Spenser's Narrative Figuration of Women in the Faerie Queene / Judith H

Western Michigan University Medieval Institute Publications/Arc Humanities Press Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture Medieval Institute Publications 3-31-2018 Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women in The Faerie Queene Judith H. Anderson Indiana University - Bloomington, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_rmemc Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons, Modern Languages Commons, and the Women's Studies Commons Recommended Citation Anderson, Judith H., "Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women in The Faerie Queene" (2018). Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. 1. https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/mip_rmemc/1 This Monograph is brought to you for free and open access by the Medieval Institute Publications at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact wmu- [email protected]. Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women in The Faerie Queene RESEARCH IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE Medieval Institute Publications is a program of The Medieval Institute, College of Arts and Sciences WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women in The Faerie Queene Judith H. Anderson Research in Medieval and Early Modern Culture MEDIEVAL INSTITUTE PUBLICATIONS Western Michigan University Kalamazoo Copyright © 2017 by the Board of Trustees of Western Michigan University Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Anderson, Judith H., author. Title: Spenser's narrative figuration of women in the Faerie Queene / Judith H. Anderson. Description: Kalamazoo : Medieval Institute Publications, 2018. | Series: Research in medieval and early modern culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017046483 | ISBN 9781580443173 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Spenser, Edmund, 1552?–1599. Faerie queene. | Women in literature. Classification: LCC PR2358 .A924 2018 | DDC 821/.3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017046483 ISBN: 9781580443173 eISBN: 9781580443180 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or trans- mitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. in memory of A. C. Hamilton “This page intentionally left blank” Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women 1 1 Parody and Perfection: Spenser’s Una 13 2 Belphoebe’s “mirrours more then one”: History’s Interlude 49 3 Britomart: Inside and Outside the Armor 75 4 Phantasies, Pains, and Punishments: A Still-Moving Coda 121 Notes 149 Index 189 “This page intentionally left blank” Acknowledgments his book has Grown out of my teaching, writing, and talk- Ting about Spenser over many years. Its debts are numerous, among them to the scholar and friend to whom it is dedicated, A. C. Hamilton. I regret that he did not live to see this effort, since he once challenged me to write it. Every student of Spenser has benefitted from Bert Hamilton’s many scholarly achievements, including his pioneering book The Structure of Allegory in “The Faerie Queene,” his collection of Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, his editorship of The Spenser Encyclopedia, and his indispensable, annotated edition of The Faerie Queene. His encouragement, out of the blue, meant a great deal to me. It came early, the time when encouragement is most needed. With respect to the project at hand, I want to thank Tamara Goeglein for reading and thoughtfully responding to the evolving project in manuscript form, and William Oram for his invaluable comments first on the initial chapter and later on the whole manuscript once it was fin- ished, or, as it turned out, nearly so. Earlier, I also had the benefit of a convivial and provocative conversation with my colleague Kathy Smith about chapter 1. A grant from the Office of the Vice-Provost of Research at Indiana University funded the final stage of my project. With the permission of the original presses, three essays pub- lished earlier have been revised and recontextualized for inclusion in this book: “‘In liuing colours and right hew’: The Queen of Spenser’s Central Books,” in Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance, edited by Maynard Mack and George deforest Lord (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 47–66; “Busirane’s Place: The House of Rhetoric,” Spenser Studies 17 (2003): 133–50; and “Britomart’s Armor in Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Reopening Cultural Matters of Gender and Figuration,” English Literary Renaissance 39 (2009): 74–96. These essays have been repurposed, expanded, and greatly revised to become parts of chapters 2 and 3. “This page intentionally left blank” Introduction: Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women he focus of this book is the figuration of women within TSpenser’s narratives in The Faerie Queene. Its introduction addresses my reason for using “figuration” in the title and begins to show why “narrative” is also featured—begins, because the proof of this pudding is in the showing, the demonstrable effect of the moving, temporal dimension of narrative on meaning as each chapter explores it. My use of “women” in the title is lexical, the designation of an initial, recognizable grouping. Within Elizabethan society and culture, including poetry and drama, women was a functioning term, however much diversity it masked, ena- bled, or suppressed. I use the term in this historical, yet still open, still moving, sense.1 In Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies, Ania Loomba and Melissa E. Sanchez observe that a key issue in early feminist criticism and theory—and one currently “far from settled”—was “how to define ‘woman,’” to which I would add, “and especially how to respect and account for a multitude of differences betweenwomen .”2 Each chapter that follows contributes to the significance of these terms in Spenser’s cultur- ally encyclopedic text, refining and modifying what they encompass. In this way, each illuminates women’s plights and possibilities in the age of Elizabeth. In emphasizing an unsettled use of language in its plural form, however—women, not woman—I am implicitly privileging history, ana- lytics, and difference over universalization, psychosociology, and theory, although I am not excluding the latter trio, and in fact will bring it into discussion when productive, clarifying, or in some other way helpful for my purpose to do so.3 Simply, if not too simply, put, my allegiance is more Aristotelian than Platonic in this study. One entailment of such prioritiz- ing is my commitment to textual detail and specifics, and this means close reading. *** 2 Introduction: Spenser’S Narrative FIGuration of Women Spenser’s figuration of women in The Faerie Queene is widely various, with figures ranging from static to mobile, from mono- to multidimensional, from monstrous to idealized, from purely fictive to strongly historicized, with many a variant in between. Like the figures of men, they develop with respect to the thematic focus of each book, some crossing from book to book. Metaphorically and analogously, that is rhetorically, they also relate to one another in interwoven, textual ways that resemble a network or web and resonate with social and cultural structures, past and present. Political and religious connections of this sort, together with gendered ones, have been in evidence for decades, as have legal ones more recently. Spenser’s richly figured text is a cross section of all these, and all further resonate with my own longstanding interests in rhetoric and figuration, which, accompa- nied by a heightened attention to narrative, this book engages. The ancient roots of rhetoric and law, for example, are thoroughly intertwined, as a number of studies have emphasized with respect to intention, probability, inference, equity, and character.4 To these, I would add the suggestive rela- tion to the Spenserian text of the accumulative, comparative role of pre- cedents in English common law and of the case-based reasoning of casuistry in ethics and religion.5 My central concern, however, is with the interwoven, resonating, paralleling, developing Spenserian text itself—a text that is variously parodic, analogous, allegorical, and intertextual. This concern accords with other broad structural phenomena, even as it connects the figures of women in Spenser’s more epic narratives in The Faerie Queene with those in his more romantic ones—Una with Florimell, for instance. Renewed interest in character in the past two decades and the con- troversies it has spawned and continues to spawn, especially in Shakespeare criticism, have also generated additional angles from which to view Spenserian figuration, and vice versa, and I have incorporated them. Perhaps above all, these developments, together with others mentioned, have further highlighted the critical function played by the lenses we choose through which to examine early modern writings. This critical function will be salient throughout my argument, as

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