Showing Like a Queen. Katherine Eggert
at Venus’s feet.33 Meanwhile, as I noted above, Amoret herself has mysteriously disappeared from the scene, as if the allegory of marriage can be recounted only when actual marriage has once again become impossible.
It is this revulsion from the feminine endings imagined by female authority, in my view, that accounts for the inconclusive structure of Book 4—its turns and returns, engagements and disengagements. Having devolved so much of its action upon anticipated wedlock, Book 4’s ultimate evasions of marriage leave the poem confronting its own heroic void. Notoriously lacking a unitary hero, a Guyon to break the Bower of Bliss’s thrall, Book 4 is seeded with ever-increasing narrative guilt for not properly ending things. The kinds of conclusions that Book 4 does feature are necessarily strained because they are not naturally arrived at, but arbitrarily imposed by the narrative voice. Canto 10, for example, reaches for completion by flatfootedly ending both Scudamour’s tale and the canto that contains it with the word end (“So ended he this tale, where I this Canto end” [4.10.58]). Elsewhere, Book 4 begins to ask forgiveness for the cliffhanger technique that The Faerie Queene has employed with confidence since Book 1. Canto 11 opens by apologizing for Florimell’s having been left “languishing in payne” since Canto 8 of Book 3 (4.11.1). Book 4 itself ends on a hasty promissory note, a one-line uncompleted completion like the one Artegall effects by leaving Britomart: the marriage of Marinell and Florimell, “Which,” says the narrative voice, “to another place I leaue to be perfected” (4.12.35).
Repealing Queenship in the Legend of Justice
That “other place”—that place of perfection—is Book 5, which in fact begins by once again shunting aside Florimell’s and Marinell’s wedding in favor of Artegall’s mission to rescue Irena. Hence Book 5’s narrative asserts openly what Book 4’s indirections implied: that marriage is not perfection at all, but rather at best a mere footnote to the glories of the heroic quest. Artegall attends the promised nuptials only as a brief stopover on his way to “his first aduenture” (5.3.40). The “firstness,” the originality, of that quest, as well as Artegall’s often-repeated intent to continue upon that first quest despite minor skirmishes and potential diversions along the way, is a new emphasis for a knight of The Faerie Queene, and one that leads us to examine what is (literally) being prioritized in Book 5. What is the first intent to which both Artegall and the narrative must insistently refer? Ostensibly, Artegall’s task is to restore originary justice. But in the reiterated word that describes Artegall’s judiciary pronouncements, doome, we hear how that “first aduenture” is dependent for its achievement of this restoration on a sense of ending, of final, irrevocable closure.34 And as we will see, the opening pretexts of Book 5 firmly disenfranchise feminine authority from this return to finality.
Of all the proems in The Faerie Queene, the Proem to Book 5 features the most cursory and oblique reference to Spenser’s queen. After declaring that God’s justice, delegated to earthly rulers, allows princes “To sit in his owne seate, his cause to end” (5.Pr.10), the Proem addresses Elizabeth in only one stanza, as the “Dread Souerayne Goddesse” who initially seems to have the apocalyptic power of bringing about that doomsday:
Dread Souerayne Goddesse, that doest highest sit
In seate of iudgement, in th’Almighties stead,
And with magnificke might and wondrous wit
Doest to thy people righteous doome aread, …
(5.Pr.11)
It is difficult, given Spenser’s cunning hubris throughout The Faerie Queene, not to read aread punningly: Elizabeth areads “righteous doome” not by discerning or pronouncing it herself, but by her act of a-reading Spenser’s poem, which dispenses its own inspired judgments. The main action of Book 5 similarly weaves into its narrative structure a determination to achieve ending by substituting male for female authority. Just as the Proem addresses Elizabeth in the person of a goddess who has not appeared, and cannot appear, in the poem—Astraea, whose naming here is prefaced on her absence from the world—so too does Canto I go on to delineate Astraea’s departure as the precondition for heroic action. It is not until she is reft from earthly sight that her foster child Artegall can begin his career. Her removal from the poem therefore at last delivers narrative into the safe keeping of the masculine. As a substitute for herself Astraea leaves Artegall the iron man Talus, “And willed him with Artegall to wend, / And doe what euer thing he did intend” (5.1.12). This absolute fulfillment of “what euer thing” a man intends seems a dream of narrative progress, considering the feminine postponements and beguilements of Books 3 and 4. Talus is never delayed or diverted on his way to a goal. Once he sets out after Sir Sanglier, for instance, he requires only three stanzas to find and bind his prey (5.1.20–22)—a remarkable contrast to the pursuits in Books 3 and 4, some of which are never concluded at all. Talus acts as an external manifestation of doome, with its connotations of finality as well as of certain judgment. In Cantos 1–4 Artegall’s doome extends even to narrative itself, as with the end of each canto an episode in his travels is firmly and finally concluded.
That conclusiveness, however, itself comes to an end as Book 5 approaches its center, a center we have learned in Books 3 and 4 to associate with realized or potential feminine arrestiveness, with marriage and feminine (re)production. Cantos 5–7 of Book 5 in fact stage in miniature the extensive, interwoven problematics of marriage and of a feminine poetics mounted at length through Books 3 and 4. The Amazon queen Radigund’s capture of Artegall externalizes what might be Artegall’s nightmare of marriage to Britomart: not only do Radigund and Britomart resemble each other in looks and actions, as many critics have noticed, but Artegall crucially consents to his bondage, “to [Radigund] yeelded of his owne accord” (5.5.17).35 Moreover, Radigund catalyzes at the precise moment of Artegall’s quasi-marital oath a regression to Book 3’s literary model, in which a feminine poem equally effeminizes its reader. We witness this regression in a complex moment of reader-response that goes beyond the earlier instances of feminine ravishment it resembles, as Artegall unhelms Radigund and sees her features for the first time:
But when as he discouered had her face,
He saw his senses straunge astonishment,
A miracle of natures goodly grace,
In her faire visage.
(5.5.12)
When he looks at her, what he sees is himself—and more than himself, his arrested self: “He saw his senses straunge astonishment.” It is that reading of his own plight, himself as Verdant in Acrasia’s bower, that causes him further to be emasculated, and finally further to emasculate himself by disarming: “At sight thereof his cruell minded hart / Empierced was with pittifull regard, / That his sharpe sword he threw from him apart” (5.5.13). At this point the doome—the finality—that he has wielded up to now returns upon himself, enforcing not masculine completion but effeminized thrall:
So was he ouercome, not ouercome,
But to her yeelded of his owne accord;
Yet was he iustly damned by the doome
Of his owne mouth, that spake so warelesse word,
To be her thrall, and seruice her afford.
(5.5.17)
The effeminization of the knightly reader is accompanied by a similar regression to the effeminized narrative of Books 3 and 4. Unlike Cantos 1–4 of Book 5, Canto 5 ends with no ending. This time Artegall remains in bondage, and his release is postponed till another place, “Which in an other Canto will be best contayned” (5.5.57). Worse yet, Canto 6 in fact fails to free Artegall, and he remains with knightly instruments suspended while Britomart makes her way to him. Thus, like Books 3 and 4, Book 5 has feminine authority at its heart. Significantly, Britomart in Book 5’s “middest” canto, Canto 6, herself rearms.
The dilemma of the arrested text begins to be resolved as Book 5 works its way out of this feminine center, a process encapsulated in Britomart’s stay in the Temple of Isis in Canto 7. The Isis Church episode has proved especially troubling for critics trying to assert a unity of purpose in Book