Abstract
“Ah who can love the worker of her smart?” The narrator of Edmund Spenser’s late-sixteenth-century magnum opus, The Faerie Queene, rhetorically poses this question at one of the grisliest moments in an often grisly poem, as the enchanter Busirane uses the very heart’s blood of his pinioned victim, the chaste Amoret, to write “a thousand charmes” meant to capture her affections.2 Rhetorically—and yet twentieth-century interpreters of the allegory of this situation have often taken the question as one that requires answering. For some 30 years beginning in the mid-1960s, the dominant critical trend among Spenser scholars was to describe Amoret’s suffering as an externalized, allegorically expressed form of either her dread of sexual union with her brand-new husband, Scudamour—Busirane having kidnapped her at the wedding masque, before the marriage could be consummated—or her shock and shame at the magnitude of her own sexual desire.3 In these readings, the “worker” of Amoret’s “smart” thus proves to be not the sadistic Busirane, but Amoret herself.
The Faerie Queene oscillates between two ontologically incompatible modes of poetry: rapine and rapturous. Rape is associated with inadequate, unsubtle, and solipsistic poetry; rapture, with a poetics of shared and sensual delight.
… men being of wit sufficient to tonder [consider] of these vertues which are in us women, are ravished with that delight of those dainties, which allure & draw the sences of them to serve us, wherby they become ravenous haukes, who doe not onely seize upon us, but devour us.
—Jane Anger Her Protection for Women (1589)1
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Notes
Jane Anger, Jane Anger Her Protection for Women, in First Feminists: British Women Writers, 1578–1799, ed. Moira Ferguson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 62.
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), 3.12.31; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by book, canto, and verse numbers, or by page number in the case of Hamilton’s notes. In all quotations, including those from Spenser, I have normalized the orthography of u/v, i/j, and vv/w but otherwise have retained original spellings.
For Amoret’s terror as women’s fear of sexual intercourse, see, for example, Thomas Roche, The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 73–88; and Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 47–58. Even Harry Berger, Jr.’s subtle account, first published in 1971, of patriarchal horrors in this episode attributes the final incarnations of Busirane’s masque to Amoret’s own psyche and her desire for Scudamour; see “Busirane and the War between the Sexes: An Interpretation of The Faerie Queene III. xi–xii,” in Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 183–84.
Sheila T. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in “The Faerie Queene” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 2–3.
Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 198.
Susan Frye, “Of Chastity and Violence: Elizabeth I and Edmund Spenser in the House of Busirane,” Signs 20 (1994): 49–78, and Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 132–35.
I have argued a more general version of this case about the attractions of ravishment in The Faerie Queene in Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 22–50.
Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 178.
Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987).
Susanne Lindgren Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), pp. 295–371. Wofford’s discussion of The Faerie Queene, like mine, explicitly associates allegory with rape, and nonteleological visionary bliss with rapture (pp. 353–71); however, she establishes an absolute gender division—only women characters are raped, only men characters are rapt—that I think does not hold true in the poem, as my ensuing discussion demonstrates.
Herbert J. C. Grierson, Cross Currents in English Literature of the Seventeenth Century (1929; rpt. London: Chatto & Windus, 1958), p. 54; C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 326.
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 183–84.
Deborah G. Burks, “I’ll Want My Will Else’: The Changeling and Women’s Complicity with Their Rapists,” ELH 62 (1995): 763.
Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 4.
Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, pp. 62–66; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 14–26.
Plutarch, “Beasts Are Rational,” Moralia 985D–992C, ed. Harold Cherniss and William C. Helmbold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 492–533.
John Milton, Areopagitica, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2:516.
Leonard Barkan, “Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis,” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 317–59.
The gender of Alma’s castle is an interesting conundrum, since it has no allegorized genitalia; but see David Lee Miller’s account of “The displacement through which genital eros finds its way into representation within the temperate body”; The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 “Faerie Queene” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. 174. Dorothy Stephens has convincingly argued, too, that even Alma’s brain is a decidedly feminine enclosure; The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 52–61.
Jacobus De Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. William Granger Ryan, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1:172.
Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, p. 10; Stephen Greenblatt, “Fiction and Friction,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 66–93.
Catherine Clément, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, trans. Sally O’Driscoll and Deirdre M. Mahoney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
Nancy Vickers, “‘The blazon of sweet beauty’s best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrèce” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 95–115.
Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 160. Louis Adrian Montrose sees this evasion of Belphoebe’s genital region as an avoidance of the danger inhering in the powerful, virginal body of Queen Elizabeth; see “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 327–28. For this blazon as not evasion, but an invitation to invasion, see Hannah Betts, ‘“The Image of this Queene so quaynt’: The Pornographic Blazon 1588–1603,” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana, ed. Julia M. Walker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 160–62.
For the Garden as a locus of feminine eros, see Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser, pp. 192–97; and 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), pp. 267–71.
Paul Alpers, The Poetry of “The Faerie Queene” (1967; rpt. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 10.
Richard Wilson, “Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare’s Late Plays,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 125–26.
For the connections between the Medusa and the experience of horror, see Marjorie Garber, “Macbeth: The Male Medusa,” in Shakespeare’s Ghostwriters: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 87–123.
Thomas Greene, The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 329.
Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays in Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 181–238; and Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 329–41. Jed’s expression “chaste thinking,” which she uses to describe fifteenth-century Italian humanist practices of exclusionary philology, has the same kind of double valence for her argument that “ravishment” does for mine. Both terms carry the connotation of sensual contact and disdain for sensual contact; for Jed, “chaste” exists “at the join of two conflicting lexical families of terms, one representing the impulse to touch and the other, the impulse to be cut off from contact… on the one hand, words related to touching or the absence of touching—tangible, contaminate, contact, integrity, intact, etc., and, on the other hand, words related to cutting—chastity, castigate, caste, and Latin carere (‘to be cut off from, to lack’)”; Chaste Thinking, p. 8.
Harry Berger, Jr., “Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser’s Gardens of Adonis,” in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 91–119; on this anxiety see also Silberman, “Singing Unsung Heroines,” 271.
Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 64.
So problematic was the notion of embodied spiritual ecstasy that in finalizing the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith in 1563, the Reformed church went so far as to omit the 1553 version’s scripturally unimpeachable tenet that “at the laste daie… to all that bee dead their awne bodies, fleshe, and bone shalbe restored”; E. Tyrrell Green, The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Age of the Reformation (London: Wells Gardner, Darton, 1896), p. 320.
Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, vol. 1: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 318–19, 368.
See Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), pp. 14–30.
Phillip Stubbes, A Motive to Good Workes (London, 1593), Epistle; quoted in Patrick Collinson, “The Elizabethan Church and the New Religion,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Christopher Haigh (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 171–72.
The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, ed. J. P. Wilson and James Bliss, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1841–54), 6:128; quoted in Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, p. 393.
Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1960), 1:108; quoted in Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, p. 437.
Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, ed. Sidney Warhaft (New York: Odyssey, 1965), p. 224; quoted in Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, p. 29.
See Christopher Haigh, “The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation,” in The English Reformation Revised, ed. Christopher Haigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 176–208. Haigh particularly notes the prevalence of such ritualistic use of objects in Lancashire, possibly the site of origin of Spenser’s family (p. 206). See also Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
Henry Ainsworth, An Arrow Against Idolatrie. Taken out of the quiver of the lord of Hosts ([Amsterdam], 1611), p. 43; quoted in Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry, p. 41. See also Huston Diehl, “Bewhored Images and Imagined Whores: Iconophobia and Gynophobia in Stuart Love Tragedies,” English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996): 111–37.
Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 64.
Roy Strong, Spirit of the Age (London: BBC Publications, 1975); cited in Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, p. 464.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (1928; London Verso, 1977), p. 176.
Deconstructive tendencies are inevitable in allegory, which often “[gives] independent mythic existence to a negative term” and thus “risks creating a verbal figure suspended between the states of demon and idol”; Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 56.
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© 2001 Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose
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Eggert, K. (2001). Spenser’s Ravishment: Rape and Rapture in The Faerie Queene. In: Robertson, E., Rose, C.M. (eds) Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10448-9_14
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