Showing Like a Queen. Katherine Eggert
I mean to illuminate in this chapter is one reason for the range and malleability of The Faerie Queene’s literary strategies. No one can say what genre, if any, Spenser originally intended his long poem most to resemble; the “Letter to Ralegh” appended to the 1590 edition of Books 1–3 of the poem employs only the terms “allegory” and “history” by way of explanation of the work. And it is certainly the case that Spenser is engaged in synthesizing, in encyclopedic fashion, any number of literary forms inherited from the classical, Christian, continental, and native English traditions. But the Letter’s invocations of Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso place The Faerie Queene in the midst of Renaissance debates over the epic versus the romance—as does the use of the term “allegory” itself, as John Watkins points out by quoting Sir Richard Blackmore, a seventeenth-century reader of the poem who uses “allegory” in place of the term “romance” to describe The Faerie Queene’s erratic narrative motions: “But Ariosto and Spencer … are hurried on with a boundless, impetuous Fancy over Hill and Dale, till they are both lost in a Wood of Allegories,—Allegories so wild, unnatural, and extravagant, as greatly displease the Reader.”15 Despite Richard Helgerson’s undoubtedly true contention that The Faerie Queene—both on the face of it and in its rejecting Tasso’s ultimate preference of public virtue over private love pursuits—entirely adheres to the genre of “Gothic” romance, within Spenser’s poem we may discern a certain guilt about poetic overreliance on this unmasculine form.16 David Quint demonstrates that the opposition of epic to romance is one that, beginning with Virgil, is one generated internally from the perspective of epic itself: “To the victors [in the Aeneid] belongs epic, with its linear teleology; to the losers belongs romance, with its random or circular wandering.”17 Hence each western epic subsequent to Virgil carries on a debate concerning which perspective—the winners’ or the losers’ perspective, epic or romance—the poem is going to embrace most fully.
For “winners” and “losers” we might easily substitute, at least in the normative terms of Renaissance ideology, “masculine” and “feminine.”18 Watkins’s analysis of the 1590 Faerie Queene suggests that the topos of the abandoned woman is key to understanding how Spenser, from moment to moment and canto to canto in the poem, is either stigmatizing or recuperating Ariostan romance, signified by its associations with femininity. Concluding as he does with Book 3 of the poem, Watkins is able to establish that Spenser by that point in the poem “transcends the debate over the compatibility of romance and epic conventions by defining epic as a genre foregrounding confrontations between antithetical influences.”19 My concern, however, is with what happens as The Faerie Queene, appearing in further installments in 1596 and 1609, is forced to reconsider this syncretism, as the poem fully faces up to what it would mean for epic poetry not to abandon femininity, but rather, like the ideal chivalric romance hero, to champion it.
Female Will and Feminine Poetics in the Legends of Chastity and of Friendship
My first task, then, is to track the history of the alliances between poetry and femininity proposed in Books 3 and 4, alliances that eventually necessitate Book 5’s generic shifts. Because Book 5’s attachment to history arises just as soon as its attachment to Britomart ends, it is worth remembering that Britomart’s entry into The Faerie Queene came hard upon the heels of a gap in history. Near the end of Book 2, Arthur in the castle of Alma finds himself reading a chronicle of Britain, a chronicle that ends just after the entry of Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s father (2.10.68). Of course Arthur’s name cannot be added to the chronicle because, in the time scheme of The Faerie Queene, he has not yet embarked upon the sequence of events that will lead him to the throne. Nevertheless, as Elizabeth Bellamy has pointed out, the chronicle’s abrupt ending reveals that Arthur himself exists in an arrested moment, in a state of history that is not yet.20 Britomart’s adventures, which commence as Book 2 ends and which inaugurate the poem’s fullest experiment with the genre of Ariostan romance, therefore come to occupy two contradictory pauses in narrative as Book 2 draws to its close. Guyon’s successful netting of Acrasia, which closes off Book 2, seems, as I asserted above, also to foreclose upon the feminine poetics that Acrasia promulgated. But Arthur’s hesitation on the brink of his future has the opposite effect: it suspends the teleology of certain ends that the telling of history might afford, and hence encourages a digression into the romantic mode.
Furthermore, Book 3 of the poem begins by taking the radical step of associating poetic power with feminine power—no matter how emasculating that power might be, no matter how it may dismay, rather than fashion, a gentleman. This extraordinary proposition is first voiced in Book 3’s Proem. At first, this Proem worries that the feminine nature of its queenly subject, Elizabeth, might dissolve artistic achievement. After the narrative voice issues a caveat that “liuing art may not least part [of Elizabeth’s chastity] expresse,” it goes on to phrase these protestations of artistic failure in terms of sexual impotence. Even Zeuxis or Praxiteles would fall short of bringing this portrait to climax: “His daedale hand would faile, and greatly faint, / And her perfections with his error taint” (3.Pr.2). At this point the narrative voice attempts to recuperate potency for a masculine poetic enterprise by enacting certain revisions in this gendered scenario. Initially, the painter’s hand “tainting” the perfections of his chaste model suggests a leading tangent that is developed further in succeeding lines:
Ne Poets wit, that passeth Painter farre
In picturing the parts of beautie daint,
So hard a workmanship aduenture darre,
For fear through want of words her excellence to marre.
(3.Pr.2)
If “marring” the queen, like “tainting” her, amounts to ruining her, then these disclaimers actually advance an author’s ability to overpower the queen through rapine misrepresentation. This language becomes even stronger a few cantos later in Book 3, when the narrative voice proclaims his desire to “Endite [the queen] … as dewtie doth excite; / But ah my rimes too rude and rugged arre, / … And striuing, fit to make, I feare do marre” (3.2.3). Even not portraying the queen adequately promises a certain masculine authorial power. “Excited” by “dewtie” (suggestively spelled to imply a kind of sexual moistness), the harsh consonants of the narrator’s “rude and rugged rimes” culminate in the reiterated “marring” of his high object. In short, aesthetic failure is posed as phallic success.
Obviously, though, it is more to poetry’s advantage to seduce its royal reader’s sensibilities than to offend them. And shortly Book 3’s Proem moves to rescind this rather improbable notion of triumphant poetic failure, when it describes the “ravishing” power of Walter Ralegh’s poetic expression of unrequited desire for his queen’s favors, “The Ocean to Cynthia”:
But if in liuing colours, and right hew,
Your selfe you couet to see pictured,
Who can it doe more liuely, or more trew,
Then that sweet verse, with Nectar sprinckeled,
In which a gracious seruant pictured
His Cynthia, his heauens fairest light?
That with his melting sweetnesse rauished,
And with the wonder of her beames bright,
My senses lulled are in slomber of delight.
(3.Pr.4)
The dangling “that” clause of this stanza’s line 7—“That which his melting sweetness rauished”—initially makes it possible that Cynthia of line 6, and not the reader of line 9, is the one ravished by the poem. Yet Ralegh’s verse ravishes by means of its “melting sweetnesse,” a phrase that makes poetry a liquid and hence potentially feminized medium. The ravished receptor of that sweetness turns out to be not Cynthia at all, but instead the presumably male possessor of the “senses” in line 9 that “lulled are in slomber of delight.” Feminized by a poetry that itself is feminine, Ralegh’s reader rests passively in delightful “slomber.”
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