Showing Like a Queen. Katherine Eggert
poem’s authoritative women. From the midpoint of Book 3 in the Garden of Adonis this feminine center will not hold; rather, the narrative embarks upon a sea of digressions that, like the sea at whose edge the habitually pursued Florimell makes yet another near escape (3.7.27), offers no assurance of fruitful outcome. Canto 7 of Book 3 is particularly dizzying in its multitudinous meanderings. Within fifty-eight stanzas the narrative turns from Florimell encountering the malevolent hag and her besotted son; to Florimell fleeing the monster the hag sends; to Florimell escaping into the fisherman’s boat; to Satyrane finding Florimell’s dropped girdle and subduing the monster; to the Giantess Argante fleeing a knight while bearing on her lap the “dolefull Squire” of Dames; to Argante defeating Satyrane and being further pursued by the knight; to the Squire of Dames, who’s been tossed aside by Argante, telling Satyrane of his unlucky quest for a virtuous woman. If Canto 7 has an anchor at all, it is the decidedly unvirtuous Argante, who as a parodic counterpart to Venus and her sexual sway over Adonis in her garden motivates not creative plenitude, but confused narration and disrupted natural hierarchy. This episode features a plethora of indefinite masculine pronouns remarkable even for Spenserian verse, as if Satyrane and the unnamed knight and the Squire are all, by virtue of their sex, equally to be picked up, dropped down, and knocked senseless by the lustful Giantess. (We do not learn until the episode is over that the unnamed knight is in fact a woman, the “faire virgin” Palladine [3.7.52].) Argante’s thralldom is the evident wage of personally and poetically going astray.27
The second half of Book 3 continues to evince uneasiness about the Garden of Adonis’s feminized conjunctions of productivity and desire, traits that reemerge (like Argante’s domination) not as affirmation but as parody. For artistic creation we are given Proteus’s shapeshifting and the hag’s creation of the false Florimell; for feminine desire, Hellenore humped by satyrs; for male passivity, the childish Scudamour, who spends his time “beat[ing] and bounse[ing] his head and brest full sore” while Britomart engages in rescuing his bride (3.11.27). At the same time, as Berger points out, “[t]he repeated pattern of male behavior in these cantos 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 hyena-like 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.”28 However, the increased level of masculine tyranny does not correspond to an increase in poetic power. The poetic model proposed by Book 3’s most obvious poet, Busirane, proves to be remarkably ineffective, an only slightly more sophisticated version of the rapine “rude and rugged” rhymes earlier invoked by the narrator. Neither Amoret nor Britomart herself is much moved by what Maureen Quilligan calls Busirane’s “sadistic sonneteering,”29 indicating that trying to convert the feminine lyricism of Acrasia’s Bower and elsewhere in the poem into some new breed of masculine lyricism will not prove a successful experiment. Even though Busirane aggressively composes his charms out of Amoret’s very blood, “Yet thousand charmes could not her stedfast heart remoue” (3.12.31).
And yet, the conclusion of Book 3 does not resolve itself in favor of a feminine mode of narrative progress, either. Despite the poem’s continued associations between femininity and inconclusiveness, we must remember that most of the primary female characters of Books 3 and 4 are in fact driving toward a particular conclusion: marriage. But as Books 3 and 4 progress, both the desirability and the conclusiveness of marriage become deeply compromised, and weddings are generally either delayed or evaded. The narrative hence finds itself in a double bind. In order fully to exploit the female knighthood that, beginning with Britomart, the poem has delineated, marriage must be acknowledged as a legitimate ending to a heroic story. But in the view of the male characters who are the necessary partners in this enterprise, marriage seems largely to replicate the dangers to heroism embodied in Acrasia’s bower, where knightly instruments are not sharpened, but suspended. Hence, aside from some marginal or deflected weddings (the curiously quadrangular union of Cambell to Cambina, and Triamond to Canacee; the morally suspect Poeana’s wedding to the Squire of Low Degree; and the unnarrated vows of purely allegorical rivers), Book 4’s narrative effort is spent eluding rather than concluding wedlock.30 This avoidance is jumpstarted, as Goldberg points out, by the 1596 revision of the ending to Book 3, which assigns not only Britomart but also Amoret to the category of frustrated brides. The abortion of Amoret’s “conceiued” hope (3.12.44) to find her husband rewrites her as a duplicate of the unhappy Britomart, who in the 1590 ending to Book 3 witnessed Scudamour’s embrace of Amoret only to be reminded of her own incompletion: “In vaine she wisht, that fate n’ould let her yet possesse” (3.12.46a).
Considering that Britomart’s quest was prompted by her conception of an envisioned Artegall, the 1590 ending’s disjuncture of the “fate” of narrative from Britomart’s wishful thinking signals the imminent demise of the feminine poetics that Britomart initially embodied.31 This demise comes to pass in the 1596 Faerie Queene, in Books 4 and 5. Although the 1596 ending to Book 3 leaves both Amoret and Britomart to “wend at will” while the narrator takes his breather, the female wanderings of Book 4 have little to do with women exercising will. Rather, women’s thought and desires in Book 4 seem largely to be displaced by happenstance and mistake. Britomart carelessly misplaces Amoret and untowardly jousts for the false Florimell; the virgin huntress Belphoebe, a double for Queen Elizabeth, “misdeems” Timias’s attentions to Amoret.32 And more significantly, the long-awaited encounter of Britomart with her intended, Artegall, in Book 4’s “middest”—the analogue point to Book 3’s superproductive, female-ruled Garden—seems pointedly to cancel Britomart’s desired fulfillment. Instead, their encounter in the central Canto 6 evades a permanent union of heroine and hero, evidently because of its emasculating potential. Artegall initially fights Britomart with the rapine intent typical of a Spenserian knight in battle, but once he unhelms her he is unmanned: “trembling horrour did his sense assayle, / And made ech member quake, and manly hart to quayle” (4.6.22). Even though Britomart is in the end similarly subdued, narration remains in the grip of feminine digressiveness and masculine failure. We learn immediately after these lovers’ mutual recognition that Amoret, once again failing to join her husband Scudamour’s company, has “wandred … or gone astray” (4.6.36). As if to countervail this unpredictable feminine derailment of narrative conclusions, or as if to countervail a woman’s effect upon himself, Artegall immediately sues to leave upon his initial quest, “To follow that, which he did long propound” (4.6.42).
Artegall’s ability to “propound,” from proponere (“to put forward”), establishes him as the opponent of postponement and delay, even though it is he who is postponing their marriage. But in the prevailing opinion of The Faerie Queene’s second half, marriage itself postpones rather than embodies masculine endings. For Artegall, what is a “concerned” hope for Amoret or Britomart would amount to a return to Acrasia’s bower. From the bridegroom’s point of view, marital union constitutes a kind of suspended animation. A male hero’s safe response to marriage in Book 4 is either to flee it (as in Canto 6’s comic argument, where “Both Scudamour and Arthegall / Doe fight with Britomart, / He sees her face; doth fall in loue, / and soone from her depart”) or to contemplate it only from several heavily mediated removes, as is signified in the Temple of Venus, which hides its hermaphroditic goddess from view precisely because—as with man and wife become one flesh—she unites both sexes in one being:
The cause why she was couered with a vele,
Was hard to know, for that her Priests the same
From peoples knowledge labour’d to concele.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But for, they say, she hath both kinds in one,
Both male and female, both vnder one name.
(4.10.41)
What must be covered up (and oddly so, in the Book that contains The Faerie Queene’s most famous union, the rivers’ wedding) is the very definition of marriage: “Both male and female, both vnder one name.” Wedlock and its results are threatening enough that Venus is thrice removed from direct experience: not only by her veil, but also by the pains