occlude the gender question and in fact to valorize the sexist reading.33 This in turn occludes a pattern of displacements central to the poem: the displacements of autophobia and misautia to gynophobia and misogyny

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that scapegoat woman. These are represented as strategies by which the hero’s complicity in his vicissitudes is diminished, rewritten, as naïveté, passivity, helplessness, the fallibility of the “stumbling” but “righteous Christian” “seduced by . . . Duessa’s evil ways” (Nelson, 175–77). • The representation and critique of displacement are carried out at the al­ legorical level through the problematic deployment of the figure of woman to express religious truth, and the peculiar terms of this deployment sug­ gest that even revised versions of the traditional approach to religious allegory in Book 1 should be reconsidered. David Norbrook, for example, claims that “the political rhetoric of Book 1 is the defence of reformed Christianity against idolatry,” and he maintains this position even though he perceives that in the first two books “the recurrent temptations of idol­ atry” are closely associated “with female sexuality.” “However enthusias­ tically Spenser may hymn female virtue,” he writes, “throughout the poem there is an undertone of fear of women” that parallels the “pronounced anti­female element in much Protestant propaganda,” with its emphasis on “control of sexuality” as an “essential precondition of religious reforma­ tion.”34 Norbrook sees a reflection of this in the fact that “Una, the em­ bodiment of religious purity, is relatively sexless” (120–21). He does not mean by this that she is neuter; he means she isn’t sexy. In other words, to borrow a peppery phrase from Lisa Jardine, he finds Una purged “of the taint of her sex.”35 This places him in good company, for it is precisely how Redcrosse expected to find her. The problem raised by the gender theme is compactly illustrated in the following interpretation of Spenser’s religious allegory. Reconstructing the iconography of the Protestant critique of Catholic ritual, the author’s own rhetoric is infiltrated by the misogynist tropology he describes as Spenser’s. The passage shows how misogyny gets overlooked, taken for granted, and therefore empowered as the reader’s attention is diverted from the female vehicle to the religious tenor: Throughout most of the book Duessa as a symbolic spiritual whore is an appropriate foil to Una as a symbolic spiritual virgin. Also, Red Crosse’s lust for Duessa is symbolic spiritual lust. . . . Just as the dame’s role as a literal witch prepares the way for her function as a physical whore, so does her symbolic witchcraft, in the anagogical allegory, prepare for her supremacy over Red Crosse through his surrender to spiritual whoredom in false worship. . . . Duessa­Fidessa . . . symbolically

44

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weakens the Knight of Holinesse in somewhat the same way that many Protestants believed the Mass sapped the spiritual health and strength of the enamored Mass­hearer. Obviously, the knight is willing. His involvement with his seductress so weakens his magnanimity . . . that fi nally through God’s grace Prince Arthur (Magnanimity) comes to his rescue.36

The formula “symbolic spiritual” demotes the vehicle of gender to a con­ venient, conventional, and purely instrumental metaphor: This poem isn’t really about whoredom, sexual desire, and the seduction of a foolishly will­ ing but other wise fine young man by a wicked witch. There is enough evidence in the poem to read physical as a symbol of spiritual fornication. (62) Spenser was aware of this practice of using sexual imagery to refer to the sacrament of communion. (64) Spenser brilliantly condensed in the figure of Duessa the con­ temporary Protestant attitude toward the Mass. (103) Sensuous and erotic imagery in Spenser’s time was not necessarily considered incongruous with “true” religion, if it was “correctly” directed against menacing forces. (73)

The vehicle is shunted to the periphery of attention by keeping the refer­ ences to—or elaboration of—“sensuous and erotic imagery” to a minimum. The result is that the “symbolic spiritual” level is saturated by misogynist fantasy: The “menacing forces” against which the imagery is directed are female. But there is a problem even when the vehicle is positive and truth is symbolized as a beautiful, good, desirable virgin. Too much vehicular detail is liable to produce wry effects— shadowy traces of homoerotic, sod­ omitical, or transvestite negotiations—in the spiritual tenor. And some­ times the effort of interpretive sublimation is beaded with sweat: “Red Crosse Knight’s dream of ‘wanton love’ (‘low lust’) for Una symbolizes, from one point of view, false teaching on the nature of truth. But . . . the temptation also engages symbolically his own speculative thirst (‘high lust’) for knowledge of God’s veiled, if not forbidden, truth (Una in a dark stole)” (28). Spenser shifts this fantasy of gender from the periphery to the center of attention, from the status of vehicle to that of tenor, by insisting and elaborating on “sensuous and erotic imagery” throughout the poem. St. Paul’s “I had not known sin but for the law” and St. Augustine’s “no

Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1

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man shall be good who was not first of all evil” are reinterpreted in Book 1’s allegory of holiness so that in the journey through Error to Despair the primary sources of misdirection are sexual desire and fantasy, through which autophobia is mediated to gynophobia and misautia to misogyny. I shall now try to show how this reorientation of the quest is prepared for in the opening episode and comes to a first climax in the fight with Error. • The initial scene of equitation is no sooner set than the two riders are driven into the woods by “an hideous storme of raine” that “angry Jove . . . / Did poure into his Lemans lap” (1.6). Anyone who recognizes the Virgil­ ian pretext, Georgics 2.325–26, is entitled to wonder why Spenser at once alludes to and oddly alters that passage, in which vernal fertility is attrib­ uted to the showery copulation of Heaven (“Aether”) with Earth, whom “pater omnipotens” inseminates by pouring his “fecundis imbribus” into the lap of his “coniugis . . . laetae.” The pretext is part of a paean to spring­ time, and however mythopoetically Virgil plays with it, treating generativ­ ity as divine sexuality, that move remains playful and merely metaphoric. Spenser darkens the picture, subtracting the joy Virgil ascribes to the wifely recipient and adding anger as the pater’s motive. Perhaps respond­ ing to the clue provided by “imbribus”—“imber” is opposed to “pluvia” as pelting rain to gentle rain—he converts the metaphor into a mythos pre­ sented in medias res: Something has made Jove angry. “The strange sexu­ ality of the thundershower,” Maureen Quilligan observes, “complicates our sense of the sexual relationship between the knight and his lady. ‘An­ gry love?’ the reader will need to ask.”37 The Georgics’ figure of happy pullulation is thus transformed into an act of aggression—possibly a sign of the cuckold’s jealous revenge—that implies something less than omnipotence in the pater. It is from this ex­ pression of the male god’s wrath, frustration, and bellicose virility that Redcrosse and Una are constrained “to shroud themselves” (1.6). They seek refuge in a wood ambiguously characterized by a figure of ephemeral splendor: The “loftie trees yclad with sommers pride” are introduced as protection against the storm but the rhyme line strangely aborts that expectation—the broad­spreading trees “heavens light did hide” (1.7). If that signifies loss of the guiding light, does it suggest that they avoid ex­ posure in some other sense than the desire to stay dry? The hideous rain­ burst also hides heaven’s light and exemplifies “sommers pride,” so that the shelter Redcrosse and Una seek is at least thematically infiltrated by the phallic danger they shelter from.38

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The narrative of course features the couple’s innocence, but several factors—the motivating context, the word “shroud,” and the statement that they pass into the wood seduced by birdsong (themselves like birds) and “with pleasure forward led” (1.8)— alert the reader not only to some im­ minent danger but also to a touch of disapproval and uneasiness in the narrative rhetoric. The narrative subtly but surely displays its inside knowledge of the pitfalls of mortality shrouded under summer’s pride. It associates these pitfalls with the beguiling power of the senses, a melodi­ ous aviary that leads innocents astray. The couple joins the birds in prais­ ing “the trees so straight and hy”; the antecedent of “they praise the trees” is vague, assimilating the couple to the complacent birds that “[s]eemd in their song to scorne the cruell sky” (1.8). To be thus led astray is repre­ sented by the narrative as unavoidable yet somehow reprehensible. “Astray” for this narrative turns out to mean in the direction of the hideous dan­ gers of sexuality, the “darksome hole” of Error’s cave where Redcrosse is nearly strangled by her desperate embrace (1.18). From the outset, then, the moral and religious agenda of the allegory of holiness unfolds in a setting of chivalric romance that betrays the gy­ nophobic and misogynistic assumptions driving it forward. The famous set piece in stanzas 8 and 9, the catalogue of trees, is no exception, though at first it may seem to be no more than a digression in which the poet es­ tablishes his credentials by overgoing his two eminent pretexts. Chaucer’s Parlement is the proximate pretext, but the remote pretext interests me a lot more; it is our old friend Ovid’s story of (and by) Orpheus in Metamor­ phoses 10. The former provides a diversionary screen because of its func­ tional and historical closeness: Readers drawn to Spenser’s emulation of Chaucer tend to ignore the more subversive implications of the allusion to Ovid. These implications have been well described by Maureen Quilligan. Noting that the catalogue begins with the laurel, “meed of mightie Conquerours / And poets sage,” and ends with “the Maple seeldom inward sound,” Quilligan postulates that Spenser uses the catalogue to represent “the power of such poetry to mislead”—as when the poet diverts the reader from the story just as Una and Redcrosse are diverted by the trees they praise and get lost in the wood. And, she continues, “the Ovidian context of the catalogue reinforces this warning. . . . Ovid’s tree catalogue appears just after he narrates the pathetic tale of Orpheus’s losing Euridice and of the poet’s mad despair at her now second death.” The trees that crowd around to hear him sing and shade him from the sun produce “a curiously wandering wood.” Its mobility, “while imaging the poet’s power, also reminds us of his lack of it. If he can make trees walk, he still cannot

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translate Euridice from hell.” Quilligan concludes that the Ovidian sub­ text is a marker of the refined but erroneous “intelligence of the ancients”; it enables Spenser to dramatize the ability of the “Christian poet to lead his reader from out of hellish error into wisdom.”39 This reading falls back at the last moment onto the more traditional ter­ rain of criticism centered on the Christian versus pagan thematics. But Quilligan’s own original and important insights into gendered reading and writing suggest a more specific relation between the loss of Euridice and the double turn to pederasty and poetry Ovid ascribes to his Orphean nar­ rator. Orpheus’s poetry displays the self­protective move from frustrated heterosexual desire to misogynistic, antierotic, and autoerotic stories. From this standpoint, the allusion to Ovid along with the reference to Jove’s an­ ger dramatizes not the Christian resistance to and revision of pagan error but rather the underlying continuity of a tradition of male discourse that embraces pagan and Christian, Catholic and Protestant, in a single struc­ ture of self­protective and self­justifying antifeminism. It is in the context of this discourse that Book 1 sets the adventures of its errant knight. The narrative that leads Redcrosse with delight and beguiles his way thrusts him toward sinful desire without letting him know it. Even as it converts his sexual pride to “greedy hardiment” and wraps him up in a nightmarish misogynist fantasy, it disguises the nature of the encounter, eliciting erroneous interpretations of Error from both the hero and the reader. First, there is a flat contradiction between the allegory of error and its episodic visualization: The duree of the labyrinthine experience of stray­ ing from the right path, losing one’s way, falling into the perplexity—the entangling coils—of sin, is here contracted, condensed, into a single en­ counter with a localized and disposable monster. Second, the description of the approach and encounter activates an ancient iconographic cluster— the labyrinth, the serpent, the woman, the sting of death—that conven­ tionalizes and metaphorizes, and thus dilutes, the force of misogynist representation. Third, the information Una relays about Error is desexu­ alized, filtered through the medium of allegorical romance and the idiom of Christian homily: “A monster vile, whom God and man does hate” (1.13). What readers read, which is dif ferent from what Una sees and knows, encourages them to replace “monster” with “female” and to construe “man”—like “God”—as male.40 And Error doesn’t represent the horror of sexuality pure and simple, for she is a monstrous caricature of maternity (1.15), a figure of abjection in Julia Kristeva’s sense, the expression of a topic in male fantasy: fear and hatred of the maternal source. This matrophobic element is oddly profiled in the simile comparing Error’s self­protective

48

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tactic of regurgitation to the recurrent generative process in which “old father Nilus gins to swell / With timely pride” and then, receding after “[h]is fattie waves do fertile slime outwell,” leaves “[h]uge heapes of mudde . . . wherein there breed / Ten thousand kindes of creatures, partly male / And partly female of his fruitfull seed” (1.21). Jeffrey Knapp observes that the “old father’s timely flooding refigures angry Jove’s miscreative ‘tempest’ as originating from below . . . while ‘fattie’, ‘fertile’, and ‘fruitfull’ positively separate the stanza from Error’s loathsome vomit until the last line, which almost contradicts the description leading up to it: ‘Such ugly monstrous shapes elsewhere may no man reed.’”41 The comparison is puzzling for many reasons. First, because of the posi­ tive/negative polarity mentioned by Knapp. Second, because it compares a female monster to an “old father.” Third, because it uses procreation as an analogue of regurgitation and displaces the comparison from the more ob­ vious analogue, Error’s “thousand yong ones” (1.15). Fourth, because of the echo of the lofty trees’ “sommers pride” in Nilus’s “timely pride.” “Timely pride” adds to the notion of sexual heat and natural exuberance a sense of control and regularity that implies acceptance of even so wild and prolific a form of male sexuality. It qualifies the pejorative meaning of theological pride so as to accommodate it to the chivalric vehicle of Christian warfare: It is the raw material of the self­assertive virtù, the “greedy hardiment,” essential to errantry, and therefore vulnerable to errancy. The epic simile frequently uses the formal enunciation of resemblance to articulate difference. In this case, the focus of difference is the invidi­ ous contrast between Error’s “claustrophobic cave” and the “expansive set­ ting” required to do justice to Nilus’s viripotent paternity.42 The image of the old father’s generosity and lavish spending is an apologia for male sexuality. But its insertion in the text only confuses Error’s muddle of functions—indiscriminate ingestion, inefficient digestion, regurgitation as a form of combat—by mapping procreation onto them, thus emphasizing her weird relation to her children, and narrowing attention from the loath­ someness of a monstrous female to that of a monstrous mother. Quilligan’s response to the description of Error’s ugly offspring nurs­ ing “upon her poisonous dugs” and popping into her mouth for safekeep­ ing (1.15) may be melodramatic, but it picks out an important counterpoise to the theological allegory of error: To underestimate the effects of nauseated horror at the facts of mon­ strous female creation this stanza evokes is to miss part of Spenser’s point; the thousand moiling, sucking creatures that disappear into her

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mouth, like so many snakes slithering from the light, image our subterranean terror at the very slime of origin. However hideous, they are appropriate for a book that chronicles the pains of spiritual rebirth.43

Is the referent of the pronoun in “our subterranean terror” indifferent with respect to gender? The question is closely related to another: Why are these effect or facts or terrors appropriate to a story of “the pains of spiritual re­ birth”? It must be because spiritual rebirth involves sloughing off the weak­ ness inherited from the complicity or collusion between the serpent and the woman. It involves sloughing off the enervating, infantilizing fantasy of the snake mother and cleaving to the fantasy of rebirth in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Spiritual rebirth is androgenetic; therefore it is a better way to be born. But the fear, hatred, and disdain condensed in the matrophobic con­ struction of the female source as a monster are classic symptoms of the cas­ tration anxiety that displaces or abjects autophobia, misautia, and despair. In the gynarchic House of Holinesse the displacement of autophobia to matro­ phobia will be undone. The imagery that focalizes Redcrosse’s attack on Error as rapelike pene­ tration of her “darksome hole” acts out both the self­transcending desire and the fear and loathing behind it. Error is depicted as a reluctant dragon lady “cruelly pend” (3 .11.10–11) and victimized by the “vile disdaine” she is full of, the disdain beamed at her by others and associated with the “gloom­ ing light”—the light that makes gloom—by which the Christian hero armed “in mayle” sees her ugliness “plaine.”44 She is “effraide,” aroused to combat chiefly by fear (1.1.14–16). Spenser’s portrait of Error, like Caravaggio’s of Medusa on the shield, offers a glimpse of the heroic quest from the victim’s viewpoint, a glimpse, therefore, of the allegorical repression that sustains the values of the quest. When Archimago redirects Redcrosse’s fears of castration and sexual guilt toward Una, the knight’s response shows that he relied on her to protect his manhood from effeminizing lust, and that he blames her for letting him down. The textual play at the beginning of canto 2— compare Archimago’s wake­up call at 2.4 (“Rise rise unhappy Swaine, / That here wex old in sleepe”) with the reference to Dawn “[w]eary of aged Tithones saffron bed” (2.7)—suggests that what Redcrosse runs away from is not only Una’s disloyalty but also his fear of being no better in bed than old Tithonus. • Una’s allegorical status extends these themes beyond the sphere of sexual psychology—not, however, by transcending that sphere but by displacing it

50

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into the sphere of religious conflict. The Protestant truth she represents is the truth of an anti­papist iconoclasm defined against “the evil of Roman idolatry . . . symbolized by the figure of the Whore of Babylon,” and Red­ crosse’s choice between Una and Duessa allegorically figures the choice “between the Invisible Church and the corrupt Visible Church” (Norbrook, 120). Yet Una is no less visible than Duessa and no less an idol. Archimago’s transformation of what was probably a male sprite into the false Una pro­ vides an obvious gloss on the creation of Duessa, but it also glances at the creation of Una. Una, the false Una, and Duessa are equally idols that symbolize the con­ flict of male values and desires in patriarchal institutions. Leigh DeNeef has convincingly shown how such allegorical distinctions as that between Una and her Duessan double, or between the Spenserian poet and “false­ speaking antagonists” like Archimago, are textually deconstructed by the “semantic duplicity” that exposes “the lie inhabiting any expression of truth.” 45 The exposure focuses on the problematic deployment of the fig­ ure of woman to express religious truth, and the peculiar terms of this de­ ployment suggest that even revised versions of the traditional approach to religious allegory in Book 1 should be reconsidered. Just as “the exigencies of male statecraft” assimilate Elizabeth to “a thriving . . . line in saving stereotypes . . . of female virtue so magnificent that they distract attention from their sex altogether,” so the exigencies of the male churchcraft represented in Book 1 assimilate Una to the same line.46 As a ste­ reotype or embodiment of both female virtue and religious purity and truth, “Una” names the integrity of an idol produced by the subtractive method of abjection (in Kristeva’s sense) that works like a lightning rod to draw off all the nasty female qualities concentrated primarily in Duessa, but also in Error and Lucifera. She thus depends on them for her differential role in the system of idolatrous gender construction that supports the male protagonist’s view of the marriageable, propertied, and beautiful virgin as trophy of the quest. Beauty versus ugliness is an important and telltale binary in this repre­ sentational structure. When truth is translated into and represented by fe­ male beauty, its values metamorphose into those of the economy of gender in which it circulates. This is simply and flatly demonstrated in the Argu­ ment to canto 3: Forsaken Truth long seekes her love, And makes the Lyon milde, Marres blind Devotions mart, and fals In hand of leachour vylde.

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Transforming Truth into a she is already a manner of forsaking. It makes Truth vulnerable to the very “blind Devotions mart” she mars. This phrase looks ahead to the anti­papist allegory involving “the mother blynd,” Corceca, who symbolizes the scotomizing effect of excessive devotion to ritual practices (1.3.12–13). In the terms of the episode concluded when the lion destroys Kirkrapine, the historical meaning is transparent: The true faith was saved by the Tudor lion who dismantled the system of ecclesias­ tical abuses made secure by the church’s ability to encourage such devo­ tion.47 But only a few lines after the phrase “blind Devotions mart” occurs, a dif ferent example of blind devotion intercepts and diverts its journey toward that episode: The narrator chivalrously wonders whether he pities Una because “her brightnesse” has blinded him (“whether lately through her brightnesse blind”) or because of the “alleageance and fast fealtie, / Which I do owe unto all woman kind” (3.1). In canto 6 the satyrs and their god Sylvanus will be similarly blinded: “[A]stonied at her beautie bright” (6.9), they “made her th’Image of ldola­ tryes” (6.19)—an image, that is, conditioned by previous objects and epi­ sodes of idolatry; a “mirrhour rare” reminding Sylvanus of Dryope, Phoebe, Venus, Diana, and even “[h[is ancient love,” Cyparisse (6.15–16). In all these cases what is worshipped is the beautiful, not the true. The brightness of beauty blinds the viewer to the truth or falsity of the image; truth reduced to beauty depends for its definition on those who admire and desire the beautiful as true. Thus for the narrator as well as for the satyrs, Una is an “Image of Idolatryes.” In this respect, if she is marked as a figure of the truth or the true faith, she does indeed represent what the Argument of canto 3 calls her, “Forsaken Truth,” a truth forsaken for no other reason than that it has been constructed as Una, the image of narrative idolatries. • The narrative energy of Book 1 springs from the conjunction of anti­papist and misogynist discourses, and its psychomachian allegory of the divided male subject marks the conjunction as the product of the intercourse be­ tween the fantasies of Archimago and Redcrosse. To return briefly to that moment of intercourse: At the beginning of canto 2, after the “feigning dreame” and “faire­forged Spright” report their failure to seduce Red­ crosse, and Archimago accordingly throws a fit, he moderates his behav­ ior in a response that duplicates Redcrosse’s swing from “fierce despight” to “sufferance wise.” The futility of his threats sends the mage back to “his balefull bookes,” and from these he gets the idea of transforming the dream spirit into an airy semblance of what in later cantos would be the very

52

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image of our truant hero undone by the witch’s wiles, “a young Squire, in loves and lusty­hed / His wanton dayes that ever loosely led, / Without regard of armes and dreaded fight” (2.3). He places this figure together with “that miscreated faire” in a “secret bed . . . to joy in vaine delight.” The deep Spenserian resonance of “vaine delight” is worth noting. The delight is vain both in the sense of worthless or idle and in the sense of errant, vitiating, and self­destructive, but it is also vain because the “lov­ ers” are incorporeal spirits with merely spectral bodies and questionable genders. The Squire­spirit on which Archimago spread “a seeming body of the subtile aire” (2.3) is several times called “he.” No pronouns mark the gen­ der of the Lady­Spirit, but Archimago’s relation to it gives a clear indica­ tion: He made a Lady of that other Spright, And fram’d of liquid ayre her tender partes So lively, and so like in all mens sight, That weaker sence it could have ravisht quight: The maker selfe for all his wondrous witt, Was nigh beguiled with so goodly sight: Her all in white he clad, and over it Cast a black stole, most like to seeme for Una fit. (1.45) And that new creature borne without her dew, Full of the makers guile, with usage sly He taught to imitate that Lady trew, Whose semblance she did carrie under feigned hew. (1.46)

It is clear that “she,” like the False Florimell, is under male instruction, and that Archimago behaves like a new Pygmalion, “transfixed by a lady of his own devising.” 48 But owing to several slippery words and phrases, other things are less clear. What is it that ravishes the weaker sense, makes sight goodly, and beguiles the maker, the specter’s verisimilitude or its pul­ chritude, its lifelikeness or its desirability? The answer is both, working together, for the triumph of this art of idolatrous construction is at once to dissemble “nature” and to replace “her” with an image that fully exter­ nalizes and gratifies erotic male fantasy. The emphasis on scopophilia and the glance at Pygmalion combine to suggest the masturbatory, autoerotic, and misogynistic pleasure in androgenesis: a “new creature,” better for be­ ing “borne” without maternal “dew,” and filled instead with “the makers guile” by which the maker is “beguiled.”

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This new creature is false for several reasons: first, because it resembles a woman, second, because it resembles Una, and third, because in imitat­ ing “that Lady trew,” its mandate is to represent her as untrue. Beyond that, the passage rubs off on “that Lady trew” with peculiar effect. The reader may initially be prepared to fix on the reference to Una’s virtue, her “trouthe” or troth, but may, on second thought, recall the ontological con­ trast between Una, who truly is a “Lady,” and the sprite, who isn’t. That second thought, however, turns out to be a boomerang for anyone who takes seriously the identification of Una as “Truth” in the Arguments of cantos 1 and 3, and who is thereby encouraged to position her as a figure in the “continued Allegory” of holiness and religious reform. Una has one thing in common with Archimago’s “miscreated faire”: She may be said to carry the semblance of Truth “under feigned hew” of “that Lady trew.” Whenever the allegorical project presses countertextually on the narra­ tive, the “Lady trew” modulates toward the status of a medieval personi­ fication, the “lady Trew.” But whether one sees her as a “Lady trew” or as the “lady Trew,” Una is no less a specter and no less under male instruc­ tion than Archimago’s sprite.49 If it isn’t obvious that the narrative labors to make Truth seem what it isn’t, the virgin daughter of a king, Archima­ go’s false semblances draw attention to that labor by their parody of it. They also draw attention to the feature David Norbrook picks out as a symptom of Spenserian and Protestant misogyny: the equation of Una’s purity with her non­display of “female sexuality.”50 This equation is so clearly a donnée of the allegorical countertext that it would make Archimago’s slanderous mumbo­jumbo seem comic were it not for Redcrosse’s response. At the level at which the countertext informs and polices narrative action, the enchanter is Archimago, the man with the power. His misrepresentation of Una’s truth is marked as entrapment, and Redcrosse’s response as the jealous rage of his victim. But at the level of textual action there is the more complex scenario I have discussed in the preceding sections of this chapter: the scenario centered on the protago­ nist’s fear of his own sexuality, on his need to defend himself against self­ distrust and guilt, and on the conflicted nature of his relation to Una and her quest suggested by the opening stanzas of canto 1. At this level com­ plicities are redistributed. Although Archimago’s infernal credentials seem impeccable and “Legions of Sprights” (1.1.38) are in his ser vice, the magi­ cal tricks he actually performs consist only of image­making and shape­ shifting; his allegorical function, “Hypocrisie” (1.1.Arg.), refers as much to theatrical as to moral performance and—this is the main point—his en­ chantments seem optative rather than coercive. Redcrosse is tricked but

54

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not forced into the position he takes. He might have been expected to  restrain himself enough “[t]o prove his sense, and tempt her faigned [un]truth,” but he chose not to. He is thus represented not as a mere vic­ tim but as a co­agent whose relation to Archimago is better expressed by the middle voice of shared responsibility than by the passive voice: He got himself deceived. It was he, then, who empowered Archimago. The disparity between these two levels and their respective messages is conspic uous. Its effect is to make the representation of Archimago and Redcrosse as complementary figures (villain and victim) in a romance plot verge on diegetic self­parody. The plot is patently inadequate to the mean­ ings the text uses it to convey. And this inadequacy rubs off on all the major allegorical sites—on the representations of anti­papism, woman, and the patron of true holiness. The inadequacy thus translates into a critique of Protestant iconography. Though the satyrs’ worship of Una in 1.6 “as Queene,” “as Goddesse,” and as “th’Image of ldolatryes,” is explicitly an antitype of proper reverence, the episode mischievously betrays the pagan and Petrarchan sources that inform the Protestant sublimation of sexual to religious desire. Such textual mischief leads me to conclude that Norbrook’s general de­ scription of Book 1, cited above, should be corrected in the following way: The book’s political rhetoric is not the countertextual “defense of reformed Christianity against idolatry”; it is the critique of that defense. The text parodies the tendency of anti­papist iconoclasm to slander woman by mak­ ing her an idolatrous embodiment—an embodiment not only of the Cath­ olic idolatry it criticizes but also of the reformed faith’s own iconoclastic aspiration to invisible truth. In this new iconography the mechanisms that assure the transmission of faith make common cause with the mechanisms that assure the transmission of property. Whether religious truth is idol­ ized as a beautiful and chaste virgin, or as a married and prolific daughter, or as a godly “matron grave and hare” (10.3), it enters into the discursive arena of sexual and patriarchal politics, where it is defined by the interests of fathers, heroes, and husbands. Book 1 rewrites apocalyptic rhetoric— and here I borrow Donald Cheney’s wonderful concept—as a eucalyptic rhe­ toric that makes a show of pretending to veil its sexual basis even as it exposes the structure of displacements by which the hero’s weakness and fear of self, his autophobia, are evasively translated into gynophobic fanta­ sies.51 These fantasies are assimilated into the reformed iconography from well­marked Ovidian and Petrarchan sites—assimilated and sublimated but by no means disabled.

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For the Protestant faith to tell its story is to contaminate the purity of an iconoclastic project with the narrative necessities of local habitations, names, and genders. Kenneth Gross was the first to develop and illustrate the argument that Book 1’s “gestures of Iconoclasm can themselves turn into or conceal idolatry.”52 John N. King disagrees with Gross’s conclu­ sion “that Spenser practices a subversive ‘poetics of idolatry’ ” and follows Ernest Gilman’s more positive and historically grounded view of a dialec­ tical “poetics of Reformation iconoclasm” that endorses a “shift away from external images of late medieval popular devotion and toward the inter­ nalized imagery of metaphor and poetic language.”53 In his long chapter on Spenserian iconoclasm King argues that Spenser’s poetry “seems to endorse the destruction of Catholic ‘idolatry’ at the same time that it preserves and adapts ‘idolatrous’ imagery to Protestant purposes” (56). Borrowing Patrick Collinson’s distinction between iconophobia and icon­ oclasm,54 he gives a balanced account of Spenser’s uneasy negotiations with the bipolar faculty of poetic fantasy and its fictions: “Spenser shares the uneasiness that contemporary Protestants felt toward the ‘fantasy’ or ‘fancy’ . . . as a deceptive faculty capable of undermining human under­ standing by transmitting false and misleading ideas. Nevertheless, The Faerie Queene incorporates an urgent defense of poetic fiction and the imagination producing it” (69). If we substitute “Therefore” for King’s “Nevertheless” we reinforce his thesis of a dialectical and compensatory poetics, an apology for the Sidneyan “right poet” as a “maker of images” who struggles against the “deceptive faculty” personified in Archimago and Busirane (75). In King’s allegory of Spenserian/Protestant poetics in Book 1, “Spenser” is the hero and Archimago the villain. “Spenser himself” as the right poet is likened to “his own Merlin and Shakespeare’s Prospero,” and set against Archimago as the source and transmitter of “false and misleading ideas.” I think this is too uncritical a view of Merlin and Prospero and too sim­ plistic a demonization of Archimago.55 The very density, range, and rich­ ness of the historical context King so impressively portrays is directed toward explaining Spenser’s treatment of iconoclasm in a manner that re­ duces The Faerie Queene to an instance of the context and thus deprives it of its distinctive character— deprives it, for example, of any oppositional power to represent its own critique of the context. In addition, King’s read­ ing of the poem is gender­blind. A thesis similar to King’s, but theoretically more sophisticated, has been elaborated by Susanne Wofford. She claims that although Spenser’s

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denigration of such idolatrous “figures hideous” (FQ, 2.12.85) as the Snowy Florimell allows him to tie an aspect of his own artistic method to Protestant polemics against what was considered the Catholic worship of images . . . the poem expresses the impossibility of renouncing images. . . . This double gesture— another example of demonizing— allows the narrator to characterize his own representational strategies as “evil” and “other,” and thus to appear to deny their role in the establishing of the hierarchies necessary for generating allegorical meaning. The text is informed, then, by two competing structures of power and compul­ sion, one marked as such and fictionally demonized as “Idolatry,” one unacknowledged but equally pervasive. The first mode of compulsion, discussed as such in the text, is associated with the dangerous power of the image to dominate the viewer and thus subdue him or her; the second, matching but opposite and unmarked in the text, enacts within the text the violence of Protestant zeal.56

Wofford is describing a contradiction by which The Faerie Queene as a whole is troubled because of its commitment to a par tic u lar poetics and politics of allegory. I want to explore the contradiction on a smaller scale and on a dif ferent level: on the scale of a single book, Book 1, and on a level at which the violence of Protestant zeal is not unmarked, not unacknowl­ edged, but is, on the contrary, the target of textual critique. The Faerie Queene begins with a poem that marks and acknowledges the contamina­ tion of iconoclastic program by the idolatrous necessities of narrative, and that explores the deleterious effects of idolatry in the specific area of gender construction. In showing how the religious problematic of male identity— autophobia and misautia—is causally related to the cultural production of gynophobic and misogynist idols of feminized truth and falsehood, it submits the quest motif to the logic of castration. The clearest example of the relation between narrative idolatry and this logic is the figure of Archimago. • The history of corrupted and corrupting eloquence is one that impinges on The Faerie Queene at every turning. The villainous avatars of craven poesis—Archimago, Busirane, Proteus, and a host of others—dog Spenser’s hero from canto to canto.57 As several critics have noticed, these avatars also dog Spenser’s poet. A recurrent insight in commentary of the last two decades is that The Faerie Queene registers or betrays the inability of its

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narrator to prevent his art from being parodied, slandered, appropriated by dubious artist figures of his own creation, figures whose power to feign images is in various ways comparable to his. Archimago is the first in a sequence that includes Despair, Merlin, Phantastes, Proteus, Busirane, and Scudamour, among others. Magicians, rhetoricians, storytellers, shapeshifters, framers of illusion in visual and verbal media— they have been loosely classified as types of false poets.58 But they also share another characteristic: haplessness. Although each of the trio of wizards who rum­ ble and ramp about in Book 3— Merlin, Proteus, and Busirane— stakes out an aggressive claim to authority or power, the claim is represented as in­ separable from his vulnerability to or frustrated pursuit of The Fair Sex. “[A] wanton man’s excessive desire— concupiscence in any of its forms— bears the seed of its own impairment”: It is telling that this aphoristic state­ ment of the logic of castration Gregerson finds packed into Malbecco’s name and predicament applies equally well to our three wizards.59 Does it also fit the portrait of Archimago? I have in the past played with the double sense of Archimago’s name—Archi­mage, the preeminent en­ chanter, and Archimage, the preeminent illusion— and on this basis as­ serted that the name authorizes a cultural imagination corrupted by its own impossible aspiration toward “wholeness”/“holiness,” toward heroic autonomy and tyrannical power, and thus torn by deprivation, anger, and the perpetual fear of impotence.60 That assertion may have a nice ring to it, but it wasn’t tested; it was nothing more than an assertion. It may find some support in accounts that designate Archimago as the hidden creator of Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss or compare his illusion­making to that of the witch who created False Florimell in 3.8.61 But whether there is any inter­ pretive substance to the claim that Archimago is not only an arch­poet but also one of the poem’s many powerful have­nots—figures of castration— remains to be seen, and I shall consider the claim after reviewing the the­ sis that he is a Spenserian counterpoet.62 Archimago has been described as “the internal competitor with the voice of the poet for authorial control of The Faerie Queene.”63 His fiction­making is featured in the poem not only as a poiesis counter to Spenser’s but also as a parody that exposes the duplicitous, or at least interested, nature of the Protestant narrator’s feigning. Leigh DeNeef, who was one of the first to explore this theme, argues that the poet figure is represented in the poem as “implicated in and even dependent upon the misrepresentations of the fictional false poets.” Because “both his manner and his matter duplicate theirs” he finds himself forced to decontaminate his own powers of fiction­ making or image­feigning from those he ascribes to “fictional false poets”

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and feigners like Archimago.64 The strong rationale that drives this argu­ ment is manifested in DeNeef’s comment on the final betrothal scene in 1.12, which rewrites, but nevertheless recalls, the plot Archimago devised to dupe Redcrosse into distrusting and abandoning Una. Since the false dream fashioned by the enchanter figures forth “a parodic betrothal, [it] also prefigures the knight’s narrative end.” After DeNeef cites verbal echoes that further link the latter to the former he states that Spenser has thereby converted Archimago’s false story into a true one, redeemed the deforming dream into a reforming reality. But his own narrative depends upon the counterfiction for its effect. Our recognition . . . of the metaphoric nature of this final union is dependent in part upon our awareness of its relation to the earlier version. As a result, Archimago . . . intrudes upon the celebratory moment even as he is bound in prison, and his story intrudes upon Spenser’s even as it is being rewritten and discredited. . . . [This] precludes our taking the text of Canto xii as a final or literal truth. The poet is neither willing nor able to silence all strains of his opponent’s song. (96–97)

Without wishing to quibble with this thesis, whose general features have been reiterated and persuasively elaborated by several critics, I would like to add a qualifying refinement to it. Archimago succeeds to the extent that his story “intrudes upon,” infiltrates, and contaminates Spenser’s. He also succeeds when his “ideas,” his illusions, infiltrate and contaminate Red­ crosse. But when he intrudes in person—in the flesh, so to speak—he is thrown into prison. Indeed, after his first appearance in 1.1, whenever he intrudes in person his plots tend to misfire. This suggests to me that there is an inverse relation between his power on the one hand and his status as a “he,” an embodied character, on the other. I want to elaborate on the sugges­ tion by quoting and querying a series of critical statements. 1. The Argument to canto 1 refers to Archimago only as “Hypocrisie,” and Maureen Quilligan warns against the premature reductiveness of these prefatory quatrains, which she thinks “Spenser consciously intended . . . as starting­points so simplistic that we willingly dispense with them as the involuted qualifications begin to pile up” in the cantos that follow the qua­ trains. Because the quatrain “works against the canto . . . the canto itself . . . will necessarily work against the easy statement made by the argument,” stimulating a process of self­discovery in the reader, who “will need to learn not to rely on allegorical tags just as the knight will learn not to rely on his own too­self­confident strengths.” 65 Quilligan goes on to suggest how the poem complicates the notion of hy pocrisy, which, she claims, is

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“the knight’s problem; when Archimago disguises himself as the Red­ crosse Knight, his disguise does not merely reveal him to be hy pocrisy, it indicates that he and the knight have become hopelessly indistinguish­ able from each other. The knight is more like Archimago than he was be­ fore, having succumbed to his own guilty imagination” (234). This analysis leads to an impor tant distinction, which I shall say more about shortly, the distinction between Archimago in Redcrosse and Archimago as Redcrosse. 2. Linda Gregerson distinguishes between exemplary and catalytic representational modes. In the first case, an allegorical figure directly bodies forth the psychic or material condition for which it is named. . . . In the second case, an allegorical figure functions as the precipitating cause or occasion of the condi­ tion for which it is named. These functions overlap, for example, in Despair (1.9) and Furor (2.4), each of whom suffers the fault of spirit for which he is named even while he induces it in others.66

Is Archimago exemplary, catalytic, or both? What psychic or material con­ dition does he body forth? What would an exemplary representation of hy pocrisy look and behave like?67 Would it look and behave like Ar­ chimago? Most important, how strictly or literally can we take the phrase “directly bodies forth” when it denotes the activity of a written verbal sign rather than of a visual sign? Is bodying forth a form of iconification, the product of narrative idolatry? 3. According to William Oram, Archimago is the first of many false artists in Spenser’s poem, tempting the will with perverse images. But he also embodies Redcrosse’s own untrust­ worthy and passionate imagination. At times he stands in for Red­ crosse as well. When Redcrosse leaves, Archimago promptly dons similar armor and accompanies Una on her travels: the picture of Christian armor concealing the weak and skeletal body of Archimago gives us a moral X­ray of Redcrosse’s condition.68

Almost, but not quite, a skeleton in armor, a Düreresque image of Death, and yet even more desperate and terrifying: the scriptural figure of our death, the Pauline Old Man, wearing the armor of Christian identity sto­ len from, or abandoned by, the errant defender of the faith.69 Oram sug­ gests that in addition to being a fictional character who tempts Redcrosse’s will, Archimago also “embodies” his imagination. Does “embodies” mean “stands for”? “Provides a narrative idol of”? Does Archimago “stand for”

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Redcrosse when he “stands in” for him in 1.3? If, as I noted above, there is a distinction between Archimago in Redcrosse and Archimago as Red­ crosse, “where” is Archimago? The haunting “moral X­ray” produced by his masquerade in 1.3 belatedly sharpens the relevance of the other wise extravagant foray into ecclesiasti­ cal allegory that was just concluded. The episode centered on an exemplary figure whose name, Kirkrapine, was given at 1.3.22 only after the lion “him . . . supprest” (1.3.19) and less than two stanzas before Una encounters Archimago “in mighty armes embost” (1.3.24).70 Kirkrapine was destroyed by the lion, but the meaning of his name is transferred to the catalytic figure of Archimago. His investment in and as St. George illustrates Kirkrap­ ine’s theft: “The holy Saints of their rich vestiments / He did disrobe, when all men carelesse slept” (1.3.17).71 Yet if indeed Archimago as the Old Man is a catalytic agent who not only produces but also “embodies” Redcrosse’s imagination, and if the embodiment disguising itself as Redcrosse “gives us a moral X­ray of Redcrosse’s condition,” then doesn’t Redcrosse embody Archimago when he acquiesces in the enchanter’s bad agency? Isn’t he, therefore, the ultimate recipient of the meaning of Kirkrapine’s name? All this is deep and dark, and I think it makes sense. Yet it isn’t the whole story, if for no other reason than that the episode does not end there. Oram’s conception of the moral X­ray is a profound insight into the metaphoric power of the image he describes, “the weak and skeletal body of Archimago” as a figure for Redcrosse’s spiritual condition. But twelve stanzas later that poor body will lose its merely metaphoric status and suffer the comic con­ sequences of materialization when Sansloy comes along and knocks it off its horse. Archimago fares less well as an embodiment of himself than as the embodiment of another. 4. Wofford claims that “Archimago serves . . . as a figure for an aspect of the internal life of the book’s hero, but he also incarnates a force apart, not existing only internally but representing a kind of constraint or power over the mind.” Nevertheless, she continues, that “force apart” is not lo­ calized: The “internal and external forces” Archimago represents “have no specific name or ‘body’ proper to themselves.” Rather the force “is associ­ ated with aesthetic power, and especially the power of books, but can be generalized to include the wider cultural shaping of the imagination and desires for which books are a figure throughout the poem.”72 It remains true, however, that inasmuch as the “force apart” is embodied in a fictional character, it has a local habitation and a name. The mundanity of this observation shouldn’t detract from its importance. But its importance shouldn’t prevent us from taking seriously the comic glee with which the

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text discomfits and even makes a spectacle of the character who embodies the Archimago force. 5. In his powerful revision of the meaning of Spenser’s “pictorialism,” Ernest Gilman locates Book 1’s version of “the deeper debate between pic­ torialism and iconoclasm” in the “paradoxical alliance . . . between the nar­ rator of the poem and Archimago.” Gilman argues incisively that Spenser’s “artful strategy of taking and yet disclaiming responsibility for . . . every­ thing in the poem generated by the ‘pictorial’ Spenser of tradition” consists in “ascribing it to the machinations of an other, a false ‘Spenser’ who must be constantly held at bay.” He reminds us that this other is an “Arch­imager” who snares “Spenser’s heroes . . . through the creation of a false ‘Una’ and a false ‘Red Crosse,’ by an art that exactly replicates Spenser’s own.”73 The replication, however, is not exact, first, because the incentive to read­as­if­ visualizing is marked as a countertextual defense against reading­as­if­ textualizing, and second, because the Arch­imager is also an Arch­image and, as such, is part of that defense. Archimago is held at bay chiefly by being “pictorialized” as a wicked old sorcerer and hypocrite. • Archimago refuses to be bound or limited: he continually escapes the fictional role of a simple antagonist, and his duplicitous creations threaten constantly to contaminate the poet’s.74

To preserve the strength of this insight we have to modify its form, for DeNeef’s “continually” and “constantly” exaggerate Archimago’s power; they gloss over its problematic relation to his “fictional role.” At the be­ ginning of Book 2 we learn that since his favorite enemy, Una, is beyond his clutches, he is forced to settle for Redcrosse: “Him therefore now the object of his spight / And deadly food he makes,” even though he well knows that “[h]is credit now in doubtfull ballaunce hong” since he is less likely to succeed with someone he has “already stong” (2.1.2–3). The thought of Archimago losing confidence in himself is no less important than it is uproarious. It may remind us that only in the first of his four cameo ap­ pearances in Book 1 does this “false infamous faitour” (2.1.30) manage to bring off his project. Even there his first attempt to turn Redcrosse against Una appears in his eyes to have failed and, after throwing a fit, he tries again (1.1.55–2.2–3). But the ways in which he fails and succeeds in this episode are complex and demand scrutiny. As we saw, the textual account of Redcrosse’s complex reaction to the dream and phantom semblances of Una shows that unbeknown to himself

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Archimago has in fact succeeded in altering the hero’s consciousness be­ fore the second attempt. Like a litmus test, his temptation of the young protagonist brings out the narcissism and misogyny structured into the discourse of Christian identity and manhood that Book 1 targets. Although the potentiality for self­division between the anonymous protagonist and his Redcrosse identity is laid out in the first three stanzas of canto 1, it is Archimago who actualizes it, and who does so in terms that bind the per­ ils of Christian narcissism to those of sexuality and the castration princi­ ple. These terms, however, focus attention on the complicity of the victim in his own victimization, for if in the first of his little intrigues Archimago is able to live up to the meaning of his name, it is only because Redcrosse proves a receptive host to the self­dividing, self­deceiving, self­defeating fantasy—the originary negative moment in the structure of Christian narcissism—packed into that name. The temptation of Redcrosse in 1.1–2 thus shows us what we have to do in order to unpack the meaning of the name Archimago, and where we have to look to discern its effects. The meaning becomes an effective force when alienated from the character bearing the name and internalized like a vi­ rus by his victim: “In The Faerie Queene, Archimago’s false likenesses in­ sinuate themselves into the hero’s inmost imaginative faculties and divide him from himself.”75 But if under such a construal he “serves . . . as a fig­ ure for an aspect of the internal life of the book’s hero,” if his name evokes “that image­making power in the mind that can cause one to misread the world,” it doesn’t necessarily follow that the hero is passive, ignorant, and defenseless.76 Rather, as we’ve seen, his reaction and subsequent behav ior activate and interpret the meaning of the name, allowing the virus to mul­ tiply and spread. Unlike the drugs of choice in the 1960s, the Archimago virus lowers consciousness. It works as a psychic inhibitor: It enables its host to disown knowledge in order to defer the self­loathing, repress the autophobia that drives and is intensified by the voluntary pursuit of errant desire. Above all, the virus attacks the fantasy of Una, breaks it down into Duessan semblances, and insidiously shields the host from the pain of au­ tophobia and misautia by transforming them to gynophobia and misog­ yny. Disseminated through Redcrosse to the multiple reflectors of his worsening state, the Archimago virus manifests its allegorical toxicity in the procession of “too solemn sad” power seekers and losers who exhibit the stunning coincidence of pride and despair, superbia and accidia, that Kierkegaard would analyze as “the sickness unto death”: the phallic hysteria and suicidal despair variously inscribed in the machismo of faithless and lawless chivalry, in the joyless aspiration and desperation of Luciferan

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glitter, in the abjection of the maternal cave of Night that haunts the house of Pride, and in the spastic thunder of Orgoglio. A “force apart,” as Wofford calls it, a textual, depersonalized, rhizom­ atic power of Spenserian discourse, the Archimago virus burrows under the sequence of episodes making up the narrative. But whenever it crops up in the detextualized and personified form of the Archimago character, it loses its virulence, for the character is a decoy, a trap, an easy fix, a scape­ goat. It condenses and visualizes the evil for handy recognition and disposal. The ideology of narrative flows effortlessly from its aesthetics: Storytelling embodies, localizes, and isolates the agency of wickedness in discrete figures and places. But the storytelling in Book 1 is performed by a textual voice that internally distantiates itself from it and that represents this condensation of evil in the form of mimetic parody. It is mimetic in two ways. First, the diegetic inventions and motifs are represented citationally as types and examples of traditional discourses. Second, the episodic struc­ ture of Archimago’s escapades distortedly—melodramatically—imitates the thematic structure of the Archimago virus; that is, in all his cameo appear­ ances after the first, his comic failures to achieve his objective simultaneously dramatize and trivialize the disempowering effects of the virus. The most salient indicator of parody is tonal: In such descriptions of Archimago as the following there is a very strong sense of high­spirited impersonation: He to his study goes, and there amiddes His Magick bookes and artes of sundry kindes, He seekes out mighty charmes, to trouble sleepy mindes. Then choosing out few wordes most horrible, (Let none them read) thereof did verses frame, With which and other spelles like terrible, He bad awake blacke Plutoes griesly Dame, And cursed heaven, and spake reprochfull shame Of highest God, the Lord of life and light; A bold bad man, that dar’d to call by name Great Gorgon, Prince of darknesse and dead night, At which Cocytus quakes, and Styx is put to flight. (1.36–37)

The solicitous censorship by indirect discourse that pretends to shield read­ ers from the terrifying blasphemies being reported only underscores the storyteller’s delight in scaring those readers. As a result, their attention is redirected from Archimago’s to his— the narrator’s—“presence” and

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per formance. He doesn’t merely report the blasphemies; he admires their hatefulness, and what he especially admires is Archimago’s linguistic skills and powers of enchantment, his discriminating deployment of words, verses, spells, curses, and daring nominations that throw Tartar­ ean rivers into a turmoil. Archimago is surely the most powerful and evil Enchanter in Faeryland. This is not a transparent account of Archimago’s shenanigans but an operatic parody that puts the mark of camp on both him and his narra­ tor. Like Bela Lugosi playing Count Dracula, the narrator conveys the joy of spooking with such verve and histrionic self­delight as to make fun of the very conventions of diegetic per for mance he excels at. In both the text’s impersonation of the narrator and the narrator’s of Archimago, the childlike enthusiasm for melodramatic mumbo jumbo, dark incanta­ tions, and energetic mummery dominates the scene of evildoing. But the narrator’s enjoyment has a Protestant—that is, a critical— edge. If Ar­ chimago’s favorite sport is to play wolf­in­sheep’s clothing, one of the nar­ rator’s favorite sports is to describe or mimic the enchanter’s performances in a manner that impresses on his readers the perils of papist hy pocrisy, its gleeful indulgence in wicked deceptions, its ultimate futility: An aged Sire, in long blacke weedes yclad, His feete all bare, his beard all hoarie gray, And by his belt his booke he hanging had; Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad, And to the ground his eyes were lowly bent, Simple in shew, and voyde of malice bad, And all the way he prayed, as he went, And often knockt his brest, as one that did repent. (1.29) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ah my deare Sonne (quoth he) how should, alas, Silly old man, that lives in hidden cell, Bidding his beades all day for his trespas, Tydings of warre and worldly trouble tell? (1.30)

Archimago begins each of his subsequent appearances with strong attacks of guile and clever disguising, but each scenario reduces him to a sheep in wolf’s clothing. The stanza that introduces the first of his adventures in shape­shifting once again rhetorically reflects the narrator’s admiration for his skills: Preparing to persecute his archenemy Una, he

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devisde himselfe how to disguise; For by his mightie science he could take As many formes and shapes in seeming wise, As ever Proteus to himselfe could make: Sometime a fowle, sometime a fish in lake, Now like a fox, now like a dragon fell, That of himselfe he oft for feare would quake, And oft would flie away. O who can tell The hidden power of herbes, and might of Magicke spell? (2.10)

The list of changes accelerated by anaphora and alliteration conveys the enthusiasm of a frenetic practitioner who sometimes gets out of hand. The narrator no less than his subject is diverted by this fantasy of exuberant self­amusement, and by the esoteric power behind it. And yet, as Hamil­ ton concisely notes, “while the humor is obvious, the lines comment on the Knight who flees from himself” (FQ, 46). In the course of humoring the fantasy of metamorphic power, the stanza executes a brilliant caricature of autophobia, anticipating the moment two stanzas later when we learn of Redcrosse’s flight “from his thoughts and gealous feare.” Archimago and Redcrosse both lose control and scare themselves: The point of the anal­ ogy lies in the sharp contrast between the trivialized comic­strip version that reduces autophobia to buffoonery and the insidious power of the Ar­ chimago virus when it is alienated from the character and internalized by his victim. Placing these two moments back to back accentuates the limits of the narrative conventions of allegorical romance with their reliance on the localization and visualization of moral agency. Archimago, as we shall now see, is a paper tiger when he tries to carry out his initiatives in person rather than making himself scarce and entrusting the transmission of his evil to textual channels. After he sends Redcrosse packing and completes his metamorphic warm­ups, Archimago disguises himself as “his late beguiled guest” and sets out to persecute Una. This turns out to be a pointless and counter­ productive exercise: He is forced to do battle, which isn’t his strong suit, and, ironically, to fight as Una’s protector against the predatory Sansloy, who unmasks and nearly kills the “lucklesse syre” (3.33–39). In his next per­ sonal appearance he takes a walk in the woods of canto 6 dressed up as a dusty pilgrim, lets himself be seen by Una and Satyrane, and gives Una an account of Redcrosse’s death at the hands of a “Paynims sonne” that we recognize as a muffled version of his own luckless encounter with Sansloy.

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He manages to oppress Una “with huge heaviness” (6.40), but he also helps Satyrane find Sansloy so that Una’s new friend can avenge the hero’s death. Now why would Archimago want to do that? The logic of the episode sug­ gests that he wants Sansloy to beat Satyrane and recapture Una. But it may equally well suggest that he wants Satyrane to give Sansloy the comeup­ pance he deserves for spoiling Archimago’s debut as Redcrosse in canto 3. In addition he gives Sansloy the chance to refute his lie and claim that it wasn’t Redcrosse but the “enchaunter vaine” that he defeated (6.42), a piece of news which, if it got back to Una, would restore her hope and defeat his purpose. As the two knights hack furiously away at each other, and Una flees, Archimago hides In secret shadow, all this to behold, And much rejoyced in their bloudy fray: But when he saw the Damsell passe away He left his stond, and her pursewd apace, In hope to bring her to her last decay. (6.48)

His departure leaves the combatants deadlocked in another of Spenser’s endless works. The deadlock reflects Archimago’s own confused motiva­ tion for arranging the fight. His hope of catching Una remains unrealized; she meets up with Arthur in the next canto while the enchanter drops out of sight until canto 12. There, in his final cameo appearance in Book 1, he tries to disrupt the nuptial ceremony by masking as a messenger who bears a letter from Fidessa/Duessa charging Redcrosse with infidelity. Since, as he might have anticipated, Una and Redcrosse easily defuse this threat and again unmask the culprit, he gets thrown into prison for his pains. This is hardly an enviable record, and it makes one wonder what the reasons are for Archimago’s cachet in literary history. In three of his four personal interventions he gets himself into situations that he either can’t win or can’t resolve. If the author of The Faerie Queene thought it manda­ tory to include an evil magician as part of his romance machinery, he doesn’t appear to have taken the convention seriously as it stood. The bril­ liance and simplicity of his solution was to take seriously his inability to take it seriously and to show how its comic inadequacy may itself be made meaningful. In its parody of anti­papist imagery the poem characterizes Archimago as a figure torn between the desire to fulfill his conventional function and do harm, and the desire to enjoy the per formance of harm­ doing. It relishes his relish in spookery, hy pocrisy, masquerade, and the occasional bizarre scenario in which, enchanted by the props and appara­ tus of his mystery, the enchanter gets caught up as in a net.

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The guiler beguiled— and self­beguiled—is an old saw that makes con­ tact with the Christian commonplace of the self­destructiveness of evil. But Spenser gives the motif a new twist. Because Archimago’s exuberant deployment of his power after his opening appearance renders him power­ less or hapless or—as in the Satyrane/Sansloy episode—beside the point, his personal appearances compose into a pattern that conveys the message of Christian comedy: Crime never pays and the wicked are their own worst enemies. The narrative does his evil work better than he does, and we could say that it doesn’t really need him except to serve as a scapegoat and to sym­ bolize by his personal failures the deeper successes of the virus. His iden­ tification as the source of evil is interrogated by the textual devices that represent the techniques of allegorical romance—localization, visualiza­ tion, personification—as machines of comic reduction. Thus if the virus is, as Wofford puts it, an unlocalized “force apart” best manifested in close encounters of the textual kind, the character named Archimago is a coun­ tertext, an idol constructed and animated by the Protestant polemic that drives the allegorical narrative. The countertextual machines of comic reduction conspicuously occlude the more complex goings­on in the field of a general psychomachian dis­ course. This discourse is explicitly a religious allegory that correlates theo­ logical and ecclesiastical conflicts with the psychology of Christian warfare and wayfaring (errantry and errancy) given the form I described above as Christian narcissism. I don’t think it useful to try with any rigor to treat this psychomachia as Redcrosse’s private war or to premise—as I once did—that every thing going on in the narrative constitutes an inter­ pretation of subjective experience in the protagonist. My current premise is that Redcrosse is a model or puppet, a nodal point of reference for the display of subjectivity effects common to the generic Christian experi­ ence and its general psychomachian structure. Things that happen to him—the meetings with Sansfoy and Sansjoy, for example—may be symp­ tomatic expressions as well as causes of things going on within him. But things going on in another part of the forest in the third and sixth cantos don’t easily translate into psychic changes specific to the hero. They may, however, explicate the consequences of his truancy for the general field of Christian psychomachia represented in Book 1. The dual pairing of Red­ crosse with Duessa and Sansloy with Una is a case in point, and one that I discuss below. “Lawlesse lust” is the phrase used in the Argument to canto 6 to refer to Sansloy’s attempted rape, but as an abstraction it may be em­ bodied or personified by whoever exhibits it. When Redcrosse cleaves to Una’s double, Duessa, he actualizes the two phantasmatic figures produced

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by Archimago (the dream and the sprite) and thereby makes himself a host to the Archimago virus. Having lost faith in Una and himself, he abandons himself to lawless lust, abandons Una and her cause far lawless lust, which then materializes in the figure of Sansloy. This narrative pattern dramatizes the logic of castration that informs the gendering and sexualization of the religious allegory. Under textual in­ terrogation, the major instrument of Protestant iconoclasm turns out to be the idolatrous construction of religious truth and falsehood as women. The outlines of misogynist discourse are sketched before Archimago’s ap­ pearance by the text of Redcrosse’s fight with Error. Archimago is then put into play as the Catholic bogeyman and the scapegoat to whom the allegorical narrative displaces the responsibility for subordinating the re­ ligious quest to sexual and misogynist fantasies. Through his temptation of Redcrosse the trials of Christian identity are confused with the trials of sexual identity, and the dangers of sin with those of woman. But having attributed this to the enchanter’s popish dev iltry and hatred of Una, the narrative continues on its own the same conflation of the perils of Chris­ tian narcissism with those of the castration principle. It associates the ex­ pression of pride with displays of phallic overcompensation (in Lucifera and Orgoglio), and it repeatedly associates Redcrosse’s moral debility with the loss of his manly powers.77 • In shifting from the comedy of Archimago as character to the morally le­ thal effects of the Archimago virus on the host who exposes himself to it, I begin by recalling the finest moment of the interplay between the coun­ tertextual and textual versions of Redcrosse’s response, in 1.2.5–12, to the scene of copulation. As we saw, his imminent flight from autophobia is an­ ticipated by Archimago’s reaction to his own over­enthusiastic shape­ shifting: “[O]f himselfe he oft for feare would quake, / And oft would flie away” (2.10). That Redcrosse has cause to fear himself, and carries the cause away with him, is suggested by the syntax connecting his flight from Una to the fight with Sansfoy: The true Saint George was wandred far away, Still flying from his thoughts and gealous feare; Will was his guide, and griefe led him astray. At last him chaunst to meete upon the way A faithlesse Sarazin all arm’d to point, In whose great shield was writ with letters gay

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Sans foy: full large of limbe and every joint He was, and cared not for God or man a point. (2.12)

The connector “At last” can have either paratactic or consequential force. In the former construction “him chaunst” signifies a casual encounter, but in the latter it signifies a coincidental encounter: “It just so happened that he met what he was looking for,” and what he was looking for was a chance to let will and grief guide him further astray— astray simultaneously from the right path he should be traveling together with Una (one of the Latin senses of that name being “together”) and from his thoughts and jealous fear. The encounter with Sansfoy gives him the chance to savor his resent­ ment and willfully continue going astray, which means to act in a manner that will do harm to both Una and himself. Against Sansfoy, he is the first to advance his spear—as Duessa notes while preoccupying Sansfoy with “faire disport and courting dalliaunce” (2.14)—thus seizing an occasion perversely “to prove his sense and tempt his faigned truth.” Whether or not he is linguistically naïve enough to be puzzled by the French name on Sansfoy’s shield, the extent of his own capacity for infidelity is clearly some­ thing he will put to the test in this episode. Duessa may not be the most reliable source, but it is through her that the narrative conveys the information (nowhere challenged) that Sansfoy is the eldest of three sons “of one bad sire,” whose name, Aveugle (“Blind’), she discloses later (5.23); the “youngest is Sans joy, / And twixt them both was borne the bloudy bold Sans loy” (2.25).78 Their mother is not men­ tioned, and the allegorical orientation toward Redcrosse encourages the thought that they issue forth from— and dramatize the course of—his self­scotomization. They appear in the order of birth, but Redcrosse never meets Sansloy, to whose “lawlesse lust” (6.Arg.) Una falls prey as a result of the former’s infidelity and lawless dalliance with Duessa. Joyless­ ness attacks Redcrosse in the House of Pride because he is bearing the shield of faithlessness that marks him as Sansfoy’s slayer. Duessa keeps Joylessness alive after he is defeated by Redcrosse, but we hear no more of the three brothers from canto 7 on. Where have they and their shades gone? One possible destination is suggested at 7.5 when, as we’ll see, Sansloy seems to have metamorphosed into Redcrosse. Another is suggested three stanzas later when we read that Orgoglio’s “stature did exceed / The hight of three the tallest sonnes of mortall seed” (7.8). On a schematic level, the fight with Sansfoy lends itself to a symptom­ atic interpretation. That is, when Redcrosse encounters and kills a pagan named Sansfoy he encounters and represses the symptom of his own loss

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of faith in Una, his flight from whom is an act of infidelity not only to her but also to her cause, to Gloriana who assigned him the quest, and thus finally to himself. Repressing the symptom, he maintains or regains un­ awareness of his errancy, and thereby become both susceptible to and guilty of greater harm— susceptible to an attack of joylessness, the harbinger of despair, and guilty of the lawlessness to which Una is exposed.79 The start­ ing point of this process is signaled in the fight with Sansfoy by the lan­ guage that renders the two combatants indistinguishable. As has often been noted, the calorific rhetoric that playfully over­ heats Spenser’s battle scenes melts down the separate identities of com­ batants into pronominal confusion, and here the confusion is raised to a higher level because both warriors in their reckless fury do as much harm to themselves as to each other. In this Classic Comics send­up of the chi­ valric encounter “their forces hideous” jeopardize even their means of locomotion: Their steeds do stagger, and amazed stand, And eke themselves too rudely rigorous, Astonied with the stroke of their owne hand, Do back rebut, and each to other yeeldeth land. As when two rams stird with ambitious pride, Fight for the rule of the rich fleeced flocke, Their horned fronts so fierce on either side Do meete, that with the terrour of the shocke Astonied both, stand sencelesse as a blocke, Forgetful of the hanging victory: So stood these twaine, unmoved as a rocke, Both staring fierce, and holding idely The broken reliques of their former cruelty. (2.15–16)

The simile that further reduces them to specular doubles has the peculiar effect of ascribing to Redcrosse a motive that is at this point less applica­ ble to him than to Sansfoy: If “rule of the rich fleeced flocke” = sexual/ political rights to Duessa, Redcrosse is stunning and endangering himself for an objective of which he isn’t yet aware and which, if he achieves, will not repair the “broken reliques” of his manhood, for in stanzas 13–14 it was clearly Duessa who seemed to be ruling Sansfoy rather than vice versa. The desire of each knight toward the other is strangely complicated in the pivot lines of stanza 17: “Each others equall puissaunce envies, / And through their iron sides with cruell spies / Does seeke to perce.” Initially,

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this means that each vies with a power in the other that is like and equal to his own, but the influence of “cruell spies” on “envies” overlays that meaning with the sense of invidia: Each looks on and envies the other’s power, wishes it were his own, and thereby tries to penetrate the armor as if to appropriate the power. For Redcrosse this implies the desire violently to make the power of faithlessness his own—which it already is, for other­ wise he wouldn’t have the desire. The true direction of the desire, hinted at in the comic reference to reckless self­injury in stanza 15, is deathward; this is more fully indicated after Redcrosse splits Sansfoy’s head: He tumbling downe alive, With bloudy mouth his mother earth did kis, Greeting his grave: his grudging ghost did strive With the fraile flesh; at last it flitted is, Whither the soules do fly of men, that live amis. (2.19)

It is as if Redcrosse has done Sansfoy a favor in helping him through “the bitter fit” (2.18) to the relief of death and the liberation of the spirit from the frail flesh that struggles to impede its flight to the place of judgment. Since by this time in the episode the two knights have converged in a sin­ gle identity, I can readily imagine Sansfoy’s imprecation in Redcrosse’s mouth: “Curse on that Crosse . . . / That keepes my body from the bitter fit” (2.18), and that will keep him alive in his infidelity until he approaches the bitter fit of Despair, who tries to do Redcrosse the same favor the lat­ ter had done Sansfoy: None else to death this man despayring drive, But his owne guiltie mind deserving death. (9.38) Who travels by the wearie wandring way, To come unto his wished home in haste, And meetes a flood, that doth his passage stay, Is not great grace to helpe him over past, Or free his feet, that in the myre sticke fast? (9.39)

Against the textual representation of the sinner’s autophobia and misautia is set the reiterative focus on the displacement of blame to scapegoats, the most prominent of which (or whom) is Duessa. Donald Cheney argues that the account of Redcrosse’s behav ior with Duessa “is in keeping with the picture of him as a naïve knight, too preoccupied with the details of chi­ valric behav ior to meditate on his own abandoned quest.”80 But given the premises developed in the foregoing interpretation, a picture not of naïveté

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but of bad faith comes into focus, the picture of a protagonist who preoc­ cupies himself with the details of chivalric behav ior so as not to meditate on his abandoned quest, and whose ability to occlude or defer knowledge of moral truancy is what enables him to continue in it. Cheney’s persua­ sive reading of the Fradubio episode suggests this: From his prison Fradubio speaks with an acute awareness of his condition. But knowledge, far from setting him free, is an index of his inability to act. . . . He is all the more rapidly driven to a crisis which the other reaches only after much indirection. (38–39) Redcrosse has turned away from the tree, thrusting the bleeding bough into the ground and stopping the wound with clay, “That from the bloud he might be innocent.” The gesture is one of piety, yet it also suggests the repression of unwelcome knowledge. The naïve “inno­ cence” which he seeks will bring its own guilty knowledge. (42–43)

As an anamorphic compression of Redcrosse’s situation, Fradubio’s inten­ sifies Duessa’s guilt and witchlike terror. At the same time, the textual res­ onances that link the two male figures shift attention to their agency in empowering the witch and to the hollowness of the appeal to the victim’s discourse. • Redcrosse’s encounters with Archimago and Duessa are situated in a tex­ tual field that oscillates between two interpretive frameworks, one domi­ nated by the sinner’s discourse and questions of moral agency, the other dominated by the victim’s discourse and threats to chivalric manhood. The Spenserian narrator is given a significant if sporadic role in dramatizing the negotiations between these frameworks. His comments often slide un­ certainly back and forth from one to the other. The utterance that opens the third canto is a case in point: Nought is there under heav’ns wide hollownesse, That moves more deare compassion of mind, Then beautie brought t’unworthy wretchednesse Through envies snares or fortunes freakes unkind: I, whether lately through her brightnesse blind, Or through alleageance and fast fealtie, Which I do owe unto all woman kind, Feele my heart perst with so great agonie, When such I see, that all for pittie I could die. (3.1)

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In this exemplary chivalric utterance the disjunction (“whether . . . / Or . . .”) has conjunctive force and bespeaks the generosity, the vulnerability, the fidelity, of the true Friend to Ladies. This heartfelt outburst of manly com­ passion is a model of the sentiment one could wish for— and sorely misses—in Redcrosse. The only problem is that although the first four lines look forward to Una’s misadventures in the stanzas that follow, they also look back to and evoke the plight of Duessa as she represented it to Redcrosse, so that the utterance as a whole suspiciously echoes—perhaps parodies?—Redcrosse’s response to Duessa in canto 2 (stanzas 21, 26–27, 45). Nor does it help that when this gallant devotee wonders whether he has been blinded by Una’s brightness, his words are preceded by the Ar­ gument’s reference to “blind Devotions mart.” Redcrosse’s own expressions of pity and “alleageance” in 2.26–27 were introduced by the narrator with an observation that belied them in advance: listening to Duessa’s tale of woe, He in great passion all this while did dwell, More busying his quicke eyes, her face to view, Then his dull eares, to heare what she did tell; And said, Faire Lady hart of flint would rew The undeserved woes and sorrowes, which ye shew. (2.26)

At the end of the canto, after thrusting the bleeding bough, and the knowl­ edge it signifies, back into the ground, he turns to find Duessa “seeming dead . . . with feigned feare” and tries to revive her: “[W]ith trembling cheare / Her up he tooke, too simple and too trew, / And oft her kist” (2.45). The syntactical duplicity of “too simple and too trew”—its antecedents are both “Her” and “he”— strongly suggests that if his naïveté is emphasized, the emphasis is textually interrogated. Granted that her simplicity and truth are a function of his—they exist only in the “quicke eyes” of the ob­ server “lately through her brightnesse blind” to what he chose not to hear, see, or believe—his simplicity and truth are finally characterized as false by being conflated with hers: She can deceive him because he has chosen to deceive himself. As a narratorial comment, “too simple and too true” is, with reference to Redcrosse, more apologetic than accusatory. But juxtaposed to his earlier comment, “More busying his quicke eyes . . . ,” it produces a strange co­ alescence between the hero’s and the narrator’s attempts to soft­peddle the former’s active complicity in yielding to Duessa. Thus in 3.1 the narrator appears momentarily to echo or imitate—or parody?—the sentiments through which Redcrosse represents himself to himself as a paragon of

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courtly and chivalrous behav ior. Then, as if catching that nuance, he turns in 3.2 to reassure the reader that it is not Duessa but Una of whom he sings. Yet the moment in which his admiration and sympathy for Una are clouded by the bad faith of Redcrosse’s self­representation in canto 2—this moment prepares the reader not only to embrace the pathos of 3.2 but also to wince at the falseness of Redcrosse’s position, so vulnerable already to the self­ lacerating argument of Despair. Stanzas 2 and 3 glance proleptically at the sinner’s remorse by empha­ sizing what Una does for him despite what he has done to her: And now it is empassioned so deepe, For fairest Unaes sake, of whom I sing, That my fraile eyes these lines with teares do steepe, To thinke how she through guilefull handeling, Though true as touch, though daughter of a king, Though faire as ever living wight was faire, Though nor in word nor deede ill meriting, Is from her knight divorced in despaire And her due loves deriv’d to that vile witches share. (3.2)

“Yet she most faithfull Ladie all this while” continues, though forsaken and as if in exile, To seeke her knight; who subtilly betrayd Through that late vision, which th’Enchaunter wrought, Had her abandond. (3.3)

The naked impact of the last three words is sharpened by the circumlocu­ tory detour that defers them: Whether or not he was (let himself get) be­ guiled by Duessa and betrayed by Archimago, the plain moral fact is that he “[h]ad her abandond.” What makes matters worse is that she perseveres in seeking her knight, “Through woods and wastnesse wide him daily sought” (3.3). She gives him all, and what she suffers on his account is pre­ viewed in the Argument of canto 3: Forsaken Truth long seekes her love, And makes the Lyon mylde, Marres blind Devotions mart, and fals In hand of leachour vylde.

Una’s absent “love” is bound here to Redcrosse’s two surrogates, the “Lyon” and “leachour,” by links of alliteration, just as later in the canto he will be bound to them and to Archimago by more substantive links.

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It is the causal linkage between what Sansloy has done (and will do) to Una and what Redcrosse does with Duessa that draws the narrator’s most biting rebuke to his protagonist: Young knight, what ever that dost armes professe, And through long labours huntest after fame, Beware of fraud, beware of ficklenesse, In choice and change of thy deare loved Dame, Least thou of her beleeve too lightly blame, And rash misweening doe thy hart remove: For unto knight there is no greater shame, Then lightnesse and inconstancie in love; That doth this Redcrosse knights ensample plainly prove. Who after that he had faire Una lorne, Through light misdeeming of her loialtie, And false Duessa in her sted had borne, Called Fidess’, and so supposd to bee; Long with her traveild, . . . (4.1–2)

until they came—under her guidance—to a structure, a topos, that is named only twice, in the Argument of canto 4 that introduces it and in the very last words of the episode at the end of canto 5. In the former, we read: “To sinfull house of Pride, Duessa / guides the faithfull knight,” a statement that converts “faithfull” from a metrical filler to an ironic com­ ment on Sansfoy’s replacement, the “supposed” Fidessa’s devoted follower. In the latter, Redcrosse and the narrator together take leave of “[t]he dread­ full spectacle of that sad house of Pride” (5.53). • Why, and how, has the sinful house become a sad house? Superficially, the change seems connected to the arrival of Sansfoy’s youngest brother, Sans­ joy. That raises a more basic set of questions. Why, at this par ticular point, do Redcrosse and Duessa not only arrive at but also visit the House of Pride?—a visit which, as the narrative is careful twice to mention (4.Arg. and 4.3), is Duessa’s idea. Why is Pride a house? Why should the sovereign owner of such a “house” be a “mayden Queene”? (4.8). Why should “men” call her “proud Lucifera”? (4.12). This intensely pictorialized episode sur­ rounds and embeds the story of Redcrosse’s errant travails, but at the same time it diverts the reader’s attention from the narrative logic that drives them forward, the logic implied by the sequence of his and Una’s

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adventures with the three Sans brothers. Had Redcrosse encountered Sansjoy while pricking across an unimproved plain, the katabasis they reflect—losing faith, he becomes lawless and vulnerable to the joylessness of despair— could have been more directly and powerfully conveyed with­ out this two­canto detour through the house of Pride. From this point on in this and the following cantos Redcrosse’s culpa­ bility is minimized: The narrator doesn’t return to it until canto 10 (ex­ cept for a brief reference in 6.2), where he directs the reader’s attention to the happenings in Lucifera’s House of Pride. The account of these hap­ penings, however, itself constitutes a self­correcting displacement to a set of targets the narrative assaults: the “goodly” but flimsy “heape” erected hastily (“without mortar”) on sand; the self­ crowned “mayden Queene” who had no “rightfull kingdome” by birth “[b]ut did usurpe . . . / Upon the scepter”; her “six wisards old,” the deadly sins lashed on by “Sathan”; the “[g]reat troupes” of fools who “traveild thitherward” and were undone by the desire “to win the wished sight” of Lucifera (4.4–5, 8, 12, 3, 6). The fate of these “troupes” is disclosed at the end of canto 5: Redcrosse escaped from the House of Pride before his wounds were healed because Una’s sur­ rogate, the Dwarf, told him he had discovered “huge numbers” of “caytive thrals” wailing away “in a dongeon deepe” (5.45), A ruefull sight, as could be seene with eie; Of whom he learned had in secret wise The hidden cause of their captivitie, How mortgaging their lives to Covetise, Through wastfull Pride, and wanton Riotise, They were by law of that proud Tyrannesse Provokt with Wrath, and Envies false surmise, Condemned to that Dongeon mercilesse, Where they should live in woe, and die in wretchednesse. (5.46)

Note once again the slippage in moral causation: “Mortgaging” implies self­willed commitment to avarice motivated by submission to the first three deadly sins, the sins of weakness or of the flesh; to pledge one’s life to avarice is to choose the condition described at 4.27–29, and the effect, according to the “law” illustrated by the serial order of Lucifera’s six per­ sonifications, is that the avaricious have­not (“whose plenty made him pore”) consumes himself with envy and gives way to wrath. “Pride” names an ethical structure that has its own logic but is freely chosen, a “house” one has to travel to and enter (i.e., internalize) on one’s own. Yet the itali­ cized and proper nouns clustered about “that proud Tyrannesse” gently but

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firmly uphold the alternative that ascribes the law of that internalized structure to the scapegoat Lucifera. The list of high and mighty prison inmates that follows stanza 46 fea­ tures Old Testament and classical figures undone by perversely imprison­ ing themselves in the structure and by divine retribution. Here, and in the more general survey of victims that concludes the list, the deadly sins are depersonified and attributed to the human agents who had “throwne them­ selves into these heavy stowres” (5.51, my italics). But when the narrator winds up the episode, he insists that “all through that great Princesse pride did fall / And came to shamefull end” (5.53). The inscription of “pride” as an unitalicized common noun produces a moment of uncertainty; either it is a genitive construction (Lucifera’s pride), in which case she now receives all the blame, or else the personification begins to dissolve into a meta­ phor (pride is a “princess”), in which case the reader is encouraged to won­ der whether the “wrong and tyrannie” (4.12) that empower her as a usurper are those of the eminent sinners who make themselves pride’s vic­ tims. If “rightfull kingdome she had none at all” (4.12), it may be because there is no “she” there, only an idolatrous displacement. Inasmuch as the depiction of the house of pride and its chief inhabit­ ants has the feel of a citational pastiche, it comes across as “traditional” (and not simply traditional); that is, what is represented is a traditional misrepresentation of pride, one in which the ethical structure is spatial­ ized, personified, and didactically reduced to a freak show, with all its evils localized and caricatured in the “medieval” pageant of deadly sins. Yet in the midst of this traditional parody the invention of Lucifera ought to come as something of a surprise, especially since it involves an explicit demo­ tion of Satan to the driver of pride’s rig. The misogynist turn given by feminizing both Satan’s prelapsarian name and the Luciferan reference in Isaiah 14.12ff. receives added emphasis when, as Nohrnberg observes, the fall­of­princes theme near the end of canto 5 makes “the House of Pride . . . a symbol of Fortune.”81 Ullrich Langer argues that in much early modem discourse Fortuna is constructed not only as a figure for but also as a prod­ uct of the arbitrariness of despotic power.82 The concentration in one idol of iconographic properties of Lucifer, Fortuna, and the “mayden Queene” is enough to make one wonder about the diegetic motive behind the con­ struction and hard treatment of Lucifera. Perhaps this motive may be elu­ cidated by Night’s statement that “some shall pay the price of others guilt” (5.26). Something else, however, brings the narratorial Pygmalion’s negative idol to life: the scapegoating of Lucifera is qualified by a network of

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allusions to the underlying sadness of pride, its “weake foundation,” its shakiness, its “hinder parts . . . ruinous and old” (4.5). It is not only the sad­ ness that crystallizes in Sansjoy, the harbinger of Despair who wounds and briefly converges with Redcrosse. A more pervasive undertone of sad­ ness is implied by the presence in Lucifera’s hall of singers whose tales (re­ sembling the one the narrator is telling) have an antidepressant function: There many Minstrales maken melody, To drive away the dull melancholy, And many Bardes, that to the trembling chord Can tune their timely voyces cunningly, And many Chroniclers that can record Old loves, and warres for Ladies doen by many a Lord. (5.3)83

The sadness of pride is the anxiety produced by the infinite desire ascribed to avarice (“wished ever more,” 4.29) and by invidia of others (“each others greater pride does spight,” 4.14), but the self­destructiveness of pride, every­ where suggested, has another side to it, a side connected with anxiety about origins—with hatred of the source of one’s existence, the source of one’s unhappiness with oneself: Of griesly Pluto she the daughter was, And sad Proserpina the Queene of hell; Yet did she thinke her pearelesse worth to pas That parentage, with pride so did she swell, And thundring Jove, that high in heaven doth dwell, And wield the world, she claymed for her syre, Or if that any else did Jove excell: For to the highest she did still aspyre, Or if ought higher were then that, did it desyre. And proud Lucifera men did her call, That made her selfe a Queene, and crownd to be, Yet rightfull kingdome she had none at all, Ne heritage of native soveraintie. . . . (4.11–12)

Duessa is inscribed in the same pattern. When Night sees her sunny bright, Adornd with gold and jewels shining cleare, She greatly grew amazed at the sight, And th’unacquainted light began to feare: For never did such brightnesse there appeare . . . (5.21)

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But Duessa reassures her: I that do seeme not I, Duessa am, (Quoth she) how ever now in garments gilt, And gorgeous gold arayd I to thee came; Duessa I, the daughter of Deceipt and Shame. (5.26)

A few stanzas later Lucifera’s restlessness is abruptly figured in a grammati­ cally syncopated comparison to Aurora: Suddein upriseth from her stately place The royall Dame, and for her coche doth call: All hurtlen forth, and she with Princely pace, As faire Aurora in her purple pall, Out of the East the dawning day doth call . . . (4.16)

Two antecedents jostle for control of the predicate in line 5, “she with Princely pace” and “faire Aurora,” and at least in grammatical terms the former wins because it produces a complete sentence, whereas the latter (“As faire Aurora . . . doth call”) remains suspended. Lucifera thereby dis­ places Aurora, usurps her function, aspires to live up to her own name as the brilliant harbinger of day.84 The comparison converts her impetuous departure to a figure of her longing. When we recall the full context of the Aurora/Tithonus myth previously mentioned in 1.2.7— each day Au­ rora, as it were, “suddein upriseth” from her aged lover’s bed—it casts the pall of a fugitive impulse over Lucifera’s progress.85 She moves as if from night to day and from a darker to a lighter realm, an unhappy runaway from her birthplace and true condition, which are expansively depicted in canto 5 in “Plutoes house” deep in the “darksome mew” of Night, the ancient “mother of dread darknesse” (5.32, 20, 44). The gossamer fabric of upward desire reaching toward another and bet­ ter identity is lined with the dark worsted of aversion and flight from an original identity. The most pertinent and interest ing gloss on this double­ ness may be found in Kierkegaard, who was familiar with medieval dis­ cussions of accidia, and who, in the following passage from The Sickness unto Death, describes pride as a function of despair: When the ambitious man whose slogan is “Either Caesar or nothing” does not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself. Conse­ quently he does not despair because he did not get to be Caesar but despairs over himself because he did not get to be Caesar. . . . In a deeper sense, it is not his failure to become Caesar that is intolerable,

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but it is this self that did not become Caesar that is intolerable; . . . what is intolerable to him is that he cannot get rid of himself. . . . Thus it is superficial for someone . . . to say of a person in despair: He is consuming himself. But this is precisely what he in his despair [wants] and this is precisely what he in his torment cannot do. . . . The self that he despairingly wants to be is a self that he is not . . . , that is, he wants to tear his self away from the power that established it. In spite of . . . all his despairing efforts, that power is the stronger and forces him to be the self he does not want to be. To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself—this is the formula for all despair.86

In the Lacanian account of narcissism I discussed at the beginning of this chapter, Joan Copjec emphasizes “the belief that one’s own being exceeds the imperfections of its image.” The despairing pride of Lucifera is repre­ sented as the hope that one’s image exceeds the imperfections of one’s own being. Pride is represented as a collapsible defense against despair, a struc­ ture flimsily and hastily built, tensely and tightly held together, a despair­ ing escape from despairing self­knowledge. To vary François Roustang’s formulation, also quoted above, the narcissism of pride/despair is the im­ possible effort of the Luciferan subject not to reunite with but to escape from itself or fully consume itself by vanishing into an “objectified image . . . within the register of representation.” The tracks of this impossibility are laid down from the beginning of the episode. If, for example, you keep the visualization of the palace in 4.5 from dissolving into the concept it allegorizes, you can imagine that its oc­ cupants must be aware of the continuous tremors, like those of an endless small earthquake, caused by its “weake foundation”: For on a sandie hill, that still did flit, And fall away, it mounted was full hie, That every breath of heaven shaked it: And all the hinder parts, that few could spie, Were ruinous and old, but painted cunningly.

“Every breath of heaven” translates allegorically into trepidations of un­ easy conscience. And since Lucifera is presumably the auctor if not the ar­ tifex of her palace, she knows better than anyone else about “the hinder parts . . . ruinous and old” that she had painted in her effort to be, unlike ancient Night and like Duessa/Fidessa, “I that do not seeme I” (5.26). The House of Pride is represented as a structure of ineffectual forgetting: Its queen, her subjects, and visitors try to go on holiday from themselves, to

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pretend to be better or higher than they know themselves to be, and Lucifera helps them do this by diverting them with her medieval freak show. The failure of this project, the insecurity of the Luciferan state, is visualized in the indicators of tenseness, discomfort, and constraint that dominate the account of her self­representation: Yet her bright blazing beautie did assay To dim the brightnesse of her glorious throne, As envying her selfe, that too exceeding shone. (4.8) So proud she shyned in her Princely state, Looking to heaven; for earth she did disdayne, And sitting high; for lowly she did hate: Lo underneath her scomefull feete, was layne A dreadfull Dragon with an hideous trayne, And in her hand she held a mirrhour bright, Wherein her face she often vewed fayne, And in her selfe­lov’d semblance tooke delight; For she was wondrous faire, as any living wight. (4.10) With loftie eyes, halfe loth to looke so low, She thanked them in her disdainefull wise, Ne other grace vouchsafed them to show Of Princesse worthy, scarse them bad arise. (4.14)

• The final line of the episode introduces the name of Lucifera’s house only after it has been adjectivally moved to a distance. Alerted by Una’s Dwarf to its horrors, Redcrosse makes a fast getaway: Forth ryding underneath that castell wall, A donghill of dead carkases he spide, The dreadfull spectacle of that [my emphasis] sad house of Pride. (5.53).

It is as if the departing observer of the spectacle has already begun to put pride’s sadness behind him. Redcrosse has, after all, temporarily triumphed over the knight who mirrors his joylessness. But the House of Pride, Lucifera, and Sansjoy are, like Archimago, hapless idols precipitated as nar­ rative scapegoats. Their very visibility and localization are misdirections: “[S]ome shall pay the price of others guilt” (5.26). The first two stanzas of canto 6 make it clear that the Luciferan sadness Redcrosse carries away with him intensifies the effect of the Archimago virus even after he has

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escapt so sad ensamples in his sight. Yet sad he was that his too hastie speed The faire Duess’ had forst him leave behind; And yet more sad, that Una his deare dreed Her truth had staind with treason so unkind. . . . (6.1–2)

By the time we reach canto 7, the two interpretive frameworks I mentioned above— one dominated by the sinner’s discourse and questions of moral agency, the other dominated by the victim’s discourse and threats to chi­ valric manhood— are locked in a struggle to define the reader’s responses. There is, for example, a zero­sum relation between Orgoglio’s inflated phallic battery and the deflated, limp, dissolving, dissolute state of the hap­ less hero. The imagery of the episode makes it possible to read it in terms of either framework and, as we shall see, the two are not compatible. It is the second framework, the one centered on victimization and gender, that preempts attention because it is the framework privileged by the narrative. But there are many textual cues to the alternative, in which the advent of Orgoglio signifies the traumatic moment of self­recognition when Red­ crosse rudely awakens to the monstrous body of carnal pride he has em­ powered to disempower him—awakens to find that as a consequence of his truancy, “the motions of sinnes, which were by the Law, had force in our membres, to bring forth frute unto death” (Romans 7.7, Geneva Bible). These cues, which I shall consider first, embed the problem of sexual de­ sire and betrayal within persistent reminders of the hero’s responsibility for what he has done to Una as well as to himself. During the first ten stanzas of canto 7 words, phrases, figures, and im­ ages evoke a montage of previous episodes: Redcrosse’s entry with Una into the wandering wood, his first dalliance with Duessa, the encounter with Fradubio (the bleeding branch, for example, is monstrously magnified in the account of Orgoglio’s “Oke, which he had torne / Out of his mothers bowelles.” (7.10).87 The passage describing Orgoglio’s birth superimposes two earlier moments: First, it develops and varies the trope introducing the action of canto 1, “angry Jove an hideous storme of raine / Did poure into his Lemans lap” (1.6); second, the image of “blustring Aeolus” filling Earth’s “hidden caves with stormie yre” touches off a memory of Redcrosse in Error’s cave; together these two echoes suggest that though Aeolus is Orgoglio’s “boasted sire,” his real sire is Redcrosse (“boasted” implies some such alternative).88 Finally, at 7.2 Redcrosse is introduced in precisely the same position Satyrane found Sansloy in nine stanzas earlier, “In secret shadow by a fountaine side” (6.40); missing Duessa, he assumes the atti­

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tude of “lawlesse lust” (6.Arg.) previously modeled by Una’s would­be rap­ ist. Yet in canto 6 Sansloy’s enemy, Satyrane, was also a surrogate for Redcrosse, succeeding the lion, Archimago, and the satyrs as Una’s pro­ tector. Although the furious fight between Satyrane and Sansloy is left un­ finished, the narrator lets Sansloy have the last word before he ends the canto with “this battels end, will need another place” (6.48).89 Since it never finds that place, we have either another example of Spenser’s casual way with narrative or else another example of the text’s deeply meditated meta­ morphoses: Presumably Redcrosse/Sansloy has gotten the better of Red­ crosse/Satyrane, and that nearly equal fight in which “[b]oth hungred after death: both chose to win, or die” (6.43) modulates in the next canto into the unequal fight between Orgoglio and a Redcrosse now fully invested in lawless lust with Duessa, an investment that was at first diegetically respon­ sible for and may now be symbolically equated with Sansloy’s attempt to rape Una. The end of canto 6 may seem to be another loose end, unrelated to the action depicted in canto 7, part of a series of romance episodes focused on Una’s encounters with various male figures. But it may also be part of a continuous moral commentary on the consequences of Redcrosse’s tru­ ancy. This is explicit in the characterizations and fortunes of his two sur­ rogates, the lion and Satyrane. It is implicit in the surrogation of the satyrs, who replace the lion (6.10–11), and whose sublimation of sexual desire to religious worship may be seen as a figure of the unreliable process of fan­ tasy by which someone—Redcrosse, for example—might be moved to re­ spond to the Princess “[f]or whose defence he was to shed his blood” (1.55). It is also implicit in the portrayal of Satyrane, who represents not the sub­ limation but the stern repression of his satyr father’s lechery, converting “sensuall desire” (6.23) to the “greedy hardiment” (1.14) that enables him to terrorize wild animals (6.24–26) but not—so far as we can tell—to win a decisive victory over Sansloy’s lawless lust.90 Psychomachian logic pre­ vents Satyrane from winning: Redcrosse’s truancy determines the enfee­ blement of greedy hardiment and the invigoration of lawless lust. For Sansloy is, or at least has, a piece of Redcrosse’s action. What Redcrosse does with Duessa he does to Una, not only in the sense that his lawless lust exposes her to the lawless lust of others but also in the sense that from his standpoint whatever happens to her is her own fault. His initially ambiva­ lent response to the copulating couple concocted by Archimago—the mix­ ture of wrath and lust conveyed in the phrases “gealous fire” and “guiltie sight” (2.5–6)—has been sorted out by the beginning of canto 6, when, as we saw, he is described as sad at having left Duessa behind and sadder at

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having been betrayed by and disappointed in Una. His early anger at Una devolved upon Sansloy, who carried her off as the spoils of victory in canto 3, and therefore as a token of the enemy. “With foul reproches, and dis­ dainfull spight” he “vildly entertaines” her, and when she fills “his dull eares” with “piteous plaints . . . he enrag’d with rancor, nothing heares” (3.44). In canto 6, just after reading the lines about Redcrosse’s disappoint­ ment in Una, we learn that Sansloy turned “wrathfull fire to lustfull heat” and “thought her to have defilde, / And made the vassall of his pleasures vilde” (6.3). His assault enacts the fantasy Redcrosse had earlier repressed and displaced to Duessa, but it does so in a manner that brings out the mi­ sogynist aggression latent in male sexuality and therefore it suggests that one meaning of Redcrosse’s desire to dally with Duessa is to exact ven­ geance on Una for “treason so unkind.” His lawless lust, as defined by Sansloy, is a form of warfare, a proof of manhood, an act of revenge: Sansloy would rather rape by seduction than by physical violence, for “greater con­ quest of hard love he gaynes, / That workes it to his will, then he that it constraines” (6.3). This interpretation, which construes Redcrosse/Duessa and Sansloy/ Una as specular inversions, causally interdependent functions, produces a clearly defined moral perspective on the sequence of episodes initiated when Archimago divided Redcrosse and Una “into double parts” (2.9). It is a perspective that accounts for the psychomachian modulation from the fight between Satyrane and Sansloy to the fight between Redcrosse and Orgoglio in terms of a complex analysis of the ethical and psychological consequences of the hero’s truancy. The focus of the analysis is on the ef­ fects of his dogged and perverse refusal to see what he is doing or where he is going, and from this standpoint canto 7 dramatizes the onset of self­ induced autophobia. But as I noted above, this is not the only or even the dominant standpoint we encounter at the beginning of the canto. The in­ terpretive framework centered on the sinner’s discourse and questions of moral agency gives way to the framework centered on the victim’s discourse and threats to chivalric manhood. With a resonant flourish, the narrator unfurls a long rhetorical question containing a prosopopoeia that gives the story a very dif ferent slant: What man so wise, what earthly wit so ware, As to descry the crafty cunning traine, By which deceipt doth maske in visour faire, And cast her colours dyed deepe in graine, To seeme like Truth, whose shape she well can faine,

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And fitting gestures to her purpose frame, The guiltlesse man with guile to entertaine? Great mistresse of her art was that false Dame, The false Duessa, cloked with Fidessaes name. Who when returning from the drery Night, She fownd not in that perilous house of Pryde, Where she had left, the noble Redcrosse knight, Her hoped pray, she would no lenger bide, But forth she went, to seeke him far and wide. Ere long she fownd, whereas he wearie sate, To rest him selfe, fore by a fountaine side, Disarmed all of yron­coted Plate, And by his side his steed the grassy forage ate. (7.1–2)

Because the preceding canto ended with Archimago, he is the first per­ sonification of “deceipt” the reader assigns to the “visour faire,” but he is quickly replaced in lines 4 and 5 by a female masker whose victim in line 7 is therefore a more gender­specific “man” than in line 1. As she turns into the horrible predatory Duessa and he into the guiltless noble Red­ crosse, the narrator’s message directly controverts the burden of the moral framework outlined above. But this is neither a casual effect nor an autho­ rial slip: The controversion is marked and underscored by the apparition of Redcrosse as the afterimage of Sansloy. Having been so marked, the narrator’s plunge into the watery medium of the male victim’s discourse is all the more conspicuous. He introduces the episode with a redundant double explanation: The result of resuming his courtship with Duessa is that, just before Orgoglio stomps in, Redcrosse ends up “[p]ourd out in loosnesse on the grassy grownd” (7. 7); but this deliquescence also results from the effects of a stream cursed by Diana because its nymph (like Red­ crosse) “[s]at downe to rest in middest of the race”; after drinking from the stream “his manly forces gan to faile / And mightie strong was turnd to feeble fraile” (7.6). In his perceptive discussion of this redundancy John Guillory notes that in the narrative “the fountain is a ‘source’ of Redcrosse’s fall to Orgoglio, but morally this makes no sense at all; that is, if we are inclined to see Red­ crosse’s fall as a moral failure,” the analogy between the nymph and the knight may be clear, but it is “also . . . misleading. . . . Redcrosse’s sudden decision to rest is given a moral value only to provoke an explanatory fic­ tion of origin (‘the cause was this . . .’). . . . The reader is not sure, how­ ever, that the story of the Nymph, in repeating Redcrosse’s action, helps to

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explain it.”91 Guillory uses this episode to illustrate the general thesis that Spenser’s poem betrays anxiety about loss of origins—fear that poetic au­ thority may be compromised if the imagination is disconnected from sources transcending fantasy— and that one symptom of this is the ten­ dency of images of origin to slip into secondariness: “In the story of the Nymph the spring is easily associated with the effect of Redcrosse’s moral lapse but continually resists what seems to be its identification with the cause” (30). I think, however, that in this case secondariness and causal in­ version have as much to do with the critique or parody of a traditional form of diegetic explanation as they do with authorial anxiety. What the conspicuously gratuitous and conspicuously pagan (primarily Ovidian) just­so story does is enable the narrative to accentuate local, external, and— most significantly—female sources of the hero’s downfall. The obvious inversion of causal attribution from the ethicospiritual to the physico­ magical register correlates with a shift of emphasis from the discourse of Christian narcissism centered on misautia and autophobia to the discourse of chivalric manhood centered on misogyny and gynophobia. Guillory’s insight is important because it suggests that the reader is encouraged to resist this shift and find the Ovidian explanation both redundant and mis­ leading. The result of this resistance is—in Guillory’s terms— awareness of a genealogical critique of discursive origins. The critique targets the general tendency of allegorical romance to trivialize or distort moral com­ plexities by the mere process of mediating them through the “everlasting scryne” or archive described in the statement by David Miller that opens this chapter: “the scattered hoards of documents found, purchased, trans­ ported, translated, reread and other wise recovered during the late medi­ eval and early modem explosion of translatio studii in Western Eu rope.” The textual impersonation of a narrator/narrative committed to the liter­ ary forms and cultural values inscribed in this archive deconstructs dis­ tinctions between pagan and Christian, Catholic and Protestant, to reveal the continuity of a tradition of male discourse dominated by a self­protective and self­justifying antifeminism. The partiality of this tradition is never more evident, never more bla­ tantly profiled, than in the unmasking of Duessa. Una’s first response to the sad spectacle of Redcrosse liberated from Orgoglio’s prison is Ah dearest Lord, what evill starre On you hath fround, and pourd his influence bad, That of your selfe ye thus berobbed arre, And this misseeming hew your manly looks doth marre? (8.42)

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There is a potentially damaging accusation embedded in the ambiguous genitive construction, “of your selfe,” but the notion that Redcrosse robbed himself is contained by her displacement of blame, first to a male “evill starre,” then, in the next stanza, to “Fortune mine avowed foe,” who “for these wrongs shall treble penaunce pay.” The response of the “chearlesse man” to Una’s “What happened to you?” is negative: He “[h]ad no delight to treaten of his griefe” because, the narrator carefully explains, “His long endured famine needed more reliefe” (8.43)— another displacement that takes advantage of the romance vehicle to shift attention from spiritual grief to hunger. At this point, Arthur steps in to continue the process of exculpation. With just the hint of a reprimand to Una, he tells her that to renew “things, that grievous were to do, or beare, / . . . breeds no delight”— another oc­ currence of the formula of self­correction (from “do” to “beare”)—and that This dayes ensample hath this lesson deare Deepe written in my heart with yron pen, That blisse may not abide in state of mortall men. Henceforth sir knight, take to you wonted strength, And maister these mishaps with patient might; Loe where your foe lyes stretcht in monstrous length, And loe that wicked woman in your sight, The roote of all your care, and wretched plight, Now in your powre, to let her live, or dye. To do her dye (quoth Una) were despight, And shame t’avenge so weake an enimy; But spoile her of her scarlet robe, and let her fly. (8.44–45)

We recognize familiar, and normally admirable, gestures of Christian charity. But the context of prior and succeeding passages disables the ges­ tures. As to the former, Una’s request is a benign echo, but still an echo, of Duessa’s to Orgoglio at 7.14 to spare Redcrosse’s life: “Hold for my sake, and do him not to dye, / But vanquisht thine eternall bondslave make.” Arthur’s reference to and emphasis on Duessa as “[t]he roote of all your care” uncovers the real object muffled by Una’s “Fortune mine avowed foe,” and at 7.50 Una herself had named this object in another instance of the formula in which accusation is shifted from the knight to the witch: Thenceforth me desolate he quite forsooke, To wander, where wilde fortune would me lead, And other bywaies he himselfe betooke,

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Where never foot of living wight did tread, That brought not backe the balefull body dead; In which him chaunced false Duessa meete, Mine onely foe, mine onely deadly dread, Who with her witchcraft and misseeming sweete, Inveigled him to follow her desires unmeete.

After Duessa is unmasked, Una’s apparently charitable request not “to’avenge so weake an enimy” gives way to a cry of vengeful exultation: Such then (said Una) as she seemeth here, Such is the face of falsehood, such the sight Of fowle Duessa, when her borrowed light Is laid away, and counterfesaunce knowne. (8.49)

Here, Una, Arthur, and the narrator, who spends three stanzas describing and expressing his horror at the monstrous female uglinesses his “chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write” (8.48), join forces in a violent act of scapegoating. Duessa is false because she is a demonic female pretending to be human (a woman) and because she is a wicked woman pretending to befriend her victims, but most of all—as the narrator’s description and Una’s repeated “such” emphasize—because she is an ugly female pretending to be a beau­ tiful woman: The emphasis is on her loathsome “counterfesaunce,” her “counter­face.” It is this emphasis that encourages an oppositional response to the scapegoating, a movement of sympathy for the alien similar to that aroused by Redcrosse’s gratuitous assault on Error (1.12–18). And it is because the displacement of emphasis from the sinner’s to the victim’s dis­ course, from the dangers of Christian narcissism to the dangers to chival­ ric manhood, from misautia to misogyny, is kept before us in the reiteration of the self­correcting formula, that Duessa’s response to their apparent pu­ nitive restraint makes it seem gratuitously cruel: Thus when they had the witch disrobed quight, And all her filthy feature open showne, They let her goe at will, and wander wayes unknowne. She flying fast from heavens hated face, And from the world that her discovered wide, Fled to the wastfull wildernesse apace, From living eyes her open shame to hide, And lurkt in rocks and caves long unespide.

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But that faire crew of knights, and Una faire Did in that castle afterwards abide, To rest them selves, and weary powres repaire, Where store they found of all, that dainty was and rare. (8.49–50)

Duessa’s desire to hide recalls Error’s, but the narrator’s account of her flight and wandering specifically echoes the account of Redcrosse’s errancy he assigns to Una at 7.50, and its scene anticipates the barren landscape of Despair. Thus the materialization of Duessa in her “true” form, followed by her flight, is expressed in terms that glance repeatedly at the hero whose guilt she bears away as the condition of the false happy ending of canto 8. • The falseness is writ large in the next canto, the movement of which falls from the sublimated erotics of Arthur’s desire through the Petrarchan plight of the despised lover to the despair of Una’s unfaithful lover. When Despair reminds Redcrosse of the infidelity to Una sealed by the outcome of the fight with Sansfoy, the knight’s response to that accusation is a self­ confession that his errancy was willful, not casual or naïve: Is not enough, that to this Ladie milde Thou falsed hast thy faith with perjurie, And sold thy selfe to serve Duessa vilde, With whom in all abuse thou hast thy selfe defilde? (9.46) The knight was much enmoved with his speach, That as a swords point through his hart did perse, And in his conscience made a secret breach, Well knowing true all, that he did reherse, And to his fresh remembrance did reverse The ugly vew of his deformed crimes, That all his manly powres it did disperse, As he were charmed with inchaunted rimes, That oftentimes he quakt, and fainted oftentimes. (9.48)

The argument of Despair is both inconsistent and profoundly logical. He first appeals to the knight’s desire to escape from himself to the ease of oblivion (9.40–44). Then, reminding him of his infidelity to Una and vile ser vice to Duessa, he appeals to Redcrosse’s conviction that he is too bad to be saved. Showing him a picture of the eternal torment to which he is doomed—and which he is sure he deserves—Despair tries to persuade him to begin that process by suicide rather than go on sinning and getting

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worse (9.45–50). In a careful analy sis of this temptation Georgia Ronan Crampton maintains that Despair’s project is to emphasize both Red­ crosse’s culpability for his actions and the illusoriness of the belief that he has been capable of action. He reduces Redcrosse’s “deeds to mere passion and suffering,” suggesting that “he is deluded if he thinks he is an actor: he is a patient, a sufferer, one who does not go on his pilgrimage, but strays.” He is, somehow, simultaneously sinner and victim, capable of culpability but not responsibility for what has happened to him.92 Crampton’s perception is astute, but its point is obscured by her failure to realize the force of an insight she consigns to a parenthetical throwaway: “(Consider the internalization of Despair; how vivid and congenial the im­ age of dissolution is to the Red Cross Knight)” (124). One of Redcrosse’s more salient doubles, Despair is a lookalike who externalizes an interior colloquy—or, to be more precise, he personifies a discursive agency that is external in being a culturally constructed argument, a sophistical con­ flation of the sinner’s and victim’s discourses available to anyone who chooses to internalize it. If, as Crampton implies, Redcrosse has internal­ ized the argument of Despair and is applying it to himself, then he is emphatically an actor, an agent, who now assumes responsibility for his culpability and self­evasion and who takes perverse enjoyment in doing himself in, giving himself what he knows he deserves by tempting himself “to the unforgivable sin— despair of salvation” (Crampton, 125). Despair can’t, therefore, be “the voice of the knight’s own conscience” or the repre­ sentation of his “lack of self­knowledge,” as some would have it, and he is more specific than “the old Man in all of us.”93 The rhetoric Redcrosse as Despair aims at himself is driven by an animus, a positive and ferocious pleasure in wheedling and badgering, that is perhaps best expressed by Rosemond Tuve’s phrase, “despairing self­blame.”94 In despair, as Despair, Redcrosse tries to victimize and take revenge on himself, deny himself re­ demption, pervert the misautia that arouses remorse and repentance to a terminal self­loathing. Actively essaying to persuade himself of his help­ lessness to avoid damnation, he aspires to the ultimate sin of pride, the sin against the bloody cross that gives him his quest name, the deadly sin of believing that “there is no hope of the Divine mercy” because of the “hor­ ror at the greatness of one’s own sins.”95 During the course of his trenchant analysis of this sequence Thomas Roche claims that the Despair episode “moves from human story to theo­ logical meaning . . . with not a word about love as a passion. This is the reason that Una must be kept unobserved until the climax lest we concen­ trate on the merely human aspect of Redcrosse’s breach of faith with Una

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once more.”96 But in fact, as we have seen, Despair himself—Redcrosse as Despair— concentrates on the breach (9.46–47) and redirects attention from the misogynist unmasking of Duessa to the unmasking of the sinner whose “ugly vew of his deformed crimes” induces the terminal misautia of one persuaded he is too wicked for even God to forgive him, love him, save him; thus he is persuaded once again, and finally, to sit “downe to rest in middest of the race.” It is from this that Una angrily rescues him, not only reminding him of “heavenly mercies” and grace but also shaming him with a calculated re­ buke to his unmanly defection: Fie, fie, faint harted knight, What meanest thou by this reprochfull strife? Is this the battell, which thou vauntst to fight With that fire­mouthed Dragon, horrible and bright? Come, come away, fraile, feeble, fleshly wight, Ne let vaine words bewitch thy manly hart, Ne divelish thoughts dismay thy constant spright. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arise, Sir knight arise, and leave this cursed place. So up he rose, and thence amounted streight. (9.52–54)

The line “Ne let vaine words bewitch thy manly hart” momentarily con­ flates the effect of Despair with that of Duessa. “There is,” Roche notes of the one line devoted to Redcrosse’s reaction, “no response to Una’s recrimi­ nations, no admission of despair, no indication that he has been through an experience” (87). Roche attributes this to the allegorical function that makes fictional characters bear “other burdens of meaning” and keeps us from reading the episode “as just another story of a knight and a lady” (86–87). Such an explanation may be otiose at this point, since Redcrosse’s silent and prompt obedience conveys a fairly obvious response to Una’s recrimina­ tions, the response of one who is cowed and shamed, and still troubled by what Roche eloquently terms “the ever present lurking menace of Despair” (88). And why not? The very “Ladie milde” to whom “[t]hou falsed hast thy faith with perjurie” (9.46) is the one who saves him from suicide by an act of love, of mercy, and, implicitly, of forgiveness. Should that gift, that expres­ sion of the donor’s discourse, be expected to undo the despair of the self­ loathing sinner who desires to be punished and therefore flinches from forgiveness? Una has a right to be angry: He flinches by behaving like a little boy who has been scolded and told to be good: “Arise, Sir knight arise. . . . / So

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up he rose, and thence amounted streight.” Two stanzas later, the narrator describes Una’s intention in bringing Redcrosse to the House of Holinesse: Seeing him “feeble, and too faint,” physically and morally debilitated from his “long enprisonment, and hard constraint,” still “unfit for bloudie fight,” “[s]he cast to bring him, where he chearen might, / Till he recovered had his late decayed plight” (10.2). The word “recovered” does extra work. Though it obviously means “recovered from,” that sense doesn’t block out two others: “found again” or “repossessed” and “covered over again.” It doesn’t block them out because the menace of despair is both reactivated and repressed or displaced by the therapy he undergoes in the House of Holinesse. In the gynarchic House of Holinesse the displacement will be undone. Under the guidance of “saving stereotypes” of female virtù—the good mother Celia and her three daughters—the hero suffers the return of the abjected, empowered by the magic of a Protestant idolatry.97 In spiritual re­ birth he will be newly tormented and filled with self­loathing (10.21–22, 29–35, 52–53). The abjected body of sin will not simply be purged but will be confirmed and sustained as the inner lining of the reborn body of grace. “These two ‘bodies’ are obviously inseparable, the second (‘sublimated’) one unable to exist without the first (perverse because it challenges Law). One of the insights of Christianity . . . is to have gathered in a single move perver­ sion and beauty as the lining and cloth of one and the same economy.”98 The function of the House of Holinesse is to restore the misautia es­ sential to Christian narcissism from its perverse to its productive form. Complementary to the personifications of the spiritual, psychic, and dis­ cursive functions of rehabilitation that people the house is the infantiliza­ tion of the hero—the moment of rebirth, obviously, but also a moment of monitored and motivated regression from the trauma of self­confrontation in the Despair episode. Yet dialectically the losses must continually be re­ stored as losses if they are to be sublated or transcended. And so they are, first in the despairing contemptus mundi that results from Fidelia’s teach­ ing (10.21), then immediately afterward, when Una finds Redcrosse with Speranza, “[d]isdeining life, desiring leave to die” (10.22), finally in his com­ plex and unstable response to Contemplation (10.62–64). In one of the examples that support his subtle analysis of the “dialectics of idolatry” Gross shows how Arthur’s veiled shield, a primary symbol of apocalyptic and iconoclastic action, is textually infected by the Medean and (as Wofford suggests) Medusan powers of the Ovidian discourse the de­ scription of the shield evokes (135–43).99 At mother Celia’s House of Holi­ ness, a similar gynophobic frisson troubles the allegorical transformation of faith into the idol Fidelia (1.10.12–13). Fidelia is linked to Arthur’s shield by

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verbal echo and is, by doctrinal logic, the source of its violent power. She is the virago of “Almightie God,” who endowed her with “such powre, and puissance great” that her mere words and commands could kill or resurrect, stop or reverse the sun, “dismay” armies, and make mountains hurl them­ selves into the sea (10.19–20). Noting that she is not only a “purveyor of di­ vine instruction” but also “a magus,” DeNeef argues that Spenser gives her a metanarrative function, which he explains as follows. The Faerie Queene poet finds himself forced to decontaminate his own powers of fiction­ making or image­feigning from those he ascribes to such “fictional false poets” and feigners as Archimago. Having given Archimago too much lee­ way in Book 1, he creates Fidelia as a “counterforce” against the enchanter’s “‘dark’ magic”: It could be argued that not until the portrait of Fidelia does Spenser adequately define his own poetic lineage in terms which defend him against the charge of an Archimago­like creation of “feigned” images. . . . His fictional strategies are so close to his antagonist’s that he must derive a positive source for his own transforming powers. . . . Fidelia provides, in short, a divinely­sanctioned authority for Spenser’s narrative presumptions.

In other words, Fidelia sanctions the narrator’s claim to be a “right­ speaking” poet and image­maker who defends the true faith against the images of the false faith he has feigned. But, DeNeef continues, although she “acts initially as a positive corrective,” she herself ultimately succumbs to the menace of contamination, and Spenser’s narrative strategy again mirrors Archimago’s: both create “feigned images” by metaphoric and parodic doubling. As Archimago himself parodies Una and Redcrosse, Fidelia parodies Archimago and Despair. . . . [Her] instruction, which begins as the attempt to correct Despair’s false teaching, leads to the same anguished result,

for the effect of “her right speaking” on Redcrosse is that he was “prickt with anguish of his sinnes so sore, / That he desirde to end his wretched dayes” (10.21).100 The House of Holinesse has been called an Anglican compromise be­ tween Protestant theology and Catholic ritual, but in terms of the oppo­ sitional reading I find encouraged by the Spenserian text, this only means that the Reformed Faith is represented as relying on and complicit with the Catholic idolatry it contemns.101 If the effects of Archimago and Duessa are countered and diminished by those of Contemplation and Fidelia

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respectively, the shadows cast by the good figures retain and recall their demonic counterparts (compare 10.13 with 8.14 and 10.46 with 1.34), just as the description of Charissa and her babes recalls that of Error and her spawn. DeNeef demonstrates that the theology of the House of Holinesse is conspicuously problematic, and although the emphasis on an allegory of corporeal symbolism may be unavoidable, its iconographic density, to­ gether with the emphasis on good works, makes it appear suspiciously fe­ tishistic.102 The strangest practice occurs in the infirmary of Patience, where the hero’s conscience is healed— and healed in a suspiciously short time—by the application of leechcraft to the body, another idolatrous dis­ placement from the spiritual tenor to the corporeal vehicle.103 Though the doctrinal sequence that moves from Patience through Amendment, Pen­ ance, and Remorse to Repentance is theoretically a move from passive suf­ fering toward active resolve, the medical vehicle accentuates a process of externally induced restoration that seems automatic and therefore magi­ cal, if momentarily painful. • The cure effected in the House of Holinesse may prepare Redcrosse for his climactic battle with the dragon, but it doesn’t prevent him from acti­ vating the strategy inscribed in the discourse of Protestant misogyny, the strategy that enables the sinner to displace guilt and maintain his con­ science in bad faith. The strategy has a particular rhetorical form: It in­ volves a shift in the pattern of self­justification from one interpretive framework to another, that is, from the framework dominated by the sinner’s discourse and questions of moral agency to the one dominated by the victim’s discourse and threats to chivalric manhood. Thus when Red­ crosse responds to Fidessa/Duessa’s accusation in canto 12, he blatantly elides his own active participation in linking up with Duessa: My Lord, my King, be nought hereat dismayd, Till well ye wote by grave intendiment, What woman, and wherefore doth me upbrayd With breach of love, and loyalty betrayd. It was in my mishaps, as hitherward I lately traveild, that unwares I strayd Out of my way, through perils straunge and hard; That day should faile me, ere I had them all declard. There did I find, or rather I was found Of this false woman, that Fidessa hight,

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Fidessa hight the falsest Dame on ground, Most false Duessa, royall richly dight, That easie was t’invegle weaker sight: Who by her wicked arts, and wylie skill, Too false and strong for earthly skill or might, Unwares me wrought unto her wicked will, And to my foe betrayd, when least I feared ill. (12.31–32)

This response recovers and re­covers the irruption of the sinner’s discourse in the cave of Despair, and it also recalls the misogynist unmasking and scapegoating of Duessa at the end of canto 8. Redcrosse’s “There did I find, or rather I was found” condenses a pattern of self­correction encountered several times in Book 1, a pattern the importance of which as a “structur­ ing principle” and narrative trope in Spenser’s practice— the trope of corrrectio or epanorthosis— has been illuminated by Carol Kaske and Ernest Gilman.104 The specific work done by the trope in the present instance is to enable Redcrosse to act out the displacement of blame, and in the next stanza Una validates his version of the story by confirming the displacement: “She onely she it is, that earst did throw / This gentle knight into a great dis­ tresse” (12.33). Yet the terms in which he describes the defection for which Duessa upbraids him clearly recall his treatment of Una (“With breach of love, and loyalty betrayd”), and the language of Duessa’s letter gives off similar sparks of truth in the midst of its mendacious message when, echo­ ing Despair, it refers to “[f]alse erraunt knight” and “his bold perjury” (12.27). And indeed, the accusation Redcrosse hears may be false with re­ spect to Duessa, but it is largely true with respect to Una. By considering— and impugning—the Duessan source, Redcrosse and Una can discredit the shadow of unhappy truth cast on their relationship by Duessa’s distortion. This moment of bad faith is by no means an isolated episode in canto 12. It was prepared for earlier, when Una’s father had asked Redcrosse to recount the “straunge adventure” and the “perils sad, / Which in his trav­ ell him befallen had” (12.15). Redcrosse then with utt’rance grave, and count’nance sad, From point to point, as is before exprest, Discourst his voyage long, according his request. Great pleasure mixt with pittifull regard, That godly King and Queene did passionate, Whiles they his pittifull adventures heard,

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That oft they did lament his lucklesse state, And often blame the too importune fate, That heapd on him so many wrathfull wreakes: For never gentle knight, as he of late, So tossed was in fortunes cruell freakes; And all the while salt teares bedeawd the hearers cheaks. Then sayd that royall Pere in sober wise; Deare Sonne, great beene the evils, which ye bore From first to last in your late enterprise, That I note, whether prayse, or pitty more: For never living man, I weene, so sore In sea of deadly daungers was distrest. (12.15–17)

Redcrosse must have answered precisely and literally in accordance with the king’s “request” for a tale of the “perils sad, / Which . . . him befallen had,” since what his royal auditors are “passionate” about is an epic perfor­ mance of the pathos or passivity of the victim’s discourse. The narrator’s repetition of “sad” and “pittiful,” supported by the king’s “pitty” and rein­ forced by the imprimatur that certifies the truth of the tale—“as is before exprest”—indicates that the narrator shares both the knight’s point of view on his adventures and the king’s opinion of it. It is, however, a point of view that produces an edited and inaccurate account of what was “before ex­ prest.” Redcrosse seems to say nothing about “the evils” Una “bore” because of him and, as we soon learn, nothing about Duessa. Even if the letter from Fidessa is a lie concocted by Archimago, it contains an impor­ tant truth, a truth that is news to the king and in response to which Red­ crosse reluctantly tells a truth that contains an important lie. The misogynist skew of this episode is marked by the appearance of Archimago as Duessa’s messenger. Whether we are to believe that he really is no more than her servant is rendered problematic by the refer­ ence to his “seeming great pretence” in 12.24. But even if this is just one more of the enchanter’s illusions, it shows that he appreciates the power of misogyny and gynophobia, and plays to it here, and the sequel proves him right. Before Redcrosse responds to the charge, the king pointedly and suspiciously demands, “Let nought be hid from me, that ought to be exprest” (12.29), and then immediately fends off possible bad news with a handy weapon from the misogynist armory: “What meane these bloudy vowes, and idle threats, / Throwne out from womanish impatient mind?” (12.30).

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Redcrosse’s self­correction and Una’s confirmation of it take on added significance as a climactic and conclusive reprise of the pattern of displace­ ment that dominates Book 1. The insistent reiteration of the formula of self­correction makes it clear that Una is represented as speaking the rhe­ toric of bad faith that supports the uneasy alliance between the discourses of chivalric romance and Christian narcissism. Her performance of that rhetoric is innocent, suave, and profound. She helps Redcrosse ensconce himself in the armor of the alienating identity of Christian hero, the iden­ tity proleptically sketched out in the first three stanzas of canto 1. In con­ firming his self­correction and thus setting the stage for their betrothal, she secures the triumph of a discourse of romance that easily serves a myth of Christian redemption as its expressive vehicle. But the form of the vehicle affects the meaning of redemption. Granted that the dragon­slaying hero performs an imitatio Christi and redeems the kingdom of Una’s par­ ents, his own redemption consists primarily in the restoration of his man­ hood and guiltlessness not through confession and forgiveness of his infidelity but through its repression, the repression effected by displacing guilt to Una’s sexual rival. Una’s complicity in this displacement subtly acknowledges the ad­ justments the discourses of Christian and chivalric errantry/errancy make to compensate for the orthopsychic pressures they impose on those men they elect to be their saints and heroes. It is of such a man, a man re­ minded by Una that “thou . . . chosen art” (9.53), that the narrator com­ plains in 10.1. Echoing and generalizing Una’s accusation of faintheartedness, he asks What man is he, that boasts of fleshly might, And vaine assurance of mortality, Which all so soone, as it doth come to fight, Against spirituall foes, yeelds by and by, Or from the field most cowardly doth fly?

Hamilton suggests that “What man is he . . . ?” implies “how foolish is that man” (FQ, 130). Yet it isn’t folly that the form of the rhetorical question tar­ gets; it is a failure in Christian warfare, which implies failure in the perfor­ mance not only of one’s mission but also of one’s gender: “What kind of man is he?” (“What sort of man are you, anyway?”). A measure of the disapproval the narrator shares with Una is that the kind of man he describes—the warrior who boasts and flees—is the miles gloriosus, the personification in

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a comic key of the logic of castration. This logic drives the uncompromising Lutheranism of the remainder of the narrator’s comment: Ne let the man ascribe it to his skill, That thorough grace hath gained victory. If any strength we have, it is to ill, But all the good is Gods, both power and eke will. (10.1)

“There is no possibility,” Roche asserts, for Redcrosse “to fail in the fic­ tion” because his allegorical function entails success. “He will be Saint George” (87). This carries the further entailment that any failures adher­ ing to the autophobia and misautia induced by the stringent orthopsychic norm of Christian warfare be swept under the rug. In Book 1 the process of sweeping them under the rug is rendered conspicuous, and its cost to the reflexive self­representation of the hero is registered by the oppositional discourse of the text. • To recapitulate my argument, this registration is marked by the poem’s two major structures of displacement. First, inasmuch as the spiritual foes sub­ sist in and are empowered by the protagonist, their interiority is masked by spectral alienation from self to other and their spirituality is masked by the corporealization that transforms them into physical foes. This makes them accessible and vincible. So, for example, the Christian allegory of the dragon fight in 1.11 is densely punctuated by rhetorical echoes and remind­ ers of previous encounters—of Error at stanzas 11, 13, and 23; of Nilus at 22; of Fradubio at 29; of the Cave of Night at 12, 31, 40, and 49; of Orgo­ glio at 21, 25, 28, and 54; of Despair at 28. Finally, at 51–52, the auspicious dawn of the third day is announced with a reference to the myth of Aurora and Tithonus, the only previous mention of which had been in connec­ tion with Una’s terrible awakening in canto 2 (2.7).105 The details of the image at 11.51–52 strangely mingle hints of rebirth and anticipation of vic­ tory with signs of sexual shame. These reminders are also remainders that stubbornly persist to haunt the very episode of conquest that should loosen their hold on the hero and allow him to transcend them.106 Their persis­ tence rewrites the dragon fight as a compendium of the acts of diegetic displacement by means of which the narrative and the hero had fended off complicity, the acts enabling Redcrosse actively to continue in, and at the same time blind himself to, his infidelity.107 “Strive your excellent selfe to

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excel”: The shadow statement made by the conventional and jingly exhor­ tation with which Una sends him forth to fight the “foeman fell” is that he must strive to overcome himself; he is his own primary “foeman fell” (11.2). The reminders convert the representation of the dragon fight to a cli­ mactic performance of the critique of chivalric romance, the critique of a secular and fantastic discourse that cooperates with Christian narcissism in sustaining the bad faith essential to the achievement of orthopsychic identity. The spiritual foes within Redcrosse can never be fully evacuated by alienation and corporealization because they are themselves coefficients of faith, constant properties of “the grounde of things which are hoped for, and the evidence of things which are not sene” (Hebrews 11.1, Geneva Bible).108 This coefficiency is well described by Nelson’s comment on the “ ‘inward fire’ kindled by the flame issuing from the dragon’s hell­mouth” at 11.26–27: “It is the ‘whole armour of God’ that burns him, and the ‘hel­ met of Salvation’ that he cannot endure. Faith itself creates despair: ‘That erst him goodly arm’d, now most of all him harm’d’ ” (Poetry of Edmund Spenser, 154).109 As an index of the second structure of displacement, I note that although the narrator proclaims in 10.1 that “all the good is Gods, both power and eke will,” many of the important sources of good, power, and will in Book 1 are feminized. Immediately after his proclamation, Una, Celia, Fidelia, and Speranza step in to mediate God’s good, joining the more remote but never absent figure of Gloriana. Along with the crucified Christ, Arthur, and Contemplation, theirs is the power of the gift. The interventions of Arthur and Contemplation are critical but confined to particular episodes and defused by the emphasis on homosocial and generational bonding. Una, however, having “compeld” Redcrosse from Gloriana, is always there, even when absent, but never more so than when they are reunited after he has abandoned her, reunited so that in the steadfastness of her love, and apparently unaffected by the infidelity that “did his conscience dant” (9.49), she may coax and coddle him, scold him, save him from despair, guide him through convalescence to health, make him complete the task she con­ scripted him for, and, finally, apologize for him in canto 12 by blaming his “falsed . . . faith” (9.46) on Duessa. As she might lead a child or a milk­white lamb, she leads him “in a line.” But we are always aware that the figure she leads is neither a child nor a lamb (nor what the lamb stands for) except in the allegorical register. The sense of Redcrosse as a complex and self­ divided subject is promoted by a textual practice that resists the reductive imperialism of allegory. This practice endows its subject with enough

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inwardness, enough specificity of motive, to make him capable of partici­ pating in the discourses of bad conscience and bad faith. Readers who have followed the traces of those discourses through Book 1 are encouraged to wonder about the effect of Una’s power of donation on the conquering hero, and on this score two features of canto 12 maculate the scene of triumph with a scatter of uneasy touches. The first is the persistent echoing of and indeed allusion to moments in the House of Pride cantos, while the sec­ ond is an odd diffidence betrayed by all concerned parties—the king, Una, and Redcrosse—in their attitude toward betrothal and marriage.

chapter 2

Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene

Narrative and rhetoric are terms that commentators on The Faerie Queene perennially couple, distinguish, and question, and this essay will continue the discussion, although the questions I ask will reflect some of the new interests and viewpoints that have emerged in criticism since the mid­ 1980s. My question about narrative takes as its point of departure the old observation, most emphatically insisted on by C. S. Lewis, that Spenser is an accomplished storyteller whose poetry has the qualities we value in sto­ rytelling.1 The question is, does it make a difference if, instead of merely reading the poem as a piece of storytelling, we approach it as a poem that represents storytelling, and does so in a manner that isn’t innocent, a man­ ner that interrogates the values and motives, the politics and ideology, embedded in the structure of storytelling? My reason for asking this ques­ tion is that I want to see whether such an approach can be illuminated by attempts to distinguish between the commitments of oral discourse and those of written discourse. The same reason lies behind my questions about rhetoric, although here the situation is a little more complex, in part because the term “rhetoric” has come to denote so many dif ferent things. It is used to refer to the art 103

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of public speaking, to the formal study and teaching of the art, and to the analysis of its products. But although rhetoric initially centered on oratory, it was always intimately associated with writing, and in a literate culture the term is often applied to the practice and study of writing intended for readers rather than for auditors. My questions about rhetoric have in gen­ eral to do with what happens when logography—the writing of speeches to be delivered before live audiences—is represented in writing produced for the very dif ferent conditions of silent reading, and produced by authors whose commitment to the constraints and challenges no less than to the pleasure, skill, and possibilities of writing run counter to the aims and functions of oral discourse. Margaret Ferguson has written about the trans­ gression of “the boundary between spoken and written discourse” ef­ fected by “a type of writing that presents itself as if it were a speech given in a court of law. Renaissance authors frequently make this ‘as if’ a locus of theoretical concern, as they meditate on the similarities and differences between a written defense and an oratorical performance.”2 Unlike the ora­ tor, the writer “addresses people who do not answer” (6), “an audience he can neither see nor control” (161), an absent “reader who perhaps cannot (or will not) understand his words at all” (151). What is at stake, then, when a work like Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence “at once exploits and questions the fiction it creates by its imitation of the classical forensic or judicial oration: the fiction . . . that the writer is an orator addressing an audience present to his view”? (5–6). The tendency to confine rhetoric to the types of oratory picked out by Aristotle, and to limit its purpose to persuasion, is reductive. Oratory is but one kind of formal public monologic speech, a genus that includes po­ etic and dramatic recitation, homiletics, didactics, ritual incantation, and storytelling. Depending on the context, each may serve any or all of sev­ eral functions of which persuasion is only one, for example, entertainment, prediction or prophecy, and such acculturative functions as instruction, initiation, and religious indoctrination. The familiar claims made for rhe­ toric by classical and humanist authors reflect these functions. They also reflect its basic orientation to social and political formations dominated by speech­centered institutions, a logocentric orientation at once modified and reinforced by Christian culture. So—to quote from a survey of im­ ages of the orator by Brian Vickers—the classical emphasis on the contri­ bution of eloquence to civic order and virtue was supported by the idea “that language is the gift of God to man,” and that rhetoric, as “the in­ strument of civilization” and “origin of human learning,” was “conducive to the maintenance of order and degree.”3

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The logocentric aspect is especially noticeable in accounts of rhetoric’s psychological function. “Renaissance theorists,” Vickers writes, “held that rhetoric’s primary purpose was to express thought or reveal the mind,” and he cites John Hoskins’s statement that the “order of God’s creatures in themselves is not only admirable and glorious, but eloquent; then he that could apprehend the consequences of things, in their truth, and utter his apprehensions as truly were a right orator” (417). Of course, this idealized view of the civic and psychological functions of public speech hardly went uncontested. As Arthur  F. Kinney reminds us, “Eloquence for many Tudor writers was not— could not have been, in any realistic sense— the golden language of the good and wise man as Quintilian . . . seemed to premise, but the manipulation of words in a country where eristics was re­ spected and daily practiced.”4 Since rhetoric is one of those “sciences” that Sidney distinguished from poetry because they claimed to affirm some­ thing—to assert and deny, to refer and refute, to state the truth—it could be accused of lying. Kinney’s extensive study of educational practices in Tudor grammar schools makes it clear that the training writers received would encourage a suspicious view of the good rhetoric and its logocen­ tric ideal, and that these writers would know how to imitate the good rhe­ toric in representations of monologic speech that criticized or deconstructed its claims to affirm truth, promote order, and move to virtuous action. “Rhetoric not only produces or organizes speech as expression, but above all things it controls speech for persuasion.” This consensus view cited by Vickers (417) indicates the two basic divisions of rhetoric, the tro­ pological and the transactional. The tropological division consists of the art of adapting linguistic expression, the relation of signifiers to signifieds, to the logical and dialectical organization of speech; it includes both the syllogistic and, as Nancy S. Struever calls it, the “topological” (from topos) approaches to mastery of the strategies of argument.5 The transactional division consists in mastering the strategies of linguistic communication, the relations of senders to receivers, and it includes the two forms of “ar­ tificial proof” Aristotle called ethos and pathos, the first focused on the speaker’s self­representation, and the second on the skills by which the speaker moves the audience. The relation between these two divisions will obviously be affected by the coupling of the shift from oral to written dis­ course with the shift from audition to silent reading. As I see it, the major change these shifts involve is the disruption of the normative scheme that dominates the theory and practice of oratory from classical to humanist rhetoric, the scheme in which tropological means serve the transac­ tional ends of persuasion, indoctrination, instruction, and control. Literary

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representations of speech make problematic either or both media, dissoci­ ate the fictional speaker from the writer or text, and the speaker’s partner, the virtual auditor, from the reader; they do this by freeing the tropo­ logical resources of language from their subordinate position in the normative scheme and turning them seditiously against their transac­ tional master. It is through the subversive mobilization of tropological strategies dear to New Critical and deconstructive hearts that the writ­ erly text interrogates the rhetorical practice and aims of fictional speakers as well as its own complicity with those aims, that is, its own attempt to control the reader’s response. We should remember that, from ancient times, rhetoric as oratory was a mixed medium inasmuch as it made use of writing: Speeches were writ­ ten to be recited; books were written to instruct writers and speakers; speeches already given were preserved in writing to serve as models for instruction and practice. Rhetoricians were a technical elite, and a major effect of this mixed­media system was to confer authority on speech that sounded as if it had been composed in advance. The effect of writtenness made the art and thought behind a speech conspicuous, and produced a predictable ambivalence. On the one hand, it could arouse the anxiety or doubt that the Greeks called deos, fear of the power of authors who were deinos (clever, dangerous, duplicitous). On the other hand, such an effect of art was praised and admired, especially if it was carried off with what Baldassare Castiglione would later call sprezzatura, if it was blended, that is, with the effect of improvisation or passion or sincerity. It was not spon­ taneity or vitality itself that was praised but its status as the effect of art. Such an effect was an important element of persuasion because it flattered those auditors capable of discerning and appreciating it, auditors whose fa­ miliarity with the finer points of rhetoric was the product of the superior education, wealth, and status that set off the oligarchs and aristocrats in the democratic city­state. This was the hidden epideictic dimension (the orator attracting praise for his implicit praise of the audience) in all forms of oratory. Thus the rhetorical economy of the classical tradition appro­ priated by Renaissance humanism was based on a complex system of ex­ change among media. Writing that imitates the speech it represents—that sounds colloquial—was no doubt one form of exchange, but it was less important than two other forms: speech that imitates the writing that represents it and speech that imitates writing that imitates speech. The changing attitudes toward this mixed­media system in early mo­ dem times may be profiled by glancing at two studies that focus in differ­ ent ways on the disruption of the normative scheme produced by turning

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tropological strategies against the rhetorical transaction. The first is Victoria Kahn’s Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (1985) and the second is Arthur F. Kinney’s Humanist Poetics (1986).6 Kahn argues that for the Quattrocento humanists, writing and reading not only repre­ sent but are analogous and supplementary to civic and political action in the Italian city­state. Even when the reader of their orations and treatises is exercised by techniques borrowed from Academic skepticism (such as the technique of antilogy, arguing both sides of a question), the humanists aspire to transcend uncertainty and redirect the reader’s will to moral ac­ tion and assured faith. I should pause here to point out that there is a big difference between the projects of classical rhetoric and Italian humanism. Kahn’s humanists were not trying to be logographers (speech writers); they were representing or imitating logography so as to transfer its rhetorical powers and effects to writing. If, in classical logography, speech writers ex­ ploited the resources of their art so that the effects and powers of writing could be reincorporated in oral performance, the early humanists gave this another twist: They tried to transfer the logographically reinforced strat­ egies of oratory to the scene of writing, and their aim was to give the writer who addressed an absent audience of readers greater control by reducing the role of reader to that of auditor. Kahn goes on to show how such later writers as Erasmus and Sidney questioned this commitment to a rhetorical writing that aspired to move the reader to virtuous action. They “stressed the merely symbolic and therefore illusory nature of such action” (20, 23). Their texts are self­ referential, “literary” in the modem sense, because for them “the rhetori­ cal dimension of the text can no longer be contained by practical concerns; rather, it is conceived as threatening, aberrant, resistant to the author’s in­ tention to persuade to right action” (21–22). A slight adjustment in Kahn’s thesis will bring it into line with my previous statements about the change in the relation between the transactional and tropological aspects of rhe­ toric. Her point is that the later writers questioned the transactional goal of the earlier humanists, and not merely their own uncertain tropological control. Therefore her statement that they “conceived” the rhetorical (that is, tropological) dimension “as threatening, etc.,” should be rewritten as follows: They represented it as threatening, aberrant, resistant to the author’s intention to persuade to right action. In other words, they used the effect of aberrant rhetoric to set off in critical quotation marks their dramatiza­ tion of logography and its politics, a politics whose ideal the Platonic Socrates paradoxically described in the Phaedrus as a kind of speaking that writes directly on the auditor’s soul. This is a logocentric ideal, a fantasy

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of unmediated transmission of the speaker’s message, truth, knowledge, or teaching from his mind to that of his auditor or pupil. But it is also a truncated model of communication with sinister overtones, for speaking and hearing are compared not to writing and reading but to writing and being written on. What the earlier humanists attempt is the effect of a kind of speechwriting that aspires to psychic inscription. The later humanists target this aim in their ironic mimesis of rhetorical transactions. I turn now to Kinney’s Humanist Poetics, which is confined to English writers; his thesis is that a humanist poetics of fiction emerged from the rhetorical orientation of Tudor educational practices and that, under the pressure of political and cultural change, it gradually broke free and came to challenge the norms and claims of the rhetorical ideal until it entered a new skeptical, posthumanist phase. Kinney isolates a specific aspect of the kinship and quarrel between rhetoric and poetry: On the one hand, hu­ manist rhetoric devises strategies for maintaining transactional stability and control by fixing the reference of discourse to a common culture and set of values “that author and reader were expected to share” (426); on the other hand, this project was jeopardized by the ultimately subversive ten­ dencies of the training in verbal wit and agility. Although this training was instrumental to the rhetorical ideal, it promoted the kind of wordplay, the experiments in perspectival incongruity, that loosened, destabilized and fictionalized the relations between signs and their referents. It sensitized writers to the tropological resources of the vernacular and encouraged them to assay the variety of ways— etymological, orthographic, lexical, figurative—in which signifiers may be disconnected and reconnected to signifieds. Kinney stresses the Tudor writers’ awareness of “the inherently prob­ lematic” character of humanist rhetoric, its claims for moral truth and its deceptive practices, and he focuses on their doubts about the effort to im­ pose its ambiguous aims on writing and fiction by means of techniques that construct the reader as a virtual auditor. Studies of Sidney and his con­ temporaries demonstrate that this skepticism about rhetoric is compli­ cated by irony directed toward the writer’s own logocentric desire—by a critique of the very desire for authority, autonomy, clarity, influence, per­ manence, and privileged esthetic status that the technologies of print and printing seem to promise. Those technologies intensify the structural ambiguity of writing: On the one hand, the written text may represent, supplement, reinforce, and extend the author’s presence, or the presence of authority; on the other hand, written discourse escapes the author’s intention, is appropriated by readerships, and confronts the author with

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the problem of trying to anticipate, control, and outmaneuver invisible readers. Sidney’s way of dealing with this dilemma may be epitomized by glanc­ ing at the implications of his statement that the poet affirms nothing and therefore never lies. This move has two consequences. The first is that in pretending to absolve poetry of the rhetorical functions of asserting, af­ firming, and denying, Sidney, as Ferguson shows, questions the aggressive and often mendacious emphasis on referential truth that marks, in his words, “the scope of other sciences.” The value of imaginariness or fictive­ ness lies in its opposition to discourses that make referential claims and in its ability to make fictiveness rub off on those claims. The second conse­ quence is that to affirm that poetry affirms nothing—itself an archly problematic move—is to imply a dif ferent role for the reader, one that is outside the zero­sum game of rhetorical practice. The interpretive power ceded to the reader increases as that role is freed from the reductive con­ fines of the rhetorical subject. Kinney gives several examples of Tudor writ­ ing that do this by representing the narrator as a rhetorician. For example, he mentions the strategy, pursued by Erasmus and More, of placing “the narrator squarely within the narrative” and making “him or her, Hythlo­ daye or Folly, a subject of the argument the narrative is meant to provide” (55). Although this is much too spicy and pungent a model of the narrator to work for the Spenserian function I’m about to discuss, the implicit con­ vergence of rhetorician and narrator suggested in Kinney’s statement helps me make a transition to Spenser because it allows my previous discussion of the rhetorical ideal and its critique by later humanists to be mapped onto Spenser’s representation of the diegetic act in The Faerie Queene. Note that I called the Spenserian narrator an it, not a he, a function and not a figure, an act and not an agent, and this is because at my back I always hear Paul Alpers’s flaggy wings mowing down the characterological and visionary seedlings in my garden of fiction. • In one of his later attempts to address the problem of narration in The Faerie Queene, Alpers insists that it is a mistake to treat the narrator dra­ matically as a character in the poem, and even a greater mistake to treat him as a character whose moral comments on the story are “inadequate to the fiction.”7 In the first half of the poem, at least, and certainly in the third book, any irony we discern in the relation between story and com­ mentary is not to be dissociated from “the narrator’s explanatory mode” and turned against it: “Far from being at the narrator’s expense, it shows

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the play of his wit” (25). Since any narrative is neither more nor less than a “process of narration,” that is, “what the narrator tells us,” “the narra­ tor’s role cannot be investigated apart from” that process (22, 24). Alpers therefore feels comfortable in identifying the “actual or putative source” of the narrative with the name “Spenser” (the “or” in his phrase, “actual or putative,” denotes synonymy rather than disjunction). And he finds that the term that best characterizes Spenser’s relation to his materials is “confidence,” which connotes both “trust in” and “fidelity to” those mate­ rials. In Book 1, for example, “Spenser shows his confidence that he speaks for realities genuinely external to him,” and this confidence, “explicit when he speaks of his poetic task, is implicit in his mode of narration, which derives its authority . . . from theological, cosmic, moral, and his­ torical truths and the literary traditions which record them” (28–29). I cite this view in some detail because it is the one I want to challenge. The view is consistent with Alpers’s earlier thesis that Spenser’s “use of nar­ rative materials” should be called “rhetorical” because his stanzas “are modes of address by the poet to the reader,” a poet whose “attention is fo­ cused on the reader’s mind and feelings and not on what is happening within his fiction.”8 These phrases make it clear that although Alpers distinguishes what he calls “Spenser” and “the poet” from the “putative speaker” as “a dramatic identity and presence” (Poetry, 95–96), he all but obliterates the distinction by treating Spenser the poet as a rhetorician whose “poetic motive in any given stanza is to elicit a response­to evoke, modify, or complicate feelings and attitudes” (Poetry, 5). For Alpers, this rhetorical transaction should control the reader’s response to both the tro­ pological and the fictional features of the poem. His emphasis on the nar­ rator as rhetorician, coupled with the easy glide from the identification of narrator with narrative to the identification of both with Spenser, is a ma­ jor symptom of the problem I want to address. It is not merely that the collapse of all functions—narrator, narrative, rhetorician, poet—into Spenser is unargued and theoretically wobbly. Rather, my interest is in un­ scrambling his account in order to appropriate a more promising view that I think his terms and distinctions both contain and defend against. The clue to this revision lies in the remarks about rhetoric that I made earlier. The rhetorical transaction Alpers commends includes a poet who trusts the universe and a reader who trusts the verse. The poet’s confidence in the world’s realities and truths, and in “the literary traditions which rec­ ord them,” is displayed by his “easygoing” attitude toward the unity of his poem as well as by the relatively “self­effacing” manner in which he addresses

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his stanzas to the reader (133–34, 9). The permissiveness of his syntax, the dominance of the verbal formula, the individual line over sentence struc­ ture, and the vividness, the “immediacy and obviousness,” that result from this dominance— these qualities of style encourage the reader to adopt a passive role and “follow the path of least resistance” (89–90, 105, 84). Although I accept the formal features of this account, my argument is that Alpers misdescribes the transaction as an empirical one between the author and actual readers, whereas I take it to be a virtual or fictive trans­ action, one that the poem actively represents and subtly criticizes, and therefore one that constitutes a rhetorical scene of reading from which actual readers can dissociate themselves. This does not oblige me to sepa­ rate the narrator as a character either from his narration or from what may loosely be called the poet, that is, whatever “voice” the reader imputes to the interpreted text. On this point I accept Alpers’s strictures against dis­ tinguishing the commentator from the storyteller in order to reduce the former to a naïve moralist (strictures that are virtually identical with those of Stan Hinton, who insists that commentator, narrator, and poet fade im­ perceptibly into each other, and whom Alpers unfairly censures).9 I accept those strictures because I think the textual critique targets the moralist/storyteller/ rhetorician not as a dramatic character but as the site of an ideological function. The function is expressed with great precision by Alpers, although of course he would strenuously object to my calling it a target: The narrator, for him, is the voice of the literary traditions that the poem puts in play by imitation, allusion, parody, and conspicuous re­ vision. The values embedded in those traditions are placed in question by a variety of strategies of which the poet’s arch mimicry of the moralizing voice is only one. I submit that the voice that comments on the story is the same as the voice that tells it because storytelling is itself one of the tradi­ tional values the poem parodically represents. And I use the word “voice” advisedly in order to accentuate the contrast between telling a story and writing a poem, between the aims and investments of the rhetorical trans­ action and those of the literary transaction, between the desire to control “the reader’s mind and feelings” as if the poet were a rhetorician and the reader an auditor, and the awareness of the danger, the duplicity, perhaps the futility, of this hegemonic desire. The view I just set forth had its origin in my reading of two impor tant essays by John Webster,10 but before turning to them, I’d like to give some examples of the traditional opinions I think Webster’s essays help super­ sede. In 1961 Northrop Frye argued that the fiction writer in Spenser never “clashes with the moralist . . . for long. . . . Complicated behaviour, mixed

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motives, or the kind of driving energy of character which makes moral con­ siderations seem less important . . . —none of this could be contained in Spenser’s framework,” and as a result, The Faerie Queene “is necessarily a romance, for romance is the genre of simplified or black and white char­ acterization.”11 Fifteen years later he suggested a political motivation for Spenser’s way with the genre when he argued that Spenser knowingly pandered to “a middlebrow appetite for stories about fearless knights and beauteous maidens and hideous ogres and dragons,” and that he did this to get “imaginative support for the Protestant revolution of his time.”12 In the same year (1976) Walter Ong argued that the “formal fixity” of Spenser’s “abstract characters, virtues and vices” and “the formal fixity of his epithets” derive from Spenser’s immersion in the “oral heritage” and “are part of the ancient oral poetic.”13 Ong’s point is that Spenser is less “bookish” than Milton, by which he means less in control of the oral for­ mulaic tradition he draws on. The idea that Spenser was an oral poet was first articulated in 1969 by Michael Murrin, who began The Veil of Allegory with the statement that since most of the numerous books published on Spenser at the time were close textual studies, he would try “to step away from the poems and understand them generally as rhetoric.”14 Although Murrin’s understanding of the term “rhetoric” coincides with mine, his understanding of the poem does not, because his rhetorical approach pro­ duces a picture of Spenser as a failed oral poet writing for an upper­class audience, expecting them to read his work aloud, hoping to instruct and control their minds, avoiding irony because he “want[ed] them to trust his statements” (14, 54, 84–85, 64). Murrin’s Spenser fails precisely where Alpers’s succeeds. Whether or not the middlebrow taste to which Frye re­ fers belongs to Murrin’s upper­class audience, Murrin’s reminder that most of Spenser’s readers probably still read aloud to themselves as well as to each other deserves to be taken seriously. It suggests something Ong should have considered, which is that Spenser may have been trying to control his audience, if not the oral tradition. Murrin, like Frye and Ong, assumes what has to be proved, namely, that the oralist and moralist they criticize is to be identified with the author of Spenser’s poetry. Others have taken the more interest ing line censured by Alpers: They agree that the oralist and moralist is to be criticized but argue that Spenser has already done so in depicting a narrator whose occasional comments on the story he tells are “frequently oversimplified, contra­ dictory, or misleading.”15 Jerome Dees, whose words I have just quoted, gave Alpers his opening by pushing the separation between the simple or obtuse narrator and the smart poet to an extreme. Dees speculates that

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the function of this figure is both to address and to represent “the typical English audience” and that in the course of moralizing his song he “embod­ ies the attitudes and aspirations” but also the “weaknesses” of this audience, and of its political, religious, literary, and social culture (554). This idea is casually mentioned, and Dees does not do much with it, but it points toward a more promising possibility, which is that the rhetorical trans­ action Frye and Murrin associate with an actual poet and audience may be reconceived as a fiction the poem represents for critical scrutiny. We can get closer to this possibility by turning to the essay from which Ong got the idea of examining Spenser’s use of oral formulas, Webster’s “Oral Form and Written Craft in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” which appeared in 1976.16 Webster argues that the style of the poem invites a conflicted mode of reading. On the one hand, the looseness of construction, the fluency of line, the lulling proliferation of merely formal epithets, the ritualistic use of narrative as well as rhetorical formulas, the redundancy and interlace of narrative patterns— all these work together to encourage readers to re­ spond as if they were an audience that “expects and appreciates only what is possible under the conditions of oral performance,” which means an au­ dience that doesn’t have “time to reflect, to go back and re­read” (84–85). On the other hand, “while the speaker and his style ask us to assume the oral mode, the poem as a written work, along with our own habits of read­ ing, makes just the opposite demand, asking us to read closely, to follow ambiguities, to appreciate verbal play” (85). Thus “if we ‘read’ the poem as well as ‘listen’ to it, we continually find that its language can reveal sur­ prisingly intricate insights on the poem’s allegory” (86). Webster seems to be making a case for the idea that the poem thematizes the limits of oral performance by asking its readers to contrast their New Critical responses with those of a narrator who simplifies his material, a storyteller whose discourse is keyed in the oral mode to solicit the kind of easy reading that slides over complexities. But although this approach generates several fine moments of local interpretation, there are two reasons why it does not suc­ ceed. The first is that Webster never tells us why the poem invests in this representation of conflicted reading; he describes it, but he does not give its motive. The second is that because he is too respectful of Alpers’s cri­ tique of the dramatic conception of the speaker, he ends up worrying whether the often aleatory wordplay that gets away from the speaker also eludes the poet (90, 93), which implies that the poet intended but failed to confine reading within the limits of imaginary audition. Webster more successfully makes the case for the thesis of simple­ versus­complex reading in a later essay that develops a parallel contrast.17

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A very smart critique of Stanley Fish’s distinction between self­satisfying and self­consuming texts leads to a revision in which he replaces Fish’s cat­ egorial scheme with another that focuses on the contrast between direct and indirect methods of organizing sequences of words, arguments, and other rhetorical or narrative units. Webster associates directness with the clarity and simplicity used to satisfy the expectations of an audience pre­ pared to be instructed, persuaded, and moved, while to the “discourse of indirection” he assigns devices “that make reading a tentative, revisionary, active mode of experience” (26–29). It is clear— although Webster does not make the connection—that Spenser’s “oral form” corresponds to the di­ rect method and his “written craft” to the indirect method. In a reading of the Phedon episode (2.4), Webster analyzes the way Spenser mixes the two methods. The episode begins with the dramatization of the “relatively simple allegorical scheme” of Occasion and Furor, which, “as if to teach [us] directly” (41), Spenser reinforces with the Palmer’s explanation in stan­ zas 10 and 11. After citing the sermon the Palmer delivers at the conclu­ sion of Phedon’s narrative (2.4.34–35), Webster goes on to show how Spenser’s rhetorical management of the subsequent encounter with Atin subverts the Palmer’s message and questions the efficacy of the action he persuades Guyon to take, for the binding of Occasion “becomes itself an ‘occasion’ for ‘wrath and heinous crueltie’ ” (39). Unfortunately, Webster does not deal with the heart of the episode, Phe­ don’s narrative, a close reading of which would have powerfully substanti­ ated his view that the indirect method subverts what the direct dramatization of the allegorical scheme promotes, namely, “a particularly debilitating conception of Temperance” (43). That Book 2 coherently and ironically represents such a conception is the thesis persuasively argued in an essay by Lauren Silberman, who shows in a brief but trenchant commentary on the Phedon passage how it contributes to that thesis.18 Spenser, she claims, discredits “Classical Temperance as a moral standard in order to put in question the actual relationship between ethical principle and moral ac­ tion and to examine allegory itself as a methodology. . . . The object of this critique . . . is not so much Temperance itself, but the misappropriation of the classical virtue as a ready­made theoretical framework for acting in the fallen world.” The temperance depicted in Book 2 “becomes a series of exegetical defenses against experience masquerading as a classical, self­ sufficient virtue.” Two interrelated aspects of Silberman’s argument bear directly on my own: her insistence that the critique is directed at the exegetical scheme of a specific traditional (“ready­made”) discourse and the skill with which she

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correlates the poem’s critique of temperance with its critique of the forms of allegory and narrative that illustrate, accommodate, and indeed rein­ force the self­subverting defensive strategies of that discourse. So, for ex­ ample, she demonstrates that the House of Alma is an “example of bad allegory that exposes the inadequate strategy of defense Temperance of­ fers in place of true understanding of the human body and its capacity to mediate experience” (16). Maleger’s assault proves “that adhering to defen­ sive strategies results only in an intolerable division between the ideal of security and the reality of perpetual siege” (18). And she shows how, in the Bower of Bliss, “Spenser strips the veil from the sexual fear that motivates the elaborate sensual defenses of Book II” (19). When she turns to Phe­ don’s tale, Silberman uses it to highlight “the discordant relationship of . . . the apparently crude allegory of personification to the full significance of Spenser’s text.” Concisely unfolding “the violent complexity of Phedon’s plight,” she focuses on the “discrepancy between narrative victory over al­ legorical figures and a satisfactory solution to the moral problems those figures represent” (13). At this juncture, however, her attention briefly swerves from the limits of the allegorical narrative to those Guyon and the Palmer display in re­ sponding to it. “Guyon does not see,” she remarks, “that Furor and Occa­ sion may refer both to inner states and to outward manifestations” (14). But as we shall see, what the analysis of Phedon’s tale discloses is that they are themselves misleading manifestations, and not because they are exter­ nalizations of inner states. On the contrary, they are misleading because they are internalizations of exteriority: They represent certain kinds of psy­ chic energy as if they were alien, autonomous, morally and socially infe­ rior, enemies to the true self within the “fort of Reason.” Thus they objectify and valorize the self­deceiving rhetoric Phedon uses “both to jus­ tify and to sustain his furor” (13); the very appearance of Furor testifies to the success of that project and presents Guyon with a narrativized misin­ terpretation of Phedon’s problem. “The limitations of Guyon’s attitude towards the allegory of Occasion and Furor” (14) are thus already struc­ tured into the allegory, whose form and function provide a decoy that at­ tracts Guyon and the Palmer toward precisely the misreading Phedon’s language defensively solicits. I think the ideological links joining the tale, the allegory, and the pro­ tagonists are even stronger than Silberman suggests, that the “exegetical defenses” of all three equally betray the basis of temperance not in “sexual fear” only but in a pervasive gynophobia, and that the poem ascribes both the defenses and the fantasy they protect against less to individual characters

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than to the literary and cultural discourses that speak through them. I pursue this line of argument by taking Silberman’s insights deeper into the tale and then, with the help of David Miller’s 1988 study, connect the tale to larger issues in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene that are discernible in the allegory of the temperate body (cantos 9–11). This will enable me to explore at the level of practical criticism the principles of suspicious reading that lead commentators such as Silberman, Webster, and Miller to question the innocence of Spenserian narrative. The exploration will set the stage for a return to Webster’s essays, in which I briefly survey the prospects they offer critics interested in revising current approaches to the literary repre­ sentation of narrative, rhetoric, and the forms of oral discourse. • Phedon tells Guyon and the Palmer how he became Furor’s victim as a re­ sult of the passion that led him to slay his betrothed and his best friend when the latter falsely persuaded him of the former’s infidelity. By letting the victim tell his own sad story, Spenser shifts the focus of action from the past to the present, from the deeds being recounted to the rhetorical performance. That performance is notable less for the lethal onslaught of irrational fury it presumptively thematizes than for the evasive rational­ izations of a guilty conscience, a guilt the speaker seems both to flee from and to savor. As Silberman points out, he “blames his own violent actions entirely upon the friend who shared his love and private confidences” and “fails to see his own faithlessness in Philemon’s guilt or to recognize the dark side of his love for Claribell in the violence provoked by intimations of her sexuality” (13). Although I agree with this, I am aware that at least in its rhetoric the statement commits the dramatistic fallacy Alpers cen­ sures. I shall return to Alpers shortly, because he has a strong reading of the episode, and one that does not ignore the psychological complexity of the speaker’s performance. For now, it is enough to say that I find it com­ patible with Silberman’s own approach to shift the focus of her observa­ tions from the dramatic speaker tout court to the “ready­made” strategies of self­exculpation, the “exegetical defenses,” of the traditional discourses which, as she rightly argues, the poem ironically portrays. The effect of this shift is to redirect attention to the interplay of several familiar discursive patterns that I have elsewhere discussed as the ethical discourses of the sinner and the victim/revenger, and the positional dis­ course of gender.19 So, for example, Silberman’s comment on “the dark side” of Phedon’s love can be supported by the indications of culturally in­ duced gynophobia in his account, as well as in the allegory of Furor and

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Occasion. Preeminent among the symbolic scapegoats of which he avails himself is the one contained in the fantasy of male disempowerment by virulent or erotic female forces. The oxymoronic embodiment of this fig­ ure in the fable as Occasion sets the stage for the Acrasian variant that Phe­ don selects to serve him as nemesis: Misfortune waites advantage to entrap The man most warie in her whelming lap. So me weake wretch, of many weakest one, Unweeting, and unware of such mishap, She brought to mischiefe through occasion, Where this same wicked villein did me light upon. (4.17)

When Phedon turns from Occasion and Furor to the “faithlesse Squire, that was the sourse / Of all my sorrow,” he attributes the origin of the “league of vowed love” into which the friends subsequently entered to their nurture “from tender dug of commune nourse” (4.18). In the victim’s per­ spective from which he speaks, this apparently benign reference to nur­ turant womanhood associates it with Misfortune’s “whelming lap,” since it contributes to the childlike trust and gullibility that blinded him to what he now recognizes as his friend’s dissembling (4.18.9). It is therefore significant that verbal elements of the two female images combine in the causal phrase that opens the next stanza: “It was my fortune commune to that age, / To love a Ladie faire of great degree” (4.19, my italics); that is, it was “natural”; he couldn’t help it. His readiness to blame and be betrayed by the woman rather than the man, to trust the man rather than the woman, is prepared for by the assumptions inscribed in the imagery: The threat to male autonomy comes from the other, not from one’s mirror image in the second self. This distinction is brought home in the characterizations of the two rela­ tionships. Equality, autonomy, and rational choice are featured in the union of friends: eft when yeares More rype us reason lent to chose our Peares, Our selves in league of vowed love we knit: In which we long time without gealous feares, Or faultie thoughts continewd, as was fit; And for my part I vow, dissembled not a whit. (4.18)

In contrast, the union of lovers is preceded by the probationary conven­ tion of courtship, with its acknowledgment of inequity and ambivalence in the ritualized role of the servant who aspires to become master. Where

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the friend is the friend of a friend, the lover is the lover of a beloved. To the sexual difference that threatens the desired unity of lovers—as well as that of friends— Phedon adds the social difference that accentuates the weakness and vulnerability of the suitor’s position, and therefore calls for a certain watchfulness:20 a Ladie faire of great degree, The which was borne of noble parentage, And set in highest seat of dignitee, Yet seemd no lesse to love, then loved to bee: Long I her serv’d, and found her faithfull still, Ne ever thing could cause us disagree: Love that two harts makes one, makes eke one will: Each strove to please, and others pleasure to fulfill. (4.19)

The rhetorical self­betrayal of the speaker’s claim to be a true lover and a “weake wretch” centers on “seemd,” the adversative clause that contains it, and the phrase “serv’d, and found.” “Seemd” is the most volatile word. At first it registers cautious gratitude for favors returned from above. Then, because the whole line echoes “And for my part I vow, dissembled not a whit,” it is momentarily tainted by a diffidence peculiar in one who knows what actually happened. The lines that follow produce another modulation—“seemd” denotes the judgment that results from an assay of the beloved’s good faith. But in this context “serv’d” takes on the uneasy connotation of “observ’d.” And the activity implicit in “serv’d, and found,” that is, “put her to the test,” assumes sinister proportions in the next stanza. Phedon there bitterly cel­ ebrates his trusting openness in giving his friend a share in the lovers’ in­ timacy, but since his account taps into the topos of the suspicious lover’s trial of his beloved, it smacks of a voyeuristic impulse to set up the classic triangle that will put both friend and beloved to the test: My friend, hight Philemon, I did partake Of all my love and all my privitie; Who greatly joyous seemed for my sake, And gratious to that Ladie, as to mee, Ne ever wight, that mote so welcome bee, As he to her, withouten blot or blame, Ne ever thing, that she could thinke or see, But unto him she would impart the same: O wretched man, that would abuse so gentle Dame. (4.20)

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Behind the final condemnation of Philemon is the shadow of guilty self­ condemnation. The shadow reaches back to darken the second clause of “Yet seemd no lesse to love, then loved to bee,” so that if we construe the line as a zeugma (she “seemd . . . loved to bee”—“I seemed, or believed my­ self, to love her”), we can read it as a muffled comment on the question­ able quality of his love. Phedon’s first reference to the traitor is touched by the same shadow: “It was a faithlesse Squire, that was the sourse / Of all my sorrow.” In his detailed and predictably anti­dramatic reading of the story, Paul Alpers argues that Spenser’s “images and formulas . . . express complete unity”: Rather than “showing the behav ior of . . . people to each other, he describes feelings or purposes they share,” and thus draws “dramatic per­ sonages and events . . . together into the phenomena of a single mind” (Poetry, 60–61). This comment is directed toward the parallel description of relationships in stanzas 18 and 19, but the approach that underwrites it governs his treatment of the whole episode, and produces several helpful insights into the way Phedon constructs and projects the external events that victimize him. Equally instructive, however, are the two flaws which, in my opinion, disable that treatment, and which derive from the insis­ tence that Spenser is “not simply dramatizing the experiences of the jealous lover,” and that the episode’s “richness of meaning” is to be sought in the ideas and formulaic energies of the verse rather than in “dramatic action” or in “the fictional complexity of Phedon’s feelings” (63, 61). The first flaw is that, in his insistence on Spenser’s versifying, Alpers overlooks the difference made by voicing the episode in the first person. In contrast to the Ariostan episode with which he compares it, our atten­ tion is centered on the discursive conflicts and strategies of evasion active in the speaker’s rhetorical transaction with auditors, among whom we as­ sume Phedon himself to be included. Alpers reads the episode as if the past and present actions could be conflated. So, for example, he illustrates his single­mind thesis with the formula Phedon utters in stanza 19: “In these stanzas [18 and 19] it is quite literally true that ‘Love that two harts makes one, makes eke one will’ ” (60). But from the speaker’s retrospective stand­ point it is quite literally false, since it does not apply to his share in the love, and his saying it—as if to comfort himself with a reassuring truism and remain blind to the truth—is part of what makes it false. The point about the “images and formulas that express complete unity” is that they do not apply in the same way to the conventions governing male friendship and those governing heterosexual love. The differences between them are registered in Phedon’s language. An air of test and contest, an

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undertone of suppressed but alert suspicion, a set of precautionary rituals and practices that guard against future infidelity—these are institutional­ ized in and reproduced by the conventions of courtship, and the uneasi­ ness they arouse is discernible in the terms with which he describes his successful suit: He served/observed her in order to test her and win her, and when he had won her (4.21), she was “to me assynd” and “to me did bynd” her faith (4.22). The lack of reciprocity is notable because it stands in contrast to the mutuality of friendship expressed earlier in “[o]ur selves in league of vowed love we knit.” Two things give ironic force to Alpers’s emphasis on the coalescence of the three characters into “a single mind”: first, that Phedon attempts to override the differences between the two conventions even as his language reproduces them and, second, that ow­ ing to this attempt, the expectations produced by each convention are reversed—the friend is unfaithful; the beloved true. In the heterosexual convention, such formulas as “[l]ove that two harts makes one, makes eke one will” mystify the narcissism or imperialism of the male fantasy that would eliminate the otherness of the other’s will: Love—that is, the lover— conquers all, and there is more otherness to con­ quer in the beloved than in the friend, according to the economy and ideology of gender that Spenser dramatizes. This may well account for the sense of wonder or magic or unreality inscribed in the hyperbolic senti­ ment, and for its usefulness in encouraging lovers to overcome reservations and suspicions in order to reach the paradise of full complacency, a para­ dise rendered improbable by a convention that carries those reservations and suspicions over the nuptial threshold into the postmarital fantasies of cuckoldry. The question raised by my reading is whether these conventions, as I describe them, are accepted or questioned by the poem, and this question leads me to what I consider the second flaw in Alpers’s account. Although his salutary attention to the formulaic qualities of Spenser’s verse puts him in a good position to deal with the question, he does not deal with it. And this failure affects his equally salutary attention to the psychological com­ plexity of the Phedon episode. Given his principled refusal to identify such complexity with the dramatic portrayal of fictional characters, he finds no alternative but to associate it with general psychological observations con­ veyed moment by moment in “the verbal events of individual stanzas” (41) that make up the rhetorical transaction between poet and readers. His own verbal formulas emphasize the merely exemplary function the characters serve, and what they exemplify are the motives, purposes, feelings, and

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passions of lovers anywhere and everywhere—the truths of the human condition: . . . the phenomena of a single mind. (61) . . . an initial formula that takes us directly into the feelings of the jealous lover. . . . (61) . . . a series of formulas, each of which suggests a disturbing quality of feeling. (62) . . . we see the “tragedy” as part of a complex psychological phenomenon—the mind feeling that it is about to do something dreadful and being helpless to stop itself. (63) The line [iv.30.5] thus turns Phedon’s proposed act of suicide into a moral formula, and . . . brings out something impor tant in the nature of wrath—its self­proliferation . . . . Spenser’s formula [iv.30.7], with its unclear fictional references, expresses . . . the continual toll taken by a criminal passion. (65)

Alpers’s essential and essentializing move is to appeal always to human ex­ perience as the touchstone of interpretation, but in his precipitous flight from fiction to the rhetorical transaction, he bypasses the possibility that the psychological phenomena he discusses may be flagged by the poem as constituents or products of the conventions I described above. In his view of the transaction, the readers’ position is always occupied by “we,” and although “we” have a specific historical and cultural provenance, he dis­ counts the specificity, gives “us” privileged access to human truth and thus occludes the influence of the socially constructed conventions of gender and class on both our reading of the poem and its representations. To return to the question I raised before, if those conventions are among the objects represented by the poem (as I believe I have shown them to be), is the representation innocent or ironic? The case for irony can be made by reorienting Alpers’s two major emphases—on the formulaic quality of the verse and the nondramatic treatment of the characters—in the light of Webster’s distinction between, on the one hand, the direct method, the oral­formulaic mode, and the classical norms of the rhetorical transaction, and, on the other, the indirections and tropological complexities of the lit­ erary transaction. This reorientation produces the following interpretive scheme: Between the psychology of the individual dramatic character and

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that of general human nature is the psychology whose motivational pat­ terns and complications are keyed to conventional discourses (of gender, class, morality, religion, or hierarchy); between the two partners in the literary transaction, the poet and his readership, are the two partners in the rhetorical transaction, the storyteller and his virtual audience or the speakers he imitates and their audience; the conventional discourses are marked as citational by the oral­formulaic style and thus occupy the inner framework of the rhetorical transaction, where they supply the target rather than the substance of the literary transaction. In this scheme even the major characters in the story may have little dramatic depth, may be translucent if not transparent, because that enables them to model the dra­ matic interplay of discourses that shape, direct, confuse, frustrate, repress, or mystify the desires and purposes of individual agents. If characters are little more than puppets, and speakers little more than ventriloquists’ dummies, it is not Spenser who pulls their strings or speaks through them, rather it is the conventional discourses he represents, and it is the psycho­ logical complexity of those discourses which is conveyed in the literary transaction. When we apply this scheme to the Phedon episode, we may see that if Spenser uses the first­person narrative to explore the cunning of self­ deception, it is a cunning whose origin is collective rather than individual, a cunning that draws on the cognitive subtlety and rhetorical ingenuity of the resources a literary culture makes accessible to the guilty conscience that chooses to deceive itself. The episode can then be read as a wonder­ fully wry piece of citational mimicry, in which Spenser pumps up the melo­ dramatic shrillness of a popular, even banal, story type, a Mediterranean Nights entertainment at least ten versions of which had previously been published during the sixteenth century. At the same time that his hyper­ literary treatment marks it as conventional, he lets the darkness of the fan­ tasies embedded in such conventions peep through the gaps of rhetorical and diegetic formulas that seem designed to contain or domesticate them. Scattered through the speech are hints of sadomasochistic desire, gyno­ phobia, and something that resembles what Eve Sedgwick might call ho­ mosocial anxiety, hints that are amplified elsewhere in Book 2 by the varied representations of threatening female power. These hints further disturb the uneasy air of moral casuistry pervading the speaker’s rhetoric as he con­ tinues to solicit the punishment that will obliterate bad conscience in the pleasure of justly deserved victimization. (Much Ado About Nothing is just over the horizon.)

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This air of casuistry becomes more visible when Phedon reaches the cli­ max of his narration. As he tells how Philemon led and “in a secret corner layd” him to witness the betrayal, he stresses his passivity by calling him­ self the “sad spectatour of my Tragedie” (4.27); yet the very phrase speaks against him since it can mean that he is not only an actor as well as a spec­ tator, as Alpers notes (63), but also, and more important, the author of the tragedy in which he has given Philemon the “false part” of villain and cast himself as the helpless observer. The success of this play was such that, he reports, “Soone as my loathed love appeard in sight, / With wrathfull hand I slew her innocent” (4.29), where “innocent” looks both ways, ruefully at the real victim, defensively at the act. He then confesses that when Pryene, his lately departed’s “faultie Handmayd,” told him she had been suborned by Philemon to impersonate her mistress in the tragedy, he was “all enragd” with such “horrible affright / And hellish fury” that he “sought / Upon my selfe that vengeable despight / To punish,” but that a moment’s reflection produced a better idea: it better first I thought, To wreake my wrath on him, that first it wrought. To Philemon, false faytour Philemon I cast to pay, that I so dearely bought; Of deadly drugs I gave him drinke anon, And washt away his guilt with guiltie potion. (4.30)

Like “innocent” in the preceding stanza, “guiltie” looks two ways, aiming the speaker’s sarcastic wordplay first at Philemon (an eye for an eye; the drug, not the druggist, did the deed) and then at himself; the nasty little pun on absolution shifts the burden, which passes from Philemon through “guiltie” to Phedon. This new surge of guilt flares up in the rhetoric of the lines that open the next stanza with a feint toward another confession of suicidal intent: Thus heaping crime on crime, and griefe on griefe, To losse of love adioyning losse of frend, I meant to purge both with a third mischiefe, And in my woes beginner it to end: That was

Phedon? No: “That was Pryene; she did first offend, / She last should smart.” Silberman’s comment on the episode is focused on this stanza and the pre­ ceding one, especially on the “elaborate parallels,” “facile antitheses,” and

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“spurious causality” that “divert attention from Phedon’s own role” and in­ dicate an attempt “both to justify and to sustain his furor” (13–14). Her emphasis on the “poetic fakery” of his language points up the irony of the attempt to justify violent self­abandon in carefully controlled rhetoric. The above lines enact a swerve away from self­recrimination that reaches a cli­ max in “she did first offend, / She last should smart”: This has the appear­ ance of a verdict the speaker pronounces now—his present opinion. But the remainder of the sentence swerves back from the victim/ revenger’s justice to the sinner’s rhetoric of guilt: with which cruell intent, When I at her my murdrous blade did bend, She fled away with ghastly dreriment, And I pursewing my fell purpose, after went. (4.31)

“[P]ursewing my fell purpose” acknowledges willfulness and sustains the awareness of purposive (if obsessive) action registered by “I meant to purge” and “cruell intent.” In addition, the rhetorical and logical niceties noted by Silberman imply a speaker sufficiently attentive to the production of ethos and pathos to reassure us that the wounds inflicted by Furor have not robbed Phedon of his mastery of the skills of persuasive rationalization. Thus vacillating between the victim’s discourse and the sinner’s, Phedon reinvokes Furor at the conclusion of his tale: Whatever his fell purpose was— vengeance against others, or against himself, or both—it drove him into Furor’s arms, enabling him once again to lose control, ensconce himself in the victim’s position, and commit his punishment to vicious scapegoats: As I her, so he me pursewd apace, And shortly overtooke: I, breathing yre, Sore chauffed at my stay in such a cace, And with my heat kindled his cruell fyre; Which kindled once, his mother did more rage inspyre. Betwixt them both, they have me doen to dye, Through wounds, and strokes, and stubborne handeling, That death were better, then such agony, As griefe and furie unto me did bring; Of which in me yet stickes the mortall sting, That during life will never be appeasd. When he thus ended had his sorrowing, Said Guyon, Squire, sore have ye beene diseasd; But all your hurts may soone through temperance be easd. (4.32–33)

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Alpers finds Guyon’s offer of relief through temperance surprising because he wonders “whether any human act can ease the kind of anguish Phedon has undergone,” and he concludes that Spenser nodded: “a moment when Spenser allows simple moral categories to take over the complex realities rendered in his verse.” But he also assumes that when Phedon complains of the mortal sting “he refers to the passions of grief and fury, and not to what he has done” (66–67). This is an odd and arbitrary set of judgments. I would have thought it harder to ease Phedon’s anguish if it sprang from guilt over “what he has done.” His tale features that possibility, but the in­ tervention of Furor and Occasion blurs the issues so that there is no way to tell whether the mortal sting is a function of the speaker’s guilty con­ science, his inability to purge his fury by revenge, or his mauling by the monsters. It is Guyon’s and the Palmer’s decision, influenced by the mon­ sters, that occludes the first possibility. Hence if simple moral categories take over, they do so not merely in Guyon’s words but also in the allegori­ cal intervention that “objectively” skews Phedon’s problem from guilt to grief and fury. This displacement is in line with the strategies of evasion that characterize the discourse of the victim/revenger in the tale. It im­ poses a conspicuously inadequate closure, which I think we are encour­ aged to notice and resist, and it brings the victim’s disease within the scope of the kind of medicine, the simple moral categories, Guyon and the Palmer are prepared to dispense. From this standpoint, a shift of interpretive mode from judgment to description will convert Alpers’s criticism to a valuable insight: Spenser represents moral categories taking over the complex reali­ ties rendered in his verse. This takeover is secured by the Palmer’s diagnostic and prescriptive homily: Then gan the Palmer thus, Most wretched man, That to affections does the bridle lend; In their beginning they are weake and wan, But soone through suffrance grow to fearefull end; Whiles they are weake betimes with them contend: For when they once to perfect strength do grow, Strong warres they make, and cruell battry bend Gainst fort of Reason, it to overthrow: Wrath, gealosie, griefe, love this Squire have layd thus low. Wrath, gealosie, griefe, love do thus expell: Wrath is a fire, and gealosie a weede, Griefe is a flood, and love a monster fell;

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The fire of sparkes, the weede of little seede, The flood of drops, the Monster filth did breede: But sparks, seed, drops, and filth do thus delay; The sparks soone quench, the springing seed outweed, The drops dry up, and filth wipe cleane away: So shall wrath, gealosie, griefe, love dye and decay. (4.34–35)

Once again, Alpers is surprised that “the Palmer speaks only of psycho­ logical struggles” in stanza 34 “and says not a word about the murders Phe­ don committed,” but this time he insists that Spenser is not to be faulted: The Palmer’s omission reflects “the transformation of actual crimes into psychological disasters” that “occurred some stanzas before” and is part of a coherent pattern. It illustrates Spenser’s method of “transforming nar­ rative materials” so as to “give a . . . severe and fearful rendering of the passions . . . and at the same time . . . hold out the possibility of averting disaster by an act of temperance” (67–68). In this way Phedon’s passions are purged and his hurts eased even though nothing “has happened to him dramatically. It is the reader’s own mind which, simply by following the devices of . . . [stanza 35], enacts the process of being purged of passion.” Thus, he concludes, this climactic stanza “is not an action at all, but a rhe­ torical scheme, a formal arrangement of words—precisely a stanza of po­ etry, and nothing else” (69). But in the alternative scheme I’m proposing, the double framework of rhetorical and literary transactions, this interpre­ tation responds to the former and ignores the textual action of the latter. The effect of the literary transaction is to mark the rhetorical cure as a conspicuous allegorical whitewash, one in which the heroes and enemies of temperance are brought in to collude with and reconfirm the speaker’s effort throughout his tale to purge his mind of guilt by soliciting the grief and fury that qualify him as helpless. Alpers commends the Palmer’s moralizing as “genuinely impressive” because “it perfectly brings out both sides of Phedon’s tragedy—that he let himself be carried away, there was some fault of will, and yet the affec­ tions have an independent energy of their own” (67). Yet the Palmer’s di­ agnosis is hilariously self­assured and misdirected, since what he idealizes as the “fort of Reason” is revealed by Spenser’s indirect method to be a fort of rationalization, the very source of the guilty speaker’s defensive evasion of responsibility. Furthermore, the androcentrism of the discourse of tem­ perance, together with the aristocratic emphasis on the hero’s innate nobility (see 4.l), betrays the same gynophobia as the tale, and the same scapegoating of class and gender stereotypes: the “groome of base degree”

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impersonated by Philemon (4.24, 27), the “rude,” “currish,” “clownish” “vil­ lein” Furor (8, 9), and his wicked old ugly maimed mother. Stanza 35 is entertaining because the Palmer’s application of the princi­ ple of an ounce of prevention makes it all sound so easy. His instructions are delivered in the manner we nowadays associate with televised tips on personal hygiene. The displacement to the field of environmental damage control further alienates or distances the source of trouble while enhanc­ ing the conspicuous irrelevance of the prescription to what ails Phedon. At the same time, however, the advice is contaminated by an antierotic sen­ timent easy to associate with the gynophobia lurking in Phedon’s tale. After repeating the list that links stanzas 34 and 35, the Palmer separates the four passions into two pairs: wrath and grief are coupled by elemental imagery and (except for line 6) consigned to the left or pre­caesural side of the stanza, while jealousy and love are moved to the longer clauses and stronger position of the right side, where they receive more emphasis. Love in particular is singled out, not only because its place at the end of each of the two metaphoric series, descriptive and causal, gives it climactic force, but also because its characterizing epithet and cause are of a dif ferent or­ der than the others. Love is depicted not as a natural hazard but as a fig­ ure of fantasy. In the first series the difference is stressed by the trisyllable form of the epithet: fire, weed, flood, monster fell. In the second series Mon­ ster love is set off by the use of upper case, by the syntactic fullness of the phrase (which makes it incompatible with the “a of b” structure of those it follows), and by the disparity and pointed offensiveness of the cause it denotes. The stanza offers the reader three levels or registers of apprehension. First, as a predictable display of the Palmer’s wisdom, it solicits not merely unquestioning acceptance but also applause for its facile and ingenious pa­ rade of conceits. At this level the parade maintains the superficial form of a set of discrete cures to be applied severally to each of the affections, and to any others, “whiles they are weake.” Second, as a parade of concepts, the stanza produces the effect noted by Alpers: “The continual transfer­ ring of attention to new sets of terms” until “the passions and their awe­ some metaphoric equivalents turn into their small beginnings,” and the process that began with “the imperative ‘expell’ ” becomes, in the last three lines, “an easy and even natural process” (68). It is also a process whose analogical displacements from psyche to nature, inside to outside, are con­ spicuously reductive; the reversal enacted by the two stanzas as a verbal sequence takes the magical and wholly unbelievable form of the obses­ sional mechanism Freud called “undoing” (Ungeschehenmachen, “making

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unhappened”). The third level, illustrated by my analysis in the preceding paragraph, goes against the grain of the first two because it uncovers be­ neath the Palmer’s facility, wit, and prescriptive confidence an excremen­ tal vision of love as the filthy root of the other passions. The apparently causal sequence of items, in which love is merely one of the four passions strengthened through “suffrance,” is disrupted by the genetic logic imported from the context of the episode as a whole: Love causes jealousy; jealousy causes the wrath and grief that eventuate in Furor. Given that context, the love mentioned by the Palmer is presumably het­ erosexual love. And although its membership in the series of proscribed affects tends to reduce it by association to lust, its link to jealousy and its relevance to Phedon’s plight nudge the Palmer’s indictment toward the “true” love that leads to marriage. The notion that even this form of het­ erosexual love is to be expelled becomes more probable when we map the third level, with its causal logic, onto the allegory of Occasion and Furor: Then the causal power of the filth­bred monster converges with that of the filthy old hag. Both in turn converge with the figures of erotic and ma­ ternal power in Phedon’s language (the “whelming lap” and “tender dug”), the power to enfeeble, unman, and infantilize the lover, and render him vulnerable to treachery. As I suggested above, these gynophobic tropes help explain Phedon’s decision to trust his friend and distrust his beloved. The distinction reflects the influence of the culturally induced distrust of the sexuality and desire that ensnare men and make women faithless. Stephen Orgel has shown how “male domination over women” was justified in Re­ naissance ideology by a variety of arguments, some of which, drawn from ethnoscience, supported the belief that it was physiologically possible for men to regress to their prepubescent state of effeminate childhood. “Women are dangerous to men because sexual passion for women renders men effeminate: this is an age in which sexuality itself is misogynistic, as the love of women threatens the integrity of the perilously achieved male identity.”21 This integrity is the subject of the second book, whose allegories of tem­ perance defend, illustrate, and celebrate an ideal of heroic autonomy based on the repression/sublimation of what traditional moral discourse codifies as the potential alien within the self: the so­called irascible and concupis­ cible “parts” of the soul, the latter more dangerous because more deeply rooted in the gendered body. The narrator pronounces the man who un­ binds wrathful furor “[h]is owne woes authour” (5.l), but it is harder for “feeble nature” to resist what “she” covets, the “sweetnesse” that “doth al­

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lure the weaker sence,” because, unlike the “griefe and wrath, that be her enemies,” “joyous pleasure” fulfills her desire (6.1). The “fear of effemini­ zation” that Orgel notes as “a central element in all [Renaissance] discus­ sions of what constitutes a ‘real man’ ” (15) is fear of the woman within the man. The ideology of temperance dramatized in Book 2 interprets that fear as a good thing. To read the book as a critique of the ideology is to change the venue from a trial of sexuality to a trial of the fear of sexuality and of the gynophobic fantasy it privileges. “True” love is conspicuously de­emphasized in Book 2. Apart from the references to Arthur’s sublimed and deferred desire to “serve” Gloriana, it appears only twice, and both times, in the Amavia and Phedon episodes, comes to grief, for if, according to the formula of courtship, true love can make two hearts one, it cannot make two bodies one, nor would it want to “avoid” and reduce to “nought” the very difference that gives it meaning. I put those words in quotation marks because I borrow them from the fa­ mous account of the excretion machinery in Alma’s castle (9.32), which I connect with the Palmer’s image of expelling the monster bred of filth. My sense of the connection owes much to David Lee Miller’s powerful reading of the allegory of the temperate body. Miller argues that the ninth canto performs a reflexive critique of its own sublimatory allegorical procedure, a critique centered on the avoidance or omission of the genital organs that in effect makes it—although described as androgynous (9.22]—genderless.22 This “epicene body” explicitly figures an “image of the higher unity of man and woman,” but implicitly it “represents the cas­ tration of both genders,” and within the “image of transcendence and rec­ onciliation we find masculine authority hierarchically privileged”: “While the ascending movement” of the allegorical description “pursues increas­ ingly sublime refigurations of the male organ” as it leads back up to the head, “the female organ disappears except in its negative form, becoming ‘nought’ in every sense. No wonder shame is personified as a hysterically blushing woman” (182–83). Miller shows that even as the allegory of temperance “turns aside from the literal penis in order to erect the symbolic privilege of the phallus” (191)— a movement completed in 12.1 when the feminized structure re­ ceives the displaced imagery of phallic pride (when the “goodly frame of Temperance” begins “Fairely to rise, and her adorned hed / To pricke of highest praise forth to advaunce”)—the “avoided” sexuality is persistently reinscribed. For example, the language of the stanzas depicting the co­ quetry in Alma’s parlor “resonates with sexual innuendo” although it is

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partly sublimated by “strategic displacement” to the heart (169–70), the seat not only of affections scaled down “in modest wise” (9.34) but also of the cultural discourse that imprints them, the refined or etiolated sentiments of courtly romance. In the parallel encounters of Guyon with Shamefast­ nesse and Arthur with Praysdesire what has been repressed or “castrated” emerges “in an unstable ratio of shamefastness, which denies access to the genitals, and desire for praise, which reinscribes libido as ambition” (174). And, to add a footnote to Miller’s account of cantos 9 and 10, the “strong affections” that do not evade the repressive defenses of castrative sublima­ tion are expelled outside “the fort of reason” (11.l) which, under Maleger’s leadership, they have besieged for seven years, forcing the well­tempered body to keep its “gates fast barred . . . / And every loup fast lockt, as fear­ ing foes despight” (9.10). Maleger, his attendant hags, Impotence and Impatience, and his mother earth reenact a magnified Antaean variant of the allegory of Furor and Occasion.23 The analogy to Antaeus can be explained in terms of the sublimatory pattern Miller finds in the ascent from body to spirit, earth to sky, monstrosity and feminine weakness to phallic self­sufficiency: Maleger thrives on the gravitational depression that makes him the springboard of the ascent. If his “force is fiercer through infirmitie” (11.1), “most strong in most infirmitee” (11.40), it is because his wicked light­ ness of being (his mal­legerity), as a fantasy invented by the discourse of temperance, gains substance through the fortunate fall (occasio, which derives from occidere through its supine form, occasus) produced by his expulsion and dejection from the fort of reason. The origin of this mel­ ancholy fantasy, as Nohrnberg suggests, is in Phantastes’ chamber in the castle of temperance.24 To see Maleger’s repeated Lazarus­like resurrections as an effect of the forces of temperance is to confirm Silberman’s reading of Alma’s House as “the example of bad allegory that exposes the inadequate strategy of de­ fense Temperance offers. . . . The moral and exegetical defenses provided by Temperance to cope with sensual experience fail in their designated task because the very notion of defense is revealed to be a spurious ideal.” If the castle/body’s five senses are, “paradoxically, the bulwarks of defense and the points of greatest vulnerability,” it is because their assailants are created by the very structure of the defensive exegesis that interprets the senses as bulwarks (16–18). The “sure establishment” of Alma’s “happy peace and goodly government” (11.2) is inextricably bound to the process by which the “idle fantasies” of Phantastes (9.50) become the “idle shades”

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of Maleger’s army (9.15) and the shadowy Maleger, the “noyous . . . nought,” is “avoided quite, and throwne out privily” (9.32). • In reading Book 2 as a critique rather than a celebration of the ideology of temperance and heroism that it represents, Silberman and Miller direct at­ tention to the aesthetic reflexivity of the critique—that is, to the ways in which the poem places in question the narrative strategies, allegorical translations, and episodic visualizations that seem most vividly to get the message of that ideology across. They demonstrate in practice the general point I have been trying to make at a somewhat more theoretical level: the coherence of the oppositional patterns, discussed by John Webster, between the direct and oral­formulaic values of storytelling, and the complexity of the literary indirections that represent it. Miller’s general orientation toward Spenser’s poetics is similar and suggests an emergent theoretical consensus. “Our literal­minded desire to read the story for its own sake,” he notes at one point, “is often a target for the poker­faced Chaucerian irony so common in The Faerie Queene” (143). And Miller ar­ gues persuasively and in detail that the poem simultaneously projects and negates what he calls “epistemological romance, in which disciplined med­ itation on a signifying body—Nature, scripture, the beloved—produces the transcendental object of its own desire” (80) and thus metaleptically constitutes the truth it aspires to know. In opening itself to “didactic al­ legory,” the fiction of the poem has introjected a powerful cultural demand for truth, and can meet this demand only by striving to differ internally from itself as fiction. In the effort to secure within itself a decisive representation of this difference, Spenserian allegory becomes “otherspeak” in the most radical sense—generating . . . at once the integral body of truth and its repressed “other.” . . . The Faerie Queene is able to summon its ideal form into representation only as a sublimated negative image of itself. (81)

I am in general less persuaded by Miller’s positive emphasis on the po­ em’s “aesthetic theology” (“Spenser’s art fantasizes its own perfection in terms of access to a spiritual body replete with truth” [71]) than I am by his analysis of the “pervasively internalized principle of self­renunciation” on which that vision “rests” (81). I would prefer a more active term than “rests” to describe the relation between the poem’s two bodies and a rhe­ toric that more fully registers the presence and significance of the tonal

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wit, the deadpan and often hilarious impersonation of rapt tale­telling, that indicates parodic treatment of both fictional and allegorical constructions. Self­renunciation frequently manifests itself as the self­mockery of a nar­ rator at once amused and bemused by his material, falling in love with it while making fun of it— and “it” denotes both the tale and the tale­telling. These are the signals of a tonally complex form of “otherspeak” whose spe­ cific character I think has been best suggested by Webster in the two es­ says I reviewed earlier. We recall that the account he gives in one essay of the contrasting de­ mands on the reader made by Spenser’s oral­formulaic and literary modes is parallel to the account he gives in the other of the distinction between the direct and indirect methods the writer uses to maintain control of the transactional dynamics. In the latter he uses the example of the Furor/ Occasion episode to show how Spenser, by mixing the two methods, in­ duces readers to criticize the moral ideology that the narrative action, taken simply and directly, encourages them to endorse. Webster’s steady focus in both essays on the transactional dimension in rhetorical and liter­ ary performance offers a model of the kind of interpretive attention that is especially well suited to the dual project of “placing” The Faerie Queene in a specific network of textual, cultural, and institutional practices while ex­ plicating the strategies by which the poem represents its complex negotia­ tions with that network. In this concluding section, I want to move from a summary of three of the model’s most promising features to a general ac­ count of the ways in which this transactional approach can contribute to the dual project. First, in characterizing the two methods as “reader­oriented strategies” of organization, Webster in effect keys the direct method to the oral mode by showing that its objectives are the traditional rhetorical ones of instruc­ tion and persuasion. The importance of this move is that it enables us to assimilate rhetorical effects to narrative effects, that is, to analyze allegori­ cal and narrative schemes in rhetorical terms that highlight their transac­ tional aims or motives. Second, as I noted before, Webster emphasizes the consonance between the direct method as a traditional medium of instruction and the tradi­ tional moral scheme it conveys. He shows how the medium reinforces the message by conveying it not only through the directness of the Palmer’s sermon but also through translation into the directness of episodic action. He argues convincingly that the hero’s success­induced failure in the epi­ sode casts doubt on the wisdom of what is recognizably a strong classical, or classico­Puritan, strain in the traditional discourse of temperance—and,

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I add, a discourse the poem represents as elitist and sexist in its scapegoat­ ing of class and gender stereotypes. He thus makes it possible for us to see how the oral mode, the direct method, and traditional moral discourse coalesce into a complex but integrated target of Spenser’s indirect and writerly method. Third, Webster’s comments on the misdirections of the Occasion epi­ sode point the way toward a general insight into the structure of narrative irony in The Faerie Queene. He argues, for example, that if Spenser’s indi­ rections force us to complicate and revise our initial response to the epi­ sode, it was “his own allegorical logic that misled us” in the first place; “he gives us a figure called Occasion and then has his narrative treat her as if she— and, by extension, . . . [what] she represents—is indeed the kind of thing that can be taken hold of and subdued” (41, 39). What is misleading, as we saw in the Phedon episode, is the very process of externalization it­ self, or rather the internalization of exteriority, because it alienates and scapegoats the source of moral responsibility. And this holds in general for the logic of allegorical translation. The process that makes for good sto­ ries, instructive examples, and easy listening is also a process that accom­ modates the powers, dangers, and comforts of moral self­deception. The Faerie Queene sustains a sharp and ironic focus on what Freud called “con­ siderations of representability” and “intelligibility.” Again and again, its landscapes, figures, and events are marked as conspicuously reductive and deceptive by textual indirections that challenge the reader to question the meanings offered by the storyteller’s oral, visual, and dramatic formulas. That the poem’s duplicitous landscape and wordscape pose problems of interpretation for characters and readers alike is hardly a new idea. It was the major thesis of Maureen Quilligan’s Language of Allegory (1979), and it was explored as far back as 1966 by Donald Cheney in ways that anticipate both Quilligan and Webster.25 After noting that “Spenser must appeal to conceptual and narrative continuities if he is to keep his audience,” Cheney goes on to demonstrate that the intricacies of the Spenserian stanza call for a dif ferent tempo of reading: The sequence of stanzas sometimes reads like a sonnet sequence in the play of its “continually shifting ironic per­ spectives” coupled with “imagistic repetition” (97–98). He argues that al­ though the allegorical explanations appended by Tasso to his epic may be “helpful in providing an initial perspective” on scenes of temptation in The Faerie Queene, “they quickly fail to account for the developing complexi­ ties” of those scenes (95). Of an Ariostan echo in the first episode of Book 3 (in which Britomart floors Guyon), he remarks that “Spenser appears to be presenting in all seriousness the conventional sentiments which his

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predecessor was satirizing,” but that his wryly nuanced rhetoric unhorses the seriousness and the sentiments along with the hero (85–86). Cheney’s account of the structural strain between two modes of read­ ing becomes even more illuminating when beamed through some of the formulations in William Kennedy’s Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Liter­ ature, published in 1978, and one of the army of “formalists­have­it­wrong, let’s­get­more­historical” books appearing in that decade.26 Kennedy scolds critics for their narrow focus on the tropological dimension of rhetoric, and he urges them to recontextualize their analyses by reviving the tradi­ tional study of rhetoric as a transactional art of persuasion and communi­ cation. His own response to this challenge is to center on the “rhetorical strategies of voice and address” (130), and on the “norms of integration gov­ erning the speaker’s characterization and his relationship to an audience,” as keys to genre differences as well as to differences of style and mode within the larger system of genre (3). Thus he describes as a constant and normative feature of epics from Homer through the Renaissance the “im­ plicit rhetorical identification” of speaker with audience effected by the speaker “himself playing an audience to the action . . . he recounts as trans­ mitter or mediator” (136). In this relation “the speaker formalizes and codifies the values of the culture” he shares with the audience, “and he does so with hortatory force, urging contemplation and acceptance of those val­ ues” (187–88). Kennedy’s chapter on the Petrarchan mode in lyric poetry brings out the sharp contrast between lyric and epic genres. This mode is characterized by “a split addresser whose voice as speaker differs from that of the author,” and a “split addressee whose function as fictive audience— usually the speaker’s beloved— differs from that of the actual reader” (20). The emphasis on transactional relations as a structural principle under­ lying differences of genre is genuinely useful because it directs attention to the larger framework within which to explore the critical representa­ tion of one medium by another. In this connection, Kennedy’s account of the moral purpose of the epic speaker is especially suggestive; it delineates a possible target of irony. But partly because of what is for all practical pur­ poses a bias against close reading, he does not entertain this possibility and fails to realize the full value of his approach.27 Nevertheless, if we re­ vise that approach in the light of Cheney’s observations, a revision that in­ volves combining the epic and lyric norms, which Kennedy discusses in separate chapters, we can better grasp the peculiar role of Spenser’s nar­ rator as an epic speaker who “formalizes and codifies the values” of his au­ dience, but does so in a poem whose modal structure resembles that of Petrarchan lyric. This means that his identification with his audience is

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not merely implicit, as Kennedy claims; it is explicit, and even preemptive in that it models or represents a particular kind of response, one that con­ forms not only with the culture’s dominant discourses but also with the expectations of oral narrative discussed by Webster. In order to make this effect conspicuous, the poem has to encourage, and the critic acknowledge, the very dif ferent expectations and practices of reading for story, and of close reading as at least a potentially opposi­ tional discourse. But the clash is not so much between two kinds of read­ ing as between two representations of reading: reading­as­if­listening and reading­as­if­reading. And since the oral­formulaic devices that invite us to read as if listening to a story contribute to the strings of generalized and discontinuous descriptions by which the story is made vivid, they also contribute to an effect of reference by inviting us to visualize or pictori­ alize or cinematize as we “listen,” that is, to imagine the referent, whether it is an event, a place, or an agent. The cavalier treatment of the story’s referents—the inconsistencies, contradictions, interruptions, ritualized repetitions, and deferrals for which the narrative of The Faerie Queene is famous— could not be registered as interference unless the story at the same time depicted the referent with which those strategies interfered. The moments of strident allegorical visualization that characterize the episodes of Furor and Alma encourage the reader intermittently to abstract the pictures from the rhetoric in which they are conveyed and through which they are interpreted. Thus reading­as­if­seeing is a component of reading­as­if­listening. If the textual critique of reading­as­if­listening is (for me) the implicit thesis of Webster’s argument, the critique of reading­as­if­seeing is the ex­ plicit thesis of Miller’s. He picks out as “a central feature” of Spenser’s “allegorical poetics, a sort of internalized iconoclasm that makes the po­ etry a perpetually self­displacing mode of discourse. . . . It is as if the text contained an implicit self­censoring principle, or were doubly written as itself and its own simultaneous retractation” (12–13). The specular reflex­ ivity Miller pursues through his study of the poem’s two bodies can be made less specular and less reflexive by premising that the allegorical schemes and narrative rhetoric of its “body politic” are the site of the cor­ porate wisdom, the traditional discourses, the cultural imperium, on which the text— Miller’s “poetic ‘body natu ral’ ” (14)—performs its iconoclastic operations. These operations proceed by “a sustained movement of displacement­and­revision that keeps undoing the premature or provisional closure which enables mimetic repre sentation” (175). Miller acutely perceives the consonance between the allegorical­mimetic method of the

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poem’s body politic and the tendency of epistemological romance to visu­ alize or envision the icons that desire constructs and misrecognizes as transcendent. The anti­mimetic and anti­representational strategies de­ scribed by Miller as iconoclastic I associate with the textual critique of reading­as­if­seeing, which is encouraged by the storyteller’s induce­ ment to read­as­if­listening. The drift of the observations I have gathered together from various sources indicates, as I noted earlier, an emergent consensus among recent Spenserians as to the ideological meaning and rhetorical function of nar­ rative. It also indicates a new approach to the problem of the inadequate or unreliable speaker—the narrator as commentator— that responds to Alpers’s important criticism of the concept. Two interrelated consequences of the approach are especially relevant to my argument. First, it shifts the locus of unreliability from the speaker’s commentary to the story itself, that is, to the values of the allegorical and narrative schemes directly con­ veyed by the storyteller’s discursive practices. As a result, second, there is no longer any point in insisting that the narrator’s occasional comments on and reactions to the story be narrowly construed as the performance of a dramatic speaker, but at the same time, the unreliability we may wish to attribute to that performance can be explained on new grounds. I shall con­ clude with comments on each of these features. 1. The transfer of unreliability from commentary to story puts us in a good position to explore the connection between the unreliability of the schemes and values and their expressly traditional character. And it sets the stage for an ideological reading of The Faerie Queene as a critique of the cultural discourses it represents, a reading that numbers among those targeted discourses the traditional forms of storytelling the poem imitates. Webster’s description of the way Spenser’s narrative technique, “in being traditional, redundant, and in some sense ‘loosely’ put together, repeatedly encourages the expectations proper to an oral mode” (“Oral Form,” 83), takes on added resonance when set against the background of the field of media studies inaugurated by Innes, McLuhan, Havelock, and Ong. Their work is more sensitive to the politics of storytelling and oral performance than that of the scholars Webster himself relies on (Parry, Lord, Bowra), and during the 1970s and ’80s study of the politics of oral communication expanded across the whole range of the “human sciences.” To pause briefly over one example, the analysis of oratory as social control has been illumi­ nated by the theory of ritual communication that the anthropologist Maurice Bloch developed during his fieldwork in Madagascar.

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The thesis of Bloch’s inquiry into the effects of stylized rhetoric in song, dance, political oratory, and other forms of ritualized communication may be epigrammatically expressed by his statement that “you cannot argue with a song.”28 He claims that “reasoned contradiction or argument . . . is . . . reduced or ruled out” by the formalized character, the “arthritic” ar­ ticulation and restricted code, of ritual speech, whether in political or re­ ligious contexts.29 Thus in examining the procedural protocols of village councils, he found that “if you have allowed somebody to speak in an ora­ torical manner you have practically accepted his proposal,” since “the highly formalised codes of . . . oratory put people in a situation where they feel compelled . . . to follow a course of action.”30 Stylized expression en­ courages acquiescence in the receivers of messages whose formulaic rhe­ toric is itself a sign of traditionality. Bloch notes that in the politico­religious practices of the Malagasy people with whom he worked, ritual speech is called “speaking the words of the ancestors.” The elders employ “a re­ stricted archaic vocabulary,” “a special style of delivery,” “a rigid tradi­ tional” organization of the sequence of speech acts, and illustrations drawn only from traditional sources, to imitate as if by ventriloquism the authori­ tative voices of the dead.31 He shows how such formalization of language can be used to express, maintain, and control hierarchic relations in sys­ tems of traditional authority. Ritual communication is among the ideologi­ cal apparatuses that Bloch examines in analyzing the means by which one Malagasy people, the Merina, converted power into authority—the means by which “a turbulent state based on . . . unscrupulous exploitation” came to be represented as a harmoniously integrated hierarchy. The archaism and change­resistant formality of ritual communication “makes the social world appear organized in a fixed order which recurs without beginning and without end,” and so “the political, the social, the discontinuous, the cultural and the arbitrary” are projected “into the image and the realm of repetitive nature,” an image that focuses on its “beneficial cyclical aspects, fertility and reproduction.”32 All this is familiar enough to students of Tudor ideology, and especially to those who have amused themselves by deconstructing E. M. W. Till­ yard’s celebration of the Elizabethan World Picture and uncovering the imperialist program it legitimates. To close the link to Spenser we need only include storytelling and mythmaking among the forms of ritual com­ munication discussed by Bloch. Of course, the archaism and formalism of the Spenserian storyteller have been seen as instruments that participate in the exploitative colonialism of the Renaissance state. Thus Stephen

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Greenblatt, who reads The Faerie Queene as an ambivalent celebration of royal and colonial power, implies that the poet shared his heroes’ “profound conviction that there is a moral task set for themselves by virtue of the power of Gloriana,” and that “the rightness of the moral mission” was “an­ chored in the ardent worship of power.”33 It is significant that when Greenblatt speculates on the cultural conditions that enabled Spenser suc­ cessfully to convey this conviction, he characterizes the communicative act as an oral transaction, and assimilates it to an inscriptive process which he impugns with a Kafkaesque analogy: If Spenser told his readers a story, they listened, and listened with pleasure because they themselves, in the shared life of their culture, were telling versions of that story again and again, recording the texts on themselves and on the world around them. . . . Spenser’s poem is one manifestation of a symbolic language that is inscribed by history on the bodies of living beings as, in Kafka’s great parable, the legal sentences are inscribed by the demonic penal machine on the bodies of the condemned. (179) Spenser’s art does not lead us to perceive ideology critically, but rather affirms the existence and inescapable moral power of ideology as that principle of truth toward which art forever yearns. It is art whose status is questioned in Spenser, not ideology; indeed, art is questioned precisely to spare ideology that internal distantiation it undergoes in the work of Shakespeare or Marlowe. In The Faerie Queene reality as given by ideology always lies safely outside the bounds of art, in a dif ferent realm, distant, infinitely powerful, perfectly good. (192)

The first of these two passages articulates in initially benign but ultimately sinister language the logocentric fantasy of unmediated inscription which, early in this essay, I attributed to Plato’s Phaedrus. The effect is both benign and sinister because the pleasure induced by the consonance of Spenser’s story with the culturally preinscribed story is morally ambiguous. On the one hand, in Greenblatt’s Freudian reading focused on the Bower of Bliss, this consonance supports the forces of civilization against the excess of unruly sexual pleasure. On the other hand, the repression and renuncia­ tion facilitated by the poem’s pleasurable rehearsal of privileged cultural texts serves an art inseparably linked to “a repellent political ideology” (174). The second passage, however, articulates the ideological desire and goal of Spenser’s art in terms remarkably similar to those with which Miller characterizes the aims of Spenser’s “epistemological romance” and the poem’s “body politic.” The point about this similarity is that Miller

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persuasively demonstrates the omnipresent force of internal distantia­ tion by which the poem in effect makes Greenblatt’s version of The Faerie Queene the target of the very criticism he essays. The politics of Spenserian storytelling, which Greenblatt takes straight, is contested by the counter­ discourse, the countermedium, of an iconoclastic and audioclastic écriture. 2. The second of the two consequences of the approach I have been sketching out is that if the locus of unreliability shifts from narrator to nar­ rative, we can be a little more relaxed in our efforts to make sense of what often seems to many readers to be misleading or inadequate commentary. If, that is, we find that the unreliability of the speaker reflects that of the story, that the ideological premises of his explicit comments are consistent with those implicit in the story, then we can assume that it makes no dif­ ference whether he is merely fabulating or moralizing and expostulating, since in all three capacities he performs an interpretive function of a spe­ cific kind. As a storyteller he is a reader of traditional discourses, and as a commentator he is a reader of the stories he tells, a traditional reader of a traditional story, the first reader of The Faerie Queene, a guide and model for all subsequent readers, but a guide whose misinterpretation is to be noted and rejected, a model of how not to read The Faerie Queene. Like the listeners imagined by Greenblatt, the narrator who speaks the words of the ancestors and retells their stories often shows himself to be seduced by the traditional pleasures, powers, and values the text subjects to a critique, including the jouissance and spellbinding mastery of storytelling itself. And this mastery is traditional in a special sense: The narrator is marked as a male storyteller who gets his material and authority from the old books and oral sources—the anonymous “They say”—of traditions shaped by the male imagination. In the Garden of Adonis and other passages, this gender­marking is particularly strong and renders conspicuous the chau­ vinism of the discourses that speak through his voice. The narrator’s didactic or exegetical function is roughly comparable to that of the Palmer in the episode with Occasion. The Palmer is an unreli­ able guide because the morality he endorses conforms with that which is inscribed in the allegorical scheme transparently rendered by narrative ac­ tion; it is the story and not merely the diagnostic sermon that misinter­ prets Phedon’s problem. And if the Palmer has inside knowledge of allegorical­narrative “facts” (the true meaning of Occasion and Furor, the reason why the babe’s hands cannot be washed in canto 2), it is because those “facts” have been constructed to conform with the morality he en­ dorses and the medicine he is prepared to dispense. Similarly, the narrator annotates the commitments of such schemes and actions in melodramatic

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utterance that reinforces our sense of their parodic or citational character. But his exegetical “voice” can hardly be accorded the status of an inade­ quate or obtuse dramatic speaker—on this point I agree with Alpers— because it is so obviously the altered “voice” of the authorial or textual impersonator ventriloquized in the same ebullient and self­delighting spirit of citational parody that enlivens the stories he tells.34 These stories compose into a compendious interlace of discursive tra­ ditions that includes not only the spectrum of literary genres but also the genres of religious, ethical, political, and cosmological discourse, along with their attendant motifs and topoi. Critics writing in the early decades of the twentieth century were content to ascribe this grab bag of traditional forms to Spenser’s eclecticism, as in C. S. Lewis’s two lists, “Elfin Spenser: Renaissance Spenser: voluptuous Spenser: courtly Spenser: Italianate Spenser: decorative Spenser,” and “English Spenser: Protestant Spenser: rustic Spenser: manly Spenser: churchwardenly Spenser: domestic Spenser: thrifty Spenser: honest Spenser”;35 or as in Douglas Bush’s portrait of “the wistful panegyrist of an imagined chivalry, the bold satirist of ugly actu­ ality, cosmic philosopher and pastoral dreamer, didactic moralist and vo­ luptuous pagan, puritan preacher and Catholic worshipper, eager lover and mystical Neo­Platonist.”36 Noting that Bush at the same time insists that Spenser was not “conscious . . . of disturbing conflicts,” Angus Fletcher re­ marks that despite this “disturbingly bland account of Spenser’s charac­ teristic manner,” Bush’s list “presents a Spenser full of conflict.” Fletcher’s own attempt to do justice to the ambiguity of Spenserian epic while ac­ counting for its “striking lack of dramatic excitement” brings us close to the view that the personas Bush conjures up denote not the author but the figures constructed by the stories they tell, and that if these stories are not themselves exciting, it is because they defer and displace excitement from the immediacy of the rhetorical transaction to the process of reading­as­ if­reading, the process in which we interrogate the rhetoricity of narrative. Fletcher argues that it is the reader who brings excitement to the work; the work does not, like a mimetic work, present us with a series of events capable in their autonomy of exciting our attention and sympathy [although, I add, they make a pretense of, a feint toward, doing so]. On our first encounter the figures are miniature, like the knights Proust imagined on his bed, jousting in the playful light of a magic lantern. But as we read our way into Spenser, his figures grow large with another size, of dull reverberations, by alluding to other cultures, other religions, other philosophies than our own. (273)

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Passing through the playful light of citational magic we may indeed find behind the miniatures thus illuminated and amplified the traces of uncanny forces, but what surprises us most is the perception that those forces live and lurk within the old familiar places catalogued by Lewis and Bush.37 Spenser’s magic lantern casts defamiliarizing shadows even as it sharp­ ens the outlines and flattens the forms of its twice­told tales. Ironically, those shadows compel our attention as soon as we recognize that the nar­ rative is a crazy quilt less of discursive traditions than of discursive traduc­ tions. As I have tried to demonstrate, the targets of parody are problematic effects of the culture’s dominant discourses on attitudes toward gender, desire, marriage, morality, justice, and religion. But, in the manner sug­ gested by Fletcher, our sense of the seriousness of the problems is enhanced by and inseparable from our first encounter with the miniatures. The tales of jousting figures appear in the poem as metonymic and occasion­ ally slanderous simulations of the system Miller calls “epistemological romance”— simulations of the tropological strategies, ideological commit­ ments and claims of truth by which (he argues) the system brings the idealized body politic of the poem into being. These simulations are marked as such by the expressive simulation that conveys them: the oral­formulaic simulation of a medium whose transactional structure inhibits decelerated inquiry into textual aporias. The conspicuousness of the effect of inhibi­ tion is directly proportional to that of the text’s complexity. If the narra­ tor models a kind of reading that dramatizes the direct method by inviting identification rather than distance, innocent rather than suspicious re­ sponse, mimesis rather than irony, our refusal of the invitation begins with the awareness that the effect of the fiction of direct method is one of the poem’s major forms of indirection. I noted above that I view the narrator as the first reader of The Faerie Queene, and I now conclude with the suggestion that the best and most sus­ tained example of his kind of reading—the reading of the oralist and mor­ alist—is to be found in the Letter to Ralegh. There he states that to give Ralegh and the general reader better light and understanding, he will ig­ nore “any particular purposes or by­accidents . . . occasioned” in the course of fashioning “a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle disci­ pline.” For Ralegh’s benefit he will “overronne” the “whole course” of the poem in order to direct his “understanding to the wel­head of the History, that from thence gathering the whole intention of the conceit, ye may as in a handfull gripe al the discourse, which other wise may happily seeme tedious and confused.” I am tempted to add that directing attention to the

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well­head is directing it away from what Ralegh, his peers, and his Queen, might consider to be the sick textual feet the poem creeps on. Like the writer represented by the Letter, the narrator represented by the poem “kidnaps” romance and its readership and brings them tied up like Acrasia to the well­head of Tudor ideology. In this he contributes to the project described by Frye in the foreword to Unfolded Tales: “Renaissance educa­ tion was within a context of class and patriarchy, and knowing one’s place in society was at the center of all other knowledge. But romance tries to give that knowledge a chivalric idealism that minimizes the arrogance that goes with class and sex distinctions.”38 However, as I have noted elsewhere, if the narrator and his story are working for the government, the poem is not.39 Rather it is a double agent that kidnaps the narrator and his chival­ ric idealism in the ser vice of a subversive agenda, lurking snakelike in the dense underground forest of “by­accidents” that twist like rhizomes through the text, but occasionally showing its back, like the serpentine gold thread of Busirane’s tapestries.

chapter 3

Wring Out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001 for Judith Anderson and Angus Fletcher We have nothing to fear but fear itself. —franklin delano roosevelt

Jeepers [!], Creepers! —harry warren and johnny mercer

I began writing this essay at the turn of the century, just a half century after I had begun reading Spenser.1 By the early 1950s World War II had turned cold while the intellectual climate of the universities was warming up in the glow of the magisterial studies that lit a fire under all of us in my generation, studies that drove us beyond war­torn Europe, beyond the balkanized precincts of academic disciplines, toward relatively more inte­ grated and global approaches to culture that presaged the future of human­ istic curricula. There were the translations of Auerbach, Curtius, and Beauvoir that appeared in 1953, the books by Kantorowicz and Wind that came out a few years later along with translations of Lévi­Strauss, followed in the early 1960s by belated translations of Sartre and Merleau­Ponty. Although these authors were changing my view of Spenser, literature, and the world, I remained mired in the practice of close interpretation then being promoted by the New Critics who were my teachers at Yale. At the time, these same New Critics were pushing Metaphysical poetry and not having any truck with The Faerie Queene. Consequently, I decided that trying to close­read The Faerie Queene would be a way to get in their face, 143

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and that is what I proceeded to do, and what I’m still doing, though the critical map has changed in so many ways. In retrospect, two features of the Spenser sector of the postwar map stand out. First, it was still dominated by the prewar culture of the Vari­ orum edition, a culture steeped (if not drowned) in a more or less pious and genteel ideology produced by an uncritical commitment to the inter­ pretive procedures of the history of ideas.2 Second, the criticism of my gen­ eration, including my own, was sexist and gender­blind. I was aware of the first but had no awareness whatsoever of the second. I made the Variorum culture my target, which made me feel hip, and I thought nothing of re­ ferring to Frances Yates as Miss Yates, which made me feel courtly. Today I think the classical­to­Christian scenario that informs my account of Book 2 in The Allegorical Temper 3 is about as Variorum as you can get, and never more so than when I blame every thing on the witch I refer to as a demonic allegorist. Now, as I revisit the scene of my crime, I know that what I should have written was not “demonic,” but “demonized.” Between then and now, three convergent public conversations about the politics of reading have profoundly affected Spenser criticism. One con­ cerns orality and literacy, the second concerns feminism, gender, and the role of the reader, and the third concerns the possibility of internal dis­ tance and oppositional reading. For me personally, what made the differ­ ence was, first, finding my way into a method of reading that emphasized the internal distance of the text from its narrative and, second, discover­ ing the interpretive power of feminist and gender criticism, which was the single most important factor in my critical reorientation between the 1950s and today. Though feminist criticism started to make a difference in the early 1960s, it didn’t really enter Spenser commentary until the late 1970s. But when it did kick in, its impact on me was profound. It provided a viewpoint from which to stand outside and revaluate the traditional account of Spenser as the poet’s poet whose poetry is poetry about poetry. I still accept that account, but the revaluation taught me to look at Spenser’s poetry as a cri­ tique of the poetry it is about, and a critique in a particular sense: It rep­ resents the precursors as elements in a pastiche integrated under a single rubric, the rubric of embattled male fantasy and discourse. As to the change in the method of reading, sometimes a single essay will turn your practice around, and this happened to me several times, but what I remember most vividly is the effect produced by an essay John Webster published forty­four years ago. It taught me to distinguish two dif ferent invitations Spenser’s poetry sends.4 The first is to look through the lan­

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guage in either or both of two ways: to read as if listening to a story or as if visualizing it; in other words, to treat it as a speaking picture. The sec­ ond is to look at the language, look into it, explore “the languageness of language” (as Joel Fineman put it).5 In simple terms, the first induces you to read more quickly and the second induces you to slow down. The first solicits obedience to the instructions of the allegorical police and prom­ ises to lead you to the heaven of official meaning while the second invites you to question or oppose that solicitation. Webster’s approach evokes the spirit of Kenelm Digby, who wrote in 1638 that unless Spenser is read with “great attention, rare and wonderful conceptions will unperceived slide by” the reader, who “will think he hath mett with nothing but familiar and easie discourses: But lett one dwell a while upon them, and he shall feele a strange fulness and roundness in all he sayth.” 6 Mieke Bal makes a distinction similar to Webster’s between two modes of reading, “reading for the text,” which involves the “continual shaping and reshaping of sign events,” and the “realist” mode of “reading for a content . . . modeled on real ity at the expense of awareness of the signi­ fying system of which the work is constructed.”7 Although these two modes are incompatible, they can, she insists, “be brought to bear on the same work,” and in fact exploring the conflict between them is itself an exem­ plary “critical endeavor” (508). In Spenser, the equivalent of the realist mode is the allegorical­narrative mode that produces speaking pictures and that often seems “countertextual” in that it resists or discourages “reading for the text.”8 The relevance of such a lectorial dialectic to The Faerie Queene has been reinforced by power ful studies of Spenserian allegory. In dif ferent ways, for example, both Susanne Wofford and Gordon Teskey have fo­ cused our attention not merely on the violence of allegory but on its con­ spicuously suspect character. As Teskey puts it, “The more powerful the allegory, the more openly violent the moments in which the materials of narrative are shown being actively subdued for the purpose of raising a structure of meaning.”9 It’s the very ostensiveness of the violence that calls forth resistance from both characters and readers. One of the impor­ tant consequences of this view has been to reinforce an older idea of allegory— the idea that allegory battens on the visualizable and audible content of poetry after capturing (or abstracting) it from its textual en­ vironment. For allegorical purposes, one picture is worth a thousand words, which is to say, a thousand words are or should be reducible to a speaking picture. This is a countertextual theory, a theory that defends against interpretation.10

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To shift to the information­theory metaphor Teskey once used, allegory thrives on redundancy, and textuality is the noise it tries to override.11 Re­ dundancy is the principle on which the speaking pictures called emblems rely for effectiveness. In some brief but excellent comments on Spenser’s recourse to speaking pictures, Elizabeth Heale notes that such images “could say much in little because their readers could be relied on to recog­ nize many of the traditional connotations and implications. . . . Spenser uses such traditional images throughout The Faerie Queene, but they are particularly frequent and particularly important in Book 2.” Their conspic­ uous presence and resonance in the Bower of Bliss, for example, give the episode a “clear moral significance.”12 But just what is that significance? At the end of her absorbing chapter on Book 2, Heale suggests two dif ferent answers. (1) The whole of the Bower of Bliss episode has made it clear that “the delinquency is Acrasia’s: she it is who has perverted nature and art, making their beauty a web to trap men’s souls,” but (2) “while Acrasia’s gar­ den has drawn and seduced the weak and unwary, there are those who will­ ingly seek it out. It is a sign of Spenser’s realism that the destruction of the Bower and the action of the Palmer’s staff will not free these men from them­ selves” (72). I return to this passage later but for now it is enough to say that in these two statements Spenser’s more “realistic” attribution of delinquency and responsibility is not to Acrasia but to her so­ called victims. The possibility of textual critique or internal distance is promoted by the ambiguous manner in which Spenser’s poetry cues readers to respond to the topos as simultaneously a natural place in the mimetic order and a literary place in the intertextual order. By “natu ral” I mean visualizable (and thus allegorizable). The Bower of Bliss, for example, appears as a to­ pos in the sense of a place the reader is invited mentally to imagine and travel through. Part of the illusion is that this place is created and popu­ lated not by poetic art but by independent actors, characters, or persons, figures like Acrasia on whom the power of agency is conferred—in this case the disempowering agency of embowerment. Susanne Wofford registers the power of this invitation in the following comment: “Central to the po­ etics of the Bower of Bliss . . . is the text’s identification of the power that transforms men into animals as female sexuality rather than as its own ar­ tistic necessity.”13 Yet the perception of this power can be changed by rec­ ognizing that the visualizable Bower is a signifier of the topos as a literary place— a Tasso place, for example, or a Chaucer place, or a Homer place. When illusion gives way to allusion, the mimetic contiguity of the topos as a bower on a “wandring Island” (2.1.51) gives way to the intertextual con­ tinuity of a misogynist discourse centered on the figure of Circe: “Acrasia

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and her bower are themselves new and complex versions of a long tradi­ tion of seductive enchantresses and emasculating gardens to which Spenser alludes.”14 A major feature of Spenserian allusion is the topos of resistance Colin Burrow has found characteristic of “classicizing epics in the romance tra­ dition,” a topos in which “authors and heroes alike battle to separate them­ selves from deceptive women in order at once to obey their rulers, and to replicate the structural unity and animating virtues of Virgilian epic.” Guyon’s destruction of the Bower is a moment in such a battle, and the moment “is acutely awkward: it shows Spenser attempting to exorcise from his hero and his poem a digressive form of romance, in which knights aban­ don their course to pursue pitiful ladies. . . . Particularly disturbing for contemporary readers is the way issues of gender and questions of genre are interfolded: resisting a woman becomes a means of moving closer to Virgilian heroism.”15 What makes Acrasia and the Bower dif ferent and new in this respect has been brilliantly characterized by Mary Ellen Lamb: Spenser, she argues, tweaks “assumptions about masculinity codified as the virtue of Temper­ ance” by constructing Acrasia as the product of effeminizing poetry and as the embodiment of “gendered fictions” calculated to unman the male reader.16 Spenser, in other words, tweaks Heale’s “long tradition,” the dia­ chronic series of poems by male authors about male warriors and wander­ ers and the women who try to lead them astray. “Tweaking” may be defined as exposing the tradition’s metonymic tendency to change the status of its gendered fictions from the effects of masculine fantasy to its causes. This displacement demonstrates the working of a general princi­ ple, the principle of specular tautology, which asserts that the evil the mind constructs and represents is always displaced from [the mind] itself and blamed on the evil it constructs and represents.17 If, for example, Tasso’s Armida is “identified as the concupiscible faculty of the soul, an emblem of libido,” can this be anything other than a male soul or libido?18 When Heale states that “Acrasia clearly represents more powerful and danger­ ous appetites” than Phaedria (69), whose appetites does she represent? And if “Acrasia represents a voluptuous revelling in sexual excitement,” whose revelling does she represent?19 Maleger and his “idle shades” ex­ pressly displace Phantastes’ “idle phantasies” from within the temperate body to its perimeter.20 Why shouldn’t the same logic be extended to the Bower of Bliss? To take specular tautology into account is to transform the transparent verbal window of speaking pictures to an opaque screen, a palimpsest, a

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text that evokes, interrogates, and overwrites its predecessors in the ghosts of poems past. “Perhaps no scene in The Faerie Queene is as intertextual as Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss.”21 As the speaking picture modulates into a con­ spicuously textual history of embowerment, attention gets redirected from the agency of characters like Acrasia to that of multiple converging poetic sites— sites that redundantly reinforce the archaic fear of the threat to mas­ culinity. Thus a countertextual discourse of temperance demonizes Acra­ sia by activating the principle of specular tautology. The textual critique of temperance represents and undoes this process of displacement. • My current view of these palimpsestuous relations is chiefly indebted to the work of Theresa Krier and Lauren Silberman: to Krier’s strong reading of the way the incompatible values of moralized epic and chivalric romance coexist in a single conflicted, and therefore anxiety­ridden, in­ tertextual field; to Silberman’s argument that in Book 2 the ideology of temperance promoted by moralized epic becomes a target of textual cri­ tique.22 Krier’s study clearly shows how, as one pre­ or subtextual allusion mutates into another, the process brings into view the contours of an en­ during if shape­shifting cultural discourse; and it shows how the story of the knight of temperance is deeply implicated in this discourse in a way that characterizes—that is, criticizes—both the knight and the discourse. But “characterizes” is too weak a term, for the argument is not simply the standard one about the epic poet’s desire to overgo this or that poem or poet in order to produce “[t]hings unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.” The argument centers on critique rather than on mere emulation. Taken together, Silberman’s and Krier’s accounts suggest that the traditional con­ test between temperance and pleasure may itself be an illusion created to support the interests of a rectilinear, repressive, and violent discourse of temperance, a discourse that derives its authority from moralized epic but is complicit and tightly interwoven with the divagations of romance and the temptations of pleasure. Romance and pleasure are its creations, its scapegoats, its necessary others. Again and again, the poetry of Book 2 dra­ matizes the bad faith of that discourse in showing how a man’s fear of being unmanned by one’s own lust, the fear of becoming a “womanish weake knight,” is transformed into the fear of being “in Ladies lap en­ tombed” (5.36). Krier’s argument takes account of the often­noted irony that Chaucer’s Sir Thopas is (in Jonathan Goldberg’s words) “a most unlikely and yet un­ deniable source for The Faerie Queene. . . . No doubt it is one of the won­

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ders of The Faerie Queene that it can relocate— and dislocate—itself in this way.” Spenser’s poem “is so fully the rewriting of epic and romance . . . that it establishes a literary space that is located, in its play of text against text, on the deadpan side of parody.”23 The anamorphic shadow of tiny Sir Thopas’s dream and pursuit of his “elf­queene” cast by the figure of “that most noble Briton Prince” in search of Tanaquill/Gloriana says it all. It cues the informed reader to recall how englished romance had already been reduced to the butt of Harry Bailly’s displeasure; any poem intent on reno­ vating the genre would have to acknowledge and live with that prior defla­ tion. It may be that the values of romance are being conspicuously reinflated for a more congenial readership than fourteenth­century bourgeois inn­ keeper bullies. But it may also be that the reinflation is dogged by its Chaucerian shadow.24 Does The Faerie Queene preemptively wear Sir Tho­ pas as a deadpan parody of itself, a kind of cuirass or bullet­proof vest? The idea that Spenser’s poetry is a critique of the poetic traditions it imitates goes back very far and was brilliantly articulated by C. S. Lewis. Writing in the thirties, he may not have been ideally situated to develop a gender­centered version of the idea, and I return to this problem below. But he surely did anticipate such a version. He found the Bower of Bliss sick because there is no sex going on, only the skeptophilia produced by “male prurience and female provocation.” He has been severely criticized for this emphasis, but I think he was onto something, though it took a para­ digm shift to make that particular something plausible as an interpretive possibility.25 Acrasia, he writes, “herself does nothing: she is merely ‘dis­ covered’, posed on a sofa beside a sleeping young man.” Why does he put the word “discovered” in scare quotes? And who “posed” her? And if, as he phrases it, “eyes, greedy eyes, are the tyrants of that whole region,” whose eyes are they? The subversive reading all but articulated by Lewis is that Acrasia is not merely posed and discovered but created by those tyranni­ cal greedy eyes, and that what is really sick about the Bower of Bliss—the sickness the poetry represents and invites us to recognize—is the displace­ ment of responsibility and blame from male prurience to female provoca­ tion. The phantasmatic female provocateur materializes to justify both the prurient distemper and the reactive violence of the temperance congealed in the upright hero and his uptight guide. Such a displacement is at once marked and demystified by the translat­ ability of a name that designates disorder in the male ethos. As is so fre­ quently the case, A. C. Hamilton’s gloss makes all the relevant connections: “Akrasia” conflates two Greek words, one denoting humoral imbalance and the other impotence, and the second is reinforced by its links to Aerates

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and to Maleger’s hags, Impatience and Impotence.26 Book 2 represents temperance as fear of akrasia, a fear that creeps from the common noun toward the proper name, that is, from a­krasia toward Acrasia, from attri­ butes of self toward the personification of the other, from incontinence and impotence toward their putative cause in Acrasia. This logic of displacement leads me to conclude that Acrasia is the ob­ jectification of male hysteria, the seductive, lethal, and vampiric objectifi­ cation of a narrative fantasy that shows itself at times dangerously seduced and vulnerable, that doesn’t trust her to relent, or trust itself to be any­ thing but relentless, in the violence with which it punishes her for its lapses. So, for example, it perversely fixes and feeds its “hungry eies” on hers (12.78) even after it describes “her false eyes fast fixed in his sight” and “greedily depasturing delight” (12.73). Acrasia is male in the double sense that she is placed in the position of dominance and that she is the product of male fantasy, a fantasy fascinated by the Venerean specter it creates as the ef­ fect, and installs as the cause, of its fear, its desire, its castration. In canto 12 this fantasy expressly includes the positioning of our two furtive creepers (and peepers), Guyon and the Palmer, in the unenviable but self­ justifying role of the injured party, the cuckold, the lame and jealous Vulcan. Remember that the poem also associates Vulcan with another figure of castration, that grimy loser, Mammon, whose gold fusts unused in—of all places—his lap (2.7.4). • My argument, then, is that the misogynist and gynophobic representation of woman may be a target rather than a donnée of The Faerie Queene. This is hardly an inevitable conclusion. You are not likely to imagine the pos­ sibility that The Faerie Queene internally distances itself from its misogyny if you haven’t first internally distanced yourself from the misogyny of aca­ demic culture. In 1966, it was still academic second nature for even younger critics like A. Bartlett Giamatti to describe the earthly paradise in Renais­ sance epic as the product of a line of male writers who seem to agree in identifying the enemy with the subject position of woman.27 Giamatti is concerned with what Spenser inherited and adopted from his precursors, the fantasy of the earthly paradise that reflects “the vast extent of man’s preoccupation with the place of bliss and delight.” The “ambiguous nature of the gardens represents the conflicting forces at the center of . . . Renais­ sance poems, the conflicts between classical heritage and Christian culture, between Love and Duty, woman and God, illusion and reality” (5–6). The earthly paradise depicted “in the Renaissance epics” is “a place of reason

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overcome by passion, duty by pleasure, man by woman, spirit by sense” (289). Woman is not only the enemy of man and God but also the personi­ fication of passion, pleasure, sense, and illusion. Giamatti’s Spenser goes along with this view, and so did mine, many years ago. You may well find the view offensively sexist, but if you accept it on Giamatti’s terms, you’ll want to say the same about the poem and its poet and its precursors and the Western tradition. Yet that isn’t the only alternative. Giamatti himself twice mentions an­ other. He suggests that the garden is “an allegory for a self­deluding frame of mind, a false illusion or fantasy one creates, to one’s detriment” (258). Who is “one” here? Later he suggests that by having Guyon and the Palmer pass through a gate of ivory, Spenser is introducing the Bower “as a false state of mind, a self­imposed illusion” (269). In both these statements, the creative agency, the self that deludes itself, must be male, if for no other reason than that Giamatti’s poets don’t ascribe this sort of cognitive disso­ nance and conflicted agency to female subjects. But if the garden or bower is an allegory of self­delusion, doesn’t its false state of mind consist in refus­ ing to acknowledge this and displacing responsibility for it elsewhere? Doesn’t the poetic mind maintain itself in bad faith by activating the princi­ ple of specular tautology? Can we show that the poem represents and un­ does this process of displacement, that it demystifies and critiques the demonization of Acrasia?28 Giamatti broaches such a possibility only to refute it.29 And although things have changed since then, the temptation to treat Spenserian misog­ yny as a given rather than as a target remains very strong. This is because so much criticism in the 1980s and ’90s was dominated by context­oriented interpretations that deny the poem anything but a participatory and sub­ missive role in the tangle of cultural discourses flowing through and around it. That countertextualizing tendency was predictable in an older criticism guided, like Giamatti’s, by the agendas of social, literary, political, and in­ tellectual history. It persisted in Northrop Frye’s claim (1976) that Spenser “kidnapped” erotic and chivalric formulas, and made them serve an apoc­ alyptic discourse expressing the religious and social ideals of the Refor­ mation state.30 This is a countertextual claim. In textual perspective, as I have tried to show, Frye’s kidnapped formulas have the effect of contami­ nating the integrity of the Protestant argument.31 The tendency was less predictable but still evident in New Historicist practice. It was thematized by Stephen Greenblatt, for example, when— after a brilliantly subversive set of textual readings—he chose to subordinate this level of analysis to the larger­scale exploration of Spenser’s complicity in English colonialism

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and Protestant iconoclasm. Thus contained, the violent destruction of the Bower can easily be reinterpreted as a colonial and Reformation counter­ text, that is, a sign of Spenser’s willing subordination of subversive textu­ ality to colonialist and anti­papist ideology.32 Fi nally, even in such an avowedly post–New Historicist historicism as Claire McEachern’s valuable chapter on Spenser in The Poetics of English Nationhood, Book 1 is counter­ textually presented as following its religious and social leaders. McEach­ ern tries to show that the doctrinal confusions and signifying practices affecting the continuum of Reformation discourses saturate and overde­ termine Spenser’s poem, so that it perforce reproduces the misogyny that operates along the whole continuum from radicals to conservatives.33 Such context­oriented approaches, like others common in Spenser crit­ icism (especially on the Irish front), are genuinely valuable as antidotes both to claustrophobic close analy sis and to the broader, more diffuse, strains of allegorical and myth criticism. But they aren’t likely to encour­ age readers to explore the possibility that The Faerie Queene might inter­ nally distance itself from the sexist ideology and rhetoric that dominates the Reformation continuum. Nor are they likely to encourage exploration of this possibility in the poem’s representation of its literary precursors, precursors notable for their instrumental deployment of the same misog­ ynist and gynophobic constructions McEachern finds in the Reformation continuum. The poem’s literary precursors and its Reformation contem­ poraries both rely more or less innocently on the principle of specular tau­ tology, which transforms akrasia and its power over male subjects into Acrasia and her power over male subjects. Specular tautology is a principle of self­evasion (or bad faith). Its dynam­ ics of displacement is encapsulated in reflexive uses of the grammatical scheme of correctio. Puttenham more dramatically names this figure “meta­ noia or the Penitent” (compare pentimento in painting), but I prefer E.K.’s term epanorthosis, because its etymological implications link it to the act of straightening oneself out, or up, and regaining one’s rectitude.34 Spenser uses epanorthosis not only to represent an act of self­correction but also to mark it as an act of self­exculpation.35 In Books 1 and 2, for example, epanorthosis is the vehicle of bad faith, that is, the rhetorical means by which the narrative and its male protagonists displace what they find in­ temperate or effeminizing in themselves to the alterity of the female. It is thus the founding trope of the virtues of perfect Holiness and Temper­ ance, and it gives both rhetorical and narrative form to the proposition, articulated by Debora Shuger, that “the specter of female desire is also the structure of religious (and male) subjectivity.”36

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To take this principle into account is to convert Spenser’s archive, his “everlasting scryne,” from a backdrop, a fabric of influences, to the primary object of textual scrutiny. It’s no longer enough to treat that archive as an intertextual ecology within which the poem metabolically exchanges ma­ terial with other literary organisms. Literary ontogeny doesn’t merely re­ capitulate phylogeny. It decapitates it. In this version of appropriative violence, the poem distorts the formulas it kidnaps in a manner calculated to impair the integrity of the Reformation argument. So, for example, in fusing the Christian quest for identity with the chivalric quest for man­ hood, Book 1 shows how the spiritual dangers connected with the loss of faith and joy are strategically displaced to—and misunderstood as— sexual dangers. If it’s true that through the seventeenth century a model of inwardness (male as well as female) persists in which, as Shuger beautifully puts it, “the voice of the soul is always soprano” (371), it may well be that figures like Una and Alma (not to mention Praysdesire and Shamefastnesse) conform to that model. But this is represented as a source of anxiety for Spenser’s male protagonists. And why not? What man would want to spend any time— any time at all— creeping about in a world so dominated by the various modalities of Big Sister—be they good, bad, or middling; gor­ geous or grotesque; mother, matron, goddess, or queen; virgin or virago; wet nurse, witch, hag or whore—so dominated that he can’t even call his body his own? Gloriana, Eliza, Una, Error, Duessa, Lucifera, Night, Celia, Fidelia, Speranza, Charissa, Medina, Belphoebe, Occasion, Pha­ edria, Philotime, Alma, Praysdesire and Shamefastness, Impotence and Impatience, Acrasia— all those power ful, perfect, petulant, provocative, or appalling women, women wall to wall. Jeepers. Do you think it’s any more fun to be scared in the woods by Belphoebe or led on a line by Una than to be decked by Occasion or Impotence or Acrasia? Especially when the familiar model of the tripartite soul featured in Book 2, the soul di­ vided into rational, irascible, and concupiscible faculties, is normatively and indeed resonantly male, so much so that one imagines its voice pitched more in the bass­baritone range than in that of the castrato.37 But it is not true­blue masculine through and through, and therein lies its problem. Its subordinate and less worthy parts (concupiscence in the sensitive or ani­ mal soul, appetite in the nutritive or vegetable soul) may be marked as fem­ inine, weaker, more antithetical to reason. Spenser hints at this during his description of the Castle of Temperance at 2.9.22 with the spelling, “fœminine,” which, as Hamilton brilliantly observes, “suggests that the feminine is . . . opposed to the masculine” (FQ, 251).

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Given this gender imbalance, given, that is, the identification of the soul’s krasis with masculinity, it’s easy to understand the otherwise arbitrary distribution of internal and external agencies in the following passage: Guyon is a man. Pyrochles and Cymochles are inward impulses or urges which he must fight. Acrasia, however, is external temptation, meaning that she must be an actual woman who ensnares many men . . . and whom Guyon successfully resists.38

Nor is it hard to understand why threats against reason that imperil the soul’s gender may be considered even more serious than excessive irasci­ bility. In 2.5.1 the narrator insists that the pursuit of temperance finds “no greater enimy” than the “stubborne perturbation” illustrated by Pyrochles’ self­endangering enlargement of Furor. But after the subse­ quent account of Cymochles deliquescing in the Bower—a “womanish weake knight, / . . . in Ladies lap entombed” (2.5.36)—and after the verse itself demonstrates Cymochlean desire by dallying for seven stanzas in a rhetorically lush fantasy of embowerment (2.5.28–34), the message changes: A harder lesson, to learne Continence In joyous pleasure, then in grievous paine: For sweetnesse doth allure the weaker sence So strongly, that uneathes it can refraine From that, which feeble nature covets faine; But griefe and wrath, that be her enemies, And foes of life, she better can restraine; Yet vertue vauntes in both their victories, And Guyon in them all shewes goodly maisteries. (2.6.1)39

“The weaker sense” of “feeble nature”: The “fear of effeminization” that Stephen Orgel notes as “a central element in all [Renaissance] discussions of what constitutes a ‘real man’ ” is fear of the woman within the man.40 Book 2 dramatizes an ideology of temperance that interprets this fear as a good thing. To read the book as a critique of the ideology is to change the venue from a trial of sexuality to a trial of the fear of sexuality, a trial of the gynophobic fantasy that fear privileges. • To write as a male reader, identifying unselfconsciously with Guyon’s position, with Guyon’s gaze, leads to a misrecognition of the gender­ specific character of the self­fashioning process figured in Guyon’s violent repression of his own sexual arousal. What is being fashioned

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here is . . . a male subject, whose self­defining violence is enacted against an objectified other who is specifically female . . . [and threat­ ens] him with maternal engulfment.41

It is no wonder, then, that in Book 2 temperance is a “heroic” and “dynamic even frantic maintenance of order in the face of perpetual insurrection.” These are Michael Schoenfeldt’s words, and according to him they express Spenser’s idea of the discipline necessary to protect the “fragile and un­ stable” self.42 I agree with the description but not with the attribution. Al­ though Schoenfeldt’s account of the beleaguered temperate self applies as much to Alma and Medina as to Guyon, it’s obvious that the generic self he is concerned with, the subject and agent of temperance, is more restric­ tively a male self than he allows—not the human self, not an androgyne self. He doesn’t always make that clear, but he does register the complex­ ity of the situation while describing the argument of canto 9: The castle’s owner and tour guide is a woman who “leads the knights . . . through a body that is probably masculine. . . . The sexual ideology at work here is certainly masculinist, but in a conjunction of traits confusedly endowed with masculine and feminine meaning.” 43 Book 2 questions the unhappy, defensive, anxiety­driven structure Schoenfeldt eloquently depicts as temperance. Even as that virtue’s clas­ sical and Christian antecedents are established, its cultural glamour and psychological efficacy are demystified.44 The protagonist’s behav ior con­ tributes to this effect. When Guyon first rides into view, we see him ini­ tially through Archimago’s eyes as a potential cat’s paw, a muscular and domesticated but skittish terminator, “all armd in harnesse meete, / That from his head no place appeared to his feet.” He travels with an old but “comely Palmer” who “with a staffe his feeble steps did stire” (steer and stir) and whose “slow pace” makes the knight temper “his trampling steed” (2.1.6–7), which suggests that the Palmer’s job is to keep Guyon from prick­ ing on the plain. This is a comfortably familiar emblem of generational teamwork: Wis­ dom tempers courage; prudence counsels self­restraint; gravitas commands pietas— comfortable, at any rate, to men—an exclusively male genealogy, a homosocial ideal of identity formation. The only trouble is that in Book 2 it is honored as much in the breach as in the observance. Several times Guyon rushes impetuously off to practice what the Palmer preaches—“the weake to strengthen, and the strong suppresse”— only to get misdirected by Archimago, lose his horse to Braggadocchio, take a beating from Furor and a boat ride in the wrong direction with Phaedria, and end up half dead

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outside Mammon’s cave.45 Not an enviable record—less like the patron of temperance than a patient in need of it. At the conclusion of the first epi­ sode (the fiasco involving Archimago and Redcrosse), the Palmer reasserts his leadership with a competently ritualistic disengagement (2.1.31–33) and then guides his charge over dale and hill, And with his steedie staffe did point his way: His race with reason, and with words his will, From foul intemperance he oft did stay, And suffred not in wrath his hastie steps to stray. (2.1.34)

“Steedie”—a 1590 reading inadvisedly emended to “steadie” in 1609—picks out the locomotive function of the staff that “stires” the Palmer’s feeble steps and is thus both the equivalent and the moderator of the hero’s tram­ pling steed. The colon ending the second line has the force of an id est leading to an allegorical interpretation of the visualized act. In its Faerie form, temperance is allegorical magic: Rational and verbal restraint are no more difficult or problematic than the staff­pointing to which they are pas­ torally reduced. Nevertheless, the last two lines, especially “foul” and “oft” and “suffred,” suggest that the allegory may be a whitewash. But at this early juncture in the poem, the moral force the staff represents is not seriously challenged, as it will be later. One contextual allusion may frame the portrayal of the Palmer, his staff, and his moral leadership in a possibly wry set of associations. The portrayal is evocative of an important but problematic and often parodied figure in the cultural, moral, and sexual economy of Spenser’s England: the human­ ist schoolmaster whose lessons are sometimes punctuated by the rattattoo of the palmer or the rod.46 Studies of pedagogy and mimesis have isolated this figure as a significant factor contributing to the crises that beset the construction of masculine identity during the sixteenth century. Perhaps the Palmer is the personification of a punitive paddle. Between Guyon’s steed and the Palmer’s staff there is an important dif­ ference in symbolic valency. The former derives ultimately from the em­ bodied tripartite soul of Platonic tradition: Whether it signifies irascibility or concupiscence, the steed connotes aspects of male virility associated with sexual difference and its bodily inscription. The staff, however, is a prosthesis dissociated from the body, a crafted object cunningly framed of “vertuous” wood and invested with an extra­organic genealogy. It rep­ resents phallic authority, and it comes into its own in canto 12, when

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Mosaic and Hermetic analogies affiliate it with the herald’s staff, the di­ vine magician’s wand, and the god’s scepter. They give it an aura of antiq­ uity that fixes attention on the continuity, the transmission, of traditional male authority from the gods to the Palmer.47 At the same time, this continuity is charged with negative meaning.48 Through the analogy of the Palmer’s staff to Mercury’s caduceus in 2.12.41, our heroes’ assault on the Bower of Bliss is compared to an invasion of the “Stygian realmes,” and when, two stanzas later, they pass through an ivory gate, the assault is marked as a katabasis, a voyage down into an infernal region of false dreams.49 From the Morpheus episode in Book 1 on, Spense­ rian katabasis is Virgilian rather than Christian in its mode and meaning, which is to say that it is represented not as a world­changing redemptive trip to the lower world but as a trope in which to journey “down” means to journey “back” through a syllabus of literary precursors to the region of the dead those precursors now inhabit. This is the region of the past, the impe­ rium of mos maiores, the medium through which the all­male chorus of the dead poets’ society perceive, understand, predict, and sing the future.50 All this suggests to me that as guide and teacher the Palmer leaves some­ thing to be desired, and possibly something to be feared. That something, which is necessary to the success of his regimen, is a­krasia, or Acrasia. Greenblatt trenchantly articulates this relation in a comment that identi­ fies Acrasia with “excess” and does so by appealing (in effect) to the princi­ ple of specular tautology: “Excess” is defined not by some inherent balance or impropriety, but by the mechanism of control, the exercise of restraining power. And if excess is virtually invented by this power, so too, paradoxically, power is invented by excess: this is why Acrasia [and what she is made to represent] cannot be destroyed. . . . For were she not to exist as a constant threat, the power Guyon embodies would also cease to exist.51

Thus, as Sprengnether and Silberman have demonstrated, temperance is not a defense against the self’s instability. Temperance is its cause. The poem targets precisely the hyperactive conception of temperance Michael Schoenfeldt describes.52 A paranoid ideal of security generates a nightmare of perpetual siege. Consider, for example, the first stanza of canto 12. Why does the nar­ rator describe the goodly frame of temperance in a figure that recalls Alma’s castle/body and then rewrites it as a kind of dominatrix?

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Now gins this goodly frame of Temperance Fairely to rise, and her adorned hed To pricke of highest praise forth to advance, Formerly grounded, and fast setteled On firme foundation of true bountihed; And this brave knight, that for that vertue fights, Now comes to point of that same perilous sted, Where Pleasure dwelles in sensuall delights, Mongst thousand dangers, and ten thousand magick mights.

Parataxis and three enjambments push the first and longer of the stanza’s two clauses energetically forward through a summary of the work done by the preceding eleven cantos and then maps it onto an image previously used to describe Alma’s castle. By contrast, the second clause describing Guyon seems hobbled by hypotaxis. For just a moment, the castle is trans­ formed into a threatening figure the seeds of which were planted in the ninth canto: The frame thereof seemd partly circulare, And part triangulare, O worke divine; These two the first and last proportions are, The one imperfect, mortall, fœminine; Th’other immortall, perfect, masculine. (2.9.22)

Since lines 4 and 5 are reversible, the linear sequence seems to be arbitrarily scrambled: The circular part and the first proportion are prosodically linked to the imperfect feminine gender, so that the reader has to resist the word order in order to uphold the primacy of the masculine. The ten­ sion is increased, as I note above, by the spelling of “fœminine.” It’s as if a momentary challenge to the normative order materializes in the verse. This challenge revives in 2.12.1 in the looming figure whose “adorned hed” ges­ tures complexly beyond Alma and toward more aggressive apparitions of female power—not only Gloriana and Elizabeth, but also Duessa, Lucifera, Mammon’s Luciferan daughter, and, in the remote symbolic distances, the terrible Cybelean mother. I have to confess that I find the figure engagingly sinister. The phallic daunger of Temperance is displaced to a feminized structure, and one that’s still rising, still animated by her desire to advance toward a climactic ful­ fillment, which will be achieved when the knight “comes to point of that same perilous sted, / Where Pleasure dwelles.” Even though “that perilous sted” is distinguished from “this goodly frame,” its “point” converges with

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the “pricke of highest praise,” and, in this moment, as the a­krasia of Maleger’s shade gives way to that of Acrasia’s, you may recall that Alma, like Pleasure, dwells “Mongst thousand dangers, and ten thousand magick mights.” In fact, because “pricke” and “point” are also archery terms (Ham­ ilton’s gloss), they recall the several references in the preceding canto to the bowman, Maleger, and his archers. Commenting on the final stanza of canto 11 in still another of his illuminating glosses, Hamilton notes that the description of Arthur wounded—“of his armes despoyled” and with Alma hovering about—“parallels that of Acrasia’s victims.” This prepares the way for the forces of Temperance to mutate into those of pleasure and Acrasia. Pleasure is the form Temperance takes in order to make its hero stand at the crossroads and “for that vertue fight.” It may well turn out— to borrow a figure from Book 1—that the castle of Temperance is built on the sands of the Bower of Bliss. • Women are dangerous to men because sexual passion for women renders men effeminate: this is an age in which sexuality itself is misogynistic, as the love of women threatens the integrity of the perilously achieved male identity.53

The most significant pattern in canto 12’s confrontation between Temper­ ance and Pleasure is a transgendering of power in which accountability is gradually shifted from male to female agency. The Odyssean voyagers first encounter shades of Charybdis and Scylla in the “Gulfe of Greedinesse” and “Rocke of Vile Reproch” (2.12.2–9). But whereas Scylla and Charyb­ dis are traditionally female, here they are rewritten as male monsters.54 Like funhouse mirrors, they reflect in distorted form the calamities that befall men who succumb to the lure of “lustfull luxurie and thriftlesse wast” (2.12.9). The message delivered by the allegory and the Palmer’s moral is that this is strictly “a man thing.” Victims of their own intemperance, these “miserable wights” have only themselves to blame.55 Nevertheless, the dis­ course of temperance finds little comfort in this reflexive formulation, and steers away from it. During the remainder of the canto it gradually turns from male to female threats, and from the dangers of shipwreck to those of seduction. This change is signaled in stanza 10, immediately after the Palmer’s mini­sermon. As the Ferryman plied his oars, “[T]he hoare waters from his frigot ran, / And the light bubbles daunced all along,” and the “salt brine out of the billows sprong.” At that moment the narrator brings the floating

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islands into view as if they too are bubbly effects of the temperate rowing that roils up the ocean; the trio of temperate travelers “espy” both the wandering islands and the giggling Phaedria alongside her “little skippet.” The light dancing bubbles not only “anticipate Phaedria’s appearance” (Hamilton, FQ, 283), they are its figurative origin. The islands and Pha­ edria, whose “boate withouten oare” propels itself, emerge here as a fan­ tasy projected from the efforts of the stiff oars of temperance.56 “Frigot” first appears in 2.6.7 as another name for Phaedria’s “Gondelay.” Martha Craig suggests an allusion to Italian “frigotare, ‘to chuckle, to shrug or strut for overjoy,’ ” but the more obvious echo, “frigate,” momentary lights up a side­splitting image of Captain Phaedria (464).57 In canto 12 the mean­ ing of “frigot” is influenced by its introduction into the salty, “hoare,” and frigorific context of the boat of temperance, and the identity of the two opposed forms of transport is thus suggested shortly before the perpetu­ ally “salt” Phaedria reappears in her “skippet.”58 When the boat of tem­ perance finally approaches the “sacred soile, where all our perils grow,” a strange thing happens. As Guyon prepares to disembark, “the nimble boate so well her sped / That with her crooked keele the land she strooke.” Hero and guide sally forth while the boatman “by his boate behind did stay,” and we hear no more about him (2.12.37–38). But for some reason, the last reference to his boat all but turns it into a Phaedrian skippet. Martha Craig reads the representation of Phaedria as a critique of the effeminizing influence of Italianism, and particularly of Venetianism, on English morals (464, 466).59 Giving this interpretation another turn, I take Phaedria to be a light­hearted burlesque of that critique, that is, a jab at those who, like Ascham, warn against “the Siren songs of Italy” (among whose singers Ascham singles out Petrarch and Ariosto). Phaedria differs from similar Spenserian figures in that she and her little “gondelay” or “frigot” or “skippet” are both fun and funny, never more so than when she quotes Our Lord (via Tasso) as a way of lulling Cymochles to sleep (2.6.15–17).60 Outrageously but hilariously irreverent, she affords a famil­ iar standpoint within the poem from which to smile at the principles of “Stoick” censorship Guyon and the Palmer are shown more or less hysteri­ cally, and not very effectively, to defend. Phaedria’s is the standpoint of Richard Helgerson’s Elizabethan prodigals.61 Her antics, like theirs, send up the “rugged forehead” of the civic humanism represented by the Palmer and his staff, or rod. Phaedrian poetry temporarily disables the Palmer and laughs at the repressive discourse that invents it as a model of wicked woman’s wiles only to castigate it as the “pleasing baite” “by which fraile youth is oft to follie led” (FQ, 4.Pr.1). But “Phaedrian poetry” of course designates a

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mixed, indeed, a conflicted, form of expression in which the male narrator’s ambivalence is as much the subject of representation as is Phaedria. The Phaedrian experience first materializes as a mirage viewed through the eyes of the hapless Cymochles, who sees what appears to be a movable billboard— a “bush” in both senses of the term—that advertises the plea­ sures of embowerment: he saw whereas did swim A long the shore, as swift as glaunce of eye, A little Gondelay, bedecked trim With boughes and arbours woven cunningly, That like a litle forrest seemed outwardly. (2.6.2)

Beginning with the devaluation implied by “glaunce of eye,” “­delay,” and “cunningly,” the terms of narratorial disapproval are threaded throughout the episode, but they seem to enable or justify rather than to suppress the delight in disorder sustained through eighteen stanzas of rapt attention to and quotation of the garrulous Phaedria. The narrator’s Cymochlean ex­ cess is sublimely and pleasurably ridiculous because he gets carried away by his impersonation of Phaedria getting carried away. “A harder lesson, to learne Continence / In joyous pleasure, then in grievous paine” (2.6.1): By the time Guyon appears on the scene in 2.6.19 it has become clear that these plaintive words characterize not only the figures within the narra­ tive but also the behav ior of the narrative itself. Phaedria’s refusal to let “the Blacke Palmer” board her “ferry” (6.19) imitates and ratifies the absence of his restraining influence from stanzas that go on Phaedrian holi­ day before Guyon’s arrival, stanzas that dwell perversely and pleasurably— and mischievously—on Phaedria’s perverse and mischievous calls to pleasure. The narrative’s indulgence in “immodest Merth” reaches two climac­ tic moments. The first is the cacophonous double allusion that intertextu­ ally complicates Phaedria’s hedonistic sermon. The second occurs at the end of her fourth and longest utterance. In a skewed replay of Medina’s impassioned plea (2.2.29–31) she importunes Cymochles and Guyon to make love not war: “Mars is Cupidoes frend, / And is for Venus loves re­ nowmed more, / Then all his wars and spoiles, the which he did of yore” (2.6.35).62 This is followed by one of the great moments in literary history: “Thereat she sweetly smiled.” The narrator then celebrates her successful pacification of the two warriors with a pair of misapplied proverbs: “Such powre have pleasing words: such is the might / Of courteous clemencie in gentle hart” (2.6.36). Yet throughout this performance, even as he dwells

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in delight on her gaucheries, he shows his moral and aesthetic sensibilities being persistently offended by her looseness and behavioral style.63 The sum effect of so incontinent and unstable a performance is to make him sound as prudish as the Palmer, or as troubled and as ludicrously chival­ rous as Guyon, who was wise, and warie of her will, And ever held his hand upon his hart: Yet would not seeme so rude, and thewed ill, As to despise so courteous seeming part, That gentle Ladie did to him impart, But fairely tempring fond desire subdewd, And ever her desired to depart. (2.6.26)

At the end, “She no lesse glad, then he desirous was / Of his departure thence” (2.6.37), and in the remaining lines of the stanza, as Alpers notes, “Spenser keeps in touch with Phaedria’s point of view . . . by making each line a separate accusation against Guyon” (317). But whether or not “the lines mean one thing to Phaedria and another to Guyon and us” (ibid.), the Phaedrian rhetoric and point of view that dominate the episode indel­ ibly underscore the narrative’s impatience with the rigid hero and his spoil­ sport guide. Phaedria finds them both a little slow on the uptake— a little “sluggish,” perhaps, like “the dull billowes” through which “her flit barke” speeds with such legerity. But why did Guyon let her so easily whisk him away without even giving him “leave to bid that aged sire / Adieu”? (2.6.20). • A major Phaedrian moment in Book 2 occurs in the little scene of frolic immortalized by C. S. Lewis: As Guyon hapned by the same to wend, Two naked Damzelles he therein espyde, Which therein bathing, seemed to contend, And wrestle wantonly, ne car’d to hyde, Their dainty parts from vew of any, which them eyde. Sometimes the one would lift the other quight Above the waters, and then downe againe Her plong, as over maistered by might, Where both awhile would covered remaine, And each the other from to rise restraine; The whiles their snowy limbes, as through a vele,

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So through the Christall waves appeared plaine: Then suddeinly both would themselves unhele, And th’amarous sweet spoiles to greedy eyes revele. As that faire Starre, the messenger of morne, His deawy face out of the sea doth reare: Or as the Cyprian goddesse, newly borne Of th’Oceans fruitfull froth, did first appeare: Such seemed they, and so their yellow heare Christalline humour dropped downe apace. Whom such when Guyon saw, he drew him neare, And somewhat gan relent his earnest pace, His stubborne brest gan secret pleasaunce to embrace. (2.12.63–65)

Lewis’s cavalier reference to Cissie and Flossie, reducing Spenser’s bath­ ers to (what his colleagues might have called) “shopgirls” cavorting in a public pool, is misleading in part because these figures do more than duck and giggle and display themselves for the benefit of any male “which them eyde.” They perform two of the major activities of the book of temperance. First, they wrestle, recalling Guyon the wrestler’s fight with Furor, also Arthur’s scrimmages not only with Pyrochles and Maleger but also with another pair of female brawlers, Impotence and that terminal dunker, Im­ patience. Second, they contribute to the spirit of intertextual pluralism that dominates canto 12 by summoning up figures from an earlier text—the naked wrestling swimmers in Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (15.58–66).64 As to their wrestling, its target is not the chivalry of noble riders but the dirty and demeaning hand­to­hand struggle forced upon our unhorsed heroes by villeinous enemies in moments of humiliation, desperate frustration, and Pyrochlean fury. The bathers don’t simply mock­wrestle; they wres­ tle “wantonly,” advertising as an alternative to “dolefull . . . scarmoges” (2.6.34) the more pleasurable contact sport in which predatory women re­ duce their disarmed heroes to “Love’s warriors only” (Ger. Lib. 15.63). In short, they enact the Phaedrian program: “Another warre, and other weap­ ons I / Doe love, where love does give his sweet alarmes, / Without bloud­ shed” (2.6.34). This is more than a come­on. The bathers play both men’s and women’s roles. They “seemed to contend” like men only to suggest that the wanton wrestling of two women is preferable to the angry brawling of two men. Their play glances at same­sex erotics while staging an aquatic striptease for men’s “greedy eyes.” The rhetoric of exuberant self­delight in play thus

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slides into the rhetoric of exuberant self­display, and the exuberance edges their energetic hide­and­seek with mockery. Under the pretext of careless abandon they watch themselves being watched, and with preemptive voy­ eurism stage a caricature of what it is “that men in women do require,” the lineaments not of gratified desire but of men’s pornographic fantasy. Theirs is a high­spirited travesty of the Acrasian nightmare that motivates and un­ derwrites the ideology of self­restraint. But they flaunt it in a Phaedrian rather than Acrasian mode, an effect that sharpens when, after the double simile at stanza 65, the bathers notice Guyon and pull out all stops—but only after they “stood / Gazing a while at his unwonted guise” (2.12.66). The moment of pause, as if to allow them to take in their target and prepare their show, renders the Phaedrian reprise that follows more the­ atrical and comical. For over two stanzas they take turns frenetically al­ ternating between coy and brazen poses, engaging in Elissan and Perissan capers, turning the roughly parallel contraries of Shamefastnesse versus Praysdesire and Impotence versus Impatience into modes of flirtation, until Guyon’s face begins to sparkle, at which point Their wanton meriments they did encreace, And to him beckned, to approach more neare, And shewd him many sights, that courage cold could reare. (2.12.68)

Finally, the translation and transgendering of power is repeated in the dou­ ble simile at stanza 65. Spenser accurately if loosely translates the star figure from Tasso, departing from it in only one detail; he adds the mas­ culine personification (“His deawy face”) that confuses matters by alter­ ing the sex both of the bathers it’s compared to and of the star itself, which is traditionally male in its hesperian manifestation but changes to Venus in the morning. The sex change is repeated when the rising of the morn­ ing star gives way to the birth of its eponymous goddess from the severed genitals of the father. The androgynous structure of the house of Temperance, along with the hint of gender conflict registered in the spelling of “fœminine” (2.9.22), has already been mentioned. Elsewhere, Spenser twice refers to the lability of Venus’s gender: at Faerie Queene 4.10.41 (“Both male and female, both under one name”) and at Colin Clouts Come Home Againe 800–801 (the God of Love was “[b]orne without Syre or couples of one kynd, / For Venus selfe doth soly couples seeme”). In the allegories of reproduction John Hankins collects from Spenser’s sources, the foam­born Aphrodite is identified with “the masculine semen” and with “the desire caused in part by a superabun­ dance of that fluid.” 65 Thus although mythographers and others depict

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Venus as a goddess, they interpret her as an alienated figure of the mascu­ line role in procreation.66 Like the roiling sea­cradled sex of the castrated father from which she is born, Venus materializes— along with Phaedria and Acrasia—as a projection, an ejaculation, of male fantasy, constituted and empowered by the seminal spume of desire, and then, according to the logic of specular tautology, externalized as its object and its cause.67 As I suggest above, a comic version of this foamy genesis occurs when the wandering islands and Phaedria seem to materialize together like Aph­ rodite in a bubbly springtime fantasy stirred up by the “stiffe oares” that aggravate the ocean. For me, the double simile associates the journey of the “well­rigged . . . barke” of temperance (2.11.4) with the birth of Venus and also of the Venerean/Circean intemperance named Acrasia. As prod­ ucts of a primal act of penile or literal castration, Venus and her avatars are abiding figures of the symbolic castration necessary (in David Miller’s words) “to erect the . . . privilege of the phallus.” 68 That privilege—which in Book 2 is called temperance— depends on, is supported by, the femini­ zation and demonization of akrasia. • My treatment of Cissie and Flossie has been no dif ferent from Lewis’s in one important respect. I have been describing them as if they are indepen­ dent characters, autonomous agents, when obviously they are no such thing. They are what they signify, which is less what they imitate and al­ lude to—the passage in Jerusalem Delivered—than that they imitate and allude to a topos within the Circean discourse: the temptation and un­ manning of heroes by perfidious women. Thus all the intentions and ef­ fects I ascribed to the bathers in the preceding section must be reascribed to male discourse, and this includes the illusion that the bathers are autonomous—that deliberate female provocation (to replay Lewis’s terms) is the cause of male prurience. Re­cognized as an effect of male discourse, the illusion flags the activity of specular tautology, the process by which the “sweetnesse [that] doth allure the weaker sence” (2.6.1) is systemati­ cally alienated to, personified as, phantasmatic female provocateurs. To ex­ pose the process is to show how a traditional epico­romantic discourse provides the scapegoat that can be used to excuse and therefore to render more forgivable a hero’s occasional lapse in the “whelming lap” (2.4.17) of the temptress who flatters his manhood by displaying her desire.69 Stephen Gosson, who noted in 1579 that “our wreastling at armes, is turned to wal­ lowyng in Ladies laps,” would have been sensitive to this exculpatory dis­ placement: “[T]he ornamentes” with which poets “beautifye their woorkes”

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are “the Cuppes of Circes, that turne reasonable creatures into brute Beastes.”‘70 Spenser defamiliarizes such clichés by taking them literally and treating them as displacements. One of the strategies of textual critique is to represent the standpoint of the slandered scapegoat and have its agents talk back to temperance. Phaedria is the most loquacious of these agents, but I’m not sure “talk back” is the right expression for Cissie and Flossie, who are not major players and are not much with words, but who make a big splash in a deceptively small pool.71 Inasmuch as they caricature not only heroic wrestling but also the pornographic fantasy they objectify, the bathers dramatize male self­mockery and self­despite. To see their contribution in this light is to see it as the acknowledgment both of self­disempowerment and of the slanderous reduction of woman to a spectral displacement that taunts its maker. • The enforcement of temperance begins to demand forms of extreme violence that replicate the forces it intends to harness.72

The conventional focus on the quest formula encouraged by the titular emphasis, “The Legend of Sir Guyon, or Of Temperaunce,” may divert attention from the scenario announced in the Letter to Ralegh and dis­ closed by Guyon to Medina at 2.2.43: the primary conflict in Book 2 is between the Palmer and Acrasia, with Guyon serving an instrumental function. Compared to Redcrosse’s quest, Guyon’s is, if anything, anti­ erotic in the sense that he is less uncomfortable dealing with the dangers of irascibility than with those of concupiscence.73 But his discomfort, which is comically featured in the Phaedria episode, is perforce thematized and amplified by the fact that his guide’s major objective lies in the area of gen­ der politics. And in this area the Palmer has problems of his own. Of the several flaws isolated by Judith Anderson in her persuasive analysis of his early responses, the major ones concern his labored “Aesopic” aetiology of the stream that won’t wash off the bloody­handed babe (2.2.5–10) and his hilariously self­assured and misdirected insistence that heterosexual love is the filthy root of Phedon’s problem (2.4.34–35).74 The former, as Ander­ son notes, “is basically a presentation of extreme opposites, of passionate lust and frigid purity” (162), with the Palmer praising the transformation of the nymph’s “stony feare” into the “vertues” that make the water “chast and pure, as purest snow, / Ne lets her waves with any filth be dyde, / But ever like her selfe unstained hath been tryde” (2.2.8–9).75

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It is generally agreed that the appearance of the angel and Arthur, along with the reappearance of the Palmer, around the stuporific Guyon in canto 8 signal “a significant change [for the better] in the relationship of the Palmer to Guyon.”76 Guyon, at least, doesn’t ramble off on his own, and for most of the next three cantos the reader gets a vacation from the Palmer. But after he returns in canto 12 to take charge of the final leg of the quest, a significant change of another kind appears. When his staff was first described in 2.1.7, emphasis fell on its allegorical potency as an ethical symbol: Pointing the way was conflated with the restraining influence of words and reason. But in canto 12 this potency is no longer adequate to the challenges that confront temperance. The “vertuous staffe” (2.12.26, 86) becomes charged with thaumaturgical power; its “vertue” consists more in its magical than in its moral force. That force and the objective it serves are validated by assimilation to biblical and classical precedents. Nevertheless, a review of its actual uses indicates that the very passages in which an august phallic genealogy is affirmed are the passages that most betray the phallic impotency of temperance as a defense against akrasia. During canto 12, the Palmer delivers three strikes with his staff. First, after calming the terrified hero with the information that the sea monsters are illusions concocted by Acrasia to scare him off, he lifted “up his vertuous staffe on hye” and “smote the sea, which calmed was with speed” (2.12.26).77 This invests the action with the authority of multiple distinguished pre­ cedents covering all cultural bases: Moses in the Old Testament (Exodus 14–16), Christ in the New Testament (Matthew 8.26), and the classicized Hermit of Ascalon in Gerusalemme Liberata (14.73). To some extent, such allusionary overkill has a compensatory feel to it. Next, he quells the raging beasts outside the Bower with “[h]is mighty staffe, that could all charmes defeat” and all “monsters . . . subdew to him, that did it beare,” so that “[I]n stead of fraying, they them selves did feare.” The virtue of the staff is now identified with that of Mercury’s caduceus (2.12.40–41), and this association, together with the Palmer’s subsequent actions, in turn identify the “vertue” of his staff with that of moly, Hermes’ gift to Odysseus. Finally, when our heroes encounter Acrasia’s beasts on their way out, Guyon asks what they “meant” and the Palmer tells him they are her “transformed” lovers, “turned into figures hideous, / According to their mindes like monstru­ ous.”78 Guyon then asks that they be restored to human form, and with the third stroke of his “vertuous staffe” the Palmer obliges (2.12.85–86). Thus it isn’t until canto 12 that we discover that the Palmer is a magus with arcane powers, powers that match or duplicate those of Acrasia, the effects of whose spells he can reverse.79 From early in Book 2 he had

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expressed predictably strong opinions about temperance, chastity, and love, and had also shown himself in possession of esoteric knowledge.80 But in canto 12 he does and says things that mark him as an Acrasian in­ sider, an expert on Acrasian affairs. And by relegating the restoration of her lovers to the Palmer, the text conspicuously departs from its Homeric source, in which a domesticated Circe helps the hero and restores the men with her wand and medicine. Although this comparison with Circe fur­ ther demonizes Acrasia, it places the Palmer in a strangely ambiguous position. To the extent that his role and action are partly affined to and defined by those of Circe, they must also be partly affined to—and defined by?—those of Acrasia. As a female figure of evil, an intemperate witch with a classical pedigree, Acrasia is the dark double of the good and temper­ ate male magus whose name evokes a Christian institution. But the duplic­ ity of mirroring powers casts unarticulated shadows that link the Palmer vaguely with his enemies—with Archimago as well as with Acrasia.81 • I conclude not with an anecdote but with a parable, the parable of Pinoc­ chio and his nose: The more he lies, the bigger it gets. This logic is in­ verted in the parable of the phallus: The bigger it gets, the more it lies. In short, this is the logic of castration, and it is founded on the alienability of the phallus, which can express masculine power “only symbolically (that is, . . . not sexually)” and which—for the very reason that it is not a body part— can too easily be alienated.82 As I suggest above, the anxiety it pro­ duces is figured in the first stanza of 2.12 in the strange depiction of the “goodly frame of Temperance.” Book 2 ends with a victory for Acrasia in that the imperfect restoration of her victims—“they did unmanly looke” and resisted or resented their liberation— signifies a last­minute breach of the powers previously integrated by the ambiguous epithet “vertuous”: The Palmer’s staff retains its magical potency but his resort to the violence of magic testifies to the failure of moral authority and to the alienation of akrasia to Acrasia.83 It is true that one stroke of his “vertuous staffe” can return her victims to their original form and show them for what they are: Streight way he with his vertuous staffe them strooke, And streight of beasts they comely men became; Yet being men they did unmanly looke, And stared ghastly, some for inward shame, And some for wrath, to see their captive Dame. . . . (2.12.86)

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But this is only the mirror of Acrasian enchantment, whereas the aim of any Mulcastrian pedagogue prepared to use the “Palmer wyth a Rodde” whenever necessary is to work the more difficult magic of reformation of which this easy metamorphosis is a hyperbole. The Palmer’s stroke restores their shapes but fails to improve minds and wills still subject to akrasia. Such a conclusion justifies and underscores the sense of futility conveyed by the “rigour pittilesse” with which Guyon destroys the Bower. To imag­ ine that the Bower is simply located in a particular place is an idyllic eva­ sion because it leads to the mistaken impression that “man” can get rid of it, destroy it, be free of it, and move on. But since the Bower is a literary topos, a place in male discourse (and the “mind”), making it vanish as a mimetic topos only ensures its continuing power over the mind as a liter­ ary topos. I noted earlier that Elizabeth Heale offers two dif ferent explanations of the assignment of responsibility for suspending the instruments of Acra­ sia’s victims: (1) “The delinquency is Acrasia’s,” and (2) it “is a sign of Spens­ er’s realism” that “those who willingly seek out” the Bower will not be freed “from themselves” either by its destruction or by “the action of the Palmer’s staff.” My conclusion is that these judgments are incompatible, or to put it tendentiously, that the first is a mystification and misrepresen­ tation of the second.84 The true genesis of Acrasia and her power is dis­ closed by the figure of Grill, who “chooseth, with vile difference, / To be a beast, and lacke intelligence” (2.12.87). Although the Palmer character­ izes this as “foule incontinence,” a precise Aristotelian would note that what was just described is not incontinence but stubborn and dedicated intem­ perance: not being victimized but getting victimized; not lacking intelligence but choosing to lack it— disowning knowledge, “suspending” one’s “instruments”— and thereby alienating the control of one’s akrasia to its figural fulfillment in Acrasia. Grill represents what Guyon, his Palmer, and temperance fear to be, and what they blame on Acrasia. Or so it seems in 2002 as I continue to wonder what would have happened to Acrasia had the Palmer “with his vertuous staffe her strooke.”

chapter 4

Resisting Translation: Britomart in Book 3 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Old Archimago, the archi­mage and the arch­image, the enchanter with “mightie science” (1.2.10) and the feckless Old Man, the strongest of the strong and the weakest of the weak, is a figure of male fantasy dominated by the logic of the castration principle.1 In his role as arch­villain in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, his primary target is not Redcrosse, the book’s hero, but Redcrosse’s lady Una: “For her he hated as the hissing snake, / And in her many troubles did most pleasure take” (1.2.9). That the hissing snake in the ambiguous construction can denote either Una as characterized by Archimago or Archimago as characterized by the narrator draws the two image­makers, Archimago and the narrator, together in a common proj­ ect of demonization. In this blending of anti­papism with misogyny the pharmakos of evil illusion becomes the pharmakon of poetic truth, the re­ medial scapegoat that “refuses to be bound or limited: He continually es­ capes the fictional role of a simple antagonist, and his duplicitous creations threaten constantly to contaminate the poet’s.”2 Hence his own anoma­ lous reappearance in Book 3 (4.45), just when Florimell is about to reenact Una’s flight through the woods, brings to the surface the originary power of the castration principle behind the gynophobic discourses disseminated 173

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among his surrogates in Book 3. In this chapter I examine the manifesta­ tions of this principle in the legend of Britomart. Its power is explicitly invested not only in the allegorical and magical violence of antipoetic scapegoats—the witch, Proteus, and Busirane—but also in the apparently benign patrons of patriarchal order and continuity. Britomart’s violent awakening to love, her induction into the heterosexual regime of the trans­ latio imperii, is presided over by an agent whose motives and career are shown to be dominated by the fantasy of castration. This agent is Merlin, and he is introduced in 3.3 as a figure of folklore by a narrator who reports what “men say” and who addresses the reader like a tour guide promoting the thrills and chills of a weekend in old Wales. He begins, however, with a backward glance at Archimago and Mammon: Britomart and Glauce, disguised “in straunge / And base attyre, that none might them bewray,” travel To Maridunum, that is now by chaunge Of name Cayr­Merdin cald. . . . There the wise Merlin whylome wont (they say) To make his wonne, low underneath the ground, In a deepe delve, farre from the vew of day, That of no living wight he mote be found, when so he counseld with his sprights encompast round. And if thou ever happen that same way To travell, goe to see that dreadfull place: It is an hideous hollow cave (they say) under a rocke that lyes a little space From the swift Barry, tombling downe apace, Emongst the woodie hilles of Dynevowre: But dare thou not, I charge, in any cace, To enter into that same balefull Bowre, For fear the cruell Feends should thee unwares devowre. But standing high aloft, low lay thine eare, And there such ghastly noise of yron chaines, And brasen caudrons thou shalt rombling heare, which thousand sprights with long enduring paines Doe tosse, that it will stonne thy feeble braines, And oftentimes great grones, and grievous stounds, when too huge toile and labour them constraines. (3.3.7–9)

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“The cause some say is this”: Merlin commanded his sprights to build a brazen wall around his house of care and to stay at it until they brought it “to perfect end.”3 When his beloved Lady of the Lake suddenly called him away, he bound them to their labor “till his returne,” which failed to ma­ terialize because, “through that false Ladies traine,” he was “buried under beare” (3.10–11). As if to counter this fatal vulnerability the narrator goes on to exalt his magical powers, especially those enabling him singlehand­ edly to “dismay” huge “hostes of men” and, when he wished, “his enimies to fray” (3.12). The Merlin Spenser constructs as a folklore fantasy surrounds himself with walls, terrorizes his slaves, and is undone by a Bad Lady. His career profile is depicted in terms that emphasize insecurity, distrust of others, the desire to be invisible, the self­protective aspiration to a level of power that only magic or clairvoyance can guarantee, and the sexual vulnerabil­ ity that renders all precautions futile. A dextrous reading by Kenneth Gross throws light on this sinister figure: “This agent of truth . . . was ‘won­ drously begotten, and begonne / By false illusion of a guilefull spright / On a faire Ladie Nonne’ (3.3.13)—born, that is, out of demonic violation, or out of [the] meeting of illusion with nothing or ‘none.’ ” 4 The pun— begotten on no fair lady; of no woman born—lights up for only a mo­ ment, since the next four lines give the mother a name and pedigree, and suggest a demonic form of virgin birth in which the body of a Christian virgin, and of a Christian myth, are appropriated and inseminated by an Archimagian illusion. But what flashes forth from the pun leaves luminous traces after it fades: the fantasy of androgenesis as the hyperbolic expres­ sion of the male desire of impregnability. Its very impossibility measures the apprehensiveness with which males regard the necessary but less se­ cure practices of heterosexual reproduction. Myths of immaculate con­ ception and divine or demonic rape are attempts to maintain ideological control over female sexuality. We’ll see that although Merlin’s control of Britomart’s desire is given political legitimacy, it participates in a simi­ lar structure of illusion, anxiety, appropriation, or rape, and ideological co­optation. If the tone of high­spirited disenchantment with which the narrator re­ ports what “they say” makes light of regional superstitions and antiqui­ ties, with their apprehensive rocky­horror fantasies, it is to foreground his own creative transformation of Merlin from this menacing and capricious figure to the benign mouthpiece of Clio, the narrator’s “dearest sacred Dame” (3.4). But as a product of the intercourse of false illusion with

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nothing, the Welsh Merlin is by no means canceled out. His effort to bind fiends will be displaced to the effort to use prophecy to bind Britomart to her fate, and the Lady of the Lake’s interruption of his wall­building will be replicated by the secret “spectacle” that cuts the prophecy short and leaves him “dismayd” (3.50).5 Whatever else Merlin was dismayed by, the immediate cause is the specter of the phallic virgin’s destruction of a male fortress: Then shall a royall virgin raine, which shall Stretch her white rod over the Belgicke shore, And the great Castle smite so sore with all, That it shall make him shake, and shortly learne to fall. (3.49)

Even the positive reference to Elizabeth’s defeat of the Spanish forces in the Netherlands (“Castle” suggests Castilian) produces a gesture of recoil after the broken ending: But yet the end is not. There Merlin stayd, As overcomen of the spirites powre, or other ghastly spectacle dismayd, That secretly he saw, yet note discoure. (3.50)

Such coyness is a trap for the curious interpreter: Just when Britomart is being conscripted into the discourse of Tudor dynasticism, just when she is being shown why she should arc up through the martial then down to the marital and maternal stages of her “fated” trajectory, the very speech aimed at persuading her to submit to the male plot falters over an image of resistance to that trajectory, the glorious descendant who retains the rod of power and refuses motherhood. The unfinished history and wall converg­ ing thematically in the motif of endless work; the spirit­binding enchanter now, as prophet, overcome by the spirit’s power—these figures of analogy and reversal suggest another ghastly spectacle in which the royal virgin modulates into the Lady of the Lake who will make Merlin “shake, and shortly learne to fall.” Thus although the historical agenda of the reno­ vated Tudor Merlin is rhetorically distinguished from the abortive and fre­ netic activities ascribed to the folk Merlin, their continuity is textually affirmed in a manner that subverts the distinction. Like Pinocchio’s nose, the Tudor discourse stretches out the “soveraines goodly auncestrie, / . . . by dew degrees and long protense” (3.4)—or, as in the 1596 and later edi­ tions, “long pretence.” The outcome of Merlin’s chronicle is informed by the same anxiety that motivates his fiend­binding and wall­building.

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This anxiety had been foreshadowed in canto 2 when the narrator de­ scribed the “vertues” of Merlin’s “looking glasse.” At first it is depicted in innocuous terms as a useful addition to any royal household: It could show in perfect sight What ever thing was in the world contaynd, So that it to the looker appertaynd. . . .

But from this point on, what appertains to the looker reflects and objecti­ fies the maker’s apprehensiveness, and it is limited to two kinds of disclosure: what ever foe had wrought, or frend had faynd, Therein discovered was, ne ought mote pas, Ne ought in secret from the same remaynd; For thy it round and hollow shaped was, Like to the world it selfe, and seem’d a world of glas. (2.19)

The analogy is reversible: The world constructed by phobic fantasy is a world the hollow truth of which has been made transparent when its “con­ cealing continents” have been stripped away. It is the truth of a frangible reality dominated by the secret machinations of foes and false friends. The looker to whom this appertains is constructed in the mirror’s image. He or she— especially she—must discover/disclose the secret desire that will be interpreted and policed according to the necessities of state, and the se­ curity of princes, fathers, and lovers. The next stanza relocates this paranoid construction in the self­ shattering folly of sexual jealousy: Who wonders not, that reades so wonderous worke? But who does wonder, that has red the Towre, wherein th’Ægyptian Phao long did lurke From all mens vew, that none might her discoure, Yet she might all men vew out of her bowre? Great Ptolomæe it for his lemans sake Ybuilded all of glasse, by Magicke powre, And also it impregnable did make: Yet when his love was false, he with a peaze it brake. Such was the glassie globe that Merlin made, And gave unto king Ryence for his gard, That never foes his kingdome might invade,

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But it he knew at home before he hard Tydings thereof, and so them still debar’d. It was a famous Present for a Prince, And worthy worke of infinite reward, That treasons could bewray, and foes convince; Happie this Realme, had it remained ever since. (2.20–21)

Since “Ægyptian Phao” touches off a thought of Pharaoh, the analogue im­ plies that the imperial magician yields his power to the beloved he wants to conceal from potential competitors and that in acceding to her scopic desire he produces the very outcome he most fears.6 The self­fulfilling fear of treason and betrayal then marches across the bridge of “[s]uch was the glassie globe” to plant its banner in the counterfactual— and rueful—wish expressed in the alexandrine of stanza 21. Against this uneasy background I want to glance briefly at the relation between Britomart’s awakening to love and the two major subtexts that not only inform Spenser’s construction of Britomart but are also persistently and conspicuously echoed during the first three cantos: the stories of Scylla and Myrrha in the Ciris and Metamorphoses 10. Myrrha wants to sleep with her father, while Scylla’s passion for her father’s enemy Minos leads her in the opposite direction: She wants to betray her father and put his king­ dom in the enemy’s hands. When Glauce consolingly distinguishes the confused and distraught Britomart’s desire from that of Myrrha (2.41), she echoes the words of Scylla’s nurse, Carme (Ciris 237–40), mother of the original Britomartis. The two perversions ironically conflated by this in­ tersection and focused on Britomart project a range of threats to the pa­ triarchal organization of family and state, and since so much of Glauce’s language echoes Carme’s, that alternative to Myrrha’s incest looms with special force behind the dialogue in canto 2. By the end of the canto one would think that Merlin had read the Ciris and Metamorphoses 10 and had designed for Ryence, Britomart’s father, a glass that “treasons could be­ wray and foes convince” specifically with the predicaments of Nisus and Cinyras in mind. But Merlin does more. He is allowed to collaborate with the poet who rescues Britomart from her shadowy shelf life in Ciris. When the poet rein­ vents her along Ariostan lines as a woman warrior and dynastic progenitor, he also reinvents Ariosto’s Merlin so as to augment his prophetic power with poetic and rhetorical power—the power of shaping, interpreting, and directing the heroine’s desire. Yet in restoring Merlin to life, the poet not only gives him the power of the mirror but also motivates and contex­

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tualizes its defensive virtues by making them reflect the politico­sexual diffidence of a failed career. The genesis of Britomart’s passion is represented as the effect and the target of anx ieties inscribed in a network of male discourses that can only interpret woman’s desire as politically threaten­ ing. The same network interprets and promotes the major allegorical themes of each book—holiness, temperance, chastity—in ways congenial to cultur­ ally dominant ideals of behav ior and thought, ideals of spiritual, ethical, and sexual integrity. It is a network that opposes Eumnestes to Phantastes, the “matter of just memory” to “th’aboundance of an idle braine” (2.Pr.l), the Muses to the sirens, contemplation to Archimago, Alma to Acrasia. This table of opposites adumbrates the problematic of imagination picked out by John Guillory in arguing that what Spenser most fears is “the prospect of the imagination as beginning, displacing some other and more valued origin.” Guillory shows that Spenser responds to the danger by re­ ducing the power of imagination “to failed representations,” as in the “easy derogation” of Phantastes (2.9.49–52), “to whom any power of origi­ nation is being denied,” and by praising “Eumnestes (‘good memory’), who might also be called ‘true re­presentation’ ”: The digression through the castle of Alma in Book II provides Spenser with a needed defense against Phantastes the Poet—his double. Spenser is thoroughly conventional in tracing his poetry to the more authoritative quarters of Reason, who is . . . a censor, a “magistrate,” ruling and overruling the false productions of the magus, his unau­ thorized double. The legal analogue fits into the general scheme of repressed imagination.7

Guillory’s valuable formulation can be protected against an obvious criti­ cism by rewriting “Spenser” as the ideology that is privileged by the nar­ rative and narrator but interrogated by the text, which represents the former as a repressive agency. The conflation of Reason with the magus, Merlin, in Book 3 conspicuously stages the problematic described by Guil­ lory because it shows, first, how the originary power of male fantasy is a compensatory response to the politico­sexual anxiety of impotence, and second, how this power authenticates its repressive inventions by embed­ ding them in “matter of just memory” and “the more authoritative quar­ ters of Reason” of state. Both the genesis of Merlin and the folkloristic “re­presentation” of his birth, career, and powers conform suspiciously with some of the fantasies buzzing about in Phantastes’ chamber: “shewes, visions, sooth­sayes, and prophesies; / And all that fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies” (2.9.51).

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Because this activity is both ideological and repressive, I shall designate it as a function of the poem’s ideological police. In the most definitive treat­ ment of the activity to date, these are depicted as the forces within the poem that arrest interpretation, handcuff textuality, and submit all mean­ ings to judgment in the politico­judicial court of allegory: The interplay of the text’s self­conscious self­interrogation on the one hand and its unacknowledged and partially submerged discursive self­positioning on the other allows us to recognize a critique in­ scribed within its discursive mediations and juxtapositions, and to trace, to some extent, the analogies between that critique and the kinds of criticism generated by our own ideological position. An impor tant determinant of the analogy that the critic thus constructs is precisely the text’s characterization of the workings of “allegory,” since this is the mode it identifies with the court and with its political necessity to harmonize any more disruptive picture of literary power with its celebrations of Elizabeth. In this particular characterization, allegory is deeply implicated in political schemes . . . not simply because it is thematically concerned with systems of government, but because it proposes to provide a government for the country of meanings. Allegory—to elaborate the personification—promises to sort out all the competing meanings and to provide a hierarchy [a monarchy rather than a commonwealth] by which one can distinguish which is the most important, and which the least.8 “Fate” . . . is one name for the fully authorized explanation that becomes associated with the allegorical (and . . . political) claims to assign meaning to the chivalric fiction. (275)

In Book 1 the policing function is relegated to Protestant iconography, the narrator, and the House of Holiness; its function, as Wofford shows, is figured and analyzed in the power of Arthur’s shield “to strip away ap­ pearances” and produce the equivalent of epistemological closure, the closure that “destroys, petrifies, or transforms the human gazer, reduc­ ing what ‘seems’ to what ‘is’, and in doing so, suggesting that what ‘is’ can be found only in eternity” (262–63). In Book 2 the allegorical police in­ clude Guyon, the Palmer, and Alma’s castle; here the subtextual gyno­ phobia displaced to and repressed by Redcrosse’s autophobia in Book 1 becomes explicit.9 In Book 3 the text’s “self­conscious self­interrogation” is even more pointed when the policing function is assigned to a Merlin whose demonic magic conspicuously links him to Archimago and is later evoked by Busirane.

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Merlin “tells Britomart that she loves Artegall because with him she will produce a fine lineage—thus he authorizes her love by identifying a future event as its cause,” and this authorization “takes the form of compulsion” by fate, which “can be read as a metaphor not only for the constraints of plot but for both familial and cultural constraints imposed on women” (Wofford, 274). She is bound to this fate “by the tree of genealogy” (ibid.) but also by the very ruse of the mirror itself, for despite Britomart’s fear that the image is a self­created illusion (2.44), the image was “planted” by the police. If, as Wofford states elsewhere, “Britomart imagines an ideal husband whose image is drawn from her own self­reflection within her father’s closet,” it doesn’t follow that she has withdrawn “into a secluded world of self­contemplation.”10 For it is her father’s closet, and Wofford herself notes that what Britomart sees in the mirror is “a literary vision. The image of Artegall is constituted of fragments taken from the epic and romance traditions, his motto appropriately enough being ‘written . . . with cyphers old’ ” (8). Thus the heroine’s complaint that she was snagged by “a hidden hooke with baite” floating within the “hollow” globe of “my fathers wondrous mirrhour” (2.37–38) is truer than she knows. The hook “infixed” fast in her “bleeding bowels” (2.39) turns out, in Merlin’s rede­ scription, to be her initial contact with the huge tree “enrooted deepe” in her womb, which is appropriated in the name of the father and the trans­ latio imperii (3.22). This appropriation is represented as a kind of rape. Since the mirror discloses threats and dangers that “to the looker appertaynd,” the prospect of false friends and potential invaders of the kingdom is insidiously dis­ placed to the image that answers Britomart’s idle curiosity about the future husband she knows she will have to accept (2.19, 21, 22–25). As Hamilton concisely puts it, “Britomart sees Artegall in the mirror for he invades her kingdom.”11 The invasion is preemptive, and the conspicuously canceled scenarios of the Scylla and Myrrha stories index the anx ieties that moti­ vate it. But cancellation is repression. What is being repressed is not sim­ ply the potential waywardness of Britomart’s desire, which isn’t even activated until she sees the image. What is being repressed is the wayward­ ness of desire in general as it is depicted throughout Book 3—the poly­ morphous carnival of desire that transgresses gender and generation and therefore motivates the effort of the ideological police to enforce the het­ erosexual contract by writing it on woman’s body.12 Or, to reverse the emphasis and produce an equally probable scenario, Book 3 represents polymorphous desire as a fantasy constructed by the ideological police to justify their inscription of the (other wise arbitrary) heterosexual contract.

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With respect to Britomart, their project is to give her the training and experience that will qualify her for dynastic motherhood by Making her seeke an unknowne Paramoure, From the worlds end, through many a bitter stowre: From whose two loynes thou afterwards did rayse Most famous fruits of matrimoniall bowre. (3.3)

Here the ideological police speak through the narrator. A little later this message will be unpacked by Merlin in a rigorous account of her respon­ sibility to God, Artegall, and the British future. Having displaced this weighty burden to Merlin, the narrative briskly sends her forth on her mar­ tial exploits, creating opportunities for the display of transvestite puissance and even, as Wofford observes, allowing her to collaborate with Glauce in writing “her own story” and designing “the plot of knightly disguise” (Choice of Achilles, 275). But brisk and blithe as it may initially seem, this proj­ ect is beset with crosscurrents of doubt and fear that betray the ambiva­ lence, the sense of uncertain control, marking the narrative’s construction of Britomart. • My view of the relations among text, narrative, and character springs di­ rectly from formulations Wofford first aired in “Gendering Allegory” and developed in Choice of Achilles. The strength of her approach lies in its com­ pelling integration of structural and ethical insights. On the one hand, she argues that because Britomart is “one of Spenser’s most fictionalized characters, imagined as quite distinct from the allegory of chastity that is also told in her book,” she seems autonomous and possessed of a will of her own (Choice of Achilles, 328). “In the episodes that introduce her story” she “is given a psychological history unusually specific for the characters of The Faerie Queene,” and she displays in general “an openness of charac­ ter that leads her into unexpected adventures and makes her respond in unpredictable ways” (“Gendering,” 9, 15). On the other hand, Wofford argues that even though the narrative sustains Britomart in her “illusion of ‘liberty’ by permanently deferring” the subjection to matrimony and motherhood that will write her “out of the action altogether” (Choice of Achilles, 328, 275), it attempts, in the interest of that fate, “to attach spe­ cific allegorical meanings to Britomart’s quest” and to maintain her as the personification of the ideal of chaste love the fate prescribes (“Gender­ ing,” 13–14, 15).

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This disjunctive formulation picks out elements of strain between the character’s autonomy and the narrative reaction to it: “The principal char­ acters of Spenser’s poem, particularly Britomart, resist the controlling force of the figures that organize the story and give it meaning,” and this conflict “limits the poet’s claims to allegorical clarity” (“Gendering,” 1). Finally, and most important, Wofford reads the conflict in terms of gen­ der and insists that the “voice” of the Spenserian text is not identical with but critical of the voice, stance, and authority of the male narrator it represents: The comedy of the narrator’s erotic involvement [with Belphoebe] allows Spenser to imply that there may be a separate perspective on events, one that judges the male version of the story. This more expansive authorial perspective makes room for Spenser’s female readers; it allows the poem to make use of a male narrator while revealing the dangers of the male point of view. The kind of double reading Book III calls for, then, is an androgynous one, but the story of Britomart nonetheless is told from an explicitly male perspective. In Book III . . . the sexual tension which animates the narrative undermines the absoluteness of the authority of the narrative voice. Spenser dramatizes . . . the disjunction between the male meanings imposed by narrator or magician and the female understandings represented and acted upon within the story as story. (“Gendering,” 6–7, 15, 16)

In the powerful, tough­minded, and self­aware development of her theo­ retical framework in Choice of Achilles, Wofford maintains this distinction but defines her terms more carefully and is more skeptical about the ex­ tent to which “Spenser” may be in full control of the distinction. “The name ‘Spenser,’ ” she argues, “seems to attach itself to the morals provided by the not­always­helpful narrator of The Faerie Queene, though there is clearly another ‘Spenser’ at work throughout, a ‘Spenser’ who at moments cagily identifies that narrator with such evil geniuses as Busyrane and Archimago while laughing at the poem’s own formal need to round out its action in often moralizing alexandrines” (11). “Spenser” is “a metonym for the discursive . . . practices employed by his text” (296). But, she insists, neither “ ‘Spenser’ nor ‘the text’ is therefore in full control of all the ideo­ logical displacements, suppressions, or denials that may be at work, nor is the critical counternarrative that I have found to be a feature of the epic

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inscribed ‘within’ each poem in the sense of being located only ‘within’ its own self­conscious critique of its processes of generating meaning” (11). The counternarrative, a notion Wofford develops by means of a brilliant analysis of the structure of epic simile, functions as alternative politics or cultural critique, or as a “narrative of resistance” that “figures in the poem as Spenser’s own self­interrogation” and makes “space for a challenge to the narrative celebration of power” (228). She maintains that the text “does not disclose a fully satisfactory answer” to the question “whether ‘Spenser’ participates in the testing and complicating of the discourses his poem em­ ploys,” but concludes from her analysis that the counternarrative critique is more than a projection from the latter­day commentator’s “critical dis­ course”; “it is also crucial to Spenser’s own method” (296–97). So far, my project fits comfortably within this theoretical conspectus. The “figures of compulsion” that dominate the action, that “develop into a systematic poetics of compulsion” (298) and threaten characters with “al­ legorical bondage,” do the work of the ideological police, while the coun­ ternarrative voice of the text performs a cultural critique of the mainstream discourses it represents. Yet at one point, in maintaining this complex view of the negotiation between allegorical compulsion and counternarrative re­ sistance, Wofford makes a statement I find confusing. She has been argu­ ing that although such freedom and resistance as that most fully embodied in the portrayal of Britomart “may be deeply desired and even fought for by the characters in the action, the constraints and ‘bonds’ are consistently reimposed— even in Britomart’s case—by the allegorical mode of the text” (320). And she goes on to remark that this containment “makes any escape” from allegorical compulsion “difficult, though this fact is disguised by Spenser’s use of the epic fiction to challenge precisely the text’s thorough­ going coercion of its characters” (330). Here it is the action, the epic fiction, that seems to provide the counternarrative site of freedom and resistance, as illustrated by Wofford’s remark, quoted earlier, that Britomart attains “her freedom in part . . . by remaining one of Spenser’s most fictionalized characters, imagined as quite distinct from the allegory of chastity” (328). And it is the “text” that provides the site of allegorical compulsion, work­ ing, so to speak, behind the back of a character who doesn’t know that she is only a fictional character in a poem. The problem is that to direct attention to what is “behind the back” of the fictional character produces a structure of interpretive relations dif­ ferent from the structure produced by directing attention to what is “behind the back” of the allegorical narrator. In the former case, the character is the target or object of narrative and figural ironies generated by the alle­

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gorical mode and the “poetics of compulsion,” which have their own quasi­autonomous logic, their tendencies toward absolutist control of meaning, their “potentially tyrannical powers” (353). But in the latter case the allegorical narrator/narrative is the target or object of devices of impersonation and diegetic construction that are conspicuously parodic and that disclose the target’s motivated efforts to misdirect or foreclose interpretation. Wofford moves back and forth between these options. On the one hand, there is a systematic tendency for “the order of allegory” to reestablish it­ self and “the structure of compulsion by figures” to reassert itself, so that the forms of escape from this tyranny are “severely limited” (330). On the other hand, allegory can neither contain nor fully control its many antitheses and contra­ dictions. Since it works by positing a system of opposites and arrogates to itself the hyperbolic power to legislate and to move from one to the other, it finds its monarchy always threatened by rebellious underlings, who call attention to themselves by exposing a dif ferent significance to events. . . . When the text finds allegory to have potentially tyrannical powers . . . it is . . . forced to disclose that the good government it reveres resembles allegory more closely than its politic plots will allow. Spenser’s allegorical narrator may feel that this is a price worth paying for order. . . . But his poem is less com­ fortable with this choice. (353)

These two alternatives are not strictly opposed, and activating either or both when the interpretive situation calls for it gives Wofford the flexibil­ ity she needs to do justice to her complex multiperspectival theory and method of reading.13 But for my purposes, conferring primacy on the second alternative produces a sharper and simpler model of the relation between narrative and counternarrative agencies. It may be arbitrarily restrictive, it may even be simplistic, but the method of reading it under­ writes, consistently marks out and travels along the seam that both divides and correlates the counternarrative site and the narrative/allegorical tar­ get of impersonation. In particular, it enables me to show how Wofford’s various descriptions of the allegorical drive toward containment convey precisely the sense of diegetic anxiety that, in the earlier essay, “Gender­ ing,” she associates with “the male point of view” dramatized and judged by the “more expansive authorial perspective” she calls “Spenser.” In that essay Wofford discusses “Spenser’s” revelation of “the dangers of the male point of view.” But her characterization of allegory in The Choice of Achilles

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as a fearful and therefore tyrannical and compulsive force orients us toward the other side of that revelation: the dangers to the male point of view. It is thus by combining dif ferent if not incompatible emphases from Wofford’s essay and book that I arrive at my present formulation, which may be expressed as follows: There is a textual or counternarrative voice that represents itself representing the voice of a diegetic agency of story­ telling. Storytelling includes and integrates narrator, narrative, and alle­ gory in a single register, the register of the ideological police. The two voices are distinguishable but not distinct. The reader apprehends—or can, with a little practice, apprehend—the textual voice and agency as the impersonator and performer of the diegetic voice and agency. The textual impersonator alters its voice, unfolds the narrative in an ebullient and self­delighting spirit of citational parody, ventriloquizes the narrator in the same spirit, and often turns the parody back on itself to mock its own at­ tachment to the very discourses it subjects to mimicry and critique. It rep­ resents not only fictional episodes and characters but also their intertextual and subtextual relations as objectifications of diegetic desire, anxiety, in­ terests, values, and aims. That is, the stories that are invented and told have reflexive force as contributions to the textual portrayal of narrative agency and its ideological agendas. I consider this portrayal to be the metanarrative plot of The Faerie Queene: The poem is not “about” Britomart or Guyon, chastity or tem­ perance, Elizabeth or Protestantism. It is “about” the way it tells the story of all those things and “about” why it tells it that way. The way includes not only rhetoric but also the whole range of fictive constructions (episodes, plots, characters, places). The why is diegetic motivation. In order to make this formulation work, one has to premise that diegetic agency extends be­ yond the telling of the story to its invention—invention in its older sense of “finding” (selective appropriation) as well as its newer sense of “creat­ ing.” Why, for example, invent Guyon as the hero of the book of temper­ ance or Britomart as the heroine of the book of chastity? Why invent the particular episodes, and the sequences of episodes, that make up the book? What do the design and the detail of narrative construction tell us about the motives informing diegetic agency? Taking this a step further, I as­ sume that if narrative decisions are to display and objectify diegetic mo­ tives, they must be assigned the same value one ordinarily assigns to the events and characters of the story—the value of fictions that fall within the purview of interpretation. If narrative invention produces events and characters that objectify diegetic desire and anxiety, it must be a strategy by which the ideological police strive to control the empire of meaning,

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and this should make it a prime target of textual impersonation. The pages and sections that follow unpack the consequences of this approach in a se­ ries of readings centered on the representation of Britomart and Glauce in the first four cantos. If we think of the narrative as an arm of the ideological police, then we can’t avoid being amused by its persistent habit of making trouble for it­ self. It tries very hard to be liberal, to rein in the absoluteness of its au­ thority, to give Britomart and Glauce some say in the means by which they will reach the fated end of the quest. So, as Wofford notes, they are al­ lowed to design “the plot of knightly disguise.” Wouldn’t Merlin have been a more logical choice to inaugurate this chivalric enterprise, and legitimize it by giving it his blessing? Instead, the narrative assigns the major share of the invention to the figure least able to stamp it with the imprimatur it needs: Glauce. She, however, rises to the occasion with admirable chival­ ric form by suggesting the woman warrior caper. One would have thought she should be congratulated on her good taste. Why, then, does the nar­ rator not only fail to commend her but add insult to injury by responding to the moment in which she conceives the scheme with a touch of testi­ ness? “At last the Nourse in her foolhardy wit / Conceiv’d a bold devise” (3.52). Why the epithet “foolhardy”? The reason she offers for the plan seems eminently sensible. It is pre­ emptive self­defense: “[A]ll Britanie doth burne in armes bright”; therefore, lest anyone “our passage may empeach,” they should disguise themselves as the male enemy and put arms in their “weake hands” (3.52–53). But after this she thinks more aggressive thoughts. She observes that Brit­ omart is “tall, / And large of limbe,” and that a little practice will “shortly make you a mayd Martiall” (3.53), and she reels off an impressive list of steroidal precedents for Britomart to emulate: Bards tell of many women valorous which have full many feats adventurous Performd, in paragone of proudest men: The bold Bunduca, whose victorious Exploits made Rome to quake, stout Guendolen, Renowmed Martia, and redoubted Emmilen. (3.54)14

Granted that some of these figures were known as ferocious or unreliable viragos, the narrator himself had made a similar move at the beginning of canto 2 and would do so again at the beginning of canto 4. Why should this exhortation to Britomart seem foolhardy to the same narrator? Per­ haps it is because Glauce’s rhetoric and examples urge Britomart not only

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to behave like but also to compete with “proudest men” in aggression. Even more dubious is her next suggestion, which indicates that she gives gender competition precedence over political alliances: As a model for Britomart, and also as a source of war gear, she nominates the saxon Angela, the enemy of the Britons and of Britomart’s father, King Ryence (3.55–60)—who pre­ sumably could have received intelligence of Angela’s whereabouts from his magic mirror.15 Glauce leads Britomart to the armor and with her own hands “her therein appareled” (3.59). Thus her foolhardy wit is responsi­ ble for introducing a subversive signifier of the political enemy into the iconography of Britomart’s quest. At least emblematically, this implies that the interests of politics and gender fuse while those of Britomart and her father (which include the interests of Merlin and the ideological police) di­ vide: Women unite against men, virgins against fathers. If this is a purely emblematic figure of betrayal, it nevertheless stirs up subtextual residues of Scylla and the complicit Carme. Donning the armor of resistance and potential rebellion in order to fulfill the political destiny predicted (i.e., imposed) by Merlin, Britomart becomes at least symbolically a threat to her father and the patriarchal order—as Scylla and Myrrha were, in their dif ferent ways, to theirs. As an even stranger product of the taint of the subtext, Artegall is placed in the position of Minos, the royal father’s enemy. What to make of all this? Glauce’s “bold devise” and its implementa­ tion take up the last twelve stanzas— almost a fifth—of the canto, and five of these are devoted to Angela and her armor. This production of an em­ blem of betrayal seems carefully wrought, and yet it is conspicuously ir­ relevant to the story. The emblem receives no narrative development and nothing in the story motivates it; therefore, it hovers mysteriously and un­ fixedly over the episode like a “secret cloud of silent night” (3.61). There have of course been attempts to dispel the cloud, attempts to resolve the tension and reconcile the conflicting claims of Glauce’s and Merlin’s agen­ das, by finding patterns of resolution and reconciliation in the poem. A. C. Hamilton’s note on the following passage concisely epitomizes such attempts: After dressing Britomart in Angela’s armor Glauce adds a mighty speare, Which Bladud made by Magick art of yore, And usd the same in battell aye to beare; Sith which it had bin here preserv’d in store, For his great vertues proved long afore: For never wight so fast in sell could sit, But him perforce unto the ground it bore. (3.60)

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Hamilton’s note on this passage reads: Bladud: a Briton king whose magical powers are told at 2.10.25–26. The powers of the Saxons and the Britons are brought together in Britomart’s armour. (FQ, 336)

The coalescence of unfriendly powers, the reconciliation of opposites into a complex and stable structure, on the model, say, of the ancient theory of the cycle of simple constitutions and the mixed constitution: This is one way to defuse the subversive aspects of the episode.16 But consider how much it sweeps under the rug. The text of 2.10.25–26 describes more than Bladud’s magic powers. It describes his contribution to society, the baths at “Cairbadon” (Bath), in diabolistic imagery echoed in the account of Merlin’s subterranean project, and it depicts him as an overreacher whose Icarian folly killed him. The spear protects him from external enemies but not from the enemy within. A male weapon to be used against other men, “his great vertues” give its owner an unfair advantage in single encoun­ ters, and these virtues now confer invincibility on the woman who steals it from her father, the current owner, and uses it, or “him,” to bear Guyon, Marinell, and Paridell “unto the ground.” Thus if the little parable of Bladud’s spear is unpacked, it doesn’t speak so much of a resolved discordia concors as of a parable of phallic pride and self­protectiveness and of their consequences, that is, the nocturnal theft of the spear/phallus by the daughter who “resolv’d, unweeting to her sire, / Advent’rous knighthood on her selfe to don” (3.57). The theft of Angela’s armor plays on the same register. Because her arms were taken by “Britons riding on forray,” King Ryence had them put on display “for endlesse moniments / of his successe and gladfull victory” (3.58–59). But so far as one can tell from reading the text, the victory is over the armor, not its owner; no mention is made of Angela’s having been taken or defeated. “Endlesse” carries its characteristic Spenserian ambi­ guity: What will be celebrated forever will be an unfinished monument/ admonition—the armor without its wearer—of an unfinished victory. This irony is now compounded by the quiet rebellion in the king’s household: the daughter and nurse who steal first the armor and then themselves away from Ryence, riding “through back wayes, that none might them espy, / covered with secret cloud of silent night” (3.61). What disappears into the cloudy night along with Britomart and Glauce is the narrative rationale that might explain the bearing those subversive implications have on the remainder of the segment of Britomart’s story that ends in canto 4. They seem conspicuously irrelevant to her seaside lament

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and encounter with Marinell, though perhaps her ferocious spearwork in that episode touches off a jangly echo of Bladud along with its more obvi­ ous echo of 1.7, in which the narrator mentions the “secret powre unseene” of the enchanted spear that unhorses Guyon. Yet I think the conspicuous­ ness of their irrelevance to the story, combined with the equally conspicu­ ous manner in which they insist on the reader’s attention, is itself significant. Lacking any evident influence on the story proper, they can only reflect the attitude inscribed in the agency responsible for the story. To revert to my alteration of Wofford’s formula, they display a ner vous awareness of dan­ gers to the male point of view on the story. Inconsistencies in the portrayal of Britomart have often been noted. Wofford and others have ascribed them to the diverse claims of the alle­ gorical agenda and psychological characterization. The argument goes that Spenser’s failure to reconcile these claims resulted in a split between the heroic exemplar and the passion­driven young woman.17 Richard Lanham attributes “Spenser’s problem” to another source, the paradoxes inform­ ing the dual gender identities of Britomart’s literary forebears: the ancient conflation of Venus and Mars in the figure of the Amazon and the combi­ nation of “sweetness and strength” in Ariosto’s woman warrior. Lanham reasons that “the more realistically he characterized her, the more contra­ dictory would her two identities appear. She would be demure maiden one minute, bossy woman the next,” and—Lanham adds later— a maiden dis­ eased with passion. These “three ingredients of Britomart’s character . . . hardly blend into a credible personality, a consistent literal Britomart,” and Spenser fails to integrate them, but if she “does in fact re­enact a domi­ nant image, it is the irritable, domineering virago, the woman who threat­ ens a man’s masculinity.”18 Predictably, my strategy in responding to this view is to get “Spenser” out of the picture and preserve Lanham’s astute analysis by shifting its mode from criticism of what the poet failed to do to description of what the poem does. Lanham picks out all the right ingredients and is in my opinion correct in judging them inconsistent, but I conceive of the flawed blend as itself one ingredient in another blend composed, in Wofford’s terms, of “the male version of the story” and the “more expansive autho­ rial perspective” that judges that version. This conception can be made more active by changing metaphors: from an authorial perspective that judges the (male version of the) story to a textual voice that performs it in such a way as to mark the performance as mimicry and the story as the target of parody. It is a mimetic parody, by which I mean that the text

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represents the narrative as an imitation of traditional discourse networks that authorize (give authority to, make an author of) male fantasy. On the basis of this account, I hypothesize that the varied and often in­ consistent inventions by which a “portrait” of Britomart is placed before the reader reflect and objectify the uncertainties of the narrative agency— its anxiety, desire, hopes, plans, and interests. To read the portrayal of Britomart as a continuous construction that continuously objectifies the motives of portrayal is to read the poem as the portrayal of its narrative, the story of its storytelling. So, for example, when we read about the ap­ propriation of Angela’s armor, we interpret it as a motivated invention. What it expresses and objectifies is the sense of shaky control unsettling a male discourse that aims both to construct a heroine worthy of conscrip­ tion into its patriarchal ser vice and to do so by committing itself to a pro­ feminist agenda. The conscription is itself problematic since it entails the temporary alienation of phallic power to a militant and passionate virgin. This problem is only exacerbated by a narrative spokesman who proclaims himself a friend of the Ladies and offers the portrait of Britomart as par­ tial redress for the wrongs done them by the dominant male traditions of discourse. Both parts of the narrative project—allegorical conscription and the profeminist enhancement of the independence and inferiority that make the heroine a subject, not merely an object, of desire— come into clear focus in cantos 2 and 3; but so also does the uneasiness troubling the flow of episodic inventions that objectify the strains in the project. This interpretive framework, fi nally, supplies a context for the recon­ sideration of the question with which the present discussion began: Why does the narrative displace to Glauce its brilliant Ariostan invention of the woman warrior and then accuse her of “foolhardy wit”? To catch the tonal valence of “foolhardy” we might recall the description of Redcrosse rushing “full of fire and greedy hardiment . . . unto the darksome hole” of the dragon lady named Error (1.1.14), or of Arthur “prickt forth with jollitie / Of looser life, and heat of hardiment” (1.9.12). Condensing “fool­ ish hardiment,” “foolhardy wit” pricks out the nurse in similar chivalric pricklings and blames her for the “bold devise” conceived by narrative wit to regale the reader with Britomart’s chivalric exploits. It is another of the moves by which the narrative reveals itself to be torn between the desire to imagine a world in which women have freedom and power equal to men and the gynophobic reaction of the ideological police to such a subversive fantasy. The diegetic agency that creates, alienates, and empowers Brit­ omart gives her enough autonomy to resist its control and at the same

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time ner vously tries to control her resistance. In cantos 2, 3, and 4 this conflict is given dramatic emphasis in the notable disparity between the narrator’s prefatory enunciations and the diegetic material they introduce, and it is also discernible in what amounts to a dialogical negotiation be­ tween the narrator and Glauce. • Canto 2 begins with an outburst of profeminist ardor: Here have I cause, in men just blame to find, That in their proper prayse too partiall bee, And not indifferent to woman kind, To whom no share in armes and chevalrie They do impart, ne maken memorie Of their brave gestes and prowesse martiall; Scarse do they spare to one or two or three, Rowme in their writs; yet the same writing small Does all their deeds deface, and dims their glories all. But by record of antique times I find, That women wont in warres to beare most sway, And to all great exploits them selves inclind: Of which they still the girlond bore away, Till envious Men fearing their rules decay, Gan coyne streight lawes to curb their liberty; Yet sith they warlike armes have layd away, They have exceld in artes and pollicy, That now we foolish men that prayse gin eke t’envy. Of warlike puissaunce in ages spent, Be thou faire Britomart, whose prayse I write, But of all wisedome be thou precedent, O soveraigne Queene, whose prayse I would endite, Endite I would as dewtie doth excite; But ah my rimes too rude and rugged arre, When in so high an object they do lite, And striving, fit to make, I feare do marre: Thy selfe thy prayses tell, and make them knowen farre. (2.1–3)

In her careful reading of this passage Pamela Benson notes that the first stanza adopts a traditional profeminist view “consonant with Anglican and humanist accounts of women’s abilities” though exceptional “in its

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exclusive attention to military prowess.”19 But, she argues, this is only a feint in the direction of a synoptic praise of women throughout history. Midway through the second stanza the narrator begins to back away from that position: From the pivot line on, the stanza “accepts the rule of men over women as a fact of life and although it expresses regret for the state of things, it does not urge rebellion” but maintains the “traditional sexual hierarchy” in which “men make the laws and write the histories and there­ fore can restrict the liberty of women and create their image for posterity” (283). Benson’s thesis is that Spenser ultimately articulates the Calvinist viewpoint that women as a group are inferior to men and “unsuited to rule” (277). Although my reading of the situation differs radically from hers, Ben­ son’s subtle parsing of the ideological moves helps me defend “Spenser” from her criticism in the (by now) expected way, for it shows that even as the narrator dissociates himself from fearful “envious Men,” his fear of the fantasy of the woman warrior leads him to keep that fantasy penned in the past—in the alternative tradition of the “record of antique times.” And he goes on, as Benson notes, to respond to the resilience of latter­day women with relatively mild praise (for their skill “in artes and pollicy”) that “may even hold a threat of repression” (285). The split between ancient and mod­ ern is repeated in that between Britomart and Elizabeth, with the added emphasis on the sharpness of the disjunction: He does write the praise of the paradigm of the virtù possessed by women in ages not merely past but spent; he would “endite” the praise of the queen but he lacks the skill. Since, on the analogy of the preceding stanza, her wisdom must be manifested in arts and policy, is there some link or analogy between “we foolish men” who “envy” the praise of modern women and the narrator who refuses to praise Elizabeth on grounds of inability? I don’t agree with Benson that the burden of the lines praising Eliza­ beth is to exempt her from the process of historical decline “by asserting that she, unlike other women, is not threatened by the power of male envy to tarnish reputation or restrict action,” nor do I agree that the alexandrine in stanza 3 “puts the male poet in the background” and emphasizes his “superfluousness as recorder of her fame” (286, 287). Rather the effect of 2.8–9 on 3.4–9 is to inject into the narrator’s fear of marring his praise something more than courtly deference or aesthetic diffidence: She threat­ ens the power of male envy to tarnish her reputation, and since “foolish men” have suffered for indicting rather than inditing her praise, he isn’t going to take any risks. If this histrionic flinch proclaims his “superflu­ ousness,” the social and artistic inability of the humble subject, it expresses

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a legitimate fear—the same fear as that expressed in more copious and courtly terms in the second stanza of the proem to Book 3. Wofford’s gloss on the central couplet of that stanza—“His daedale hand would faile, and greatly faint, / And her perfections with his error taint”—is that the nar­ rator fears he may, like Daedalus, release “the child of his imagination for a doomed flight.” His portrait of the Queen “would become an Icarus which would ‘faile and greatly faint,’ ” and “marre” her excellence (“Gen­ dering Allegory,” 4–5). Wofford reads this set of tactful displacements as expressing a concern for the queen’s image; they also imply apprehension about her power and the poet’s safety: The female ruler in all her power and danger is represented by Spenser as his ideal and as his most difficult audience. Elizabeth as a political power and Elizabeth as a figurative ideal are two versions of the same emblem which do not always fit easily together. (“Gendering Allegory” 3)

In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabe­ than Culture,” Louis Adrian Montrose writes in a similar vein: The woman to whom all Elizabethan men were vulnerable was Queen Elizabeth herself. Within legal and fiscal limits, she held the power of life and death over every Englishman, the power to advance or frustrate the worldly desires of all her subjects.20

In the face of such extratextual constraints expressions of inability mani­ fest a politic appreciation of the monarch’s power and inexpressible value. But the display of apprehensiveness takes on an altogether dif ferent tonal quality when viewed through the lenses provided by commentators who, following Louis Montrose’s lead, observe that the display may respond not only to extratextual constraints but also to possible intratextual indiscre­ tions. Thus Montrose: Thus, in the movement of the proem to Book 3 from the queen to her representations, from referentiality to intertextuality, the male subject/poet puts into question the female monarch’s claim to shape herself and her subjects, to personify the principle and power of form. What the poet conventionally deprecates as his inability to produce an adequate reflection of the glorious royal image is the methodical process of fragmentation and refraction by which the text appropriates that image, imposing upon it its own specificity.21

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Maureen Quilligan writes: We know that Elizabeth’s regime was very careful about pictorial representations of her physical person— and that if she disliked what an author published about her marriage program, for example, she could have his hand cut off. . . . Spenser has to tread very delicately in his portrayal of Belphoebe. . . . Feminist criticism has recently taught us to see in the genre of the blazon . . . a subversive movement against female erotic power as well as a celebration of it. . . . Spenser’s blazon [in 2.3] functions as a further movement against Diana/Belphoebe’s (and Elizabeth’s) power to dismember those mortal males who would look upon her; such a display therefore reinforces the qualification of female power by exposing the female body to an anatomizing gaze.22

Montrose again, now in “Shaping Fantasies”: When, in the proem to the second book of The Faerie Queene, Spenser conjoins “the Amazons huge river” and “fruitfullest Virginia” . . . , he is invoking not only two regions of the New World but two archetypes of Elizabethan culture: the engulfing Amazon and the nurturing virgin.23

And Bruce Thomas Boehrer: Britomart . . . has the paradoxical advantage of being both virginal and fruitful. Thus she may be chaste in all senses of the word, and thus Merlin may reveal to her the specific fleshly, genealogical connection between her and the woman of whom she is a distant mirror. It is the sole project of Merlin’s long prophetic passage to demonstrate and manifest that connection. “But yet the end is not,” Merlin ends (50), and in so doing he confronts— and denies—the very dynastic tension that generates his (and Spenser’s) narrative. For . . . the queen’s own person, . . . chaste and barren, subverts the very representation that is the enchanter’s, and the poet’s text. It is this uniqueness . . . , the barren integrity of the queen’s person, that is at once unspoken and ubiquitous in book 3.24

Given this network of innuendoes, I can imagine— can “hear”—the inflec­ tions of another voice crossing that of the prudent subject who dutifully proclaims his inability. Even as this second, counternarrative, voice, bump­ tious and playfully hubristic, mimics the trepidations of the prudent nar­ rator, it implies that no writing but the queen’s could satisfy the queen, and it gives the poor narrator plenty to worry about. For the repertory of

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subtly shaded icons of the queen’s two bodies that it assigns to the narra­ tive authority of the “Poet” includes not only Gloriana, Belphoebe, and Diana, not only Britomart, not only Alma, Mercilla, and Isis/Venus, but also Lucifera, Philotime, and Radegund.25 Claiming to write Britomart’s praises but not Elizabeth’s, the narrator restricts the former to her role as the “precedent” of “warlike puissaunce”; her “specific fleshly, genealogical connection” to Elizabeth is suppressed and her distance from Elizabeth rhetorically enhanced by the finality of the phrase “in ages spent.” The restriction and suppression are odd, given the subject matter of the canto these stanzas introduce, and by the end of the long discussion of Britomart’s lovesickness, they have become conspicuous. When the textual “voice” that performs the narrative func­ tion personifies it by impersonating the narrator, its parody raises the fig­ ure of a self­professed but not very persuasive profeminist, courtly and a little blustery, whose view of the story he tells is blindered, straitened, stringently policed. Nothing he says registers any allusion to Malecasta or prepares the reader for what is to come. His little speech is in fact a mis­ direction, as if there is material in the story he doesn’t (care to) notice or won’t deal with. The excluded material consists not only of the erotic pas­ sages but also of the account of the mirror with all the subversive implica­ tions (of gynophobia, specular rape, the conflation of political with sexual anxiety) textually embedded in it. Only one phrase in the first three stan­ zas glances briefly—furtively, one might say—at those themes, and it falls exactly in the center of the passage, the pivot line of stanza 2: “[E]nvious Men fearing their rules decay” gestures broadly in the direction of all the material the narrator keeps at arm’s length. This pattern continues in the stanzas that introduce canto 3. The sus­ picion that the narrator may be troubled by the story he unfolded in canto 2 is indicated, first, by his attempt to make a distinction between love and lust that puts Britomart on the wrong side of the moral divide, and second, by his recourse to the rhetoric of an uncompromisingly anti­heterosexual tradition: Most sacred fire, that burnest mightily In living brests, ykindled first above, Emongst th’ eternall spheres and lamping sky, And thence pourd into men, which men call Love; Not that same, which doth base affections move In brutish minds, and filthy lust inflame, But that sweet fit, that doth true beautie love,

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And choseth vertue for his dearest Dame, Whence spring all noble deeds and never dying fame: Well did Antiquitie a God thee deeme, That over mortal minds hast so great might, To order them, as best to thee doth seeme, And all their actions to direct aright; The fatall purpose of divine foresight, Thou doest effect in destined descents, Through deepe impression of thy secret might, And stirredst up th’Heroes high intents, Which the late world admyres for wondrous moniments. (3.1–2)

The genealogy of this discourse—from Plato’s Symposium through Christian Neoplatonism to Bembo’s speech in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier—is clearly marked, as are its homosocial, homoerotic, and insidiously misog­ ynist implications. By modulating into a vaguely matrimonial figure—“that sweet fit” becomes the husband who chooses virtue to be the mother of his noble deeds—the first stanza expressly displaces woman from the repro­ ductive role, for this ideal of male parthenogenesis is set over against het­ erosexual reproduction. That the lover of true beauty chooses virtue implies rejection of the love of woman’s beauty as if it were less true, or untrue (the lust of brutish minds?), implies also rejection of the reproductive agency that must resort to woman’s body and sexuality. But since in the fallen world of dynastic politics such impediments to the marriage of a true mind (with itself) must be admitted, they must be rigorously policed. In the words of a latter­day Pygmalion, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” The nar­ rator has done his best to defeminize Britomart. In the stanzas that open canto 2 he praises her as a woman warrior while engaging in a profeminist critique of “envious Men” who, as chroniclers, refused to record the mar­ tial exploits of ancient women and, as legislators “fearing their rules decay,” began to “coyne streight lawes to curb their liberty” (1.1–2). But his story compels him to preside over the sexual awakening that takes up so much of the first two cantos, and in canto 3, as if he fears his rule’s decay, he partici­ pates with Merlin in imposing on Britomart the “streight lawes” of destiny that will eventually curb her liberty. The effects of this imposition had been graphically represented from Britomart’s standpoint in canto 2 in images of mental suffering and bodily pain, images of violation that convey her sense of having lost control over her body and sexuality. The standpoint of the ideological police respon­ sible for such violence is revealed in 3.1–3. The “base affections” and “filthy

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lust” from which the speaker recoils in the first stanza seem as applicable to the intensity and messiness of Britomart’s experience as to Malecasta. In sharp contrast, the Neoplatonic fantasy of the asexual and homosocial reproduction of virtuous deeds is securely determined from above and depicted as smooth and painless: Love is “pourd into men.” As the next stanza moves from this impossible ideal to the fantasy of dynastic repro­ duction, and as the narrator edges cautiously toward the heterosexual im­ perative, his rhetoric stiffens: Instead of a sweet fit poured into receptive minds he describes a power that orders, directs, and effects its fatal pur­ pose through deep impression of its secret might. Though “destined de­ scents” anticipates historical genealogies and “secret might” glances at the covert warfare of “the false Archer” (2.26), the stanza swerves away from the unavoidable contact with woman’s body and, if it refers to Britomart, does so only as one of the “Heroes” whose “high intents” are stirred up by heavenly love. When the narrator fi nally turns to consider her in stanza 3, it is in aggressive and even punitive terms that well accord with the sense of violation she expressed in canto 2: But thy dread darts in none doe triumph more, Ne braver proofe in any, of thy powre Shew’ dst thou, then in this royall Maid of yore, Making her seeke an unknowne Paramoure, From the worlds end, through many a bitter stowre: From whose two loynes thou afterwards did rayse Most famous fruits of matrimoniall bowre, Which through the earth have spred their living prayse, That fame in trompe of gold eternally displayes. (3.3)

The sacred power apotheosized by the pagans in stanza 2 now emerges as a figure similar to the Cupid who will materialize in Busirane’s house, and the narrator’s praise is not so much for the heroine whom the god subjected and tormented but for the god’s “maisterie” in driving her to her fate. The narrator seals her fate by moving it back into the remote past and then as­ signing its disclosure in 3.4 to “my dearest sacred Dame,” Clio. In the fig­ ure of an asexual but gendered female the muse is transparently an allegory of self­authentication by which the male poet pretends to guarantee the accuracy or truth of “information” gleaned from mortal, fallible, inter­ ested, and often unreliable sources. The narrator seeks to control his story, Britomart’s sexuality, and his readers by coupling himself to the muse of history. But Clio’s history will soon become Merlin’s prophecy. When the fantasy of a securely closed past is reimagined as the fantasy of

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an open and incomplete future, when the medium of disclosure shifts from the muse to the mage who chose as his dearest Dame the Lady of the Lake, then, as we saw, the conditions of disclosure are such as to inscribe the launching of Elizabeth’s “glorious auncestry” in an atmosphere of sexual and political diffidence that seems to motivate the stringent and occasion­ ally vindictive rhetoric of the ideological police. The generic tradition represented and cited in Book 3—the tradition of epic and romance culminating in Ariosto— establishes a limited be­ havioral pattern for the figure of the passionate woman warrior. After she falls in love and hears the prophecy only one response is possible, the re­ sponse predicted by the narrator’s praise in 2.3: to transform her passion into “warlike puissaunce.” That precedent is too restricted for the new dispensation of British history, and it will cause problems for a narrative that has one foot in the old Mediterranean tradition and the other in the new myth of Tudor England. The old generic model based on the binary opposition and interchangeability of love and war will have to give way to a more complex libidinal economy subjecting desire to the detours and obstacles of the politics of government and reproduction. In the context of this larger framework, the initial move Glauce and Britomart make in response to the prophecy is described in terms that make it seem almost frivolous: They both conceiving hope of comfort glad, With lighter hearts unto their home retird; Where they in secret counsell close conspird, How to effect so hard an enterprize, And to possess the purpose they desird: Now this, now that twixt them they did devise, And diverse plots did frame, to maske in strange disguise. At last the Nourse in her foolhardy wit Conceiv’ d a bold devise. . . . (3.51–52)

The rhetoric coolly distances the narrative perspective from the fun and games of the euphoric plotters. Two stanzas later, the narrative assigns Glauce the task of citing examples from the “record of antique times,” dis­ placing to her— and thereby placing in question—the praise of “warlike puissaunce in ages spent.” The potential subversiveness of this fantasy is actualized in the assimilation of Angela to Britomart. The reaction of the ideological police to these developments occurs at the beginning of canto 4. There, the narrator first echoes and extends, and

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then co­opts, the brief catalogue of women warriors Glauce gave at 3.54. At first he parades his male feminism in a stanza of ubi sunts calling for a revival of women’s “Antique glory” that “matter made for famous Poets verse, / And boastfull men so oft abasht to heare” (4.1). The trumpet­tones of the next stanza peak in two self­descriptions that protest the virile man­ liness of one who, far from being abashed by the prospect, shows himself impatient, excited, even aroused: “I burne with envy sore” and “I swell with great disdaine.” It turns out, however, that what he longs for is not the femi­ nist revival itself: He burns to hear “the warlike feates, which Homer spake / Of bold Penthesilee,” and he swells when he reads about the mankill­ ers Deborah and Camilla (4.2). The antique glory is to be resurrected not by women but by poets, that is, himself. And his specific reason for resurrecting it is to keep it where it belongs—in the fabled past, with other one­sided and foolhardy if pleas­ antly spine­tingling tales of ferocious women— and to reaffirm both his commitment and women’s submission to the more civilized, politic virtue of which he writes: Yet these, and all that else had puissaunce, Cannot with noble Britomart compare, Aswell for glory of great valiaunce, As for pure chastitie and vertue rare . . .

Britomart will surpass her antique models when she is domesticated, wed­ ded, and bedded so as to bear “so faire a blossome . . . / As thee, O Queene, the matter of my song” (4.3), matter that enables him to castigate and re­ write the antique “matter made for famous Poets verse.” But this noble project is no sooner announced than it is foiled and de­ ferred by the heroine’s resistance. The narrator uses her departure from Redcrosse to symbolize her backsliding: Then he forth on his journey did proceede, To seeke adventures, which mote him befall, And win him worship through his warlike deed, Which alwayes of his paines he made the chiefest meed. But Britomart kept on her former course, Ne ever doft her armes, but all the way Grew pensive through that amorous discourse, By which the Redcrosse knight did earst display Her lovers shape, and chevalrous aray; A thousand thoughts she fashioned in her mind,

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And in her feigning fancie did pourtray Him such, as fittest she for love could find, Wise, warlike, personable, courteous, and kind. With such selfe­pleasing thoughts her wound she fed, And thought so to beguile her grievous smart; But so her smart was much more grievous bred, And the deepe wound more deepe engord her hart, That nought but death her dolour mote depart. (4.4–6)

Redcrosse does what every good knight should do: He moves on motivated by the same chivalric desire he ascribed to Artegall just a moment earlier in story time but two cantos earlier (2.14) in discourse time. Britomart, however, is being bad. Thus Montrose writes, “As the rhyme indicates, her former course was an amorous discourse, and it will continue to be one. The lament this pensiveness evokes and the ensuing battle with Marinell illustrate the difficulty of making an amorous discourse, necessarily a de­ viation from the course, work as allegory or succeed as quest.”26 The sense of deceleration, regression, and deviation is intensified by the two­canto flashback that immobilizes the discussion about Artegall and leaves the im­ pression that Britomart has continued “[t]o feede her humour” with Red­ crosse’s praise of Artegall for a very long time (2.12). Two stanzas before the flashback the narrator had used the mimicry of free indirect discourse to put the mark of rationalization on the bromides with which she justifies her little experiment in Malecastan self­titillation: Redcrosse’s spirited defense of Artegall her feeble sence much pleased, And softly sunck into her molten hart; Hart that is inly hurt, is greatly eased With hope of thing, that may allegge his smart; For pleasing words are like to Magick art, That doth the charmed Snake in slomber lay: Such secret ease felt gentle Britomart, Yet list the same efforce with faind gainsay: So dischord oft in Musick makes the sweeter lay. (2.15)

The description that resumes Britomart’s pensive dalliance in 4.6 displays the growing impatience and petulance of the diegetic describer: She is still fooling herself with these “selfe­pleasing thoughts” two cantos later, and if she continues willfully to aggravate her condition, it is unlikely that she will ever fulfill either her allegorical obligations as the exemplar of “chaste

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affection” or her historical task as Elizabeth’s progenitor. Since her “griev­ ous smart” is self­inflicted, she deserves what she gets, and the story pun­ ishes her self­indulgence by temporarily installing her, as Wofford shows, in a position the poem discredits, “the position of a Petrarchan lover, with all the dangers for her quest and her poem which that stance entails.”27 The most telling phrase in 4.6 is the middle clause in the statement that Brit­ omart “kept on her former course, / Ne ever daft her armes, but all the way / Grew pensive.” That she never doffed her arms seems initially a puz­ zling non sequitur, but if we think of the arms as the symbol of Britomart’s historical mission, the phrase glances at their diversion and subordination to the erotic furor that is nominally the mere instrument of the mission. And perhaps it’s also relevant that she wears and bears Angela’s arms, which symbolize not only Britomart’s mission but also the virgin’s internal resis­ tance to it. The narrative thus discloses a mild propensity for Britomart­ bashing. The reader who has just heard in canto 3 what Britomart has known for some time must appreciate its impatience with her perverse ten­ dency to prolong the “hard begin” despite Merlin’s sage and prudent counsel. But she is also prolonging what the narrative clearly marks as a Malecastan hangover, and its impatience can be traced back to its account of her behav ior in the Castle Joyeous. • Britomart forgoes the chance to save Florimell in canto 1 because her “con­ stant mind, / Would not so lightly follow beauties chace, / Ne reckt of La­ dies love” (1.14). The narrator praises her as if she were the man she is pretending to be. But since he knows better and he knows we know better, the combined earnestness and gratuitousness of his little kudos continue the transvestite funfest that began when the upright Guyon was bounced off his high horse and received the narrator’s heartfelt apologies. The gen­ der joke, however, is about to get serious. In Malecasta’s house Britomart will reck of “Ladies love” and receive Malecasta’s advances as if she were the man she is pretending to be. But since she knows better, readers are entitled to wonder how this will go down with the narrator who had in effect praised her commitment to heterosexual values in refusing to chase Florimell. Our curiosity crinkles up into perplexity when, during the up­ roar that concludes the Malecasta episode, Britomart receives a glancing wound in “her side” from a figure named Gardante. Gardante was introduced at 1.44–45 as the first of the master mistress’s six “liegemen.” Since their names denote the stages of ritualized courtly foreplay, Hamilton adds, after translating Gardante as “gazing,” that it

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“signified loving glances upon beauty” (FQ, 313). The scopic nuances of the term range from the voyeuristic to the self­protective, and include gazing, glancing, looking, ogling, viewing, and watching. Which nuance applies to the wound inflicted by Gardante? Is Britomart the object or sub­ ject of the scopic activity that wounds her? Does Gardante’s action symbol­ ize the effect on Britomart of only the immediately preceding events or does it, as Hamilton suggests, symbolize “her inner wounding . . . by the sight of Artegall” (316), whose image, we have already been told, “she had seene in Venus looking glas”? (1.8). Hamilton adds that the “gored side is a sexual wound,” and this connects it to the narrator’s subsequent simile of gestation in the “closet of her painefull side” (2.11). Though obviously allegorical and therefore conspicuously meaningful, the wound is just as conspicuously underdetermined in its meaning. This arouses suspicion and solicits interpretation. To read suspiciously is to wonder what is being with­ held, by what agency (narrator? narrative? text?), and why. It becomes dif­ ficult to scrutinize the object of representation without scrutinizing the motives informing the act of representation. The widening network of associations adduced by Hamilton clearly in­ dicates that Britomart can be the subject of the (self­)inflicted wound of Looking only because she is the object of the mirror that “looks” at her, since “Venus looking glas” constructed by Merlin for the security of Brit­ omart’s father is a glass that looks. It “sees” her gazing curiously into it and is magically rigged to activate “the false Archer, which that arrow shot / So slyly, that she did not feele the wound” (2.26) until it is reopened by Gardante’s arrow. She is selected to embody the mirror’s gaze, which is the gaze of the ideological police recruiting her to fulfill its designs. But the tone of the narrator’s reference to Cupid at 2.26 is troubling: His state­ ment that the false archer, having furtively wounded her, “[d]id smyle full smoothly at her weetlesse wofull stound” is more in the nature of a gloat than a criticism; he sides and smiles with Cupid, admires his efficiency; the statement is a touch vindictive, the smile sardonic; it is the smile of Busirane.28 Why should this be? The only way to answer this question is to return to the Malecasta episode and examine not only Britomart’s re­ sponse to Malecasta’s advances but also the narrative response to her response. The focus of this double response is the most peculiar and unexpected feature of the episode: the voyeuristic curiosity aroused in Britomart by her ability to arouse Malecasta’s desire. The curiosity is suggested first by the narrator’s subtly critical characterization of her reaction— she “dissembled it with ignoraunce” (2.50)— and later by his overscrupulous explanation of

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her reason for entertaining Malecasta’s advances: unfamiliarity with “such malengine,” and “self­feeling of her feeble sex,” produce misplaced sym­ pathy for one who expresses feelings for her/him that match her own feel­ ings for Artegall; the chivalric courtesy appropriate to the role she performs keeps her from “rudely” scorning Malecasta’s “faire offer of good will pro­ fest” even though “she inly deemd / Her love too light, to wooe a wandring guest” (1.53–55). This makes the narrator’s explanation seem disingenuous because it implies that her misconstrual is in bad faith: In his interpreta­ tion, she dissembles ignorance of what “she inly deemd” in order to focus on the illusory analogy to her own predicament. Richard Lanham finds this scene confusing because “Britomart is never tempted” and none of the justifications for Britomart’s behav ior seems compelling. He concludes that Spenser is “working hard to motivate a scene that had little real motivation” and that “what the scene really does is fur­ ther fix the male attributes of Britomart” (“Literal Britomart,” 432–33). We can realize the cash value of the final insight by dropping the idea that she isn’t tempted, for stanza 55 suggests that she is tempted by the chance to imagine herself in Artegall’s place and Malecasta in hers: For thy she would not in discourteise wise, Scorne the faire offer of good will profest; For great rebuke it is, love to despise, Or rudely deigne a gentle harts request; But with faire countenaunce, as beseemed best, Her entertaynd; nath’lesse she inly deemd Her love too light, to wooe a wandring guest: Which she misconstruing, thereby esteemd That from like inward fire that outward smoke had steemd.

The narrator gives the impression that Britomart enjoys watching Male­ casta act out the passion she herself feels and that she enjoys pretending she is the male cause of the outburst, but that if she were Artegall she wouldn’t like Malecasta’s style. Sympathetic identification with Malecasta thus modulates into sympathetic identification with the “maisterie” of the male source of “imperious love” that Britomart’s “hart did vexe” (1.54).29 The illusion of psychological complexity in the heroine’s response is produced by a shift into free indirect discourse at stanzas 54–55 the effect of which is to transform the narrator’s disingenuous emphasis on Brit­ omart’s ingenuousness into her rationalization. His gesture of sympathetic identification with Britomart is, however, rendered suspect by other fea­ tures of the episode. When he interrupts the explanation at 1.54.6–9

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with a slightly tart comment on her ingenuous misconstrual (“The bird that knowes not the false fowlers call, / Into his hidden net full easily doth fall”), the “Faire Ladies” in his readership would understand the cause of his impatience. For she fudges precisely the distinction he had consoled them with at 1.49: Faire Ladies, that to love captived arre, And chaste desires do nourish in your mind, Let not her fault your sweet affections marre, Ne blot the bounty of all womankind; ’Mongst thousands good one wanton Dame to find: Emongst the Roses grow some wicked weeds; For this was not to love, but lust inclind; For love does alwayes bring forth bounteous deeds, And in each gentle hart desire of honour breeds.30

They shouldn’t feel tarnished by this exception to their rule nor inhibited from pursuing their desires. The rhetoric of the closing couplet suavely negotiates the transfer of bounty and honor from the Ladies to their Men: “[B]ring forth bounteous deeds” both suggests and displaces the “multi­ tude of babes” (1.10.31) the Ladies will breed as they, withdrawing into honorable motherhood, cheer on their Men from the sidelines. Like the “imperious love” that vexes and tyrannizes Britomart’s “gentle heart” (1.54, 2.23), the love to which the Ladies “captived arre” is the male­identified force that sometimes materializes as Cupid, to contain whose unruly, ty­ rannical, and promiscuous desire male subjects rely on the “chaste desires” of those humans they socialize to be Ladies. Britomart’s reaction and behav ior in Malecasta’s house thus illustrates a transgressive threat to both the instituted gender hierarchy and the sex­ ual morality it mandates. The misprision produced by cross­dressing si­ multa neously deflates the threat to the level of a sitcom episode and preserves in symbolic form the traces of the anxiety about female trans­ gression that structures the episode. This anxiety is rhetorically focused in the narrator’s occasionally mordant comments about Britomart. In an unpublished essay to which my reading is heavily indebted, Sarah Murphy brilliantly analyzes the meaning of Britomart’s disruptive influence in this and other episodes: Britomart clearly presents a threat to the established chivalric order, evoking a strong conservative . . . reaction. But from whom? The ambiguity of Britomart’s position is mirrored by the ambiguity of the

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narrative’s treatment of her. A straightforward narrator . . . endorses the chivalric order and . . . struggles to integrate Britomart into established categories and neutralize her threat. This is the voice that would like us to believe that Britomart is lovely as the moon and that her victories stem from a magic spear [the symbol of chastity made by a male magician]. Yet this narrator’s dilemma regarding Britomart is constantly undermined by a more playful voice . . . that delights in the disorder Britomart brings, viewing a male tradition’s floundering attempts to accommodate a female knight. The poem simultaneously represents and mocks the chivalric order, throwing in Britomart, a disrupting presence whose beauty pales in comparison to her penchant for causing chaos, as a way to highlight the rigid biases, assumptions, and limitations on which the tradition is based.31

Murphy argues that the conservative reaction is homophobic because the episode “contains the subversive possibility of lesbian relations that could give women autonomy and free them from male domination,” and that al­ though Gardante’s wound “can be viewed as a punishment for her trans­ gression and a means of propelling Britomart safely back into the category of heterosexual woman, an object of male desire and amorous glances,” this attempt at control fails when Britomart responds to the wound by furiously laying about with her sword (6–7). In the light provided by Murphy’s strong reading, not only the narra­ tor’s performance but also the very design of the narrative in the next two cantos appear as motivated reactions to the meaning of Gardante’s wound. The deferred account of her prior awakening to love melodramatically “propels” Britomart into the position of the subject of female heterosexual desire in canto 2, and in effect intensifies the “punishment” represented by the wound. The link between Gardante’s arrow and the reference to Cupid at 2.26 confirms this continuity, as does the aggressiveness that edges the tone in which that reference is voiced. The Myrrha/Scylla subtext jus­ tifies the narratorial anxiety and need for control, both of which are dis­ placed to Merlin in canto 3. At the same time, what Murphy calls the “more playful narrative voice,” a voice that delights in deflationary mimicry, is very much in evidence; it bumptiously asserts itself not only in perform­ ing the interlocutory exchanges between Britomart and Glauce but also in its spirited representations of anxiety­ridden male ruses, as in the stanzas on the mirror and Phao’s tower (2.18–20), and of narratorial vindictiveness, as in the alliterative overkill with which the narrator crows over the hum­ bling of Britomart by “the false Archer”:

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Thenceforth the feather in her loftie crest, Ruffed of love, gan lowly to availe, And her proud portance, and her princely gest, With which she earst tryumphed, now did quaile: Sad, solemne, sowre, and full of fancies fraile She woxe; yet wist she neither how, nor why, She wist not, silly Mayd, what she did aile, Yet wist, she was not well at ease perdy, Yet thought it was not love, but some melancholy. (2.27)

The first quatrain can refer only to the chivalric episodes that happened “earst” strictly in the order of storytelling; they haven’t yet happened in Britomart’s career. Such a “mistake” may be dismissed as part of the loose and baggy conventions of romance narrative, but it doesn’t have to be. To notice it is to regard with genial suspicion the motives of the narrator who takes advantage of those conventions in order to have his revenge on the upstart heroine. And as we know, the high comedy of the stanzas that fol­ low derives from the parading of his “silly” victim’s misconceptions and the often hilarious reactions of an “aged Nurse” who mixes epic rhetoric (2.32) and classical references with folk remedies and motherly hugs. Before leaving this discussion I want to explore a little further the func­ tion of a feature of the poem everyone has noticed since people stopped revering Spenser as a sage and serious and therefore permissibly boring poet. This feature can be expressed in one word: The Faerie Queene, more often than not, is funny. The comedy varies from understatement to slap­ stick, and readers who have appreciated it have until recently responded more often with pleasure than with analysis. Maureen Quilligan was one of the first critics to take the humor seriously, showing how Spenser uses it to contain or defuse the excessive or anomalous power granted females in positions of political and cultural authority, and both my substantial debt to her work and my superficial departures from it are registered in the chapter to follow.32 What makes the poem funny for me is my continuous awareness of the altered “voice” of the textual impersonator saturating the voices it parodies. Thus even when the narrative is at its sagest and most serious, even when such diegetic motives as gynophobia are suggested through complex textual articulations, the discernible sense that some voice in the poem is not taking it as seriously as the story is—may indeed be hav­ ing fun pretending to be serious—produces the effect of internal distan­ tiation. I want to illustrate this by returning to the figure of Glauce.

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The invention of an aged female figure whose name is Glauce and who is both nutrix and squire draws on but complicates a Hellenistic stereo­ type, a figure that is often the butt of ageist, classist, and sexist humor. This edition of the garrulous old nurse is condescendingly dismissed by Merlin (3.19), and though she isn’t identified when first introduced in cross­dressed guise, the narrative is already on her case, describing her as “an aged Squire” That seem’d to couch under his shield three­square, As if that age bad him that burden spare, And yield it those, that stouter could it wield. . . . (1.4)

After this, she disappears until 2.30, when she gets baptized. The etymo­ logical provenance of “Glauce” from glaux, the owl that signifies the male­ identified wisdom of Athene, reinforces the idea that Britomart’s nurse is to oppose the bad influence of her subtextual precursors in Ciris and Meta­ morphoses 10, and so also does the fact that she fills the position of squire previously occupied by the Palmer, most exemplary of ideological police­ men. Subtextual interactions are nevertheless ambiguous and hard to control: the affiliation of Glauce’s discourse with that of the nurses who accommodated the desires and “wicked art” (2.41) of Myrrha and Scylla sends residual tremors of old treacheries through her words. These are male tremors, and they are illuminated by Lanham’s remark that in the case of Scylla, who “loves her father’s enemy . . . the pains of love are ex­ acerbated by her awareness that they are treacherous. Spenser transfers this conflicting loyalty to Britomart’s first stirrings of love for Arthur [sic], where it does not altogether fit” (“Literal Britomart,” 435). It doesn’t fit at all; it is a conspicuous misfit which, if it can’t be explained or justified by attributing the transfer to “Spenser,” makes good sense as part of a pat­ tern of fictive constructions that objectify the insecurity of a narrative un­ sure of its control of the heroine’s behav ior and desire. Similar diegetic tremors may be sensed in the following descriptions of Glauce’s attempts to comfort Britomart: Her aged Nurse, whose name was Glauce hight, Feeling her leape out of her loathed nest, Betwixt her feeble armes her quickly keight, And downe againe in her warme bed her dight. . . . (2.30) So having said, her twixt her armes twaine She straightly strayed, and coiled tenderly, And every trembling joynt, and every vaine

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She softly felt, and rubbed busily, To doe the frosen cold away to fly; And her faire deawy eies with kisses deare She oft did bath, and oft againe did dry. . . . (2.34) With that upleaning on her elbow weake, Her alablaster brest she soft did kis. . . . (2.42)

The first passage is straightforward by itself but receives a comically erotic charge from the lines it clearly recalls, the moment in which Britomart, feeling Malecasta “close couched by her side, / . . . lightly lept out of her filed bed” (1.62). In the second passage Spenser departs from his source (Carme “dulcia . . . genis rorantibus oscula figens,” “planting sweet kisses on Scylla’s tear­bedewed cheeks”33) to produce an echo of Venus bathing the eyes of Myrrha’s son “with ambrosiall kisses” (1.36). The third pas­ sage gets its charge from “alablaster,” a term of art that indexically signifies the admiring gaze of the ardent Petrarchan connoisseur. In their slippage from maternal to erotic gestures these passages adumbrate a form of bonding that mirrors the potentially unstable and affectively potent bonding of fathers and sons, elders and ju niors, pedagogues and pupils. The associations with Malecasta and Venus bring out the latent sexuality and extend it into the futile attempts of aggressive women to seduce and dominate men. These cross­connections throw a strange light on the nurse’s relation to her “deare daughter” and “dearest dread” (2.30; “dread” is an object of reverence, but also a danger, an object of worry). For one thing, they high­ light an implication present but minimized in the accounts of Scylla’s and Myrrha’s nurses: The complicity and influence of the older but socially in­ ferior confidante in facilitating the crime against the father is linked here with the nurse’s homoerotic attachment. For another thing, the fact that Britomart’s passion is not at all criminal doesn’t nullify the implication; it only displaces and generalizes it. What the homoerotic innuendo glances at is the specter of a female conspiracy against men in patriarchy. The strangeness, the apparent irrelevance and incoherence, of this tissue of cross­connections itself becomes relevant and coherent when we read it as a symptom of narrative anxiety. At the same time, whatever anxiety the narrative displays is not likely to infect a reader entertained by the image of Glauce consolingly cuddling the large well­built hysteric whose bed she shares. The textual prankster responsible for intensifying this droll effect by associating Glauce with Malecasta and Venus also, and with the same move, intensifies the latent scariness of the image.

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Readers who think the image funny and the associations witty may ap­ prehend the scary implications and laugh them away.34 They may mark them as an interpretation, gratuitous with respect to the “facts” of the story of Britomart that the narrative is constructing, therefore motivated by the gynophobic fantasy represented in Book 3 as a reaction inseparably linked to the profeminist sympathies of the legend of chastity. There is, however, an alternative reading of the situation I just described: The reader is of­ fered an image shadowed by hints of transgressive desire, but the image is comical. The disordered passion evoked by the Malecastan associations is self­subverting and bound to fail; the danger is laughed away, and the reader is soothed. This represents a strategy by which the ideological police try to keep the reader in line, whereas the other interpretation emphasizes the displacement of anxiety to the police. My point about this is that although the two readings of the situation are dif ferent they reinforce each other, for it is the possibly gratuitous anxiety of the police that moves them to manipulate the (male) reader by throwing a scare into him and then neu­ tralizing it with laughter. In the very process of imagining the episode, con­ structing it, filling in its details, and describing it, the narrative inscribes its worries, its “dearest dread,” in its product and inoculates its readers against them.

chapter 5

Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser’s Gardens of Adonis

Ovid begins the tenth book of Metamorphoses by telling how Orpheus loses his wife in the underworld and how it affects him: He rejects the love of women, institutes pederasty in Thrace, and begins plinking his lyre in an open field.1 The promise of a Thracian Woodstock pulls in an audience of shade trees, birds, and wild animals, and Orpheus sings to them of boys loved by the gods and girls inflamed by hidden lust. These are the stories we read during the remainder of the tenth book. They are bound together by misogynist, antierotic, and gynophobic themes that reflect the bitter­ ness of the singer. The figure who links several of the stories, and who fi­ nally emerges as the singer’s target when she is trapped by the consequences of her own actions and the eddying force of his ironic narrative, is Venus. It is Venus who turns the Cyprian Propoetides first into prostitutes and then into stones for denying her divinity; Venus who reverses that trick by bestowing life on Pygmalion’s ivory dream virgin, making it possible for her to found a line that includes the incestuous great­granddaughter and grandson, Myrrha and Cinyras; Venus who loves and loses their son Adonis. The statue is both the product and the symbol of Pygmalion’s misogyny: He quickly generalizes his disgust at the Propoetides’ shamelessness to “the 211

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faults that nature had so lavishly bestowed on woman’s mind,” and gives his snowy figure a forma no natural woman (“femina nasci”) could match.2 Orpheus drops several clues suggesting that Venus would have done bet­ ter to butt out and let Pygmalion continue in his harmless autoerotic rela­ tion with his life­size doll. When Adonis unwittingly “avenges his mother’s passion” (10.524) by arousing that of Venus, his death in effect punishes the goddess for releasing the statue from her androgenetic purity and dooming her to the curse of motherhood. The account of the gardens of Adonis in canto 6 of the third book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene is Venus’s answer to Orpheus. But of course it isn’t Venus who delivers the answer; it’s Spenser. Or, to be more precise, it is the narrator whose relation to Spenser’s text is the same as that of Orpheus to Ovid’s text. Spenser’s narrator doesn’t make the distinction I do between Ovid and Orpheus.3 He is represented as one who reads, interprets, and reacts to the Ovidian text not as a literary critic but as a cultural critic, and therefore he dissolves the particular motivated bias of the Orphean viewpoint into a more diffuse and culturally influential discourse of male chauvinism.4 In The Faerie Queene, and especially in Book 3, we find a ci­ tational and anthological interlace of traditional discourses— among them the Petrarchan, the Ovidian, the Neoplatonic, the chivalric, the courtly, the goliardic, and the pastoral—all represented as ideological strategies for defending or legitimating male dominance and desire, and for justifying the instrumental functions of woman in the patriarchal mode of reproduc­ tion. The object of the Spenserian critique of these discourses is the logic of the phallus which, in Chapter 1, I compared to the logic of Pinocchio’s nose: In the latter, the more he lies, the bigger it grows; in the former, the bigger it grows, the more it lies.5 In short, this is the logic of castration. Spenser’s dramatization and critique of this logic in the sixth canto of Book 3, and especially the reflexive irony of his narrator’s knowing failure to avoid what he criticizes, is the topic of this chapter. I explore the problems that confront the male narrator—indeed the problems displayed and per­ formed by the narrator—as he tries to rectify the injustices of the domi­ nant discourses by imagining an erotico­matriarchal idyll of fulfilled Venerean desire. The method informing Spenser’s critique is that of con­ spicuous allusion. Though it is now a familiar device, and I have frequently discussed it in earlier publications, a brief comment on its recent critical history may be in order before I proceed. Sixty years ago, one of the major efforts of New Critical practice was to distinguish the concept of allusion from that of influence; this was part of a program aimed at dissociating the work from its historical context, and

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the concerns of interpretation from those of literary history. Since then the meaning of allusion has been greatly enriched by four other develop­ ments. One is the reconceiving of genre as a form of intertextual discourse. The second is the related interest in exploring the interconnection and therefore the citationality of all literary texts. The third is the encourage­ ment given by such ideas as belatedness and strong reading to the study of citational practice as a form of space­clearing parody. The fourth is the extension of these strategies beyond literary discourse to a broad range of cultural discourses whose concealed intertextual relations and fictive char­ acter may be exposed, along with their ideological interests, from the standpoint of what Althusser calls “internal distance.” In the interpreta­ tion that follows, we shall see both the narrator’s attempt to establish in­ ternal distance from the regime of Ovidian discourse and the obstacles placed in his way by his own subjection to the logic of castration. • Even in the happy garden state of the Variorum tradition, no one working on Book 3 could avoid the theme of sexual politics, but until the late 1960s there was very little public discourse or theorizing about the topic. As a result, those of us who asked Old Genius to let us out of the Variorum gar­ den continued, mentally, to work there “without a mate.” My efforts in that paradise of patriarchal pedantries were as crude as those of other Spenserians who, after venturing outside the walls that surround the “fruit­ full soyle of old” criticism and sampling the cultural realities of sexual warfare, soon returned “backe by the hinder gate” into the more comfort­ able and familiar pieties of visionary resolutions. Since that time activities on several fronts have populated the extramural landscape with new atti­ tudes toward and insights into the problematics of gender, generation, the family romance, the role of the reader, and the relation of Spenser’s po­ etry to its intertextual and extratextual settings. This makes it possible for an aged boy belatedly to return to the scenes of his youthful crimes with­ out actually returning, to stay outside the walls so as to displace his desire for Spenserian visions into the revisionary play of the poem’s discursive critique of androcentric vision. Or so he hopes. His hope, however, is mingled with the apprehensiveness caused by re­ alizing that if he desires to defend the Spenserian narrator’s defense of Venus, he too is subject to the logic of castration. He plans to guard against this by looking—or peeping—at the gardens of Adonis from the observa­ tion point provided by feminist critics who argue that the sixth canto con­ structs a virtual reader more congenial to woman’s interests than to man’s.

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He is aware that this may expose him to Actaeonic dangers, but he is will­ ing to take the risk because he knows that after Pinocchio stopped lying the fairy did to him what Venus did to Pygmalion’s statue.6 And I share his confidence. A real puer, however senex, may find new life, a life unclogged by fear, unburdened by the woody growth of alien horns,7 if only he will take the precaution of eyeing the garden not directly but in the mediating mirror of the feminist gaze. And so I hope, and in this hope I shall avail myself primarily of Maureen Quilligan’s stimulating account of gendered reading in Milton’s Spenser. I hasten to add that in using the phrase “gen­ dered reading,” I don’t mean to imply that one set of responses character­ izes the way women read, and another the way men read. Rather, I’m alluding to the possibility that the third book, which centers on problems of gender, generation, and sexuality, offers its readers gendered positions that correspond to those it represents. Not two but three such positions have been identified (and there may be more). Quilligan, after noting that “Spenser’s direct addresses to female readers are far more numerous in Book III than elsewhere throughout the poem,” goes on to argue that “the male perspective on the experiences of Book III’s narrative is radically censured” (188). Simon Shepherd, who rep­ resents himself as a feminist traveler, objects to this thesis and claims that “the text of The Faerie Queene assumes a male readership, in that it offers points of identification available to men only and objects of desire cultur­ ally designated for men rather than women. . . . In terms of pleasure and identification there is little point of entry for the woman reader.”8 Finally, according to Lauren Silberman, the movement toward an androgynous dis­ course in 3.6 creates a reader whose allegiance “transcends the partiality Spenser attributes to men.” 9 My project in what follows is to navigate among these positions, and, in particular, to give Quilligan’s complex ar­ gument more prime time than it gets from Shepherd, who dismisses it in a single parenthetical phrase, and who flaunts his contempt for efforts by “the academic servants of ‘great Literature’ ” to “locate ‘feminist’ thought” in a narrative that “implicates the reader in some of the classic sexist ways of looking at women” (60, 79). • After the bachelor hero of Book 2 has been bounced off his horse, the chi­ valric love quest is restored in a complex form that makes the virgin the subject of desire and makes virgin power even more central than in Book 1— dangerous not only to men who are overthrown by chastity’s spear or undone by beauty’s chase but also to those who suffer the ignominy of

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having to be saved or replaced by the fearless woman warrior.10 When the simple, hearty, fair­minded male reader contemplates the story of Brit­ omart in its general lines, how can he think himself implicated in a classic sexist way of looking at women? When Britomart’s desire is inscribed by Merlin in a political text, another aspect of virgin power is underlined: Whether erotic or antierotic, it is a virtue necessary to male control of mar­ riage, the institutional cornerstone on which the preservation and conti­ nuity of patriarchal order is founded. Here, perhaps, our admiration and sympathy for Britomart are crossed by just a twinge of classic sexism if we find ourselves inclined to applaud Merlin’s sage advice: “Submit thy wayes unto his will,” he urges her, and “his” refers both to Artegall and “eternall providence.” Merlin’s own submission to the Lady of the Lake adds ironic emphasis to his advice; it reminds us that since men are weak, they need to insemi­ nate strong women with the fidelity and capacity for chaste love required to guarantee orderly transmission of the phallus.11 But of course men are weak, as those of us who have passed through Acrasia’s bower know, and when the narrator refers to the good wizard’s fall through “that False Ladies traine,” we males may wonder whether he was ensnared in another seductive pietà, the dangerously ambiguous figure that conflates mother­ ing with sexuality and death. The Acrasian shadow falling across Book 3 smokes the edges of the varied restatements of the pietà so that not even the witch’s antitypes, Belphoebe and the great mother in her gloomy grove, are free of menace. The ministrations of maid and mother wound or en­ ervate, inflame or infantilize, those they aspire to protect or heal or grat­ ify. As Book 3 winds its readers through episodes whose turnings again and again expose the precariousness of male identity, whoever tries to iden­ tify with Guyon, Redcrosse, Merlin, Marinell, Arthur, Timias, or Adonis may be excused for succumbing to just the tiniest frisson of anxiety. On what grounds do we determine whether this sequence of locally ineffec­ tive and lyrically overmastered males constructs the reader position de­ scribed by Quilligan or the one described by Shepherd? The various episodes centered on Florimell, Malecasta, Britomart, Cymoent, and Belphoebe give diegetic continuity to an other wise diffuse flurry of moves in a campaign against male autonomy, power, and desire. Cantos 1–6 modulate from an emphasis on the flight, fear, suffering, and frustration of women to an emphasis on their self­sufficiency and power over men. After Britomart leaves the field with “all . . . in her powre,” Mari­ nell languishes on the ocean floor, Arthur stomps off in a pet, the Foster meets his just desert, and Belphoebe’s pharmakon leaves Timias flat on the

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forest floor. As the woman’s movement gathers force, the momentum in­ creases with the turn backward in story time but forward in discourse time to Belphoebe’s birth. This diegetic split is itself important in a poem whose broken story line is subordinated to the rhetorical transactions between narrator and reader in the now of discourse time, transactions that not only represent but also interpret the story. Thus if it takes an etiological flash­ back to advance the woman’s movement, that may signify either a regres­ sive withdrawal to an ancient vision of maternal paradise or else the need to send the Belphoebe figure back through the hinder gate so that it can be reconceived and reinterpreted— assimilated, sublated, transcended in a utopian revision of Venus. It is utopian because when Venus combines with Diana to recapture and disarm or repossess truant male desire (Cupid), she forms an alliance that temporarily diminishes the generational conflict be­ tween mothers and the loving virgins whose quest threatens maternal control of sons and lovers. By the end of canto 6 one is strongly tempted to agree with Quilligan that the male perspective has been “radically cen­ sured”: Woman power peaks in the garden; Venus finds the maternal and erotic fulfillment she and Cymoent vainly sought in earlier episodes; not only Adonis and his Boar but also Cupid and his little family are safely back under the Mother’s green thumb, along with Amoret. Thus the problem embodied as Belphoebe is resolved: Because her share of Venus is muffled and repressed within the Diana function she performs, she can tend and pity the male but she can’t respond to the love her tendance arouses. Her pietà is perforce a defective shadow of the one Venus attains to: a pietà of power and pity only, not of power and joy. When the narrator returns her to birth, supplies her with a Venerean twin, makes Venus temporarily over­ come Diana’s resistance, and sends Belphoebe out of Book 3 under Diana’s tutelage, he releases Venus from her Belphoeban containment so that she may recapture the male desire she generates and perpetuates, may do for Adonis what Belphoebe was unable to do for Timias.12 In her gynarchic idyll there is no need for figures of daunger whose chief purpose is to re­ sist domination by male desire. Surely this can’t be one of Spenser’s “classic sexist ways of looking at women.” Or is it? No one says “surely” unless he isn’t sure his interlocutor has been reassured by what he says. And if we look harder at the discursive structure inscribed in Belphoebe, we may find it difficult to deny the jus­ tice of Shepherd’s position. It is true that she combines the resonances of Diana and Elizabeth I, but she does so under Petrarchan dispensation. As Patricia Parker notes in developing Nancy Vickers’s important insights, al­ though the male subject in Petrarchan discourse “is always potentially an

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Actaeon,” his vulnerable status as lover is “countered by the mastery of the poet” (62). Whatever power a Diana figure like Belphoebe has over man is a power ceded by the poets who have power over her in the sense that she is their fantasy. The ideal of the autonomous virgin is a diversionary fic­ tion enabling the male to represent himself as a victim entitled to poetic revenge.13 In Book 3 the male origins of the fantasy are flagged in the poem by the three interconnected accounts of Belphoebe’s birth. The first, which is anticipatory and is easy to overlook, occurs in the penultimate stanza of Arthur’s self­victimizing complaint against foul Mother Night: Dayes dearest children be the blessed seed, Which darknesse shall subdew, and heaven win: Truth is his daughter; he her first did breed, Most sacred virgin, without spot of sin. Our life is day, but death with darknesse doth begin. (4.59)

Turning from the evil matriarchy of Night to the good patriarchy of Day, Arthur speaks less of a virgin­like truth than of a truth­like virgin.14 His terms will be echoed and amplified in the stanzas of the sixth canto de­ scribing the conception of the sun’s daughters. The second account occurs near the end of the fifth canto when, as Thomas Roche notes, Belphoebe’s creation is “treated like that of a Platonic Idea”: “Eternall God” planted her virtue in Paradise and then transplanted it “in stocke of earthly flesh” (5.52): here, as in the first account, the mother’s role is cut out.15 The third account encodes Belphoebe’s origin in poetry in the statement that “Phoe­ bus with faire beames did her adorne,” and then readmits a chastened version of the mother whose name, Chrysogone (“golden birth”), has the force of a patronym, and signifies her subjection. Belphoebe’s birth thus betrays the “secret powre unspide” of the very male fantasy she has been invented to fend off and despise. But she can fulfill her protective function only by being created at the same time to arouse desire; other wise, she wouldn’t get the chance to fend it off. This constrains her to produce the effect of Venus and Cupid in the figure of Diana, and for this reason Spenser doesn’t fully extricate her from the son­ neteer’s famous goddess and scapegoat, the Cruel Fair. Inscribed by con­ spicuous allusion and exclusion in the encounter with Timias, the ghost of that Bad Lady hovers over the Malady produced by Belphoebe’s kind and caring intervention. In the wicked medium of the poet’s delighted word­ play, the energetic Belphoebe fares no better than the enervated Timias. Her hidden lord and master can’t resist loading every rift with puns— and

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bad ones at that. While she makes Timias’s wound gather and “grow hole,” the effect of her “dayly plaisters” is “to save a part, and lose the whole.” If we now follow Belphoebe into the sixth canto and look more closely at the third account of her birth, we may find ourselves leaning away from Quilligan’s feminist Spenser and toward Shepherd’s view of a poet who offers “little point of entry for the woman reader.” • Although the opening stanzas of 3.6 superficially portray an idyll of sex­ ual cooperation and female parthenogenesis, a little probing uncovers a male discourse of “powre” (or pour) within the cornucopia of euphemisms that spill out in the second stanza: But to this faire Belphoebe in her berth The heavens so favourable were and free, Looking with myld aspect upon the earth, In th’Horoscope of her nativitee, That all the gifts of grace and chastitee On her they poured forth of plenteous home; Jove laught on Venus from his soveraigne see, And Phoebus with faire beames did her adorne, And all the Graces rockt her cradle being borne.

This passage demands readers to pay attention to Belphoebe’s horoscope, and during the years when the “faire beames” of Panofsky, Wind, Seznec, Keith Thomas, D.  C. Allen, the early Gombrich, and others irradiated literary studies it was tempting to solicit help from such claims to knowl­ edge as those made by iconography, numerology, and astrology. So, for example, almost fifty years ago one critic cast Belphoebe’s horoscope in or­ der to “validate” her “celestial heritage” by reconciling divergent inter­ pretations and disambiguating the passage.16 Although, as we shall see, this approach to the detection of meaning privileges the astrological Thin Man over the textual Fat Lady, it responds to a line of exegesis thrown by the stanza itself to readers adrift in the shifting currents of Spenserian narra­ tive. Thus the astrological critic who proposes that Belphoebe’s horoscope reflects the discourse of the heavens rather than that, say, of Petrarchan lyric, only imitates a process initiated by the poem’s language when it trans­ forms the conflicts of gender and generation into a benign figure of con­ cord under the aegis of the Olympian patriarchy. It makes those conflicts rhetorically accessible to readers inclined to seek them out, but it also es­ tablishes a high­minded vantage point for a kinder, gentler reader inclined

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to screen them out. From this vantage point the suspiciousness that con­ taminated the reading of the eighties can only seem perverse. To see just how perverse, consider the “plenteous home” in line 6. The astrologer connects the home to the goat of Amalthea that “suckled infant Jove” and cites the ancient opinion that “the famous cornucopia is identi­ cal with the goat’s horn and is discovered now in the constellation Capri­ corn” (485). Surely it is perverse to wonder about the nasty events behind Jove’s nurture, and the divine mother’s effort to save her children from Saturn. It is even more perverse to sneak that allusion back through the hinder gate or over the garden wall, as critics have done more than once when they connected Saturn and his sickle or scythe with the figure of “wicked Time” who appears in 6.39. Surely such conjunctions dump shame and ignominy on Venus’s garden state, as do several other allusions poured forth from the horn, not only to goats and satyrs but also to cuckolds. It only made matters worse when critics began reading Actaeonic sermons in horns and finding traces of male voyeurism behind every bush and before every babbling brook. Anyone who has encountered the exciting but surely perverse ideas of Nancy Vickers, Leonard Barkan, and Maureen Quilligan on this subject might be misled into seeing a pun or two in “soveraigne see,” though it would be foolhardy to reduce Jove to a giggling Faunus, since he prefers to enjoy panoptic pleasures in the security of his high im­ perial sconce. There is safety in distance as well as in disguise—for males, at least. In the move from Jove’s laughter to the scopic action first of Phoe­ bus and then, in stanza 6, of Titan, the conception of Belphoebe gets as­ similated to some famous classical fantasies of violation. That most perverse mythographer, James Nohrnberg, has folded the rape of Danae into the name and plight of Chrysogone, and noted its appearance in the tapestries of Busirane (11.31).17 The tapestries work as a gloss measuring the comple­ mentary intensities of violence and euphemism in the account of Belphoe­ be’s birth; other ecphrastic episodes— the lines on Helle and Europa in 11.30—retroactively play strange tricks on the reader trying to hold fast to his kinder, gentler view of the sovereign see and plenteous horn.18 They jeopardize the innocence of the mirth with which he learns from the astrologer that the horoscope places “Jove in Virgo” at the same time that it has Phoebus lounging in Capricorn only 120 degrees away (Berleth, 489); what could he possibly be doing there? This shimmer of Ovidian rape images blurs and destabilizes the dance that goes on in the astrological distance. It generates a mirage in which we can glimpse the swelling shape of woman’s fear, and that of man’s: her fear of being violated by the phallic eye, implied by Chrysogone’s sequestering

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herself “farre from all mens vew” (3.6); his fear of being unmanned by yielding to the desire for close encounters with Belphoeban “ympes of beautie” who subdue “royalties and Realmes” to their “willes” (5.53). And the first fear is soon justified. When Phoebus detaches himself from Belphoebe’s astrological chart to turn his eye and ray on Chrysogone, that heavenly horoscope becomes an Ovidian horrorscope. By the time we slip from the poetry of Phoebus in stanza 2 to the power of Titan in stanzas 6 and 7, we realize that the statement “Phoebus with faire beames did her adorne” politely periphrases a solar rape: From a safe distance the sun god’s “fruitfull ray” pierces Chrysogone’s womb with “secret powre unspide” even though, like Diana, she hides from men. This miracle of distanced and furtive sex affords the god the pleasures of Actaeon without the attendant dangers, while for the nymph there is impregnation without apparent sex, without awareness, without consent or pleasure. The slippage I mentioned actually begins to affect the narrator while he is laughing on Belphoebe in the last three lines of stanza 2, where a pro­ nominal swerve momentarily identifies her with Venus—“Jove laught on Venus . . . , / And Phoebus . . . did her adorne”— and the swerve is con­ firmed in the mention of the Graces. As if this seductive transformation occurs too precipitously, he tries in the next stanza to chasten the image: Her berth was of the wombe of Morning dew, And her conception of the joyous Prime, And all her whole creation did her shew Pure and unspotted from all loathly crime, That is ingenerate in fleshly slime. So was this virgin borne, so was she bred, So was she trayned up from time to time, In all chaste vertue, and true bounti­hed Till to her dew perfection she was ripened. (6.3)

The residual touch of Venus in “berth . . . of Morning dew” leads to a sub­ limatory recoil similar to that which motivates Pygmalion’s immaculate conception of his statue. Here the aversion to sex seems focused primarily on the loathly crime ingenerate in the slimy female element—of which Bel­ phoebe is free because the narrator imagines for her a mother “who by race / A Faerie was, yborne of high degree” (6.4). The attempted distinction between “fleshly slime” and “Morning dew” is undone by the fact that in this context both are Venerean traces—the homonymous recurrence of “dew” in the final line ironically sustains the Venus ripening within Belphoebe—and we shall see later that they are also

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traces of the “loathly crime” of castration to which Venus owes her dewy birth and power. But when fleshly slime snakes back in at stanza 8, it is di­ verted to a dif ferent order of explanation. To the bemused male reader— “him that reades / So straunge ensample”—the learned narrator offers the comfort of ethnoscience. Soberly he cites the analogy of Nilus, the fertile action of whose “fattie waves” we last saw being compared to Error’s vomit in Book 1. The “sacred throne” of Chrysogone’s “chaste bodie” is now as­ similated to the fluvial mud informed, as “men do fynd,” with “[i]nfinite shapes of creatures,” and in her abjection poor Chrysogone wonders to see that throne transformed not only biologically but also rhetorically into “a belly so upblone” (6.5, 8–9). It doesn’t seem likely that the women to whom, according to Quilligan, this canto is addressed can be as pleased as the men by what “reason teacheth” (6.8). But they can’t complain about the subse­ quent course of the narrative. As if in reaction to Chrysogone’s plight and Titan’s monopoly of power, the rest of canto 6 is devoted to the project of domesticating male sexuality and placing it firmly under female control. When we reach the garden, for example, we find a much improved model of parthenogenesis— a horticultural model that guarantees automatic, im­ personal, nonerotic, male­free reproduction; a model that gives women the kind of reproductive freedom from the male denied to Chrysogone. “Dame Nature” presides over it at stanza 30, and at stanza 34 the God of Genesis confers reproductive autonomy on it by the verbal fiat that, uttered long ago, eliminates the need not only for a “Gardiner” but also for the solar middleman, who reappears at the end of stanza 38 only in his dimin­ ished and despicable role as a lily­killer. By the end of the journey, Adonis will have replaced Chrysogone in the passive position, and Venus will have replaced the phallic god. It has often been said that Adonis is or has become the sun, and although this may seem incompatible with the pattern I’m discussing, a minor re­ phrasing that makes the statement more precise will show that it is fully compatible, and is in fact the point of the pattern. What has been displaced to Adonis is not the title or being of the sun but its function and power— the symbolic function of representing the cosmic source of physical life and light under the aspect of male virility and sexual domination. This symbolism is embedded in a biological myth, a discourse of ethnoscience, that not only reflects but reinforces and naturalizes male domination in the discourse of gender. The father of this discursive imperialism is Phoe­ bus as the god of poetry, the patron of male imagination who is also, in his role as Belphoebe’s sire, the father of another familiar genre in the dis­ course of gender, Petrarchism. When Venus and Adonis replace Titan and

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Chrysogone, their positional inversion signifies a change from one hege­ monic form of the discourse of gender to its mirroring opposite. The point made by the inversion is that the generative and sexual power of the male, initially symbolized by solar aggressivity, has been resymbolized in a form that emphasizes wounded, engulfed, acquiescent passivity, a form congenial to the gynarchic idyll toward which the canto drives. If canto 6 may be said to have a “story,” it is the story of the play and conflict of these opposed discourses. When the narrator calls the birth of the twins “a goodly storie” that he found “in antique books” (5–6), he cues us to its citational status and marks it as a traditional cultural discourse. Later, he moves past the elegiac tokens of “sweet Poets verse” (45) and as­ cribes his account of Adonis to unspecified sources (46–48). Paul Alpers notes that the repeated hearsay formulas “remind us that the myth is a cre­ ation of many men and has taken on a life of its own;” a life, he adds, that is “independent but still obviously capable of nourishing an individual poet.”19 To put this more precisely, it may be the creation of many males, though that has yet to be determined. My question is whether Alpers has got their relation to the individual poet right when he uses the word “nour­ ishing.” Every thing “some say” and “they say” in those stanzas is consoling to partisans of Adonis and assures them that he has escaped the “wretched fate” of the “sad lovers” who died into flowers. But doesn’t that Ovidian metaphor linger on in the image of the prone Adonis? Resembling Mari­ nell on the ocean floor and Timias on the forest floor, there he lies, en­ snared with flowers like Marvell’s vegetable love, or better (or worse), like the lovely vegetable Marvell’s phrase so wickedly suggests and turns away from. So I am not convinced that the poet of the Adonis stanzas is exactly nourished by the mythic sources he mobilizes. I think it more likely that he is seeking protection from them— protection from the consequences of his own courageous quest for the woman’s paradise beyond the bound­ aries of the domains of language use controlled by men. Let’s premise that the consolation he seeks at this august moment comes from a myth created by males. Doesn’t that suggest a small swerve away from the goal of the quest? And incidentally, just who is “he”? I can go along with Alpers’s view that “he” is Spenser only if I stipulate that Spenser— and by “Spenser” I mean the text I interpret impersonates a narrator who tells stories recognizably appropriated from “antique books” and whose commitment to the values inscribed in those books the imper­ sonator questions. Given that reservation, I accept Alpers’s notion that the narrator need not be separated from his narrative and that his com­ ments on the stories he tells reinforce those values. In canto 6 the sinuous

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oscillation between impersonated commentary and impersonated de­ scription is at times bewildering, and in fact the very idea of storytelling is rendered extremely problematical. If a speaker informs us that he is going to “declare” a goodly story, we expect to hear about things that happen in time and space, and from the fifth stanza to the second line of stanza 19 these expectations are met. For this very reason, they are all the more frustrated by the subsequent account of the garden. One critic after another has pointed to the incongruities, the rhetorical duplicity, the bizarre disruptions of narrative and descrip­ tive logic, that drop a kind of hinder gate between the reader and the ref­ erent of description. The referent is more clearly a place (the seminary of Nature) from stanzas 29 through 33 than it is from 34 through 38, and with the assault of Time in 39 it gathers itself back into a definite place (the hill and grove of Venus), but one that is pictorially and iconographically dif­ ferent from the first place. The two places are locked into positional rela­ tion to us by demonstrative shifters: The narrator and his readers are here, in the world, this side of the garden wall; that garden is there, vaguely somewhere—the narrator isn’t telling— but definitely elsewhere, except when it seems to be in, or to represent, the world, which happens between the two descriptions as well as in moments of positional and visual unclar­ ity in the first. These changes in the account intensify what may be called the effect of allegory. The account has a conspicuous air of meaning or sym­ bolizing something Big, but as the even bigger gobbets of learned com­ mentary allowed into print testify, it would be hard to say just what that something is. The problem, then, is how to interpret this investment in mystifying discourse, and especially, how to connect it to the gender con­ flict the discourse vehiculates. I begin with a few observations and reminders. First, the gardens of Adonis passage both invites and frustrates visualization; it raises from the verdure of description a mist of overlapping allegories that invite but re­ sist rational paraphrase; it diffuses these effects of allegory in a haze of al­ lusions to a variety of mainstream texts and traditions. Second, the effect of allegory changes with the introduction of the mons Veneris in stanza 43. An iconography that couples the bodies of the goddess and her garden within an Ovidian framework differs from one whose terms and images touch off sparks of Platonic, Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, Augustinian, hex­ ameral, cosmographic, eschatological, and—last but not least—antifeminist discourses. Finally, let’s remember the old tradition that compares man to woman as reason to passion, soul to body, spirit to matter, culture to na­ ture, and head to torso; and in connection with that let’s recall the specific

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claim, most notably expressed in the Symposium, that the creation of poems, laws, ideas, and other products of the mind or spirit (philosophies and cosmologies, for example) are preferable to the creation of babies. This dream of male parthenogenesis ingeniously excludes the female other while appropriating her generative power and nurturant role through meta­ phoric sublimation. Such tactics are familiar wherever the gendering of male children involves their being weaned by initiation or education from the woman­dominated household to the extradomestic world dominated by men. From what I have just said, it may seem that I think the heavily allego­ rized seminary of Nature described from stanzas 30 through 38 appeals to male readers, while the account of the sensuous, passionate, and bodily pleasance of Venus appeals to female readers. That deduction would not be entirely correct. It could even be totally wrong if the claim were ascribed to my belief that women go for more concrete description and less abstract allegory than men because they are naturally more sensuous and emotional and stupid. That isn’t it at all. My reasons are not based on difference in nature; they are not even culture­specific but Book 3– specific and canto 6– specific. The position of female reader engendered by the poem is one anyone can apply for and fill so long as she or he sympathizes with the desire to escape from the predatory or narcissistic or patriarchal scenarios women find themselves inscribed in during the first five cantos; to escape from the pains mothers and virgins were forced to suffer under the pressure of chi­ valric, dynastic, and erotic initiatives; to withdraw into a garden that holds out the promise of autonomy, fulfillment, and power. The applicants for the position don’t want a garden that will dissolve into allegory once they get there, especially the sorts of allegory, or phallegory, that would rein­ scribe them in hierarchies congenial to the male imagination. So they want a real hortus conclusus with real groves and real flowery beds and boys and birds safe behind a real double wall secured by the golden locks and iron bolts of a real hinder gate. The position of male reader engendered by the poem is a little more challenging. Its applicants will endorse what woman wants because they’re decent and fair­minded, having been fashioned by the poem in virtuous and gentle discipline; they are true gentlemen, whatever their gender. But they are still troubled by bad dreams; the old gynophobia won’t go away, and even as they applaud the progress of Venus into the gloomy grove atop her real garden, the narrator keeps pricking them with image­darts that

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bear the traces of primal terrors. So surely they can be forgiven if they respond with gratitude to such minims of allegorical sublimation as the glimpse of “the Father of all formes” in stanza 47. This, then, is how I propose to treat the relation of the narrative as rhe­ toric to the engendering of the reader. Let’s look first at what happens between stanzas 30 and 33: In that same Gardin all the goodly flowres, Wherewith dame Nature doth her beautifie, And decks the girlonds of her paramoures, Are fetcht: there is the first seminarie Of all things, that are borne to live and die, According to their kindes. Long worke it were, Here to account the endlesse progenie Of all the weedes, that bud and blossome there; But so much as doth need, must needs be counted here. It sited was in fruitfull soyle of old, And girt in with two walles on either side; The one of yron, the other of bright gold, That none might thorough breake, nor over­stride: And double gates it had, which opened wide, By which both in and out men moten pas; Th’one faire and fresh, the other old and dride: Old Genius the porter of them was, Old Genius, the which a double nature has. He letteth in, he letteth out to wend, All that to come into the world desire; A thousand thousand naked babes attend About him day and night, which doe require, That he with fleshly weedes would them attire: Such as him list, such as eternall fate Ordained hath, he clothes with sinfull mire, And sendeth forth to live in mortall state, Till they againe returne backe by the hinder gate. After that they againe returned beene, They in that Gardin planted be againe; And grow afresh, as they had never seene Fleshly corruption, nor mortall paine.

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Some thousand yeares so doen they there remaine; And then of him are clad with other hew, Or sent into the chaungefull world againe, Till thither they returne, where first they grew: So like a wheele around they runne from old to new. (6.30–33)

As the narrator begins to describe a scene that will embody a gynarchic perspective on generation, desire, and pleasure, he uses names (Nature and Genius) that carry strong allusions to The Complaint of Nature, Cosmo­ graphia, and The Romance of the Rose. This allows the suspicion that the gynarchic perspective is circumscribed by that of the male tradition in terms of which it is conveyed. The terms include the antifeminism of Genius’s speech in the Romance and the problem of sodomy about which the Nature of Alanus complains. In dif ferent ways, both encode resistance to the very gynarchic idyll the stanzas celebrate.20 Hence if this intertex­ tual network evokes a thought of matriarchal utopia, it is a limited matri­ archy. Nevertheless, my sympathy with the maternal perspective on the life cycle moves me to discount the vaguely misanthropic description of the activities assigned the garden’s first male figure, but not without first indicating what is misanthropic about them. The double nature of Old Genius, like his double gates, signifies not merely that he is both birthgiver and deathgiver, but that he is a deathgi­ ver because he is a birthgiver. The sad antithesis of stanza 31—“faire and fresh” versus “old and dride”— seems to prejudice the description of the gatekeeper to whom the dark side of Dame Nature’s reproductive power is displaced: Old Genius is bound by his epithet more closely to the “old and dride” than to the “faire and fresh.” The rhetoric stabs with increasing force at the folly of the desire to leave the garden for the world: from “fleshly weedes” to “sinfull mire” to “fleshly corruption,” and from “mortal state” to “mortall paine.” The naked babes who long for this fate do so only because the promise of new life is coupled with the eradication of old knowledge. The emphasis tilts from departure to return, and the cycle is reversed as if to undo the harm—to “make­it­unhappened” (Ungeschehen­ machen again). The wheel of desire runs back toward the garden from old to new. “Leeve mooder, leet me in,” and when she does, it takes the returned veterans “[s]ome thousand yeares” to recover.21 This is a parent’s golden­age view of the life cycle. It does not take much probing to expose the strains and transgressions smoothed over by the in­ cantatory flow of echoing words and phrases that celebrate the idyllic dream of reversal: the strains of sexual and generational warfare, the eli­

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sion of sexual with generational desire. The pejorative epithets suspended in the flow encapsulate in generalized form the bitterness of the elder’s view of life as loss, a bitterness which elsewhere in Spenser is composed of nos­ talgia for lost youth, envy of those who have it, anger at their prodigal mis­ use of it. The bitterness in this passage seems directed against the folly of the naked babes’ desire of incarnation: They pester Genius for “fleshly weedes,” and “weedes” is still redolent of the fragrance of those that “bud and blossome” in stanza 30; he rewards them instead with “sinfull mire” and sends them “forth to live in mortall state” until they have had enough and learned their lesson. This bitterness can easily be assimi­ lated to the narrator’s partisan representation of Nature and Venus. You can, for example, associate it with the mother’s judgment on those who are foolish enough to leave their vegetable bliss in the womb for the au­ tonomy of gendered life in a man’s world, the life in Jove’s iron age and under his “soveraigne see.” The enclosed garden is introduced as a place that commemorates loss—that “called is by her lost lovers name” (29)— and then, in stanzas 30–33, is depicted as a place walled in against loss, isolated from the male­ and death­dominated “world” of “mortall state.” The theme of the mother’s loss of power over her child, the center of the previous episode involving Venus’s search for Cupid, modulates into the theme of the lover’s loss of her beloved. The elision of these two themes affects the description in stanza 31. James Nohrnberg and David Miller have discussed the importance of in­ cestuous desire in Book 3, and in lines 5 through 7 of that stanza there is a hint of sexual intercourse that adumbrates the two perspectives, mater­ nal and filial, on the mother’s desire.22 The hint is dropped partly by the use of the term “men” in line 6; this is the only occurrence of that word in the description of the garden and its occupants, and though the usage seems generic, it momentarily narrows the range of Nature’s creatures to the human race and its dominant gender (in stanza 35 forms “fit for reason­ able soules” are mentioned). The perspectival difference is produced by the ambiguous relation of the contrasting pairs coupled in lines 6 and 7: “By which both in and out men moten pas; / Th’ one faire and fresh, the other old and dride.” The featured aspect is the fantasy of reversal and promise of rebirth: You enter the garden old and dried, and leave it fair and fresh. But the parallel position of the clauses—“in” lines up with the pre­caesural “faire and fresh”—momentarily muddies that message. If you are fair and fresh when you go in through the wide­open gates, and old and dried when you leave, that is clearly another story: the story of the threat or fear of maternal eroticism, of the mother’s power to enfeeble, desiccate, and

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reduce her “men” to impotence. Again, this is only a momentary effect, and the reading is of course ruled out by what follows. But if you have registered it, it may affect the connotative value you give to the naked babes who want out in stanza 32, and who seem importunate about it by the time their desire is matched by its first rhyme­word. The price of the rebirth the garden promises is perpetual infantilization, life as a vegeta­ ble. From the standpoint of the male reader, the only safe position in that maternal paradise is the one occupied by Old Genius, whom Nohrnberg calls “a slightly dissociated puer senex” (532), and whose two natures as womb and tomb porter are liminal parentheses: They bracket out those stages of the male life cycle during which the mother’s control over her sons and lovers could be more effectively resisted. This diminution of the male conforms with the logic of idyllic desire, which is autonomous desire, desire of escape from the power of the other. Idyll means “little picture” (eidyllion), and its logic drives the imagina­ tion toward the closure of spatial enclosure, the conclusion of the hortus conclusus. Accordingly, idyllic narrative drives toward the visualization or description of a place apart from others, securely removed from the world’s grasp. I emphasize this drive because it contrastively highlights the meaning of the rhetorical strategy that resists it.23 Thomas Roche was one of the first to demonstrate that the rhetoric of stanzas 31–33 de­ nies precisely the visualization that the narrator pretends to offer, and more recently David Miller showed how the ambiguous “barrage of dou­ blings” in stanza 31 “dis­locates” what the narrative presumptively lo­ cates.24 The ambiguity continues in the first two lines of stanza 32—“He letteth in, he letteth out to wend, / All that to come into the world desire”— where letting in and letting out both seem to denote coming into the world. Of lines 6 and 7 in stanza 33 A. C. Hamilton notes that the dis­ junctive “[o]r” is puzzling because “and sent into the chaungeful world againe” would make more sense.25 Nothing in the passage suggests that “clad with other hew” indicates an intragarden alternative to being sent out, so we are left with the possibility that the two lines express synony­ mous alternatives, which means that the garden and the world must be the same. This dissolution of boundaries is contained by the shifters— “that” in line 2, “thither” in line 8—but, as we’ll see, the boundaries break down from stanzas 34 through 38 and do not get securely reestablished until the counterfactual subjunctive that exorcises Time in stanza 41 modulates into the indicative mood. Then, as the fantasy is actualized, the garden’s body solidifies, becomes an icon of the goddess’s body, and

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forms the uncanny place elsewhere that protectively enfolds her trium­ phant idyll. • In the first section of this chapter I stated that I would present the gardens of Adonis passage as Venus’s answer to the misogynist, antierotic, and gy­ nophobic discourse Ovid assigns Orpheus in Metamorphoses X. But I also stated that since the answer was delivered by a male narrator his critique might be vulnerable to the effects of the logic—the logic of Pinocchio’s nose, or of castration—it targets. This hypothesis, which has been tested in the preceding pages of interpretation, will obviously affect my response to the conflict about gender positions I reported in the second section— Maureen Quilligan’s claim and Simon Shepherd’s denial that Book 3 of The Faerie Queene privileges the female perspective and censures the male per­ spective on its narrative. The reading developed in the subsequent sec­ tions indicates a strong preference in both its author and Spenser’s narrator for the position Quilligan advocates. But it also testifies to a kind of back­ lash, a subversive countermovement of gynophobia generated by the nar­ rator’s drive to visualize and actualize the fantasy of Venerean gynarchy. Though this aspect of the reading may seem to implicate the reader “in some of the classic sexist ways of looking at women” (Shepherd, 79), it ac­ tually has very little in common with Shepherd’s simplistic argument and terse rejection of the alternative. My debts are all to Quilligan, and an important part of any critical debt is gratitude for the chance to differ, the chance to find, in the paradise of interpretive desire, a little corner all one’s own. And this is all I seek as I turn to give Quilligan’s reading the atten­ tion it deserves. Quilligan argues that “the safest vantage point for viewing” what hap­ pens in the gardens “is that of Venus herself—that is, the female perspec­ tive.” The male viewpoint is “potentially endangered by” the vision of “Venus’s awesome power over Adonis,” so that “the most comfortable and unthreatened viewpoint” on the gardens is that of a female reader (193, 196).26 Quilligan finds this message inscribed in the moment of the meet­ ing between Venus and Diana at which the Actaeon allusion is displaced to Venus. Here, as she notes in a later essay, Spenser “conspicuously re­ writes tragedy out of the famous moment by removing the potential for sexual violation.”27 These perceptions compose into a power ful and orig­ inal interpretation, one that has forced or enabled me to revisit 3.6 after many years of complacency with what I thought was an adequate if

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youthful vision of the canto. Under her tutelage I have, like other reentry students, discovered that all has changed, and that these ancient glittering eyes must learn to see differently. Therefore, I hope it will not be miscon­ strued as patronizing if I suggest one or two small changes that will strengthen Quilligan’s argument—give it more muscle, so to speak. I begin by interrogating the status she assigns the name “Spenser” because she uses it frequently and casually without specifying the range of its referents or making distinctions among them, so that it isn’t easy to de­ termine whether in any particular instance she is referring to the author or the narrator and, if to the narrator, whether she views him as an inno­ cent or suspicious reader of the stories he tells. I have already touched on this problem, so I’ll simply repeat that since in my lexicon “Spenser” de­ notes the product rather than the producer of his text, it also denotes the product of interpretations of the text. The complication that bears on Quil­ ligan’s usage stems from my thesis that this product, this narrator, some­ times mimics or parodies the perspective of a traditional (ergo, male) reader whose attitudes are those of the dominant literary and cultural discourses The Faerie Queene represents. For example, in the sixth canto the narrator begins by sharing with his readers an Actaeonic prospect on the secrets of the goodly new stories he claims to have discovered in old books. When, in the seventh stanza, he says that the sunbeams pierced Chrysogone’s womb “[w]ith so sweet sence and secret power unspide,” the “sweet sence” must— since Chrysogone sleeps through it—be Titan’s, and the narrator seems in describing Titan’s secret pleasure to be identifying himself with it.28 At such moments I’m not sure he could be said to be making an ap­ peal to female readers, and this leads to another revision of Quilligan’s thesis. Her statement that in canto 6 we “look at female power from a pe­ culiarly female perspective” (197) seems to collapse the distinction be­ tween the narrator and the implied reader. I would prefer to say that we look at female power from the peculiarly male perspective of the narrative occasionally addressed to female readers to whose interests it is clearly sym­ pathetic. This revision in fact reinforces and renders more consistent Quilligan’s claim that the male viewpoint on the garden is represented as threatened by its vision of female power. But to say this only leads me to wonder whether what I am doing for, or to, Quilligan is a clue to what the narrator is doing for, or to, his female readers. For the consequences of my revision differ from those she adduces. By way of making my own position clear, let me reaffirm my commit­ ment to the notion that canto 6 is trying to give the woman’s cause a bet­ ter than even break. Speaking for myself, I want Venus to have every thing

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that is coming to her, and I commend the narrator for wanting the same. But wanting it is one thing and responding to what transpires when you make it happen is another. My point is that if Quilligan likes the garden as much as she says Spenser’s female readers do, she and they may be tempted to like it more than they should—or at least with more unqualified enthu­ siasm than I think is warranted by the narrator’s responses to the woman’s fantasy of paradise he gradually builds up to. The garden, Quilligan claims, celebrates “the cosmic legitimacy of the female Eros’s triumph over a male Thanatos” (196). It clearly does, and even as I applaud this outcome I have to admit that I find it a little scary. Nor am I relieved by her attempt to assure me that “the garden’s eroticism should not be read as dismember­ ment” after reminding me that Venus’s cave has been described by Lauren Silberman as “the vagina dentata.” I take some heart, but not too much, from her view of the garden as “a vision of male sexuality brought safely and creatively under the control of an awesome female power,” but her comment that “the anatomical allegory plays out [a fantasy] . . . of female control over everlasting sexual communion” leaves me vicariously ex­ hausted (195–96). So I am forced to wonder whether my reaction merely betrays my own anxiety or whether I can find any justification for it, any echo of it, in the narrator’s discourse. The examples I have chosen to dis­ cuss are admittedly one­sided since they include some of the more lurid passages in the stanzas (34–38) that follow the account of Old Genius at the garden gate. Critics have often been puzzled by the way Spenser uses the philosoph­ ical buzzwords “substance” and “form” in the sequence that moves from the God of Genesis (34) through the description of the cosmic womb (36) to the news that the bits of unchanging substance, feminized in stanza 38 (“her hew,” “her temper”), put on and wear out variable forms. I think it’s less puzzling if we see it as an example of a familiar and relevant effect: the effect of “symbolic inversion,” which Stallybrass and White more point­ edly describe as “a generalized economy of transgression and of the re­ coding of high/low relations,” though a recoding that retains the same hierarchic structure of inequality.29 The biblical image of creative auton­ omy as the legacy of the Father—“the mightie word, / Which first was spoken by th’Almightie lord” (34)—is recoded in stanzas 36 and 37 as an exercise of maternal power. Now it isn’t the inversion itself that makes me uneasy. I praise and admire it as a long­delayed acknowledgment of Mother’s share in the hexameral achievement, a share concealed by the tra­ dition of hexameral discourse. But I can do this only as long as I keep a safe Platonic distance between me and the substance of the text. If I draw

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too close, I begin to feel the need of an ounce of civet. What the text dis­ closes may not be hell, may not be the sulphurous pit, but it’s pretty bad. For in the wide womb of the world there lyes, In hatefull darknesse and in deepe horrore, An huge eternall Chaos, which supplyes The substances of natures fruitfull progenyes. (36)

This begins to sound a little like Arthur’s fantasy of Night, “foule Mother of annoyance sad” (4.55). I hear the “deepe horrore” of the phallic mother’s savage beasts. I think also of previous touches of aversion in the references to “fleshly slime” in stanza 3, “mud” in stanza 8, and “sinfull mire” in stanza 32—touches, to put it more forcefully, of abjection in the precise sense given that term by Julia Kristeva. And things are not made easier by the invasion from inner space that follows in stanza 37: All things from thence doe their first being fetch, And borrow matter, whereof they are made, Which when as forme and feature it does ketch, Becomes a bodie, and doth then invade The state of life, out of the griesly shade.

It is soothing to learn, if only for a moment, that the things have some power: They can fetch their first being and borrow their matter. But as soon as they do, they open themselves up to predation. The “plenteous horne” of Belphoebe’s horoscope has become a fearsome copia, an inva­ sion of maternal body­snatchers, a monstrous forcing­bed, the implacable force of an inexhaustible reproductive power flooding the world with her grisly hungry stuff, catching and consuming the forms of individual things. And I am truly scared. But no matter. To return to our goodly story: At stanza 38, with woman securely on top, the chastened masculine viewpoint is inscribed in the Pla­ tonic nuance and courtly flourish of the elegiac phrase, “that faire flowre of beautie.” The transgressive logic of the passage might suggest that even the idea of beauty falls prey to the incessant metamorphoses of the mater­ nal invaders. But this possibility is immediately blocked by the simile that follows: The image of the lily undone by “the sunny ray” displaces blame to the power that pierced Chrysogone’s womb; Titan’s “fruitfull ray” is readmitted only as a destroyer. I suspect Spenser’s female readers would be pleased by this development, as well as by the appearance of the new scapegoat it introduces in stanza 39: wicked Time flailing rabidly away with his scythe and flaggy wings. I do not share their complacency.

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Expelling the lethal power of the mother’s fertility onto that figure slan­ ders my sex, converts my fear to anger, and prompts a thought of revenge. If you can’t enjoy their joy or youth, if you can’t stem the killing force that through the green fuse drives the flower, then cut them down. I sympa­ thize with wicked Time as I think Milton did, and in his behalf I say this to Venus’s “deare brood”: “League with you I seek, / And mutual amity so strait, so close, / That I with you must dwell or you with me.” Evil be thou my good. This bitter moment represents the cost of the effort to imagine “male sexuality brought safely and creatively under the control of an awesome female power.” I repeat Quilligan’s phrase here because I think my reac­ tions to canto 6 bear out her stunning insight into gendered reading, and I also think they reflect the discursive reactions that produce and are ob­ jectified in the figure of Time. What Time signifies is a mutability not limited to mortality. It extends to losses and deprivations of other kinds. He is, both objectively and subjectively, a figure of castration. His scythe, his flaggy wings, his “malice hard,” proclaim his draconian or Saturnine affinity to the class of envious have­nots that people Spenser’s poetry—to the bitter elders, for example, and the guardians of the law whose fear of Venus makes them stoic censors in Book 4. His destructive frenzy repeats that of Guyon in the Bower of Bliss. He is recalled in the wild Boar’s cruel tusk and malice, also in “the winged boy” who “has with spoiles and cruelty / Ransackt the world” (49), and will again, when Venus’s great enemy reap­ pears in the figure of Busirane. Time is like one of the nodal points in a network whose synapses fire off in dif ferent parts of The Faerie Queene, and the charges he bears suggest that Quilligan’s phrase could well supply the network with its name: The Endangered Male Viewpoint. As if relieved by the explosive and frenzied materialization of Time, the narrative sympathetically reverts to the perspective of Venus. The mantle of motherhood is transferred from dame Nature to Venus after the lethal effects of unrestrained fertility have been transferred from the cosmic womb to Time, whose enmity now justifies the continuing exercise of re­ productive power. Before turning to the Venerean climax of the canto, I would like to review the goddess’s progress through the sixth canto. When the canto begins, she is confined to her planetary role under Jove’s “soveraigne see.” We next find her in her Uranian “house of goodly formes and faire aspects.” In both of these textual sites she serves “high God” as one of the instruments through which he exercises his creative power, either as a planetary influence or as a generative but desexualized princi­ ple of the World Soul. Trapped in that refined form she has a hard time

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commanding the obedience of the male desire her fatter incarnation gives birth to. She can regain control of Cupid only by leaving her patriarchal house and descending—or regressing—to her Pandemic and Ovidian av­ atars, and by co­opting Diana in a mythological conjunction that will shift the balance of power. This happy if suspect negotiation facilitates the suc­ cessful journey to her bower of bliss. She receives the title of “great mother” in stanza 40 (not before) and soon thereafter regains her fabled fatness by sheltering in the dilated landscape of her own body, where she rules unchallenged. At this point, since I seem to be turning Venus into a dramatic charac­ ter, I should probably issue a disclaimer in the spirit of Paul Alpers. Let me reassure you, therefore, that I think of Venus only as a symbol, a kind of intertextual allusion. The denotation of the name “Venus” doesn’t have to be restricted to, say, a goddess or a planet or the World Soul, or to a symbol of beauty, of woman’s desire and desirability, of her dangerous erotic and creative power, and so forth. “Venus” may also denote a second­ order symbol of discourses that produce and deploy the figure. That is, representing Venus may be a way to represent and parody the discourses that represent Venus. And those discourses are expressions not merely of male desire, but of the discursive regime we somewhat loosely call “patriarchal.”30 The demystification of that regime can be found oddly enough within the very traditions that perpetuate it. John Hankins’s traditional survey of the traditions behind Spenser shows that although mythographers and others depict Venus as a goddess, they interpret her as an alienated figure of the masculine role in procreation.31 Like the roiling sea­cradled sex of the castrated father from which she is born, Venus is a projection, an ejac­ ulation, of male fantasy. The product of a castration, she is constituted and empowered by the seminal spume of desire, and then externalized as its object and cause. (She is, in that respect, the daughter of her own son.) Her dangerous phallic power, her power both to generate and to castrate, de­ rives from the Oedipal scene of her birth. The complex of fears and de­ sires condensed in her figure is repeatedly repressed in discourses that purge it of Oedipal terrors by various strategies of allegorization, coun­ tertextual strategies that dissociate the castration from the birth and re­ position both in such safer sites as cosmology, cosmogony, and theology.32 When Spenser begins his Venus canto with allusions to two of those purged Venerean sites, the planetary and Neoplatonic contexts mentioned in stanzas 2 and 12, he marks the target of a textualizing discourse that will restore to the rarefied Venus both her “copious fertility” and her

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“threatening . . . sexuality.”33 Her progress through the partitions of the canto’s citational field gives fullest scope to a fantasy of what women do in men require— and seldom find—the lineaments of gratified desire. Yet at the same time, the canto registers the threat, the risk, to a narrative view­ point engendered by the very discourses it opposes. The threat is inscribed in the teller’s rhetorical and narrative inventions. These are organized as a dialectic between, on the one hand, the increase and integration of woman’s powers and, on the other, increasing signs of male anxiety, resis­ tance, malice, and, finally, submission to a climactic moment of genera­ tive sexuality, a submission that remains, nevertheless, serrated by hints of terror and symbolic castration. As this climax approaches, the narrative shifts attention from Venus’s reproductive power to sexual pleasure and to an image of perpetual com­ munion that, although it implies reproduction, carefully excludes mention of its pains and labors; it isn’t Venus who has the babies. The logic of this withdrawal to erotic play enacts that of the song of the Rose in the Bower of Bliss (2.12.74–75). In the climactic image of redundant jouissance Venus modulates back into her Ovidian form so as to “reape sweet pleasure of the wanton boy” (46). This is clearly a benign revision of Malecasta’s tapestry Venus, conflating that figure with the great mother, and its echoes of the Bower of Bliss make it a benign revision of Acrasia. Nevertheless, the Male­ castan and Acrasian overtones, along with their dangers and ambiguities, adhere to the revision. They draw the figure of Venus back into the sys­ tem of erotic discourses that edge her with menace. The beautiful reaper is the antithesis of the grim reaper, but she remains a reaper; she does Time’s work, and the boar’s. Or they do her work. Although the poetry of her wish­hill excludes one after another fragmentary image of male threat— sharp steel, wicked beasts, “Phoebus beams,” and “Aeolus sharp blast”—in the cave beneath her landscape body Time’s “malice hard” has become internalized as the prisoner or property of the phallic mother. In Lauren Silberman’s fine reading of the passage, “the boar returns as the agent of castration” in an image that “promises Adonis’s safety while figuring forth the vagina dentata, ultimate expression of Venus’s fearsome power” (271). That reading is supported, I think, by the pun in the phrase “with his cruel tuske him deadly cloyd” (48). Since “cloy” means not only to pierce but also to surfeit or satiate with sweetness, to gratify beyond the limits of desire, it isn’t inconceivable that the phrase conceals a subversive comment on the statement that Venus “when ever that she will, / Possess­ eth him, and of his sweetnesse takes her fill,” or on the statement that “he may not / For ever die,” even if he should want to (46–47). Adonis’s share

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in this pleasure is described in an oddly qualified way: “Joying his goddess and of her enjoyd.” The goddess is the primary subject of both verbs.34 When Adonis momentarily merges with the boar in stanza 48, there is a question, intensified by the syntactic inversion in line 7 (“That her sweet love his malice mote avoyd”), as to whose malice it is, and who or what’s doing the avoiding—or voiding—to what or whom. These confusions are not resolvable, and they have the effect of clogging, or cloying, the path to decisive acceptance or wholehearted approval of Venus’s triumph. In such moments the narrative perspective seems trapped in ceaseless oscillation between the desire and the fear of Venus, between the desire to promote and proclaim woman’s right to unencumbered fulfillment and the anxiety that, projected in the figure of Adonis, is not fully allayed by all the nice things Poets and others say. Silberman differs from Quilligan in hypothesizing a male reader: “The text . . . creates a reader who is anything but partial, who by a courage that is moral as well as sexual transcends the partiality Spenser attributes to men.” She commends this reader for “facing the threat to which hierarchy and exclusion attest” (271). But her focus on the reader, like Quilligan’s, blunts what I take to be the force of Spenser’s Venus canto, which derives from the male narrator’s viewpoint. The text creates a narrator who is any­ thing but impartial, not only because he inscribes the male fear of abjec­ tion in his celebration of Venus’s triumph but also because he justifies the fear by the way he characterizes that triumph. For he represents it as a one­ sided, absolute, and premature desire for closure, a hegemonic fantasy of maternal eroticism, or erotic maternalism. He motivates the fantasy, in­ deed justifies it, as a reaction to the spectacle of predatory, unstable, and self­protective male behav ior in the earlier cantos, a reaction also to the cosmic imperialism of male desire and fantasy suggested by the sixth can­ to’s discursive sampler. Spenser’s discourse of Venus is a contestatory dis­ course that talks back to the Ovidian source it alludes to as it does to all the other “antique books” glanced at or referred to in the sampler. Yet at the same time, the narrator marks the extremism of that reaction by dis­ playing the anxiety that founds and sustains the contested master dis­ courses. Thus the breakdown that occurs in the next six cantos is latent in the self­divided narrative of this one, and Busirane’s hall of horrors in can­ tos 11–12 is only the climax of a process of backlash already at work in that self­division. Perhaps that is why the endangered male viewpoint dramatized in canto 6 finds its specular complement in the endangered female viewpoint dra­ matized in cantos 11–12. From 7 through 12 the narrative teeters crazily

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though a fun house full of sexual freaks, a mob of lechers, deviants, rap­ ists, monsters, whores, and sadists rushing by with the verve of a Russ Meyer production. This narrative conforms to and illustrates the logic of castration. From canto 8 on the males try ever more busily—because inef­ fectively—to dominate, violate, and terrorize, or merely defend themselves against, female figures. The repeated pattern of male behavior in these can­ tos is the shift from weaker to more aggressive forms of violence, and from victimization to tyranny: the shift, for example, from the hapless witch’s son to the hyena­like monster that feeds on women’s flesh; from the Squire of Dames and Argante’s other victims to Ollyphant; from the fisherman to Proteus, Malbecco to Paridell, and Scudamour to Busirane. Castration is inscribed in the reliance of helpless males on the cross­dressed virgins—Palladine (7.37, 43–44, 52) and Britomart—whose investment parodies the gender roles of chivalric discourse. The cantos that follow Venus’s garden idyll pour forth from their “plenteous home” such an inge­ nious array of threats and lets to the male will that it is no wonder the legend of chastity eventuates in the busy reign of terror. • The intensifying gynophobia that accompanies the narrator’s depiction of the garden idyll modulates to misogyny in canto 7 with the tale of the witch, her son, and Florimell. The figure of the supine male, after being raised from the plight of Marinell and Timias to the glory of Adonis, is wickedly mimicked in the witch’s son “stretched forth in idlenesse alwayes” and lying “in slothfull shade” (7.12). Like the bower in Venus’s high gloomy grove, the witch’s “little cottage” is also hidden from the world down “in a gloomy hollow den” (7.6). The strange conjunction of the wanton boy with the boar splits into the unbalanced pairing of the lovesick son with the witch’s other issue, the beast. What Venus bound the witch releases. But her maternal solicitude is not the only force that drives the male foes toward the flower; the flower contributes her share when Florimell disrupts the little rustic household. Together the desperate mother and virgin gen­ erate the actions to which the son, the monster, and Satyrane react, all with little or no success. But it is the witch who initiates the transfer of power that betrays woman into the hands of man by driving Florimell toward the old lechers of the sea and then cobbling together False Florimell out of sonnetry bits. It thus appears that a confluence of female plots, desires, and fears acti­ vates the male revenge that later materializes in Cupid and Busirane. The pagan and courtly discourses condensed in the parallel stories of the

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attempted violation of Florimell and Amoret by Proteus and Busirane are marked by their position in the narrative sequence as defensive reactions to the threat of castration depicted in the (s)mothering love of Venus, the doting motherhood of the wicked witch, the unattainability of the desir­ able but paranoid virgin, the unappeasability of the monstrous Argante. Although Florimell and Amoret deserve our sympathy, Britomart and Pal­ ladine our admiration, Proteus and Busirane our indignation, Satyrane our dissatisfaction (we expected more), the Squire of Dames and Paridell our derision, Malbecco our contempt, and Scudamour our impatience, it behooves us to remember that threat and try to understand how hard it is to be a real man in a story world in which the testing and triumph of chas­ tity seems to threaten the integrity of all gender positions, especially that of Mother. At least it behooves half of us to remember. The other half might insist that if we are inclined to blame men’s trouble on women we are only following the example set by the poem. Consider, for example, the shabby treatment of Florimell. When canto 7 begins, she is still in full career, flying away “of her owne feet affeard” like a “[h]ynd forth singled from the heard, / That hath escaped from a rav­ enous beast.” Granted the poor thing has had an appalling run through the woods, isn’t she overreacting? “So fled faire Florimell from her vaine feare, / Long after she from perill was releast” (7.l). Perhaps if she had been sensible and paused to take stock, the ravenous beast would not have been transferred from the simile to the story world later in the canto. The rhe­ torical prolepsis prepares readers to assign some of the responsibility for the witch’s monster to the virgin’s paranoia. And though the friends of Florimell may legitimately protest this churlish maneuver, the storyteller begins the next canto by inscribing a similar reservation in the midst of a smarmily compassionate outburst: So oft as I this history record, My hart doth melt with meere compassion, To thinke, how causelesse of her owne accord This gentle Damzell, whom I write upon, Should plonged be in such affliction, Without all hope of comfort or reliefe, That sure I weene, the hardest hart of stone, Would hardly find to aggravate her griefe; For misery craves rather mercie, then repriefe. (8.l)

We should go easy on the poor thing even though it is the poor thing’s own fault. Were I a friend of Florimell I would think her, if not as “cruelly

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pend” as Amoret (11.11), at least more insidiously written on. But at the same time I am half persuaded to go easy on the narrator by Susanne Wofford’s argument that the text indicates his responsibility for Flo­ rimell’s plight: “Similar Ariostan laments and comments throughout the Florimell episode implicate the narrator as the cause of her suffering, so that he too is treated as a writer who imprisons and ‘pens’ or ‘writes upon’ his characters, the two actions being joined,” and the construction of a character according to a patriarchal template being at the same time rep­ resented as an act of carceral violence.35 The burden of narrative scorn of course falls on the wicked witch. She too is miserable “of her owne accord,” dwelling in “wilfull want, all care­ lesse of her needes” (7.6). In moving from the rich semantic and mytho­ logical heights of the garden text to the bathos of a straitened Hibernian fantasy the narrative maintains continuity by reproducing the pietà motif (Venus over Adonis, the witch over her son) but refiguring it from an im­ age that solicits the reader’s wonder to one that solicits his (and her?) con­ tempt. Playing on gender, class, and perhaps colonialist prejudices, the literate and courtly/chivalric narrator produces a reductive travesty on the dolors and ardors of Cymoent and Marinell, Belphoebe and Timias, and Venus and Adonis. However, there are moments early in the canto during which the reported behavior of the witch and her son belies the barbed epi­ thets the narrator peppers them with. In their initial dealings with Flo­ rimell neither seems particularly dangerous. Both are cowed by “the faire Virgin,” the witch even tries to make her feel at home, and when Florimell slips away, the witch joins her son in making “mone, as they had bene un­ donne” (7.l9). She will soon snap out of it and live up to her bad names, but the reader is at first struck by the disproportion between her treatment of Florimell and the tonal overkill of So choosing solitarie to abide, Far from all neighbours, that her dev ilish deedes And hellish arts from people she might hide, And hurt far off unknowne, whom ever she envide. (7.6)

When Florimell finds her “sitting on the flore . . . / Busie (as seem’d) about some wicked gin” (7.7), the image and the dismissive “some” hilari­ ously diminish “that vile Hag” to a child performing mumbo jumbo. The disproportion raises questions. Why the initial rhetorical overkill? And why does the misogynist selection of and assault on a witch evoke echoes of previous sites of necromancy, the most obvious of which is Archimago in 1.1?

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Even later, when the witch gets really bad, her motives are represented as patently confused, and as her maternal animus against the diffident vir­ gin sharpens, her machinations misfire. After the narrator tells us that the witch sought to restore her lovelorn son “to plight,” his account of her strat­ agems unfolds the contradictory implications of that verb: “[B]y her dev­ ilish arts” she intended to bring Florimell “backe againe, or worke her finall bale” (7.21), and the instrument she creates for this purpose indicates that she is less interested in restoring his mental health than in restoring the “comfort of her age and weary dayes” to his listless and torpid subjection (7.12). “The Monster swift as word” that she calls forth “out of her hidden cave” betrays her preference not only because it recalls the beast that gored Adonis but also because it “likest to an Hyena was, / That feeds on womens flesh, as others feede on gras” (7.22–23). So it isn’t surprising that when the monster returns with Florimell’s “broken girdle” and the witch assumes it has finished the poor girl off, she, unable to contain her “wondrous glad­ nesse,” triumphantly and stupidly shows it to the son, who responds by try­ ing to finish her off (8.2–4). His murderous reaction, Jonathan Goldberg remarks, signifies that “he recognizes his mother as . . . [Florimell’s] rival” so that his assault is a “grotesque parody of the liberation of the male from the overwhelming mother.”36 Thus the narrator’s treatment of the witch remains puzzling. He continues to belittle her while investing her with the infernal aura of an Archimago. A clue to this procedure may be found in the textual pedigree of her two inventions. The beast is likened to a hyena at 7.22 and definitively named one at 8.44. In bestiary sources that go back to Aristotle the hyena is described as unclean both because it periodically alternates between male and female and because when male it prefers to have sex with males; in a few sources it is depicted as necrophagous and given to oral sex.37 The witch’s gynophagous monster is a figure of misogyny, but since its creation is motivated by maternal parthenophobia, its diet is presumably restricted. Its association with the hyena suggests that it represents not homosexuality per se but the instability of gender, sexuality, and desire that resists the het­ erosexual norms and needs of patriarchal society, and that is prominently featured in the citational network of traditional discourses that Book 3 rep­ resents. When the witch, after being confused by her antipathy to “beau­ ties scornefull grace” (7.23), returns to her senses and concentrates on healing her son, she prudently consults her “Sprights,” who are the “mais­ ters of her art”—prudently, because they appear to be male— and the re­ sult of their conference is the False Florimell (8.4–5). As if to literalize this figure’s origins in Petrarchan fantasy she delegates its operation to a male

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spright (8.7–9) whose expertise at the robot’s controls enables him to en­ tertain the son and many other males “with shadowes” (8.l0) of heterosex­ ual and safely contraceptive pleasures. Both these inventions are fundamentally misogynist, and both ges­ ture toward a diffusely homoerotic and homosocial if not homosexual model. They are also parthenophobic: They endanger and slander the virgins whose chaste desire to appropriate from mothers first their sons and later their maternal power keeps the system of patriarchal hetero­ sexuality going, but at the expense of those who are replaced and resist being displaced. The hyena and false Florimell chime with other exam­ ples in Book 3 of desires and practices constituted as deviant by the sys­ tem, which is parasitic on such outlaw forms to maintain its normative status— examples of male and female parthenogenesis, transvestism, uto­ pian gynarchy, incest, erotic maternalism, adultery, and same­sex desire. It may seem logical to blame perverse challenges to Chastity, the corner­ stone of the system in Book 3, on a figure the system dispossesses and scapegoats—logical, that is, for the male narrator to continue to scape­ goat the “(m)other” by attributing the two inventions to a witch. This explanation would support the charge that Spenser “implicates the reader in some of the classic sexist ways of looking at women.” But the specific account of the witch’s relation to the two Florimells places that explana­ tion in doubt. When the narrator proclaims the false Florimell “a wondrous worke . . . / Whose like on earth was never framed yit” (8.4) and then goes on to de­ scribe a construction whose like in books had been tediously and repeti­ tively framed for centuries, he marks the attribution as an outrageous displacement, especially since its like had been framed in this book. As Hamilton notes, the creation of false Florimell is anticipated at 7.9 in the narrator’s statement that Florimell’s tears trickled from “her Christall eyne” like “two Orient pearles” that “did purely shyne / Upon her snowy cheeke” (FQ, 367). Two stanzas later, after Florimell has tidied herself up and donned her “golden wreath and gorgeous ornament,” the narrator hi­ lariously places the witch in the position of Timias before Belphoebe, or of any sonneteer before his idol: She was astonisht at her heavenly hew, And doubted her to deeme an earthly wight, But or some Goddesse, or of Dianes crew, And thought her to adore with humble spright; T’ adore thing so divine as beauty, were but right. (7.11)

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In this high­spirited act of scapegoating the narrator does to the witch what he later has her do to false Florimell: He animates her with a male spright. This spright has several names. One is the spirit of Petrarchan discourse. Another, suggested by the accounts in cantos 7 and 8 of “her dev ilish deedes / And hellish arts,” is Archimago. A third is “Spenser,” by which I mean both the allegorical story and its narrator. • We have seen how in canto 6 the narrator of The Faerie Queene speaks the words of the ancestors, and how in retelling their stories he often shows himself to be seduced by the traditional pleasures, powers, and values the text subjects to critique, including the jouissance and spellbinding mastery of storytelling itself. And this mastery is traditional in a special sense: The narrator is marked as a male storyteller who gets his material and author­ ity from the old books and oral sources of traditions shaped by the male imagination, and monitored by the power, needs, fears, and vulnerabili­ ties of men in patriarchal institutions. This is what makes his association with the witch so interest ing, and the reason why it is interest ing has been brilliantly explained by Susanne Wofford: The hint that the poem . . . may have certain generic slanderous or duplicitous qualities is consistent with Spenser’s representations of evil artist figures who, the allegorical narrator asserts defensively, work their magic in opposition to his own and depend on the devil or evil “sprites.” There is, nevertheless, a significant difference between treating an evil double as a powerful male magician, like Archimago or Busyrane, and representing it in a weaker, impoverished female, such as the “witch” who constructs Snowy Florimell. . . . As a literal­ ization of sonnet tropes, Snowy Florimell might most logically be allegorized as a figure of a courtly tradition. Once again, however, the text displaces the blame for this courtly double from its own poetic method, suggesting that the fraudulent challenge to the social order that Snowy Florimell represents comes not from the Queen’s allego­ rizer but from the lower orders—from “Witches” in the forest. Nonetheless, after Archimago’s fashioning of a character “most like” (1, i, 49) Una, the witch’s fashioning of Snowy Florimell is the most detailed representation in the poem of the poet’s method of shaping character. . . . She does such a fine job of “emulating” Spenser’s own creation (known as Nature within the text) that “even Nature selfe envied the same, / And grudg’d to see the counterfet should

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shame / The thing it selfe.” . . . The witch . . . is almost as powerful an artist as Archimago: her creation remains in the poem and animates many more of its episodes than the false Una.38

The lines Wofford quotes follow the reference to the “wondrous worke . . . / Whose like on earth was never framed yit” and thus confirm the reflexive force of parody: The envious and grudging creative power “known as Nature within the text” is the text, or, more precisely, a text within the Spenserian text. It is the envious and grudging spirit of an Ovidian/Pe­ trarchan discourse stirred up by the narrative response to the garden and transparently disowned in the outrageous transfer of the spirit to an envi­ ous and grudging witch. The counterfeit shames the original not only because it is the simulacrum of a Bad Lady but also because it discloses the discursive sources of all such Ladies, good or bad. It thus reminds us that Florimell, if I may quote myself, is “no less a male invention than the False Florimell. Both equally project and reflect male desires, and their effects sometimes converge, just as Neoplatonist fantasies easily slide into Pe­ trarchan fantasies. From this standpoint the False Florimell is truer inso­ far as she is explicitly an engine built out of the parts invented by ‘ydle wits’ ” (“A Hymn in Honour of Beautie,” 66).39 The Faerie Queene repre­ sents its versions of Ovidian, courtly, and Petrarchan discourses as the work of an Archimagian fantasy. • Surveying the first three books from the standpoint of the third reveals that the textual representation and critique of the logic of castration is evi­ dent from the beginning of Book 1. Just as the true and false Florimells equally project and reflect male desires, so Una, the false Una, and Duessa are equally idols that symbolize the conflict of male values and desires in patriarchal institutions. Archimago’s transformation of what was probably a male spright into the false Una provides an obvious gloss on the creation of Duessa, but it also glances at the creation of Una. Leigh DeNeef has convincingly shown how the allegorical distinction between Una and her Duessan double is textually deconstructed by the “semantic duplicity” that exposes “the lie inhabiting any expression of truth.”40 The exposure fo­ cuses on the problematic deployment of the figure of woman to express religious truth, and the peculiar terms of this deployment suggest that even revised versions of the traditional approach to religious allegory in Book 1 should be reconsidered.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to a number of publishers for permission to reprint in revised form materials first appearing in their pages. Chapter 1, “Displacing Autophobia,” incorporates in revised form the following three articles: “Sexual and Religious Politics in Book 1 of Spens­ er’s Faerie Queene,” ELR: English Literary Renaissance 34.2 (2004): 201–42; “Archimago: Between Text and Countertext,” SEL: Studies in English Lit­ erature 43.1 (2003): 19–64; and “Displacing Autophobia in Faerie Queene I: Ethics, Gender, and Oppositional Reading in the Spenserian Text,” ELR: English Literary Renaissance 28.2 (1998): 163–82. Other chapters appeared initially in the following venues. Chapter 2, “Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene,” appeared in English Literary Renaissance 21.1 (1991): 3–48. Chapter 3, “Wring Out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001,” appeared in Spenser Studies, vol. 18 (New York: AMS Press, 2003), 81–121. Chapter 4, “Resisting Translation: Britomart in Book 3 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” appeared in Translating Desire in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Heather Hayton and Craig A. Berry (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 207–50. Copyright Arizona Board of Regents for Arizona State University. Re­ printed with permission. Chapter  5, “Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser’s Gardens of Adonis,” appeared in Desire in the Re­ naissance: Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Literature, ed. Regina Schwartz and Valeria Finucci (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 91–119. We are grateful to the publishers for permission to reprint these essays.

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Notes

editor’s introduction 1. In A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation, ed. Nina Levine and David Lee Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 264. 2. Judith H. Anderson, “Acrasian Fantasies: Outsides, Insides, Upsides, Downsides in the Bower of Bliss,” in A Touch More Rare, 77–91, also appearing as “Androcentrism and Acrasian Fantasies in the Bower of Bliss,” in Anderson, Reading the Allegorical Intertext (New York: Fordham Univer­ sity Press, 2008), 224–38; Katherine Eggert, “Harry Berger’s Genius: Porting Pleasure in the Bower of Bliss,” 92–103; Katherine Gimelli Martin, “Bergerama: New Critical and Poststructural Theory in the Work of Harry Berger, Jr.,” 139–61. In the same volume, see also Lauren Silberman, “Taking Another Peek,” 104–12. 3. Ayesha Ramachandran, “Allegory and Our Discontents: Thinking ‘Post­ Critically’ while Reading Judith Anderson,” Spenser Review 44.1.1 (2014). The quotation from Felski is cited as “Digging Down and Standing Back,” English Language Notes 51, no. 2 (2013): 22. Perhaps it is only stating the obvious to observe that there has always been criticism of this sort; a classic instance in modern Spenser studies is Theresa Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). 4. Eggert is citing Parker’s Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 47. 5. Katherine Eggert, “Spenser’s Ravishment: Rape and Rapture in The Faerie Queen,” Representations 70 (Spring 2000): 2. 6. David Lee Miller, “The Faerie Queene (1590),” in A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies, ed. Bart van Es (New York: Palgrave, 2006), 165. introduction: on texts and countertexts It gives me pleasure to thank Professor Heather Dubrow for her careful reading and constructive criticism of an earlier version of this introduction.

247

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Notes to pages 2–8

Her discerning comments led me to rethink that version and change my mind about several of its claims. 1. For an extended exploration of this theoretical model, see “The Interpretive Shut tle: The Structure of Critical Practice after World War II,” in Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 2. The definition is Umberto Eco’s in A Theory of Semiotics (Blooming­ ton: Indiana University Press, 1976), 16. 3. See Chapter 2 on the two basic divisions of rhetoric, the tropological and the transactional. 4. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloom­ ington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 183–84. 5. Mieke Bal, “De­disciplining the Eye,” Critical Inquiry 16.3 (1990): 508, 506. 6. I use “media” and “channels” casually here, but I’m aware of the problems and contradictions lurking in loose deployments of the term “medium.” See Umberto Eco’s critique of McLuhan in Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality, trans. William Weaver (1986), 227–38, especially 232–36. 7. Jean­François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 42. 8. This is an injunction Calvin, among others, objected to, when, for example, he complained that “visualization [in Norman Bryson’s paraphrase] is the mark of a failed reading of the text. . . . Understanding takes place not through visuality but rather through discourse.” Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 118. 9. Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 17. 10. On this point see my “Phaedrus and the Politics of Inscription,” in Plato and Postmodernism, ed. Steven Shankman (Glenside, Pa.: Aldine Press, 1994), 94–98. 11. Maurice Bloch, “Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation, or Is Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority?” European Journal of Sociology 15.1 (1974): 71. 12. Maurice Bloch, “The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process: An Outline of the Development of Kingdoms in Central Madagas­ car,” European Journal of Sociology 18.1 (1977): 138. See also Bloch’s introduc­ tion to Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, ed. Bloch (London: Academic Press, 1975), 1–28.

Notes to pages 8–10

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13. Bloch, “Symbols, Song, Dance,” 58: “By this is meant that the elders are speaking not on their own behalf but on behalf of the ancestors and elders of the whole descent group whether living or dead. They are repeating the general truth which they have had passed on to them by previous generations.” Bloch goes on to distinguish ritual from secular political speech in one important respect: As the ceremony goes on, and “under the influence of rhythmic music, drink, and general excitement,” the elders begin to speak in a dif ferent manner and tone, and their utterances “are often indistinct.” They “appear to be in a trance­like state and it is said that it is not they who are speaking but their ancestors.” For the participants, such “possession is an extreme form of saying what would have been said by the elders of the past, or repeating their words. Instead of the ancestors speaking indirectly through the memory of the living elders they speak directly through their person” (58–59). 14. This argument will be developed in greater detail in Chapter 2. 15. In 1969 Michael Murrin began The Veil of Allegory with the state­ ment that since most of the numerous books published on Spenser around that time were close textual studies, he would try “to step away from the poems and understand them generally as rhetoric” (The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969], ix). Murrin’s rhetorical approach produces a picture of Spenser as a failed oral poet writing for an upper­class audience, expecting them to read his work aloud, hoping to instruct and control their minds, avoiding irony because he “want[ed] them to trust his statements” (14, 54, 84–85, 64). His reminder that most of Spenser’s readers probably still read aloud to themselves as well as to each other deserves to be taken seriously. I differ from Murrin only in replacing the historical referent of “Spenser” (the poet who wrote the poem) with an aesthetic referent (the poet the poem writes). 16. John Webster, “Oral Form and Written Craft in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 16.1 (1976): 84–86. 17. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 28–30, 168. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self­Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 157–92. According to Frye, the process of embodying a society’s “ascendant values . . . in its serious literature . . . includes some form of kidnapped romance, that is, romance formulas used to reflect certain ascendant religious and social ideals.” Thus although in his own day Spenser’s poem “was regarded as pandering to a middlebrow appetite for stories about fearless knights and beauteous maidens and hideous ogres and dragons,” the poet was actually using

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Notes to pages 10–18

“his ogres and dragons . . . to get imaginative support for the Protestant revolution of his time” (28–30). Greenblatt’s position is most clearly and compactly given in the following statement: Spenser’s art does not lead us to perceive ideology critically but rather affirms the existence and inescapable moral power of ideology as that princi­ ple of truth toward which art forever yearns. . . . In The Faerie Queene reality as given by ideology always lies safely outside the bounds of art, in a dif fer­ ent realm, distant, infinitely powerful, perfectly good. . . . For Spenser this [externality of value] is the final colonialism, the colonialism of language . . . dedicated to “the Most High, Mightie, and Magnificent Empresse . . . Eliz­ abeth.” (192)

I suspect that Frye’s metaphor of kidnapping lies behind the conceptual melodrama of Gordon Teskey’s more power ful account of “capture” in Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994). 18. Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 18–19. 19. Jonathan Goldberg, “The Mothers in Book III of The Faerie Queene,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 17.1 (1975): 5. 20. Goldberg, Endlesse Worke, 78. 1. displacing autophobia in the faerie queene , book 1: ethics, gender, and oppositional rea ding in the spenserian text 1. See Angus Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 57–132. The list can be extended and variously organized. For example, it has been common to focus on the mutations of the discourse of epic romance within which the modes called chivalric and courtly receive such names as Arthurian, Ariostan, and Tassonian. 2. During her stimulating discussion of Malbecco, Gregerson ob­ serves that his “name, and the tradition it condenses, is overdetermined and oxymoronic. Insofar as the name embodies a model of psychophysical pathology, its logic goes something like this: a wanton man’s excessive desire— concupiscence in any of its forms—bears the seed of its own impair­ ment, prompting excessive suspicion or fear of loss” (Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 50). The logic of Malbec­ co’s name can stand as a pathetic caricature of the logic of castration. 3. Although what appears anomalous when one is thinking in terms of the Book of Holinesse may seem less anomalous if one has in mind, say, the Books of Temperaunce and Chastity.

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4. David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 “Faerie Queene” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 73. 5. John Webster, “Oral Form and Written Craft in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 16.1 (1976): 85; see the discussion of Webster’s argument in the introduction. 6. A. C. Hamilton, “The Vision of Piers Plowman and The Faerie Queene,” in Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Nelson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 6, 15. 7. John N. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Prince­ ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 111. 8. Of some dozen references to Greenblatt in King’s book, only one (79) vaguely gestures toward that critique. 9. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, 187. 10. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 57–58. 11. Ibid., 40. 12. Donald Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in “The Faerie Queene” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 40, 97. The phrase “symbolic parody” is borrowed from Northrop Frye. For a more recent study of— and a dif ferent approach to—the “repudiation of ‘naive allegory’ ” that locates it within the genre itself, see Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979). 13. Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature, 78. 14. François Roustang, “A Philosophy for Psychoanalysis?” trans. Terry Thomas, Stanford Literature Review 6.2 (1989): 175. 15. Joan Copjec, “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan,” in Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 37. Originally published in October 49 (Summer 1989): 53–71. 16. Romans 7:7. In the Geneva Bible: “For when we were in the flesh, the motions of sinnes, which were by the Law, had force in our membres, to bring forth frute unto death. . . . What shal we say then? Is the Law sinne? God forbid. Nay, I knewe not sinne, but by the Law: For I had not knowen lust, except the Law had said, Thou shalt not lust” (7:5, 7). The Geneva gloss on 7:7: “There is nothing more enemie to sinne then the Law: if so be therefore that sinne rage more by reason thereof then before, why shulde it be imputed to the Lawe which discloseth the sleightes of sinne her enemie.” 17. The doctrinally correct positive version of what Lacan calls “the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity” is reflected in the following statement by Isabel G. MacCaffrey: “The point comes when the

252

Notes to pages 23–30

Knight abandons his integrity as a knight, the identity he assumed when he put on the armor of God. This identity involved him in a par tic u lar relationship of submissiveness to God and acceptance of a model of virtu­ ous life laid down by him: a life ‘whose only form is the form Christ gave it’ ” (Isabel G. MacCaffrey, Spenser’s Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976], 161). See Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 7–8, for a concise and telling comment on the problematics of identification. 18. William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (New York: Colum­ bia University Press, 1963), 172. 19. All quotations of The Faerie Queene are from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, ed. J. C. Smith (1909; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 2 volumes; hereafter cited in the text. I have normalized j’s and v’s. I note in passing that “wonted feare of doing ought amis” is a good definition of what I’m calling autophobia. Across the emphasis on the habitual character of the phobic reflex falls the shadow of “wonted desire.” 20. His sight is guilty (1) because the spectacle made him burn “with gealous fire” and (2) because he blindly accepted as true an act of infidelity he should have doubted and tried to verify. This double implication extends the ambiguous resonance of “To prove his sense, and tempt her faigned truth.” 21. The remainder of this paragraph is a slightly edited replay of a passage in my Making Trifles of Terrors (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 229–30. 22. But “more sinning than sinned against” is also, interestingly enough, the formula of the villain’s discourse. The main difference is that the villain delights in the formula and proclaims it whereas the sinner’s discourse is usually hidden in the text of language or utterance, and displaced in such other forms as the victim/revenger’s discourse. 23. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott. 2 vols. Vol. 1: The History of Manners. Vol. 2: Power and Civility (New York: Pantheon, 1982). See my discussion of Elias in The Absence of Grace: Sprez­ zatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 33–50, 57–60; and Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations, ed. Judith Anderson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 223. 24. Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 102. 25. Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 41–43.

Notes to pages 31–42

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26. This discussion does little more than develop some brilliant observa­ tions by Judith H. Anderson in “ ‘A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine’: The Chaucerian Connection,” ELR: English Literary Renaissance 15.2 (1985): 166–74, esp. 166–67. See also Richard A. Levin, “The Legende of the Redcrosse Knight and Una, or Of the Love of a Good Woman,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 31.1 (1991): 4–5. 27. Miller, Poem’s Two Bodies, 112. 28. Copjec, “Orthopsychic Subject” 70. 29. A. C. Hamilton interestingly suggests that “deare” implies “dire”: A. C. Hamilton, ed., Spenser: “The Faerie Queene” (1977; rpt. New York: Longman, 1980), 30. Abbreviated to Hamilton, FQ, in subsequent references. Susanne Lindgren Wofford’s ground­breaking The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992) both explores the textual clues to oppositional discourse in The Faerie Queene and unpacks—with great theoretical power and sophistication—the prob­ lems that confront such an exploration. See 219–371, and, for the core of her argument, 233–34, 240–41, and 295–97. In a compact but profound medita­ tion on the word “scor’d” in line 5, Ernest Gilman in Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) unfolds his argument about Spenser’s iconoclastic treatment of “painted forgery,” 65–67. 30. “But” is the reading given in the 1596 and 1609 editions; 1590 reads “And.” 31. Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975); John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 27–28. 32. For a trenchant and illuminating account of textuality as oppositional discourse, see Ross Chambers, Room for Maneuver: Reading (the) Oppositional (in) Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 33. Some examples from The Poetry of Edmund Spenser: Evil . . . is so monstrous that man is inevitably repelled by it. Duessa, stripped of her disguise, is a “filthy foule old woman,” her “neather partes misshapen, monstrous” . . . , no sooner seen than rejected. (156) [Redcrosse and Fradubio take Duessa] to be as beautiful as she appears, deserving the devotion that her sad false tale inspires. It is hard to blame them, for Night herself, mother of falsehood, fails at first to recognize Duessa. (161) St.  George and England, seduced by falsehood, abandon the truth and wander in Duessa’s evil ways. (176)

254

Notes to pages 42–49

Nelson accredits a reading that conflates three deceptions: that of a bad woman pretending to be a good woman, that of a non­human female pretending to be a human female, and that of an ugly female pretending to be a beautiful female. The emphasis on the third deception, prominent in the first of the passages cited above, betrays the undercurrent of misogyny and gynophobia in much Spenser criticism. 34. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Re naissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 123, 120. Norbrook is arguing against the view “that Book I adopts an essentially conservative theological position, defending a traditionalist ‘Christian humanism’ against Calvinism” (123). Norbrook’s specific target is Virgil K. Whitaker’s The Religious Basis of Spenser’s Thought (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1950). His— Norbrook’s— own approach remains traditional because it accepts and employs the very intellectual­ historical procedures that produce the view he opposes. He thus delivers an account of the poem’s ideology at the same level of abstraction as Whitaker’s. 35. Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1983), 173. 36. D. Douglas Waters, Duessa as Theological Satire (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970), 16–17. 37. Quilligan, Language of Allegory, 255. A distorted echo of the divine philanderer’s rape of Danae flickering across the Spenserian image suggests another cause of uneasiness. 38. Although there is no etymological warrant for associating hideous with that which should be hidden, Spenserian etymologies are notoriously ad hoc. 39. Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 102–3. See also Quilligan, Language of Allegory, 256. 40. Though “God” is Christianized by its context one is entitled to wonder whether it glances back at “angry Jove.” 41. Jeffrey Knapp, “Error as a Means of Empire in The Faerie Queene I,” ELH: English Literary History 54.4 (1987): 807. 42. The quoted terms are Knapp’s, ibid., 806–7. 43. Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser, 82. 44. See Miller, Poem’s Two Bodies, 251–52, for a persuasive reading of the antifeminism in the Error episode. I am not sure, however, whom he attributes it to, the author of the episode or the narrator. For some comments on the oppositional perspective that encourages sympathy for the female scapegoat, see Wofford, Choice of Achilles, 326–28.

Notes to pages 50–52

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45. A. Leigh DeNeef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982), 95–99. Over the years I have come to rely more and more on DeNeef’s fine study, and my debt to it will be obvious in the discussions that follow. 46. Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters, 172–73. 47. The lion that threatens to devour Una and then worshipfully replaces Redcrosse as her “Champion” and “faithfull mate” (3.5–9) is represented as an inadequate symbol: a reductively idealizing caricature of the protagonist’s motives for protectorship, and of the mystical—therefore easy— sublimation of appetitive rage to devoted ser vice. His inadequacy measures the distance between an ideal of protectorship and the more complicated demands Una and Redcrosse have been shown to place on each other. But the lion is also represented as a symbol adequate to the propagandistic demands of an ethical, religious, and institutional allegory that reduces Una to an embodiment of the True Faith jeopardized by the Romish misbelief and malpractices inscribed in the names Abessa, Corceca, and Kirkrapine, and in their possessors’ attributes and actions. (See the array of possible interpretations skeptically canvassed by Roche in his edition of The Faerie Queene: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978], 1082–83.) But whether he is glossed as a symbol of fortitude (Roche) or of the Church of England (Upton) or of “the Tudor . . . defender of the faith” (Hamilton, FQ, 60), the lion’s adequacy as both a symbol and a victorious agent in this allegorical episode betokens the inadequacy of the episode itself. In its simplifying effect on Una and the other embodied carriers of its meaning, the religio­ecclesiastical allegory exemplifies the violence of countertextual programming in a conspicuously retrograde genre. Canto 3 swerves toward that genre only to place it in quotation marks and carry Una beyond it into more complex and troubled allegorical waters. Kirkrapine and Corceca and Abessa may vanish, but the meanings of their names are trans­ ferred to Redcrosse—rewritten when the emblems of Redcrosse’s condition and motivation expressed in the forms of Archimago­as­Redcrosse and of Redcrosse­as­Sansloy. The lion, dispatched in short order by Sansloy, survives Kirkrapine only long enough to whet Archimago’s curiosity: In the canto’s most hilarious moment, while he and Una are “discoursing of her dreadfull late distresse, / . . . he askt her, what the Lyon ment” (3.32). 48. Gregerson, Reformation of the Subject, 144; the whole discussion of Pygmalionism, from which this phrase is taken, is illuminating. On the False Florimell, see Chapter 5, which corrects and expands a comment in my “The Faerie Queene, Book III: A General Description” (1969), reprinted in Harry Berger, Jr., Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics, ed. John Patrick Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 116.

256

Notes to pages 53–57

49. She is not named, for example, until we have been introduced to her false double in 1.45, and since Redcrosse chooses to believe the apparition, from that moment on the Una he perceives is the double of her double. See Hamilton, FQ, 41. See also the discussion by Gregerson in Reformation of the Subject, 60–61. 50. Norbrook, Poetry and Politics,120. 51. Donald Cheney, “Response: Courteous Exchange,” commentary delivered at the Spenser at Kalamazoo session of The Medieval Institute, May 6, 1989. Cheney proposes “to move away from the apocalyptic mode to its opposite, which I would like to call the eucalyptic, if I could purge that term of its connotations of cough drops or koala bears. Whoever named the eucalyptus was remarking on its finely hidden genitalia, safe (as Spenser remarks of Belphoebe’s dainty Rose) from sun and storm, not to mention from casual pollination” (3). 52. Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 10. 53. King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, 67. See Gross, Spenserian Poetics, 27, and Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, 1–3 and 31–59 passim. King’s discussion is based on his review of the Gross and Gilman books in the Spenser Newsletter 17 (Fall 1986): 55–59. 54. Patrick Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation, The Stenton Lecture, 1985 (Reading: University of Reading, 1986). 55. For a dif ferent view of Merlin, see Chapter 5. On Prospero, see my “Miraculous Harp: A Reading of Shakespeare’s Tempest,” in Berger, Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction­Making, ed. with an introduction by John Patrick Lynch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 147–85. 56. Wofford, Choice of Achilles, 306–7. 57. Gregerson, Reformation of the Subject, 62. 58. On Phantastes’s relation to these themes, see A. Bartlett Giamatti, Play of Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1975; repr. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 107–10, 125; Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, 61–62; King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, 70, and Miller, Poem’s Two Bodies, 255–57. On Scudamour as narrator, see Goldberg, Endlesse Worke, 64–67. On Archimago’s links to Merlin and Proteus see James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 114, 444, 570, and Gross, Spenserian Poetics, 152–53. I should note that the list of illusion­makers includes such female figures as Acrasia and the witch in 3.7–8. But as I argue when I discuss these figures, the text represents them as misogynist parodies, scapegoats who are made responsible

Notes to pages 57–60

257

for what are recognizably perverse fantasies found in traditional male discourses. 59. Gregerson, Reformation of the Subject, 50. See note 2 above. The applicability of this logic to Merlin is explored in Chapter 4 below. For a brief comment on its applicability to Proteus, see my “ ‘Kidnapped Romance’: Discourse in The Faerie Queene,” in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 217–18. 60. See Berger, Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 71, 463–64, and “Kid­ napped Romance,” 218–19, 248. 61. For the first assertion, see Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, 76–77. For the second, see Wofford, Choice of Achilles, 287–88. My amplification of these claims appears later in this chapter and in Chapter Five. 62. “Kidnapped Romance,” 248. 63. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, 75. See also DeNeef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor, 95–100; Miller, Poem’s Two Bodies, 82–83 and chapter 2 passim; Nohrnberg, Analogy of “The Faerie Queene,” 105; Giamatti, Play of Double Senses, 118–20. 64. DeNeef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor, 91. DeNeef is careful to emphasize the intertextual status of the figure he describes as the Spenserian “poet”: “Spenser’s ‘I’ is metaphoric; it does not identify a literal person but a generic role and progress.” This status was much more fully explicated by Richard Helgerson in a book published a year after DeNeef’s, Self­ Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley: Univer­ sity of California Press, 1983). 65. Quilligan, Language of Allegory, 233. 66. Gregerson, Reformation of the Subject, 55–56 and passim. 67. I distinguish “exemplary” in Gregerson’s sense from “conventional.” On conventional associations of hy pocrisy with monastic abuses and their relation to Archimago see King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradi­ tion, 47–52. 68. William Allen Oram, Edmund Spenser, Twayne’s English Author Series (New York: Twayne, 1997), 87. 69. On Archimago as the Old Man of scripture, see Berger, Revisionary Play, 70–71. 70. John King argues interestingly that Kirkrapine’s removal of church ornaments is problematic because it also gives him the appearance of a Protestant iconoclast. Kirkrapine may symbolize both the misappropria­ tion of ecclesiastical wealth by the monks of old and the excesses to which the Protestant movement was prone. Spenser adopts what may appear to be

258

Notes to pages 60–80

an ambiguous stance toward iconoclasm that seems to endorse the destruction of Catholic “idolatry” at the same time that it preserves and adapts “idolatrous” imagery to Protestant purposes (King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, 55–56). I would take this a step further and argue that it is in line with the textual critique of Protestant polemics I have been discussing. I find the episode so conspicuously traditional and conventional in its allegorical form that it verges on citational mimicry. 71. When Archimago reappears, the institutional wrongdoing figured in and as Kirkrapine gets rewritten as a metaphor for spiritual idolatry and theft and self­abdication within the individual soul. 72. Wofford, Choice of Achilles, 236. 73. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, 61, 75–76. 74. DeNeef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor, 95. 75. Gregerson, Reformation of the Subject, 179. 76. Wofford, Choice of Achilles, 236. 77. See Hamilton’s note on 12.33, FQ, 150. 78. What does it mean that they have French names and are consistently referred to by the terms “Sarazin” and “Paynim”? 79. On the symptomatic interpretation, see Berger, Revisionary Play, 65–66. 80. Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature, 36. 81. Nohrnberg, Analogy of “The Faerie Queene,” 205. 82. Ullrich Langer, Divine and Poetic Freedom in the Renaissance: Nominal­ ist Theology and Literature in France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton Univer­ sity Press, 2014), 62. 83. Noting that minstrels could sing to drive away their own melancholy, DeNeef remarks “the similarity between Spenser’s own song and that of Lucifera’s minstrels” (Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor, 93–94). 84. “Purple pall” is richly invested by its context because it suggests not only royal robes but also the paling purple of the dawn, and even, perhaps, the pall cast by Aurora’s nights with old Tithonus. See next note. 85. “[R]osy­fingred Morning faire / Weary of Tithones saffron bed, / Had spred her purple robe through deawy aire” (1.2.7). 86. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (1980; rpt. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 19–20. On the relevance of this notion of despair to the category of the have­not in Spenser, see my “The Prospect of Imagination: Spenser and the Limits of Poetry,” SEL: Studies in English Literature l.1 (1961): 104–7. For its specific application to the House of Pride and Cave of Night, see Joan Heiges Blythe, “Spenser and the Seven Deadly Sins: Book

Notes to pages 80–90

259

I, Cantos iv and v,” ELH: English Literary History 39.3 (1972): 342–52, esp. 344. 87. Many of the parallels are conveniently listed in Hamilton’s glosses, FQ, 95–96. 88. Note the analogy between 7.10.1–2, Orgoglio’s “arrogant delight / Of th’high descent, whereof he was ybome,” and Lucifera’s genealogical fantasy (4.11). That Aeolus is only a “boasted sire” chimes with Lucifera’s disowning her infernal parents and claiming “thundering Jove . . . for her syre, / Or if that any else did Jove excell.” 89. Sansloy’s final words to Satyrane show that he misconstrues Satyrane’s motive, but if we read them as an internal diatribe uttered by Una’s enemy (Redcrosse/Sansloy) to her would­be champion (Redcrosse/ Satyrane), some of them hit home: “Most sencelesse man he, that himselfe doth hate, / To love another” (6.47). 90. Throughout The Faerie Queene Satyrane behaves as a profeminist whose profeminism has as its condition an apparently nonsexual relation to the women he helps. His presence contributes to the idealization­through­ desexualization of Una and (less effectively) of Florimell. I say “apparently nonsexual” because in Book 3 his response to the Squire of Dames’s tale of conquest and woe (3.7.54–61) registers the underlying prurience and misog­ yny of such homosocial rituals of the male locker room. See especially his comments in stanzas 57, 58, and 61, in the last of which the narrator sends him back to “the former land, / Where late he left the Beast, he overcame”— Florimell’s pursuer, the hyena­like monster—but “He found him not; for he had broke his band.” The implication of the last phrase, with its ambiguous “he,” is that Satyrane’s swerve toward the Squire of Dames may have been partly responsible. 91. Guillory, Poetic Authority, 29–30. 92. Georgia Ronan Crampton, The Condition of Creatures: Suffering and Action in Chaucer and Spenser (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 125–26. 93. Quilligan, Language and Allegory, 38; Miller, Poem’s Two Bodies, 87; Thomas P. Roche, Jr., “The Menace of Despair and Arthur’s Vision, Faerie Queene 1.9,” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual, ed. Patrick Cullen and Thomas P. Roche, Jr., vol. 4 (New York: AMS Press, 1984), 88. Granted that, as Roche says, “Despair is of a dif ferent order of reality from Redcrosse” (88), this dif ferent order is the order of Christian discourse within which Despair may figure “the Old Man in all of us,” the sinner’s discourse gone bad and corrupted to prideful self­lacerating misautia. It is nevertheless the knight who has lost control of the argument he initially directs against Despair at ix.38 in regard to Trevisan. When Despair replies

260

Notes to pages 90–98

with “a distorted echo of Redcrosse’s boast” (Roche, “Menace of Despair,” 80), that move, in my opinion, represents the liberation of the discourse of despair from Redcrosse’s control. But it is he who turns it against himself. 94. Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Mediaeval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966), 107. 95. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 11–11, 20, 2 ad. 2, and II–II, 20, 1 ad. 2, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1957), II, 1261 and 1260. 96. Roche, “Menace of Despair,” 74. 97. “Saving stereoptypes” is Lisa Jardine’s phrase, cited earlier in this chapter: Still Harping on Daughters, 173. 98. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 124–25. 99. Wofford, Choice of Achilles, 261. 100. DeNeef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor, 91, 98–99. The Hermit Contemplation, whose words later in the canto produce the same reaction, is another “parody” of Archimago, and the stanzas describing him (10.46–48) are also seeded with reminders of Corceca, Idleness, Fradubio, Orgoglio, and Despair. DeNeef explains that “parody,” as he uses it, carries “positive as well as negative meanings” (187). 101. See Whitaker, Religious Basis, 45–58, for the Anglican reading of the House of Holiness. 102. DeNeef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor, 98–100. 103. Patience “to ease . . . him recured briefe” (10.24). Amendment was so apt at plucking out the rotting flesh “with pincers firie whot, / That soone in him was left no one corrupted jot” (10.26), while the whipping, nipping and salt lustrations of Penance, Remorse, and Repentance “in short space . . . did to health restore / The man that would not live, but earst lay at deathes dore” (10.27). 104. Carol Kaske, “Surprised by Puritanism,” p. 2, special session 515, MLA Convention, Houston, December 30, 1980. I take this reference, and the summary of Kaske’s account, from Gilman’s invaluable chapter on Spenser in Iconoclasm and Poetry, 81–83 and 209n49. For an early (1758) appreciation of self­ correction in Spenser see the comment on 1.4.8–9 by John Upton in The Works of Spenser: A Variorum Edition, vol. 1, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles G. Osgood, Frederick M. Padelford, et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932), 214–15. 105. At 4.16 Aurora appears without Tithonus in a Luciferan simile. See the discussion above. In the present figure, the role of Aurora shifts to Redcrosse, who leaves “aged Tithonus” behind.

Note to page 98

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106. This persistence illustrates the ironic dimension of the dialectics of appropriation that was given its decisive characterization by Hegel and compressed into the term aufheben, initially— and inadequately—rendered in English as “to sublate” and more recently as “to supersede.” Three dif ferent and conflicting senses of the term are activated in the Hegelian dialectic. Auf + heben means to lift up, raise, elevate to a higher plane, but also to suspend in another sense—to repeal, annul, destroy the force of— and, thirdly, to keep, reserve, preserve, or store away. The Aufhebung, as Nietz sche more aggressively characterizes it in The Genealogy of Morals, is a continuous chain of reinterpretations by which the past is simultaneously overcome and reconstructed. So, for example, Virgil sublates Homer, Ovid sublates Virgil, Dante sublates Virgil and Ovid, Spenser sublates Virgil, Ovid, and Ariosto, etc. At a different level, Christian discourse sublates or supersedes those of classical antiquity and Old Testament culture by constructing them as misguided or blind precursors, full of lies and illu­ sions, but in that very negation it enhances their historical generativity and resurrects them as the prefigurations it fulfills. The irony is that even as Christianity aims to negate the institutions, practices, and discourses of its precursors by radical appropriation and reformation, it can’t help conserving—and being troubled by—the aufgehoben it has remodeled, transcended, and thus remaindered. This last term should forestall the tendency to emphasize only the “progressive” movement of the Aufhebung, which marks its course by conserving the shades of, reanimating the danger posed by, the precursors it continuously revives as its repressed others. The remainder is thus given a new life and form and power it never sought, forced stubbornly, resentfully, to remain, living the half­life of a ghostly revenant buried under the cornerstone of a new narrative and haunting the renovated storeys of the structure from which it was and is and will be dispossessed. The threat posed by the precursor that refuses to remain remaindered has been exhaustively investigated by Harold Bloom in his applications of Oedipal conflict theory to literary history. Derrida sublates the problematics of the remainders produced by the Aufhebung in his interpretations of the logics of différance and supplementarity. On the general Derridean response to the problematics of the Aufhebung, see the illuminating footnote by Alan Bass in his translation of Derrida’s “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 19–20. For Derrida’s reading of the Hegelian concept via his Aufhebung of Bataille’s reading of the concept, see “From General to Restricted Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 251–77. And for a brilliant

262

Notes to pages 98–103

discussion of the aufgehoben as remainder in literary history, one to which I am heavily and gratefully indebted, see Julia Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), xvii–xxiii and passim. 107. An insight into this process is supplied by Falstaff’s soliloquy on sherris sack in 2 Henry IV, 4.3.84–123 (Arden lineation), when he describes courage as fear turned outward (see especially lines 100–11). Sack in this soliloquy is itself a displacement. As Falstaff s mischievous tone makes clear, it represents whatever it is that diverts one from inward fears and wars to external foes, and that prefers the swelling scene of stern tyrant War to that of “some other grief” (some “buried grief’); anything that sends one out into the world for the praise and honor and justification that will mitigate the grief of autophobia. Sherris makes the blood “course from the inwards to the parts’ extremes. It illumineth the face, which, as a beacon, gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm” (105–8). The image recalls the blazing eyes of Spenser’s dragon, “As two broad Beacons, set in open fields, / Send forth their flames farre off to every shyre, / And warning give, that enemies conspyre” (1.11.14). 108. On “ground,” see Roche, “Menace of Despair,” 88–91. 109. See also Wofford, Choice of Achilles, 257. Readers are discouraged from fully identifying the evil the dragon represents with this singular monster. His size and aspect undergo odd changes through the fight. So, for example, after the horrific opening description that expands through seven stanzas (11.8–14), 11.15 momentarily allows him a puppy­like show of enthusiasm: “often bounding on the brused gras, / As for great joyance of his newcome guest.” At the end, when he has done his symbolizing and been killed for his pains, he declines to an object of apprehensive curiosity on the part of the “rude rablement” who aren’t sure what he means (12.9–12). 2. narr ative as rhe toric in The faerie queene 1. See, for example, “Edmund Spenser, 1552–99,” in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, by C. S. Lewis (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 1966), 143; C. S. Lewis, Spenser’s Images of Life, ed. Alastair Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1–2 (although the whole of this introductory chapter is relevant in its emphasis on the immediacy of visual and iconographic effects); C. S. Lewis, English Litera­ ture in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1954), 389. In The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), Lewis implies that Spenser’s Italian precursors were racier storytellers than he was (305–6) but that the native and popu lar elements in The Faerie Queene align its effects with those of “the Lord Mayor’s show, the chap­book, the

Notes to pages 103–12

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bedtime story, the family Bible, and the village church” (312). Lewis’s emphasis on the appeal to the child in us and on the resonance of these oral, visual, and homiletic elements lends support to the thesis I shall develop in this chapter. 2. Margaret W. Ferguson, Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 5–6. 3. Brian Vickers, “‘The Power of Persuasion’: Images of the Orator, Elyot to Shakespeare,” in Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 412–13, 415. 4. Arthur F. Kinney, “Rhetoric and Fiction in Elizabethan England,” in Renaissance Eloquence, 387. 5. Nancy Struever, “Lorenzo Valla: Humanist Rhetoric and the Critique of the Classical Languages of Morality,” in Renaissance Eloquence, 195. 6. Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics; Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth­ Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986). 7. Paul Alpers, “Narration in The Faerie Queene,” ELH: English Literary History 44.1 (1977): 22, 24. 8. Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 5, hereafter identified as Poetry. 9. Stan Hinton, “The Poet and His Narrator: Spenser’s Epic Voice,” ELH: English Literary History 41.2 (1974): 165–81. See also Kathleen Wil­ liams, “Vision and Rhetoric: The Poet’s Voice in The Faerie Queene,” ELH: English Literary History 36.1 (1969): 131–44. Williams moves uncertainly toward a position similar to Hinton’s, which she states on the final page of the essay, insisting that the different functions (maker, seer, teller, commen­ tator) are aspects of one poet­narrator. 10. Discussed above in the introduction. 11. Northrop Frye, “The Structure of Imagery in The Faerie Queene,” in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), 74. Reprinted from University of Toronto Quarterly. 12. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 28–30, 168, discussed above in the introduction. 13. Walter Ong, “From Epithet to Logic: Miltonic Epic and the Closure of Existence,” in Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 1977), 198, 202–3. Reprinted from Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 120.4 (1976).

264

Notes to pages 112–18

14. Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), ix. 15. Jerome S. Dees, “The Narrator of The Faerie Queene: Patterns of Response,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 12.4 (1970–71): 537. 16. John Webster, “Oral Form and Written Craft in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 16.1 (1976): 75–93. 17. John Webster, “ ‘The Methode of a Poete’: An Inquiry into Tudor Conceptions of Poetic Sequence,” ELR: English Literary Renaissance 11.1 (1981): 22–43. 18. Lauren Silberman, “The Faerie Queene, Book II and the Limitations of Temperance,” Modern Language Studies 17.4 (1987): 9. The view that Spenser undermines his own allegory in Book 2 was put with great force by Madelon Sprengnether Gohlke in “Embattled Allegory: Book II of The Faerie Queene,” ELR: English Literary Renaissance 8.1 (1978): 123–40. My debt to this important essay is obvious. 19. Harry Berger, Jr., “What Did the King Know and When Did He Know It? Shakespearean Discourses and Psychoanalysis,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88.4 (1989): 811–62. 20. The self­description Phedon gives in his concluding words indicates his aristocratic status: Phedon I hight (quoth he) and do advance Mine ancestry from famous Coradin, Who first to rayse our house to honour did begin. (4.36)

This responds to Guyon’s question, “[R]ead how thou art nam’d, and of what kin,” and informs us that he was of lower degree than Claribell; as he intimates in stanza 19, he was still “of noble parentage” and may have exaggerated the difference in that stanza. A glance at the narrator’s effusive defense of blueblood values in 4.1 will show that Phedon is an embarrass­ ment to his and Guyon’s class, the “noble seed” who seem to be “borne by native influence” and “gentle bloud” to “things of valorous pretence” and “brave pursuit of honorable deed.” But if Phedon lets Guyon and the narrator down, so does his etymologically subverted ancestor Coradin, or Impotency of Heart, who may have raised his house to honor before the College of Herald accorded him a certificate of “gentle bloud.” The narra­ tor’s attempt to conflate the criteria of social and ethical superiority merely reflects the romance values of the chivalric epic. But the attempt falls before the demands imposed by the rationale of the allegory of temper­ ance. Social and gender boundaries are metaphorically transgressed by qualities or dispositions associated with villeinage and womanhood, and the

Notes to pages 118–37

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knightly class of Book 2 is riddled with intemperate throwbacks. But class and gender boundaries are persistently redrawn by those metaphors, since they characterize villeinage and womanhood as the source of the moral failings that assault the knights. 21. Stephen Orgel, “Nobody’s Perfect; or, Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” South Atlantic Quarterly 88.1 (1989): 14–15. 22. David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 “Faerie Queen” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 168. In reviewing the book, Donald Cheney expresses doubts about this thesis, arguing that “the conspicuously ungendered house of Alma may owe its elided genitalia to the fact that it is figuring the human body and not just the male or female body” (Spenser Newsletter 20.1 [1989]: 7). But apart from the statement in stanza 22 that the castle/body includes both feminine and masculine “proportions,” it is clear from the description of Alma’s authority, the functions represented by male figures, the courtly negotiations in the heart’s parlor where the two sexes mix and flirt, and the contrast provided by male control of the cognitive turret, that the house figures not only a gendered body but a body in which power and potential conflict are organized primarily in terms of gender. 23. As James Nohrnberg notes in The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 314. 24. Ibid., 314–23. 25. Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979); Donald Cheney, Spenser’s Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in “The Faerie Queene” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966). 26. William J. Kennedy, Rhetorical Norms in Renaissance Literature (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978). 27. Not that Kennedy doesn’t do close reading; he does it pretty well. But he does not factor it into his theoretical framework as the source of a legitimate perspective that interacts dialectically with his privileged theo­ retical perspective. 28. Maurice Bloch, “Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation: Is Religion an Extreme Form of Traditional Authority?” European Journal of Sociology 15.1 (1974): 71. 29. Maurice Bloch, “The Disconnection between Power and Rank as a Process: An Outline of the Development of Kingdoms in Central Madagas­ car,” European Journal of Sociology 18.1 (1977): 138. 30. Maurice Bloch, introduction to Political Language and Oratory in Traditional Society, ed. Maurice Bloch (London: Academic Press, 1975), 9. 31. Bloch, “Symbols, Song, Dance,” 58.

266

Notes to pages 137–142

32. Bloch, “Disconnection,” 128, 138–39. 33. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self­Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 179. 34. Rejecting the separation of the narrator from his narrative, Alpers insists that the narrator’s comments are not “intrusions” but “a continuation of his own discourse,” and he claims that if there is irony, “far from being at the narrator’s expense, it shows the play of his wit” (“Narration in The Faerie Queene,” 22–25). My view of narrative agency is congruent with this in its structural features, but where Alpers pushes the narrator/narrative unit toward the poet, I propose moving it in the other direction. In other words, Alpers incorporates the unit in the hybrid rhetorico­literary transaction occurring between Spenser and his readers: The “his” in “his own dis­ course” and “his wit” both refer to Spenser. For me, in contrast, the autho­ rial or textual play of wit informs the narrator’s discourse, but it does so in the mode of parody. The object of parody is the rhetoric of storytelling addressed as if to auditors; the play of wit is conspicuous—the sense of witty impersonation is a central feature of my experience of both narrative and narrator, and so I am not inclined to isolate and reify an unreliable speaker. Fi nally, I think the special verve of this impersonation derives from the frequently displayed tendency of the parody to turn back on itself. For example, in many descriptions of physical conflict the extravagant epithet­ stuffed, hyperbole­crammed displays of enargeia/energeia, inventively if needlessly protracted by elegant and inelegant variation, project a commit­ ment to excess, an unwillingness to leave off, that is too high­spirited not to be interpreted as reflexive mockery. The tonal effect is complex: a narrator who, as I noted earlier, parodies both the chivalric conventions he represents and his own unremitting attachment to them. He simultaneously flags his narrative folly and throws himself into it. 35. Lewis, Allegory of Love, 320–21. 36. Douglas Bush, quoted by Angus Fletcher in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1964), 273. 37. What Lewis writes of Spenser’s Italian precursors applies as well to Spenser: The pleasure they give “is not only the pleasure of mockery. Even while you laugh at it, the old incantation works. Willy­nilly the fairies allure, the monsters alarm, the labyrinthine adventures draw you on” (Allegory of Love, 299). But in Spenser the equivalent of the old incantation is not some­ thing “heard” in the telling of the story but something “worked” by deeper and darker tracings of the lineaments of desire and dread, as in the effect of nightmare that Lewis himself discerns in the representation of Maleger (308). 38. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey, eds., Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), xi.

Notes to pages 142–45

267

39. Harry Berger, Jr., Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 468. 3. wring out the old: squeezing the text, 1951–2001 1. I dedicate this essay to the Spenserians who, during this time, have been and remain my best critics and most sympathetic readers. It gives me great pleasure to express my gratitude to them for the enduring friendship and resistance that keeps me almost as honest (I hope) as they are. Many thanks also to John Watkins for his careful and sensitive response to the original version of this essay. His suggestions for revision were extraordi­ narily helpful and led me to develop or modify my argument in a number of passages. 2. It’s easy to make this sort of condescending remark so many decades later. But it would be both unfair and ungenerous to ignore the fact that the contributors to the Variorum edition made it possible for subsequent generations of readers to identify the traditional discursive landscape, the field of allusion, within which The Faerie Queene situates itself and from which it differentiates itself. The Variorum is much more than a storehouse of “sources and analogues” embellished with commentaries shaped by now obsolete categorial presuppositions. The citations and interpretations of such commentators as Upton, Kitchin, and Lemmi constitute a remarkable achievement. I often find myself reversing their opinions or putting them in scare quotes on the way to a more “ironic” reading. But the point about this is that my formulations remain parasitic on theirs. In some ways the most valuable replacement for and successor to the Variorum commentary is the Sidney­Spenser Discussion List. 3. Harry Berger, Jr., The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957). 4. John Webster, “Oral Form and Written Craft in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 16.1 (1976): 84–86, discussed above in the introduction and in Chapter 2. 5. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 27. 6. Kenelm Digby, “A Discourse concerning Edmund Spenser,” in Spenser: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. M. Cummings (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971), 150. Thanks for this reference to William A. Oram, who cites it during a discussion of allegory in his excellent chapter on the 1590 Faerie Queene: see William A. Oram, Edmund Spenser (New York: Twayne, 1997), 77. 7. Mieke Bal, “De­disciplining the Eye,” Critical Inquiry 16.3 (1990): 508, 506.

268

Notes to pages 145–47

8. See my discussion of “countertextual” dynamics in Chapter 1. 9. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 1996), 23. See also Susanne Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), chaps. 4 and 5. As Teskey observes elsewhere, when we adopt “the picture theory of language” that places “absolute meaning beyond words,” the theory that underwrites the tradition of allegorical poetry, “we imagine that what is really true exists only in an empyrean of visual forms transcend­ ing language and cleansed of acoustic impurity” (Gordon Teskey, s.v. “Allegory,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. [1990; rpt. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1997], 21). 10. See the discussion of Gregory the Great and William Durand in the introduction. 11. Teskey, “Allegory,” 21–22. 12. Elizabeth Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 48. 13. Wofford, Choice of Achilles, 306. 14. Heale, Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide, 48. 15. Colin Burrow, “Spenser and Classical Traditions,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press, 2000), 224. 16. Mary Ellen Lamb, “Gloriana, Acrasia, and the House of Busirane: Gendered Fictions in The Faerie Queene as Fairy Tale,” in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age, ed. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000), 95. 17. This is simply a way to convert a common idea about displacement into a structured practice of redistributing complicities—an idea compactly expressed in Judith Anderson’s observation that Redcrosse “saw, or thought he saw, something wrong outside him when he was really seeing the result of something wrong within” (Judith Anderson, The Growth of a Personal Voice: Piers Plowman and The Faerie Queene [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976], 52–53). 18. John E. Hankins, s.v. “Acrasia” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 6. 19. John E. Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 56. In both Heale’s and Hankins’s statements, “represents” carefully muffles any attribution of agency. Instead of “repre­ sents,” Heale could have written “possesses” and Hankins “engages in.” 20. See Chapter 2, for the argument that the castle’s assailants are created and evacuated by repressive exorcism, “avoided quite, and throwne out privily” (2.9.32), an argument first worked out by Lauren Silberman in “The Faerie Queene, Book II and the Limitations of Temperance,” Modern

Notes to pages 147–50

269

Language Studies 17.4 (1987): 9–22. Maleger’s troops clearly represent such internal properties as “lawlesse lustes” and “corrupt envies” (2.11.8). “Foolish delights and fond abusious” are “by ugly formes . . . pourtrayd” (2.11.11). Hamilton’s casual gloss on a line in 2.11.9 perfectly expresses the general logic of Malegerian displacement in these terms, but expresses it in reverse: “The attack from without is interpreted as an attack from within.” A. C. Hamilton, ed., Spenser: “The Faerie Queene” (1977; rpt. New York: Long­ man, 1980), 274. Abbreviated to Hamilton, FQ, in subsequent references. 21. Lamb, “Gloriana, Acrasia, and the House of Busirane,” 93. 22. Theresa M. Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); Silberman, “Faerie Queene, Book II and the Limitations of Temperance,” 9; Madelon Sprengnether Gohlke, “Embattled Allegory: Book II of The Faerie Queene,” English Literary Renaissance 8.1 (1978): 123–40. I’m indebted to Krier’s subtle elaboration of the idea that “a contest of genres” occurs in canto 12 of Book 2 “as Guyon struggles to remain the hero of a moralized epic and to avoid the medieval romance and romance­epic elements of his book.” The action is divided “between a heavily traditional moral­ allegorical journey over perilous seas and a heavily traditional romance garden devoted to pleasures ‘not of the purest kind’. Both of these settings are indebted in part to the Odyssey”; the journey is also affiliated with the Aeneid, and before we enter the bower and encroach on Tasso turf we briefly revisit the Phaedrian Idleness that indexes the Romance of the Rose (99, 100–2). David Quint’s exploration of generic contestation in Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993) deals only incidentally with The Faerie Queene. 23. Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 18–19. See the essays in the excellent collection edited by Theresa M. Krier, Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), especially those by Craig Berry and Judith Anderson. 24. Discussing the “English impatience with” and “demystification of courtly fictions,” Michael McKeon calls Chaucer and the Gawain poet “the greatest proponents of . . . English romance as counterromance.” Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 146–47. Is The Faerie Queene then a countercounterromance? 25. For a sympathetic and illuminating appreciation of Lewis, see Paul Alpers’s entry on “The Bower of Bliss” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 106. 26. Hamilton, FQ, 294.

270

Notes to pages 150–51

27. A. Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966). 28. Paul Alpers deduces from the line “The art, which all that wrought, appeared in no place” (2.12.5 8) that Spenser “does not attribute his false paradise to the magic of its reigning sorceress.” Rather, the phrase “directly invokes a topos of aesthetic praise; nor can he evade his own complicity in this paradise since ‘the art which all that wrought’ is in some sense his own” (“Bower of Bliss,” 107). Yet nowhere does Spenser expressly distinguish the magic that produced Acrasia’s illusions and metamorphoses from the magic that produced the Bower. Rather, he leaves the question of the source conspicuously open. If it is represented as “in some sense his own,” the qualification makes room for the possibility that it is represented as in some sense not his own. As Alpers notes of the repeated hearsay formulas in the Gardens of Adonis passage, they “remind us that the myth is a creation of many men and has taken on a life of its own,” a life, he adds, that is “inde­ pendent but still obviously capable of nourishing an individual poet” (Paul Alpers, The Poetry of The Faerie Queene [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer­ sity Press, 1967], 328). 29. In the course of insisting that Spenser attributes all evil agency to Acrasian art and magic, Giamatti takes exception to Robert Durling’s gloss on the lines in stanza 42 that describe the Bower as “[a] place picked out by choice of best alive / That nature’s work by art can imitate.” Durling claims that Spenser distinguishes between art and magic, reserving the former term for the “artfulness of the human intellect.” From this he deduces that Spenser presents the Bower as “an actual place which has been chosen, as it were, by a committee of experts, as most suited to their purposes” (Robert Durling, “The Bower of Bliss and Armida’s Palace,” Comparative Literature 6.4 [1954]: 341). Giamatti dismisses out of hand the managerial fantasy in which Acrasia gets supplanted by this “anonymous committee” and by “sinister technological forces” (256). This is precisely the fantasy I want to reinstate as the only one capable of taking into account the theme of self­delusion and the action of specular tautology. We don’t need to retain the invidious managerial figure. Hamilton’s simple gloss on the lines in question makes the point: “For the poet,” he writes, “art is the literary tradition of the locus amoenus which he picks out ‘by choice of best alive’, chiefly” the isles of Alcida and Armida (Hamilton, FQ, 288). Notice that Hamilton associates the sorceresses with their isles, not with their art; the art belongs partly to the (“committee” of) poetic experts who create them and partly to the corporate body of discourse, the collective expert, that their work metonymically signifies. Of course, Giamatti doesn’t ignore this literary tradition. On the contrary, in both The Earthly Paradise and Play of

Notes to pages 151–54

271

Double Senses: Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1975; rpt. New York: Norton, 1990), he treats literary emulation as a defining performative feature of Renais­ sance epic, e.g., “Renaissance poets ennoble their matter by consciously surpassing previous literary images of nobility” (Play of Double Senses, 23). It is impor tant, however, to distinguish emulation or overgoing from parody and critique, especially when the “matter” in question concerns attitudes toward misogyny. 30. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 28–30, 168, discussed in the introduction and in Chapter 2 above. 31. See Harry Berger, Jr., “ ‘Kidnapped Romance’: Discourse in The Faerie Queene,” in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca, N.J.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 208–56. 32. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self­Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 157–92. See especially the turn from close reading to “cultural poetics” and politics that begins on page 177 and continues to the end of the chapter. 33. Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood. 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), discussed in my “Sexual and Religious Politics in Book 1 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” ELR: English Literary Renaissance 34.2 (2004): 213–19. 34. See George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (1936; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 215–16. 35. See Carol Kaske’s stimulating discussions of correctio in Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 65–97, 121–30, 180–81, and passim. 36. Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 191. 37. The identification of the tripartite soul as masculine is clearly implied in Tasso’s “Allegory to Gerusalemme Liberata.” He flatly proposes Godfrey and Rinaldo as symbols of the rational and irascible faculties, but fails to do the same for the concupiscible faculty, which therefore remains open to whatever invests, or attacks and occupies, it from the outside, and this power is of course feminized: “Armida is the temptation that sets snares for the appetitive faculty.” Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, trans. and ed. Ralph Nash (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 474, 471. 38. Hankins, Source and Meaning, 128. Hankins is serious about this distinction. He argues that for Guyon, the dangers that “lurk in the envi­ ronment about him . . . might” include such “corporal” temptations as “the

272

Notes to pages 154–55

proximity of a brothel or acquaintance with a ‘free love’ society. Yet these external hazards are dangerous only in so far as they find a response within the man himself and become a part of his internal warfare by moving his fantasy, perplexing his judgement, and stirring his emotions” (57). “They” are the initiators, and the momentary emphasis on his assent is overborne by the series of participles emphasizing their assault. 39. The final couplet has the hollow ring of obligatory applause, and virtue’s vaunting will soon prove premature. When the narrative confronts Guyon with Phaedria eighteen stanzas later, it places him in an uncomfortable position and doesn’t let him off the hook. On the contrary, it gives him enough play to make his temperate floundering both awkward and ridiculous. The situation doesn’t improve in canto 7, when Guyon goes off on his own, replaces virtue as the vaunter, and, in a strangely scrambled appetitive figure, “himself with comfort feedes, / Of his owne vertues and prayse­worthy deedes” (2.7.2). 40. Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Per for mance of Gender in Shake­ speare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 26. 41. Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spense­ rian Text,” in Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 329. The phrase “objectified other” is either redundant or else it alludes to a prior process of objectifying displacement in the mode of specular tautology, which is of course the way I choose to read it. 42. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 73. See also the shorter version of this chapter, “The Construction of Inwardness in The Faerie Queene, Book 2,” in Worldmaking Spenser, 234–43. Time and again, Schoenfeldt brilliantly describes the anxiety and masculine insecurity he associates with the discipline of temperance. 43. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England, 57. It can’t help that most of the real estate mentioned in Book 2 is owned by women (Medina, Phaedria, Alma, Acrasia). 44. It is worth noting that the conventional Greek term for “temperance” “self­control,” “moderation,” and so on is sóphrosyné, and that this word, like its cognate sōphrōn (temperate, chaste, discreet, self­controlled), is etymo­ logically connected to sós (“safe”). Sóphrosyné may be translated as “safemind­ edness,” a sense Plato often has Socrates feature in his ironic paraphrases of apprehensive interlocutors for whom to be temperate is primarily to protect oneself from the imagined pleonexia of one’s fellow citizens. I suggest that the temperance represented in Book 2 and well described by Schoenfeldt is this form of safemindedness, or apprehensiveness, or fear of castration.

Notes to pages 156–57

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45. See the excellent comments by Oram, Edmund Spenser, 97–102. In attributing Guyon’s limitations to those of “the kind of temperance he demonstrates” (98), Oram follows the line laid out by A. C. Hamilton in The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 90–123, but his critique is more sharply and pungently attentive to the effects of the normative virtue on behavioral style. 46. “In his Shorte Dictionarie for yonge begvnners, published in 1553, John Withals includes the following terms as among the essential vocabulary for ‘The Schole with that belongeth therto’; ‘a rod to doe correction with; to beate; to be beaten; A palmer to beate or strike scholers in the hande’ . . . and, most alarmingly, ‘the marke or prynte of a hurt in the body’ ” (Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 93). The essay that most suggestively hints at the link between the representation of Acrasia and the aims and effects of humanist pedagogy is Lamb’s “Gloriana, Acrasia, and the House of Busirane.” The whole of Stewart’s chapter on “the erotics of humanist education” (Close Readers, 84–121) is relevant and valuable as a background to Lamb’s account because of its development of the thesis that “the value of the educational experience of a young man as a rite of passage or an act of institution—the making of the man—is fundamentally threatened by that experience itself” (102). See also Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 21–60; Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth­ Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 77–92 and passim. These references to and comments on humanist pedagogy are heavily indebted to Lynn Enterline’s work, now published as “Schooling the English Renaissance” (Oxford Handbooks Online [www.oxfordhandbooks .com] © Oxford University Press, 2018), and I’m grateful to her for sharing it with me. 47. On the alienability of the phallus and its necessary dissociation from the organic body, see Mikkel Borch­Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), esp. chap. 7, pp. 205–19. 48. “Like the staff of Mercury to which it is kin,” Patricia Parker writes, the Palmer’s staff “is able both to recall souls from the symbolic Hades of subjection to female power and also to ‘rule the Furyes, when they most do rage’ ” (Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property [London: Methuen, 1987], 59). The narrator, it is true, states that when Mercury “wonts the Stygian realmes invade,” he uses his rod to rule the Furies, tame Orcus, and “asswage” the infernal fiends (12.41). But he says nothing about recalling

274

Notes to page 157

souls; the psycho­pomp function is a familiar enough aspect of this motif that many Spenserians (including Hamilton, FQ, 288) mention it; therefore, a closer look makes its exclusion here noteworthy. The staff of Temperance is impotent to recall souls from Acrasia’s power. “Wonts . . . invade” indicates a practice that is habitual or recurrent, presumably because the temperance imposed by the rod is at best temporary, a practice that is both aggressive and relatively ineffective. In addition, it is a power that depends on, gets its energy, and indeed its raison d’être from the Acrasian power it opposes. 49. In the first of the two stanzas that describe this gate (2.12.44–45) the sole reference to Medea picks out “[h]er mighty charmes, her furious loving fit.” This is followed by four lines about Jason, the one mentioning his infidelity surrounded (and minimized) by three that praise his heroic adventure. The second stanza intersperses within its admiration of the gate’s artifice references to Medea’s filicide and her murder of Creüsa. This shift of emphasis from Jason’s heroics to Medea’s crimes contributes to the general redistribution of complicity from male to female agencies that marks the narrative progress of canto 12. Perhaps that is the burden of the gate’s false dream. 50. On Spenserian katabasis, see the excellent comments by John Watkins in The Specter of Dido (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 103–8. 51. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self­Fashioning, 177. Excess is in fact personi­ fied in canto 12 and associated with a transfer of power from male to female figures that takes place between stanzas 46 and 57. First we encounter Genius, the keeper of the ivory Medea gate, who is represented as the dark mirror of our true “Selfe” and who “of this Gardin had the governall,” an office represented by the “staffe” he held “for more formalitee.” After we read that he “[w]ith diverse flowres . . . daintily was deckt” (49) and that Guyon violently if easily broke his staff—no surprises here—we are given an account of the spacious plain “beautifide / With all the ornaments of Floraes pride, / Wherewith her mother Art . . . did decke her, and too lavishly adorne” (50). And after this the broken baton is handed on, so to speak, to the second gatekeeper, Dame Excess, where it becomes a gold cup, in which the plump inhabitants of a lascivious viticulture offer themselves to be “scruzd” by “[a]ll passers­by.” That resonant word “scruzd” is memorable enough for us to recall and compare its previous occurrence at 2.11.46, when Arthur “scruzd” the life out of Maleger and threw him into a “standing lake.” 52. Silberman argues, for example, that Maleger’s assault is an effect rather than the cause of the strategies of defense embodied in and as the

Notes to pages 157–60

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castle of temperance and that in the Bower of Bliss, “Spenser strips the veil from the sexual fear that motivates the elaborate sensual defenses of Book 2” (“Faerie Queene, Book II and the Limitations of Temperance,”19). 53. Orgel, Impersonations, 26. 54. See the repetitions of “he” and “his” in 2.12.3–6. 55. In a marvelous essay written long before colonialist critique came into fashion, Martha Craig suggestively comments on the way the episodes in canto 12’s Odyssean voyage allude to “the goals of the Elizabe­ than Merchant Adventurers” and “the ports they sought in ships like the ‘Delight’, the ‘Desire,’ and the ‘Castle of Comfort’ as they sailed for the expected sweet life of the West Indies.” Craig cites references such as those to “thrift” and “credit” in support of the reading that “the journey to the Bower of Bliss reveals the financial disasters that resulted from adventuring in the hope of perfect pleasure.” See Martha Craig, “The Secret Wit of Spenser’s Language,” in Elizabethan Poetry: Modem Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul Alpers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 465. The impor­ tance of her reading for my argument is that its focus is on a reference to male­identified ventures— commercial ventures—whose erotic charge may be more homosocial and romantic (as in “Westward ho!”) than sexual, but whose romantic and mercantile trajectories may always be disrupted by the adventurers’ vulnerability to akrasia in the form of “wanton joys and lusts intemperate” (2.12.7). Several decades later the connection between romance and trade in the epic tradition from the Odyssey on was the subject of a perceptive analysis by David Quint in Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 248–67. Epic, he observes, “traditionally aligns itself with aristocratic, martial values; when, in the context of the voyages of discovery, it casts romance as its alternative ‘other’, it lends a mercantile, bourgeois cast to the romance adventure” (248). Indeed, “The Rocke of Vile Reproch” is a conspicuously aristocratic epithet, associated with “fame for ever fowly blent” and with “shame and sad reproch” (2.12.7, 9), as befits the moral education of “an Elfin borne of noble state” (2.1.6). But perhaps the process Quint finds Milton responding to is already at work during the sixteenth century: “the emergence of a merchant class” whose members “not only contested with the nobleman for power but also laid claim to the nobleman’s very nobility” (265). For some evidence of this emergence see the data and interpretation provided by David Harris for Bristol in The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Community, 1450–1700 (1991; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 85–127. 56. At 2.1.51, Amavia refers to Acrasia’s dwelling as situated “[w]ithin a wandring Island, that doth ronne / And stray in perilous gulfe.” This would

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make it part of the same fantasy. However, the insularity of Acrasia’s dwelling is not mentioned in canto 12. 57. Thanks to Judith Anderson for reminding me of “frigate,” which I had overlooked. 58. Phaedria reappears in stanza 14 as part of the topographia of the “Wandring Islands” and after they have been compared to the pre­ Apollonian Delos in stanza 13. Once again, Craig’s telling comment emphasizes the phantasmagoric character of this appearance: “The classical Delos, which Spenser etymologizes traditionally to dêlos, apparent because the islands simply appeared out of nowhere” (466). 59. Craig, “Secret Wit,” 465. See Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), 62–63, 69, 73. See also the apposite comments by James Nohrnberg in The Analogy of “The Faerie Queen” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 294n14. 60. What could be cheekier than to lead off with a salutation more suitable to the Sermonizer on the Mount: “Behold, O man”! It’s for this reason that I prefer the 1596 description of her performance, “with a loud lay she thus him sweetly charm’d” (my italics), to the 1590 “with a love­lay.” To be more specific about the work the allusion does, Christ’s injunction to serve God rather than riches (Matthew 6:25–34) is mediated through and wickedly turned awry by the song of Armida’s seductive bather (Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata 14.62–64). Conspicuous allusion asks the reader not only to “consider the source” but also to consider the way it is characterized. In the ambages of epico­romantic discourse even Christ’s words may be kidnapped, then contaminated, by the seducers of heroes. This per for mance articulates the countermessage to Belphoebe’s exhortation to honor (2.3.50–52). In doing so it may remind us how ridiculously unworldly it was of Belphoebe to waste her pep talk on so inappropriate a recipient as Braggadocchio, the description of whom at 2.3.34–37 undermines the rhetorical purpose of her speech in advance. 61. Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), chap. 2 and passim. In his subsequent study of the laureate system, Helgerson ingeniously shows how the poets of the next generation reversed the prodigals’ strategy and modeled the laureate role on “humanist ideals of sobriety, measure, and deliberation” (Richard Helgerson, Self­ Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983], 33). But even though the laureate “presented himself as a poet, as a man who considered writing a duty rather than a distraction” (55), the “seductive, exuberant, self­ regarding energy . . . [Spenser, Jonson, and Milton] condemn bears a

Notes to pages 160–65

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troubling likeness to the energy of their own art. Surely Spenser owes as much to the sensual delight of Acrasia . . . as . . . to the counterforces of morally righteous judgment” (9–10, my italics). Is the italicized “of” an objective or subjective genitive? His delight in her or “her” delight? The claim that Guyon’s destruction of the Bower represents the poet’s overreac­ tion to the Acrasian prodigality of his art (86–87) oddly defuses the situation by psychologizing it: If the poet identifies himself with—reduces himself to—his protagonist, is his violence directed only at his own poetic energy or at his vulnerability to the seductiveness of the temptress he imagines or mentally “sees”? If her “sensual delight” is only the mirror and effect of his, such outwardly directed violence must be not merely futile but also self­deluding. 62. The replay is skewed in part because Phaedria, unlike Medina, is motivated not by an impartial desire to moderate extremes of behav ior and restore the mean but by a desire to save Cymochles, who is in “deadly daunger,” Guyon having just cleft “his head unto the bone” (2.6.31–32). 63. For me, the most sensitive and nuanced reading of this episode remains that of Paul Alpers in The Poetry of “The Faerie Queene,” 316–18. 64. For an excellent account of Spenser’s departures from Tasso, see Durling, “Bower of Bliss and Armida’s Palace,” 113–24. Durling’s amplifi­ cation of C. S. Lewis’s “skeptophilia” thesis is especially important: “The lust of the eyes is a technique of exquisite protraction of desire” in which the mind is “actively engaged in corrupting the appetite” (119). But whose mind? When Durling describes the self­ corruption of the soul by intem­ perance, he clearly indicates the male soul, but when he refers to the narrative his emphasis is on “the lewdness of Spenser’s bathers” and on Acrasia’s seductive power (118–19). 65. John Erskine Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory: A Study of ‘ The Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 242, 246. 66. Conti’s statement in Mythologiae (4.13) that “Venus is nothing but the symbol of the sexual impulse” prompts the same old rhetorical ques­ tion: Whose sexual impulse? Cited by C. W. Lemmi in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, C. G. Osgood, F. M. Padelford, et al., 11 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), 2:369 (hereafter cited as Var. 2). 67. From the Amavia episode on, Book 2 returns repeatedly to images of dysfunctional families or households. The various threats and seductions inscribed in the Odyssean allusions focus on the conflict between andreia and nostos— between heroic self­affirmation as a threat to Family Values and the desire of homecoming that will reaffirm them but jeopardize the hero’s autonomy. Spenser’s “Cyprian goddesse, newly borne / Of th’Oceans

278

Notes to pages 165–66

fruitfull froth” derives ultimately from Hesiod’s account of a primal dys­ functional family romance, the nightmare of terrible fathers hating, bury­ ing, swallowing their sons, of the son mutilating the father, of the paternal organ begetting the archetypal seductress who will enact his revenge by her ability to disempower and emasculate his sons. 68. David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 “Faerie Queene” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 191. 69. As Judith Anderson brilliantly observes, “the first immediate vision” of Acrasia “is specifically the narrator’s, since Guyon and the Palmer” are still creeping about in the bushes, and the stanza describing the vision acknowledges not only “the narrative’s implication in Acrasian pleasure” but also the phantasmatic entanglement of Acrasia and Verdant in each other’s dreams and in each other’s sight: “[H]er sight beholding, his sight beheld, and his sight beholding” Judith Anderson, “Narrative Reflections: Re­envisaging the Poet in The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene,” in Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance, ed. Krier, 99. After the two creepers show up, but before they destroy the vision, the narrative joins the lovers when it steals one more longing look, perversely fixing and feeding its “hungry eies” on Acrasia’s even after it has described “her false eyes fast fixed in . . . [Verdant’s] sight” and “greedily depasturing delight” (12.73). Thus floating into view on the strains of a medley of Tassonian and Chaucerian airs, and then fixed, trapped, displayed, in the crossed sight lines of discursive longing and protagonistic fury, Acrasia, as I note above , emerges as the objectification of male hysteria. 70. Stephen Gosson, The schoole of abuse (1579; rpt. New York: Garland, 1973), B8v, A2r·v. Gosson’s telltale formulations were drawn to my attention by James Nohrnberg: see The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene,” 509. 71. “Infinit streames, . . . continually” welling out of this fountain, fell into “an ample laver,” “and shortly grew to so great quantitie, / That like a little lake it seemd to bee.” Its “depth exceeded not three cubits bight,” and it “seemd the fountaine in that sea did sayle upright” (2.12.62). Notice how the description makes the laver appear both to swell and to shrink in size. The upright fountain has been called a phallic object, but it is also an afterimage of the boat of temperance, a representation of temperance installed in the center of the garden, an icon of the power and desire associated with and now dissociated from the natural male organ and placed, so to speak, in Acrasia’s hands. 72. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England, 44. 73. Mammon is an exception, but it is also anomalous in that it concerns itself with “lust of the eyes” or curiositas. This is one opinion that I expressed in The Allegorical Temper that I still endorse.

Notes to pages 166–68

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74. Judith H. Anderson, “The Knight and the Palmer in The Faerie Queene, Book II,” Modern Language Quarterly 31.2 (1970): 160–78. 75. The Palmer concludes that since this water won’t cleanse the bloody hands, they might as well remain bloody so they can serve as a symbol “to minde revengement, / And be for all chast Dames an endlesse moniment” (2.1 0). What could that mean? “Endlesse moniment” raises the same question here that it does in Epithalamion. The Palmer’s sympathy is with Amavia, whose innocence he upholds, but the phrase suggests that the bloody hands will be as much a warning to chaste dames as a memorial. They need to avoid Amavia’s predicament, and perhaps the best way to do that is to follow the nymph’s example and try to “dye a mayd” (2.8). For a subtle intertextual analysis of the episode that brings out its darker implications, see Carol Kaske, “The Bacchus Who Wouldn’t Wash: Faerie Queene II, ii,” Renaissance Quarterly 29.2 (1976): 195–209. My reading differs from Kaske’s in centering on the episode’s darker gender implications. 76. Anderson, “Knight and the Palmer,” 177. 77. Of this moment Susanne Wofford notes that “the ‘vertuous staffe’ of allegory . . . here as elsewhere seems to define the kind of interpretation practiced by the Palmer as a specifically male skill” (Choice of Achilles, 251). 78. This phrase expresses the speaker’s impatience: Circe’s victims are fools; their metamorphosis was essentially self­inflicted; they got what they deserved. 79. Durling’s formulation brings out this specularity: “The enchant­ ments of Acrasia, whereby the men become beasts, and the workings of the palmer’s staff, whereby the beasts are first calmed (Stanza 40) and then returned to human shape, are the only magical events which occur in the Bower of Bliss” (“Bower of Bliss and Armida’s Palace,” 120). 80. In this connection, Charles Ross cites literary examples that suggest that palmers were “not just those who went to Jerusalem in the literary imagination, but [also] spoilsports, particularly in matters of love,” and he adds that such a figure would therefore be appropriate “to guard the knight of Temperance”—presumably because he knows enough about the sport he is appointed to spoil to do so effectively, as is indicated by his knowledge and capture of Acrasia (communication to the Sidney­Spenser Discussion List 2/12/02). That there are limits to his knowledge and power is indicated by the ease with which Phaedria whisks Guyon away from him. 81. Compare the initial descriptions of Archimago and the Palmer: An aged Sire, in long blacke weedes yclad, His feete all bare, his beard all hoarie gray, And by his belt his booke he hanging had: Sober he seemde, and very sagely sad. . . . (1.1.29)

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Notes to page 168

A comely Palmer, clad in blacke attire, Of ripest yeares, and haires all hoarie gray, That with a staffe his feeble steps did stire, And if by lookes one may the mind aread, He seemd to be a sage and sober sire. . . . (2.1.7)

Archimago had masqueraded as a pilgrim in Book 1 (6.35–48). Most obvi­ ously, the similarity announces congruence of function—both act as guides, assistants, mages, and instructors—together with moral polarity. But the Palmer seems to me to be a veiled signifier, presented in a manner guaran­ teed to arouse perplexity or uncertainty in readers. A clue to this lurks in Amavia’s report that before going in search of Mordant, “Weake wretch I wrapt my selfe in Palmers weed” (2.1.52). In a communication to the Sidney­ Spenser Discussion List dated 2/14/02, Jacqueline T. Miller observes that since Amavia was pregnant, this may raise “some interest ing questions . . . about what the Palmer’s weed . . . can be used to hide.” See also H. J. Todd’s quotation from the 1605 History of King Leir at Var. 2.192: “[W]e will go disguisde in palmers weeds, / That no man shall mistrust us what we are,” which is, incidentally, an untrustworthy thing to do. Since he is given no proper name, “the Palmer” may seem to some readers to have the valency of a disguise, though precisely what it disguises isn’t clear. In Book 2, Archimago’s track record as a counter­Palmer is unimpressive: After his little charade with Duessa is foiled, he falls for Braggadocchio’s bluster in canto 3 and gleefully flies off to procure him Arthur’s sword. His finest moment occurs in canto 6 when he shows up with the sword and manages to heal the wounds Furor inflicted on Pyrochles. But in his last stand in canto 8 he tries unsuccessfully to persuade Pyrochles that the sword can’t be used against its rightful owner, and this failure contributes to Pyrochles’ undoing. The Palmer doesn’t avail himself of his magical power until well after Archimago has gone. 82. Borch­Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, 210, 213. 83. Roland Greene has ingeniously hypothesized a binary model of discourse, distinguishing an “ambassadorial” from an “immanentist” model, the first “a model of alterity” whose “worlds are multiple and indepen­ dent . . . of each other,” and the second a model “of envelopment” in which “worlds are situated within each other.” Greene is interested in exploring the operation in Spenser’s poem of a process of “narrative subduction” through which “a poetics of embassy is empowered and then disempowered, alterity and the differentiations of worlds continually offered and continually taken away.” Applying this hypothesis to the Bower leads him to conclude that its “essential character . . . crosses the illusion of immanence with the reality of

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embassy, confronting its visitors with . . . alterity disguised as a version, albeit brought up from the depths of the interior, of the self” (Roland Greene, “A Primer of Spenser’s Worldmaking: Alterity in the Bower of Bliss,” in Worldmaking Spenser, 11, 16, 25). This seems to me to be a precise but precisely inverted characterization of the thesis of the present essay, which is that the essential character of the Bower crosses the illusion of embassy with the reality of immanence, confronting its visitors with the self disguised as a version, albeit brought up from the depths of the interior, of Acrasian alterity. 84. Many thanks to Charles Butler, who took this argument seriously enough to resist it, and whose resistance forced me to rethink it. 4. resisting tr anslation: britomart in book 3 of spenser’s faerie queene 1. See the concluding paragraphs of Chapter 3. For a general anthro­ pological account of the structural pressures the Pinocchio principle responds to see “From Body to Cosmos: The Dynamics of Representation in Precapitalist Society,” South Atlantic Quarterly 91.3 (1992): 585, and passim. I’m very grateful to Craig Berry for several constructive suggestions that improved this essay. 2. A. Leigh DeNeef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982), 95. 3. The “chaunge / Of name” underscores the revisionary construction while the new name, Cayr­Merdin, chimes out a conflation of Merlin, his care, and the “ghastly noise” of the forced labor that testifies to his anxiety. 4. Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 153. 5. Replicated in discourse time, but anticipated in story time. 6. Otherwise, it is implied, he would have made the tower of brick. 7. John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 37. 8. Susanne Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 233–34. 9. See ibid., 252, on the Palmer. 10. Wofford, “Gendering Allegory: Spenser’s Bold Reader and the Emergence of Character in The Faerie Queene III,” Criticism 30.1 (1988): 7–8. 11. A. C. Hamilton, ed., Spenser: “The Faerie Queene” (1977; rpt. New York: Longman, 1980), 320. Abbreviated to Hamilton, FQ, in subsequent references. See Linda Gregerson, “Protestant Erotics: Idolatry and inter­ pretation in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” ELH: English Literary History 58.1 (1991): 18.

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Notes to pages 181–94

12. Not heterosexuality tout court but reproductive heterosexuality under patriarchal auspices in the context of domestic partnership. 13. In the former case the epic fiction is an imitation of chivalric exploits that may express the protagonist’s freedom and power as well as her or his freedom to abuse the power, authority, or responsibility delegated for the quest. In the latter case the chivalric mode of representation expresses the goal­directed agenda of the ideological police. By moving back and forth between these alternatives, Wofford is able to bring out the ambivalence of chivalric discourse as a site in which— and for control of which—these opposed meanings struggle. And although I find that interpretive benefit attractive, my own agenda calls for a somewhat dif ferent explanation of the ambivalence, one that centers on the divided motivation of the narrative agency parodied and impersonated by “Spenser.” 14. The first three are mentioned in Book 2, canto 10, at stanzas 54–56, 18–20, and 42, respectively. The figure named Martia here was called Mertia in 2.10.42. The change emphasizes her warlike character. 15. See the excellent comments by Gregerson in “Protestant Erotics,” 18–19. 16. This is an approach I tried out many years ago in “The Spenserian Dynamics,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 8.1 (1968): 1–18. A much more interest ing and sophisticated version appears in Gregerson’s “Protestant Erotics.” 17. See, for example, Roger Sale, Reading Spenser: An Introduction to “The Faerie Queene” (New York: Random House, 1968), 77–80; Maureen Quilli­ gan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1979), 80–81; Georgia Ronan Crampton, The Condition of Creatures: Suffering and Action in Chaucer and Spenser (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974), 172–75. 18. Richard Lanham, “The Literal Britomart,” Modern Language Quarterly 28.4 (1967): 428–29, 436–37. 19. Pamela Joseph Benson, “Rule, Virginia: Protestant Theories of Female Regiment in The Faerie Queene,” ELR: English Literary Renaissance 15.3 (1985): 282. The same argument appears in revised form in Benson’s The Invention of Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England (University Park: Penn State Press University, 1992), 280–305. 20. Louis Adrian Montrose, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 77.

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21. Louis Adrian Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spense­ rian Text,” in Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 324–25. 22. Maureen Quilligan, “The Comedy of Female Authority in The Faerie Queene,” ELR: English Literary Renaissance 17.2 (1987): 156–57, 164–65. 23. Montrose, “Shaping Fantasies,” 77. On Amazons, see the whole of Montrose’s illuminating discussion ibid., 77–80; see also Winfried Schleiner, “Divine Virago: Queene Elizabeth as an Amazon,” Studies in Philology 15.2 (1978): 163–80, and Mary R. Bowman, “ ‘she there as Princess rained’: Spenser’s Figure of Elizabeth,” Renaissance Quarterly 43.3 (1990): 509–28. 24. Bruce Thomas Boehrer, “ ‘Careless Modestee’: Chastity as Politics in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene,” ELH: English Literary History 55.3 (1988): 561. 25. See Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 312n61. 26. While refuting Stephen Greenblatt’s thesis that “Spenser’s art questions its own status” and enhances the queen’s when it “calls attention to its own processes,” Montrose claims “that it is precisely when the poet offers to make such referential and deferential gestures explicit—in his encomia to the sovereign—that the text most obstinately refers the reader back into itself” and “calls into question the status of the authority it represents” (“Elizabethan Subject,” 331). Most obstinately and—as I’ve been suggesting— most mischievously, throwing a scare not into the queen but into the doubtful and pious encomiast. 27. Susanne Wofford, “Britomart’s Petrarchan Lament: Allegory and Narrative in The Faerie Queene III.iv,” Comparative Literature 39.1 (1987): 28. In the final line of canto 3 the narrator writes, “The Redcrosse knight diverst, but forth rode Britomart” (3.62). This renders more striking the reversal of direction in 4.4–5: he “forth . . . did proceede” while she “kept on her former course.” 28. DeNeef argues that here “the narrator is made to adopt Britomart’s own view” of Cupid as false archer, and that this strategy “forces the reader to give momentary assent” to the view “simply by voicing [it] through the detached and observing narrator” (Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor, 162). But if we posit the representation of an engaged narrative/narrator, then we also posit a reader who won’t give assent to the view but will question the narrator’s aggressiveness of tone. For a dif ferent interpretation see Sale, Reading Spenser, 71. 29. This produces a subtler story of gender confusion than does the Bradamante­Fiordispina episode it alludes to (Orlando Furioso 25.26–70). Ariosto resolves the dilemma by having Bradamante disabuse Fiordispina and send her twin brother to Fiordispina’s bed in her place. This intertextual

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Notes to pages 204–12

context highlights both Britomart’s interest in keeping Malecasta in the dark and her desire to experience the male role herself. 30. Once again the comedy of mistaken gender identity is broached. In the preceding stanzas Malecasta’s lust is first branded foolish because she is “ignoraunt of her [Britomart’s] contrary sex,” and then branded vicious because of her abandon. The implication is that chaste desire will keep one not only from lust but also from making an inappropriate object choice. 31. Sarah Murphy, unpublished essay. lt is the insistence of the “ ‘playful voice’ and comic effects that serve to distance and parody the disingenuousness and disapproval of the ‘straightforward narrator,’ ” or narrative. 32. See Quilligan, “Comedy of Female Authority in The Faerie Queene.” 33. Ciris 253, in Virgil: Aeneid 7–12, The Minor Poems, ed. and trans. H. R. Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library vol. 64, 2nd ed. (1918; Cam­ bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934). I’ve slightly altered the translation. 34. This is Quilligan’s thesis, modified to bring out my focus on the textual critique of the narrative. She argues that Spenser responds to the dangerous conferral of political and cultural authority on Britomart “by surrounding her with comedy” (“Comedy of Female Authority,” 164). See also Wofford, Choice of Achilles, 463n44. 5. actaeon at the hinder gate: the stag party in spenser’s gardens of a donis 1. This is a revised and expanded version of the Kathleen Williams Lecture delivered at the Spenser at Kalamazoo meeting on May 7, 1988. It gives me pleasure to thank Professor Regina Schwartz for suggestions that made the task of revision much easier. 2. Ovid, Metamorphoses X (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), 2.64–117. For a more detailed discussion, see my “Orpheus, Pan, and the Poetics of Misogyny: Spenser’s Critique of Pastoral Love and Art,” ELH: English Literary History 50.1 (1983): 27–34. Pygmalion is both creator or “father” of Galatea and her lover. The relation is in that respect incestuous, and thus Myrrha’s desire for her father is a “genealogically” motivated mirror image of her ancestral origin. 3. On the equation of narrator with narrative see Chapter 2. 4. This representational practice is more extensively discussed in Harry Berger, Jr., “ ‘Kidnapped Romance’: Discourse in The Faerie Queene,” in Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance, ed. George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 208–58.

Notes to pages 212–14

285

5. See Harry Berger, Jr., “From Body to Cosmos: The Dynamics of Representation in Precapitalist Society,” South Atlantic Quarterly 91.3 (1992): 582–86. 6. On Actaeon in Spenser, his contemporaries, and his predecessors see Leonard Barkan’s brilliant “Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis,” ELR: English Literary Renaissance 10.3 (1980): 317–59; Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983), 166–69, 191–99; and Maureen Quilligan, “The Comedy of Female Authority in The Faerie Queene,” ELR: English Literary Renaissance 17.2 (1987): 165–67. See also my “Kidnapped Romance,” 254. 7. Cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.139–40. 8. Simon Shepherd, Spenser (New York: Harvester Press, 1990), 58. Shepherd identifies himself as “an antiheterosexist, anti­patriarchal man, who has worked in close and creative political alliances with feminists”—but who is not, he adds, “a woman” (59). In a review of this book Raymond Wadding­ ton complains that its “viewpoint is so resolutely that of the yobbo student sprawled in the back row that interest quickly fades” (“Recent Studies in the English Renaissance,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 30.1 [1990]: 180). I am more partial to Shepherd’s politics than I suspect Waddington is, and my chief quarrel with the book is that its investment in close reading is too half­hearted to support its arguments or justify its dismissive and contentious tone. 9. Lauren Silberman, “Singing Unsung Heroines: Androgynous Discourse in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 271. Pamela Joseph Benson defends the view that Spenser’s treatment of woman and women in Book 3 is only superficially profeminist but actually conservative: “Rule, Virginia: Protestant Theories of Female Regiment in The Faerie Queene,” ELR: English Literary Renaissance 15.3 (1985): 277–92. David Lee Miller seconds this view in The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 “Faerie Queene” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 215–81, especially 215–24. Arguing for “the subordination of the feminine in Spenser’s allegory,” Miller takes issue with Quilligan’s position in Milton’s Spenser, which he sees as “compelling evidence of the literary canon’s continuing power to co­opt representations of the feminine on behalf of a patriarchal ideology” (217). The view to be developed in the present chapter will in effect cut between Quilligan and Miller. For an interest ing account of gendered writing in Book 3 influenced by Quilligan and Silberman, see Susanne Lindgren Wofford, “Gendering Allegory: Spenser’s Bold Reader and the Emergence of Character in The Faerie Queene III,” Criticism 30.1 (1988): 1–21.

286

Notes to pages 215–22

10. This sentence is borrowed with slight alteration from my “Kid­ napped Romance,” 247. It accords with the logic of Britomart’s search for Artegall that she unhorses two Anteros figures— Guyon and Marinell— and thus symbolically lowers male resistance to female desire. At the same time, her threat to Cymoent— overthrowing Marinell is the first step in releasing him from maternal domination—leads to a renewal of maternal solicitude that recurs in Belphoebe in canto 5 and in Diana and Venus in 6. 11. Borrowed from my “Kidnapped Romance,” 249. 12. Notice that in the encounter between them (6.16–28) Diana is unarmed—without her hunting implements— and is thus parallel to Verdant with his “suspended instruments” in Book 2. (see Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property [New York: Methuen, 1987], 54–66). Diana lacks her normative male power and responds to Venus as if the latter is a male, an Actaeon. This, added to the anomalous reconciliation between the two traditionally antagonistic forces, suggests a potential and unusual threat to male power and security. The narrator sets the danger up as a premonitory feint and then reassuringly returns Venus and Diana to their traditional postures when Venus subordinates them both to male hegemony (“We both are bound to follow heavens beheasts, / And tend our charges with obeisance meeke,” 6.22). After this they find the twins and take up nurturant duties. 13. A. Leigh DeNeef has convincingly demonstrated how Spenser’s techniques produce the illusion of an autonomous virgin and stress her illusoriness: Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1982), 115. 14. For a parallel discussion see my “Kidnapped Romance,” 251. 15. Thomas P. Roche, Jr., The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), 107. 16. Richard J. Berleth, “Heavens Favorable and Free: Belphoebe’s Nativity in The Faerie Queene,” ELH: English Literary History 40.4 (1973): 481. 17. James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 564. 18. Tormented by Cupid, Jove, leaving heavens kingdome, here did rove In straunge disguize, to slake his scalding smart; Now like a Ram, faire Helle to pervert, Now like a Bull, Europa to withdraw. . . . (3.11.30)

19. Paul J. Alpers, The Poetry of “The Faerie Queene” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), 328.

Notes to pages 226–34

287

20. The implications of sodomy are broader than those vaguely glanced at in the reference to “the hinder gate”; but even if the reader picks up connotations of same­sex desire, the interpretive framework gives it a specific significance here: autonomy from the other and from heterosexuality. 21. Noted by Nohrnberg, Analogy, 529. 22. See Nohrnberg, Analogy, 436, and Miller, Poem’s Two Bodies, 279–80. 23. The text, as we shall shortly see, interferes with the very visualization it encourages. On the metaphorics and politics of spatialization, see Louis Marin, Utopics: Spatial Play, trans. Robert A. Vollrath (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984), esp. 33–60. 24. Roche, Kindly Flame, 119–22; Miller, Poem’s Two Bodies, 254. 25. A. C. Hamilton, ed., Spenser: “The Faerie Queene” (1977; rpt. New York: Longman, 1980), 361. Abbreviated to Hamilton, FQ, in subsequent references. 26. See also Quilligan, “Comedy of Female Authority,” 164–67. 27. Quilligan, “The Comedy of Female Authority” 165. 28. Contrast, for example, the account of Venus’s rape of Adonis in Malecasta’s tapestry (3.1.34–38): There Venus kidnaps the poor young boy and furtively takes advantage of him. Titan’s rape is no less furtive or forceful, but those qualities are rhetorically muffled, and it gets more sympathetic press from the narrator, who describes it in romantic and procreative terms. Of course, the narrator both distances himself from Venus’s rape and scape­ goats it by assimilating it to Malecasta’s desire and representing it as an ecphrasis, which is a way of putting it in scare quotes. 29. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Trans­ gression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 19. 30. See my “Kidnapped Romance,” 238–39n29. 31. See John Erskine Hankins, Source and Meaning in Spenser’s Allegory: A Study of “The Faerie Queene” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 241–46, and above, Chapter 3. 32. Conspicuous sublimation—that is, mystification and evasion—of the Hesiodic story of Aphrodite’s birth begins with Plato, most prominently in the Symposium. One has only to probe a little way beneath the surface of suave speechmaking in that dialogue to find the flood of apprehensions that shakes the homosocial confidence of the symposiasts: the desire of lovers to throw off the yoke of fathers, parents, and the patriarchal oikos; the attempt to overthrow the myth celebrating woman’s (Aphrodite’s) power over male desire by distinguishing a higher, Uranian Aphrodite who presides over all­male attachments; the fears implicit in that attempt, which registers the Hesiodic association of Aphrodite with the nightmare of terrible fathers

288

Notes to pages 234–43

hating, burying, swallowing their sons, of the son mutilating the father, of the paternal phallus begetting the archetypal seductress who will enact his revenge by her ability to disempower and emasculate his sons. The story of the twin Aphrodites, and of the sublimated Uranian twin whose genesis is carefully dissociated from the scene of castration, is picked up by Plotinus in Enneads 3.5.2. Plotinus’s straight­faced misreading of Platonic and Socratic irony is reinforced by his indifference as to whether Ouranos or Kronos is the heavenly Aphrodite’s father. This text, along with adjacent sections, is the mediating source that affects both Ficino’s and Pico’s treatments of the twin goddesses. As Edgar Wind demonstrates while discussing the sources of Botticelli’s painting, Pico and Poliziano mention the scene of castration primarily to minimize and metaphorize it away (Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1958], 115–20). In Ficino’s commentary on the Symposium, the castration of Ouranos is men­ tioned in 5.12, and carefully insulated from the discussions of the birth (6.7) and the twin Venuses (2.7). 33. The quoted phrases are Patricia Parker’s, Fat Ladies, 18. 34. A. C. Hamilton (FQ 364) glosses “Joying” as “enjoying,” and I suppose one could also render “of her enjoyd” as “made joyous by her.” Though my reading of the episode leads me to give primacy to one pair of alternatives in this range of possibilities, the range itself allows for the confusion and oscillation I mention below. 35. Susanne Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 310. 36. Jonathan Goldberg, “Mothers in Book III of The Faerie Queene,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 17.1 (1975), 13. 37. For an overview of the tradition see Mikitia Brottman, Hyena (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), chap. 2, “The Hyena in Human History.” 38. Wofford, Choice of Achilles, 287. 39. “ ‘Kidnapped Romance’: Discourse in The Faerie Queene,” in George M. Logan and Gordon Teskey, eds., Unfolded Tales: Essays on Renaissance Romance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), 220–21. 40. DeNeef, Spenser and the Motives of Metaphor, 95–99. See above, Chapter 2.

Index

Acrasia, 12, 146–50, 168–69 akrasia, 149–50 allusion, conspicuous, 212–13 Alpers, Paul, 109–13, 116, 119–27, 136, 162, 222, 234, 266n34, 269n25, 270n28, 277n63 Anderson, Judith, x–xi, 166, 253n26, 268n17, 278n69 Archimago, 50–68, 96, 173, 279–80n81 Ascham, Roger, 160 aufheben, 261–62n106 autophobia, 11, 23, 38–40, 42, 54 Bal, Mieke, 4, 145 Barkan, Leonard, 218 Belphoebe, 216–20 Benson, Pamela, 192–93, 285n9 Bloch Maurice, 8, 136–37, 249n13 Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, 195 Burrow, Colin, 147 Bush, Douglas, 140–41 Castiglione, Baldassare, 106, 197 castration, logic of, 11, 18, 39, 168, 173–74, 212 Chambers, Ross, 253n32 Cheney, Donald, 21–22, 24–25, 54, 71–72, 133–34, 256n51, 265n22 Collinson, Patrick, 55 Copjec, Joan, 22, 80 countertext, 5–6, 11–12, 19–21, 40–42 Crampton, Georgia Ronan, 90 Craig, Martha, 160, 275n55, 276n58 Dees, Jerome, 112–13 de Lauretis, Teresa, 3 DeNeef, Leigh, 50, 57–58, 61, 93–94, 243, 283n28 Despair, 79–80, 89–93, 259n93

Digby, Kenelm, 145 Dolven, Jeff, ix Duessa, 24, 43–44, 50, 69–75, 78–89, 253–54n33 Durand, William, 6 Durling, Robert, 270n29, 277n64, 279n79 Eco, Umberto, 248n6 Eggert, Katherine, xi–xii Elias, Norbert, 30 Enterline, Lynn, 273n46 epanorthosis, 95, 152 Error, 47–49 false Florimell, 240–43 feminist criticism, 144 Ferguson, Margaret, 104, 109 Fidelia, 92–93 Fineman, Joel, 10, 145 Fletcher, Angus, 17, 140–41 Florimell, 237–41 Fradubio, 72, 82 Freud, Sigmund, 127, 133 Frye, Northrop, 10–11, 111–13, 142, 151, 249–50n17 Genius, xi, 226–28, 274n51 Giamatti, A. Bartlett, 150–51, 270–71n29 Gilman, Ernest, 7–8, 55, 61, 95, 253n29 Glauce, 178, 187–92, 199, 207–9 Gohlke, Madelon Sprengnether, 157, 264n18 Goldberg, Jonathan, 10–11, 12–13, 148–49, 240 Gosson, Stephen, 165–66 Grill, 169 Gross, Kenneth, 55, 92, 175 Greenblatt, Stephen, 10, 20, 137–39, 151–52, 157, 250n17, 271n32

289

290 Greene, Roland, 80–81n83 Gregerson, Linda, 57, 59, 250n2, 255n48, 282n16 Gregory the Great, 6 Guillory, John, 40–41, 85–86, 179 Hamilton, A. C., 19, 22, 28, 38, 65, 97, 149–50, 153, 159–60, 181, 188–89, 202–3, 228, 241, 253n29, 268–69n20, 270n29, 273n45 Hankins, John, 164, 234, 268n19, 271–72n38 Heale, Elizabeth, 146–47, 169, 268n19 Helgerson, Richard, 20–21, 30–31, 160, 257n61, 276–77n61 Hinton, Stan, 111, 263n9 House of Pride, 75–82, 100 House of Holiness, 92–94, 180 irrelevance, conspicuous, 127, 190 Jardine, Lisa, 43 Kahn, Victoria, 107 Kaske, Carol, 95, 260n104, 271n35, 279n75 Kennedy, William, 134–35, 265n27 Kierkegaard, Søren, 62, 79–80 King, John, 19–20, 55, 257–58n70 Kinney, Arthur, 105, 107–9 Knapp, Jeffrey, 48 Krier, Theresa, 148–49, 247n3, 269n22 Kristeva, Julia, 47, 50, 232 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 147, 273n46 Langer, Ullrich, 77 Lanham, Richard, 190, 204, 208 Letter to Ralegh, 141–42, 166 Lewis, C. S., 9, 103, 140–41, 149, 162–63, 165, 262–63n1, 266n37 Lion, the, 51, 255n47 Lucifera, 77–81, 259n88 Lupton, Julia, 261–62n106 Lynch, John P., vii Lyotard, Jean-François, 5 Maleger, 130–31, 266n37, 268–69n20, 274n51 Martin, Catherine Gimelli, xii–xiv Mauss, Marcel, 35 McEachern, Claire, 152

Index Merlin, 55, 57, 174–82, 188–89, 195, 197–98, 215, 281n3 Miller, David Lee, 18, 34, 38, 86, 116, 129–32, 135–36, 138–39, 141, 165, 227–28, 254n44, 265n22, 285n9 Miller, Jacqueline T., 280n81 misautia, 11, 23, 40, 42, 45 Montrose, Louis Adrian, vii, 194–95, 201, 272n41, 283nn23,26 Mullaney, Steven, 30 Murphy, Sarah, 205–6 Murrin, Michael, 112–13, 249n15 Nancy, Jean-Luc, x–xii narcissism, 22, 42, 62, 80 Nelson, William, 25, 39–43, 99, 253–54n33 Nohrnberg, James, 77, 130, 219, 227–28, 256n, 278n70 Norbrook, David, 43, 50, 53–54, 254n34 Ong, Walter, 112–13, 136 Oram, William, 59–60, 267n6, 273n45 Orgel, Stephen, 128–29, 154 Orgoglio, 68–69, 82–83, 259n88 Ovid, 46–47, 211–13, 229 Palmer, xiii–xiv, 114–15, 125–29, 139, 155–57, 160, 166–69, 208, 273n46, 279nn75,79,80, 280–81n81 Parker, Patricia, xi, 216–17, 273–74n48 Phaedria, 160–66, 272n39, 276n58, 277n62 Phedon, xii–xiii, 114–28, 264–65n20 Plato, 7, 32, 107, 138, 156, 197, 248n10, 272n44, 287–88n32 Quilligan, Maureen, 25, 45, 46–49, 58–59, 133, 195, 207, 214–19, 221, 229–31, 233, 236, 284n34, 285n9 Quint, David, 269n22, 275n55 Ramachandran, Ayesha, x reading as if listening, 8–10, 19 reading as if textualizing, 9–10, 19 reading as if visualizing, 7, 9, 19 Redcrosse knight, 23–29, 32–40, 43–49, 53–54, 59–62, 65–76, 81–100, 256n49, 259–60n93, 260n105, 268n17, 283n17 rhetoric, 2, 8–9, 36, 43, 54, 97, 103–26, 134, 266n34

291

Index Roche, Thomas, 90–91, 98, 217, 228, 255n47, 259–60n93 Ross, Charles, 279n80 Roustang, François, 80 Sandys, George, 7 Sansfoy, Sansjoy, Sansloy, 69–71, 75, 81–85, 259n89 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 154–55, 157, 272nn42,44 Sedgwick, Eve, 122 Shepherd, Simon, 214–18, 229, 285n8 Shuger, Debora, 152–53 Silberman, Lauren, 114–16, 123–24, 130–31, 148, 157, 214, 231, 235–36, 268–69n20, 274–75n52 sinner’s discourse, 29–35, 231, 252n22, 259–60n93 Sir Thopas, 11, 148–49 sophrosyne, 272n44 specular tautology, 12, 147–48, 151–52, 157, 165 St. Paul, 23, 44 Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White, 231 Stewart, Alan, 273n46 Struever, Nancy S., 105

Tasso, Torquato, 133, 147, 163–64, 271n37, 276n60, 277n64 Teskey, Gordon, 145–46, 249–50n17, 268n9 textualization, detextualization, 4–5, 8, 10, 19 Tillyard, E. M. W., 137 Tuve, Rosamund, 90 Una, 32–35, 38–39, 43–44, 49–53 Ungeschehenmachen, 127–28, 226 Venus, 164–65, 211–12, 234–35 Vickers, Brian, 104–5 Vickers, Nancy J., 218 victim’s discourse, 29, 82–85, 90, 96, 124 Virgil, 45 Waters, D. Douglas, 254n36 Williams, Kathleen, 263n9 Wind, Edgar, 288n32 Webster, John, 9, 111, 113–16, 121, 131–36, 144–45 Wofford, Susanne, 55–56, 60, 63, 67, 145–47, 180–87, 190, 194, 202, 239, 242–43, 253n29, 282n13

Harry Berger, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent books include Figures of a Changing World: Metaphor and the Emergence of Modern Culture (2015) and A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare’s Venice (2012), both published by Fordham University Press. David Lee Miller is Carolina Distinguished Professor Emeritus of En­ glish and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. He is the author of Dreams of the Burning Child: Sacrificial Sons and the Father’s Witness (Cornell University Press, 2003) and The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 “Faerie Queene” (Princeton University Press, 1988), and is one of the General Editors of the forthcoming Oxford Edition of the Collected Works of Edmund Spenser.