Showing Like a Queen. Katherine Eggert
Talus from one victory of force majeure to another.”36 T. K. Dunseath, in contrast, has identified Isis Church as a necessary passageway to Britomart’s restoration of Artegall’s progress: “Once Britomart submits herself to Divine Providence in the Church of Isis, she discovers the true nature of her mission and is able to free her lover from woman’s slavery.”37 Chafing though Dunseath’s condemnation of “woman’s slavery” may now be, it is a condemnation shared by the poem at this point, and Isis Church becomes the site of the reiteration and recuperation of Artegall’s stasis. This episode at first recalls and extends the state of overwhelming feminine power in which Artegall still lies languishing: Isis, as goddess of the moon, reminds us not only of Radigund, whose face was revealed “Like as the Moone in foggie winters night” (5.5.12), but also of Britomart herself, whose own visage has borne the same comparison and whose chastity allies her with the moon-goddess. Moreover, the dream that comes to Britomart as she sleeps at Isis’s feet consistently confuses her with Isis, using only “she” and “her,” not a proper name, to describe the marvelous queen that subdues the crocodile. But unlike the close of Book 3, where Britomart’s state of feminine dismay and incompletion bled over into the state of the narrative, this moment of feminine governance and of feminine conception is safely framed. At first Britomart’s dream seems to rediscover her former authorial mode: whereas in Book 3 she set out fashioning “a thousand thoughts” of her lover, here as she awakens “long while she musing lay, / With thousand thoughts feeding her fantasie” (5.7.17). The dream’s aftermath of interpretation, however, reduces those thousand thoughts to orthodoxy. First of all, the ambiguous or oscillating gender identities inherent in the temple sort themselves out. Not only do the priests, initially of uncertain gender, now become in the person of their spokesman an unambiguous “he” (5.7.19), but the crocodile of Britomart’s dreaming—which had been given both feminine and masculine pronouns, as well as variously hermaphroditic powers of tumescence, pregnancy, engulfment, and impregnation—is now unquestionably male, a figure of both Osiris and Artegall himself. And even though in the dream Isis/Britomart exerts phallic authority over that crocodile, “turning all his pride to humblesse meeke” (5.7.16), Isis’s priest re-reads this episode for her as pointing not toward Britomart’s subjection of men, but toward her eventual marriage and male offspring (5.7.23), reincorporating feminine power into masculine heroics as Merlin did by tracing the careers of Britomart’s male descendants. Signally unlike Merlin’s vision, the priest’s explication runs without interruption, “vnto the end” (5.7.24). From this point Britomart will step, not into a maze of digressive, self-made visions, but toward a certain closure of masculine heroics that she must internalize and enforce. As critics have often noticed, in Britomart’s subsequent defeat of Radigund the two women warriors are scarcely distinguishable: the fray is described as a challenge between a tigress and a lioness (5.7.30). Britomart’s task is, evidently, to subdue herself.
We can see in Britomart’s subsequent reconstitution of Radigund’s city-state the full consequences of Spenser’s reading of Plutarch’s “Of Isis and Osiris,” a text to which the Isis Church episode alludes, although Book 5 does not explicitly refer to Isis’s piecing together of her dismembered husband. Unable to find Osiris’s penis, Plutarch’s Isis replaces it with a consecrated replica; and so too does Britomart reerect her husband’s phallic power.38 She not only rearms him and restores the Amazons “to mens subiection” (5.7.42), she also establishes Artegall’s thralldom as but a holiday aberration: “Ah my deare Lord, what sight is this (quoth she) / What May-game hath misfortune made of you?” (5.7.40). All of a sudden, and quite improbably, Artegall metamorphoses from an embarrassed, foolish Hercules to an epic Odysseus returning to his patient, waiting wife: “Not so great wonder and astonishment / Did the most chast Penelope possesse, / To see her Lord, that was reported drent” (5.7.39). With Artegall’s promotion to head of state, Book 5’s curious catalogue of ways to abuse the human head—its elaborately grisly panoply of hangings, beheadings, scalpings, and even bad haircuts—begins to make sense. All these illegitimate mishandlings of the head are cancelled in one stroke, Britomart’s decapitation of Radigund.39 From this moment, too, the narrative itself seems to know where it’s heading. Artegall ventures forth once again with purpose upon his hitherto delayed quest: “He purposd to proceed, what so be fall, / Vppon his first aduenture, which him forth did call” (5.7.43, my emphasis). And he leaves Britomart behind.
We have heard Artegall’s rededication to his “first adventure” before the end of Canto 7. Significantly, this resolution had been repeated thrice in quick succession in the brief interval between his attendance at Florimell’s and Marinell’s marriage, and his encounter with Radigund’s crew.40 If first intent prevails only in the respite between weddings and Amazons, how could it hold up if Artegall stayed to marry his own Amazon-like fiancee? Artegall’s second separation from Britomart in fact becomes an extended meditation upon the high stakes of avoiding feminine digression, both for Artegall and for the forward movement of narrative. After his announced departure at the end of Canto 7, Canto 8 surprisingly begins not by portraying Artegall on his way, but by worrying again at the issue of female dominance:
Nought vnder heauen so strongly doth allure
The sence of man, and all his minde possesse,
As beauties louely baite, that doth procure
Great warriours oft their rigour to represse,
And mighty hands forget their manlinesse.
(5.8.1)
A comment on Artegall’s recent imprisonment, it would seem—but as it turns out, the “louely baite” in question is not Radigund, but Artegall’s intended wife. Despite her recent role in suppressing female sway, Britomart still represents the “allure” that Artegall must resist, if he is to escape the fate (says the narrator) of Samson, Hercules, and Mark Antony. Feminine rule of body and mind must be cut off, beheaded, as a way of propelling Artegall back “vppon his first intent” (5.8.3)—his intent and the narrative’s, the rescue of Irena that is the ostensible mission of Book 5.
As both Busirane’s torturous rhymes and Artegall’s earlier dismissal of Britomart in Book 4 taught us, however, rejecting one version of feminine rule is not enough to restore with certainty either masculine heroics or a masculine model of poetic effect. More drastic measures are called for. In keeping with its obsessive decapitations of illegitimate authorities, Book 5 proposes a thoroughgoing revision of literary construction that ought for good and all to sever the poem from feminine influence. Feminine rule and feminized poetics are repealed in favor of the most straightforward mode that The Faerie Queene will ever assume, historical allegory. That is to say, the poem at this point assumes a new literary mode as a way of galvanizing the sense of an ending, the doome that Artegall’s adventures first promised before his digression into serving a queen.
I earlier suggested that Book 5’s revision of form reaches back nostalgically for the completed heroic endeavors of Books 1 and 2. If Books 1 and 2 can legitimately (if broadly) be described as the epic segments of The Faerie Queene, then the nostalgia that Book 5 expresses is for epic over romance. But Book 5 in its last five cantos also audaciously construes itself as more uniformly heroic than even those earlier books of epic (not to mention the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid), since it thoroughly discounts feminine otium as holding any allure whatsoever, either for the poem or for its hero. None of the women of these cantos poses any sensual danger for Artegall or for the late-arriving Arthur. Adicia’s malfeasance is described as sexual only ex post facto, once she’s been banished “farre from resort of men” (5.9.2).41 The female monster of the Inquisition’s dual appearance of foul and fair briefly recalls Duessa’s (“For of a Mayd she had the outward face, / To hide the horrour, which did lurke behinde, / The better to beguile, whom she so fond did finde” [5.11.23]), but her implied weapon of seduction is never put to use. Even Duessa’s sexual transgressions are described with extreme economy, with neither the seductive nor the repulsive flourishes of Book 1. The prosecuting attorney at her trial, Zele, simply mentions “many a knight, / By her beguyled, and confounded quight” (5.9.40). As well, these cantos decline to seduce their reader. Their refusal of sensual appeal extends to their poetry, which Angus Fletcher may be alone in praising