LITMIR.BIZ

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its most lush and enchanting exactly when it depicts an authoritative, seductive female and her hapless victim. If Spenser’s poem is ravishing in this way—if it charms, but does not rightly move—then it will have failed in the poetic purpose Spenser outlined in the “Letter to Ralegh”: to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” (p. 737). But Books 1 and 2 periodically veer toward precisely this association between bewitching poetry and emasculating female power during their various scenes of seduction—Acrasia unmanning Verdant in her bower (2.12.76–80), Duessa pleasuring and enfeebling Redcrosse at the fountain (1.7.3–7), false Una seducing Redcrosse in his dream (1.1.47–48). Book 3’s substantial investment of both moral virtue and poetic narrative in its female knight, Britomart, hence raises the stakes of assigning gender to poetic success. At first glance, Britomart seems to endanger masculine poetics as much as do the enchantresses of Books 1 and 2. She derails the progress of male knights, including heroes like Guyon, both by literally disarming them and by astounding and mesmerizing those who look on her visage—a castratingly Medusan sight that “discomfits” onlookers in Malecasta’s castle (3.1.43) and “fixes” eyes in Malbecco’s (3.9.24). Chaste as she is, Britomart is nevertheless as skilled as Acrasia in suspending knightly instruments.

      With Britomart, however, Spenser’s narrative at first displays some easiness with the associations between feminine and poetic authority, partly because Britomart’s ultimate fate is indeed a progressive one, to accomplish Spenser’s aim of revivifying masculine epic in the modern world. As Merlin tells her when she seeks his advice regarding her future course of action, her role in future history is to produce “a famous Progenie … / out of the auncient Troian blood, / Which shall reuiue the sleeping memorie / Of those same antique Peres” (3.3.22). Moreover, Britomart’s quest in Book 3 is prompted, not by a desire to dominate or incapacitate men, but rather by a vision in a magic glass—her father’s glass, no less—of her intended spouse, a vision that takes the form of a mental pregnancy: “To her reuealed in a mirrhour plaine, / Whereof did grow her first engraffed paine / … That but the fruit more sweetnesse did containe, / Her wretched dayes in dolour she mote wast” (3.2.17). With this visionary lying-in Britomart is allied with Spenser himself, who in the “Letter to Ralegh” writes of having “laboured” to “conceiue” the person of Arthur and the shape of his adventures throughout The Faerie Queene. Since “Renowmed kings, and sacred Emperours” are to be Britomart’s “fruitfull Ofspring” (3.3.23), her fate is also Spenser’s project: to produce a succession of heroes, which when complete will end in Elizabeth—The Faerie Queene. This epic product remains with her after her husband Artegall is gone:

      With thee yet shall he leaue for memory

      Of his late puissance, his Image dead,

      That liuing him in all actiuity

      To thee shall represent.

      (3.3.29)

      In this account of her future, it is unclear whether Britomart’s reproduction of epic takes the form of her children, or of her more authorially pertinent capacity for remembrance. In either case, her role is to “represent” and hence to revive the “Image” of the dead hero.

      This version of authorial conception and birth, however, is altered by the abrupt end of Merlin’s narrative, which halts as Arthur’s history does, with no end in sight. Merlin’s tracing of Britomart’s descendants ends at last in Elizabeth, whose appearance in this recitation enacts another arrestive moment, both for the pedigree and for the wizard who delivers it. “But yet the end is not,” says Merlin, and “[t]here … stayd, / As ouercomen of the spirites powre, / Or other ghastly spectacle dismayd” (3.3.50). Merlin is as nonplussed as the knights whom Britomart defeats, and his abrupt cutoff marks the suspension of future male enterprise, which “yet … is not.” Elizabeth, punningly denoted here (as Jon Quitslund has remarked) in the form of her virgin knot, is barren, producing naught and ending the Tudor line.²¹ But this end also marks the beginning of Britomart’s adventures, which immediately take the form of narrative digression, not lineal progression. She and her nurse/squire Glauce proceed with anything but straightforward authorial intent, as they “diuerse plots did frame, to maske in strange disguise” (3.3.51, my emphasis).²² From this moment, then, Spenser’s metaphor of authorial pregnancy expands so that the feminine gives form to poetic narrative. As Britomart rides along she forges her own idea of her lover, one that departs from Merlin’s prophecies: “A thousand thoughts she fashioned in her mind, / And in her feigning fancie did pourtray / Him such, as fittest she for loue could find” (3.4.5). Britomart’s “image” of her goal becomes one that she authorially invents not as a singular heroic purpose, but as a set of multiple and interchangeably pleasurable possibilities. And from this moment, Book 3’s narration itself begins its digressive turns, as if it too wished to fashion “a thousand thoughts.” Unlike the severed genealogies of both Arthur’s ancestors and Britomart’s descendants, the romance adventures of Book 3 invest their energies not in the hope for a singular conclusion, but rather in potentially endless revisions of chase, discovery, reverie, and flight. By taking full advantage of Merlin’s “but yet the end is not,” Book 3 fully exploits as poetic form the feminized qualities attributed to Ralegh’s verse. On the level not only of lyric but also of narrative structure, poetry in Book 3 becomes liquid, shifting, and diffuse, and these are the qualities meant to afford readerly delight.²³

      Such poetry is best displayed in Book 3’s Garden of Adonis, where the curt uncertainty of Merlin’s closing sentence, “but yet the end is not,” is transformed into a positive principle of “endlesse progenie” (3.6.30), so that even the arrestive power at the center of the Garden confers endlessness in the form of reanimation. The rumor that the slain Adonis still lives in Venus’s Garden acquires truth over the course of a few stanzas, as the narrator shifts from the suppositional—“There yet, some say, in secret he does ly”; to the probable—“And sooth it seemes they say: for he may not / For euer die”; to the certain—“There now he liueth in eternall blis” (3.6.46–48). And Adonis’s central resting place, upon the mons veneris, appropriates the epic place of beginning, in medias res, for the feminine place of beginnings, plural and indeterminate. Poetic activity itself is granted origins coinciding with this venereal center, whence spring Ovidian tales of those who have been converted into flowers, “To whom sweet Poets verse hath giuen endlesse date” (3.6.4’).

      Whether such a feminized poetic form is allowed much free play in The Faerie Queene is quite another question, however, one that has recently engaged several Spenser critics in their evaluations of fulfillment and loss in Books 3 and 4. Maureen Quilligan and Lauren Silberman both read Book 3’s Garden of Adonis, despite its elements of chaos, decay, and lamentation, as a privileged site of feminine production—of earthly forms, of chaste love and marital fecundity, and of a female reader’s access to understanding.²⁴ For them, Book 3’s center celebrates a satisfying feminine poetic power. Jonathan Goldberg, in contrast, contends that the poetic pleasure offered by Books 3 and 4 is not the pleasure of fulfillment, but rather a writerly delight in castration and loss, in an excess of always-unfinished, unproductive production. Nevertheless, Goldberg shares with Quilligan and Silberman a focus on the delight afforded by feminized (or at least effeminized) constructions made available in this portion of the poem. As Goldberg describes it, Book 3’s revised 1’96 ending—which departs from the 1’90 ending in omitting the reunion of husband and wife, Amoret and Scudamour, and thus emphasizes Britomart’s unconcluded quest for her own mate—acts as a template for the continued deferrals of Book 4. For Goldberg, the pleasure of the writerly text of the entire Faerie Queene, but particularly of Book 4, arises from its failure to engage in unitary poetic or narrative endings. It is instead “an ‘endlesse worke’ of substitution, sequences of names in place of other names, structures of difference, deferred identities. It plays upon a void; it occupies the place of loss—where Britomart’s wound is extended to Amoret, where Amoret is ‘perfect hole.’”²⁵

      My own view is quite different. Beginning with its exit from the Garden of Adonis (and perhaps even within the Garden itself, as Berger has pointed out),²⁶ The Faerie Queene starts to expose its own feminized poetics as eminently unsatisfying, whether

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