3—
The Hermaphrodite:
Making Sense of the Sensual

Although the motif of the chase underlies much of Book III, the book—and the entire poem—in 1590 closes with a clinch rather than a kill. The Hermaphrodite image that concludes the 1590 Faerie Queene represents a version of closure different from the alternating circuit of pursuer and pursued that Book III explores in detail.^[1] The Hermaphrodite image draws to conclusion a subtext different from those underlying the erotic chases prevalent in Book III. The myths of Diana and Actaeon and of Venus and Adonis are myths of the hunt; the Hermaphrodite figures the union of opposites. If the myth of Actaeon is the subtext of the ironic reversals of pursuer and pursued throughout Book III, the Hermaphrodite underlies the gender reversals (Berger, "Kidnapped Romance" 222–230). Moreover, the alternative subtexts evoke different versions of desire. Beauty's chase is a parodic version of the Neoplatonic pursuit of the Beautiful from its embodiment in mortal exemplars to its transcendent state. Spenser's knights errant, however, are drawn by a projection of their own desire into a thoroughly earthbound pursuit. The alternative version of desire has the lover transformed, after the Neoplatonic image of the Hermaphrodite, into the beloved, as Britomart fashions herself after the image of Artegall, and Amoret and Scudamore exchange attributes in a climactic embrace.^[2]

The image of the Hermaphrodite concludes the entire 1590 Faerie Queene , as well as the original version of Book III. Ovid's story of the Hermaphrodite is the subtext that underwrites the shift from Christian eschatology in Book I to the project of making sense of the mortal world in Book III. Direct allusions to the Hermaphrodite function as a kind of structural marker that points up the shift. An allusion to Ovid's story of the Hermaphrodite occurs at the center of Book I and at the conclusion of Book III. At the center of Book I, the Redcrosse

Knight is "pourd out in loosenesse" in a failure to submit his physical desires to the control of his rational faculties. Redcrosse's failure of physical control is symptomatic of larger, theological issues. His loss of faith in Una and the Gospel has him whoring after Duessa and Roman Catholic rite. His consequent punishment and rescue provide an object lesson in the primacy of the soul over the body.^[3] At the conclusion of Book III, Amoret "pourd out her sprite" in Scudamore's embrace. A central concern of Book III is how to engage and express what is resistant to hierarchical control. As a subtext of Books I and III, Ovid's Hermaphrodite provides focus on the body. In Book I, the body is conceived as a sign pointing beyond itself to spiritual truths. In Book III, the body is central, literally so in the Gardens of Adonis. Book III constructs a revisionary discourse designed to address directly the sensual experience transcended by the typological allegory of Book I.

The Ovidian Myth: Discursive Construction vs. Biological Resistance

Not only does the Hermaphrodite image figure forth the climactic embrace of long separated lovers, but the Ovidian myth to which that image alludes focuses explicitly on the issue of closure. The myth of the Hermaphrodite is initially presented as an etiological fable that opens with the promise to explain the peculiar properties of the famous fountain of Salmacis and concludes with the curse that gives the fountain the enfeebling properties for which it is known. Ovid tells the story of Hermaphroditus, child of Hermes and Aphrodite, who, out to explore the world for the first time, encounters the nymph Salmacis. The naive youth rejects the nymph's advances but bathes in the pool of which Salmacis is tutelary spirit. The nymph pursues him into the pool and, with the aid of divine intervention, is united to the recalcitrant young man. Hermaphroditus sees himself transformed into half a man [semimarem ] and curses the fountain, so that anyone drinking from its waters will likewise become effeminate.

The story of the Hermaphrodite functions particularly well as an alternative subtext in Book III because it is a myth of sexual identity and gender formation. Britomart fashions herself into the knight of chastity through open-ended, androgynous improvisation. She dons

armor and slips in and out of male-identified modes of behavior, all the while in pursuit of her beloved. Hermaphroditus' adolescent journey of growth and self-discovery is foreclosed in highly ironic ways. His story is a sardonic cautionary tale about taking what one perceives for what is. The Hermaphrodite misperceives his own body and is trapped by his misunderstanding. Ovid offers a myth of sexual identity in which the formal definition of manhood is set in paradoxical opposition to the active experience of it. In Platonic terms, the intelligible meaning of manhood is set in opposition to the sensible meaning. In contemporary terms, an essentialist view of gender plays ironically against one that is constructed.

Ovid's story presents a gap between a character's understanding of his own experience and what the narration of that experience conveys to the reader. Ostensibly, the myth of the Hermaphrodite defines the boundaries of manhood negatively, by Hermaphroditus' loss of shape and by the otherness of the female figure with whom he merges. At the same time, however, the sequence of events composing Hermaphroditus' loss of masculine shape presents an unmistakable, if parodic, representation of sexual intercourse. The potential double meaning of words such as "perstat" [stands firm], "mollita" [soft], and "mollescat" [became soft or effeminate] points up the gap between Hermaphroditus' understanding of his own experience and what his story can signify. Ovid describes Hermaphroditus' vision of his transformation, "fecisse videt mollitaque in illis / membra" (Met. 4.381–82), which can be rendered "and he saw that his members had become soft there" (Lewis and Short s.vv. "mollio" 1.2; "membrum" 1) or, following Miller's translation, "that his limbs had become enfeebled there." Although Hermaphroditus gives an implicitly moral interpretation to his physical transformation—he has become weak and effeminatem—the physical suggestions of postcoital flaccidity indicate a physiological interpretation of his experience.

In Ovid's myth of the Hermaphrodite, the body is the site of interplay between the epistemic and the structural.^[4] The story explores the complex negotiations between experience and the forms consciousness imposes on experience for purposes of understanding. The Hermaphrodite's body does double duty as a model of intelligible form and as an instrument of sensual experience. Hermaphroditus understands his body as a sign of masculinity and interprets changes in his physical shape as the loss of manhood. The

youth misreads his body by mistaking what he perceives for all that there is.^[5] Ironically, the physical changes he experiences indicate a male sexual function that contradicts Hermaphroditus' interpretation of emasculation and loss. In this case, the intelligible falls short of the sensible.^[6]

The ironic limitations of Hermaphroditus' understanding are made clear as the narrator describes the action of the curse on the fountain, "motus uterque parens nati rata verba biformis / fecit et incesto fontem medicamine tinxit" (Met. 4.387–88) [His parents heard the prayer of their two-formed son and charged the waters with that uncanny power (the Loeb translation reproduced here of "incesto" as uncanny is probably too weak: "polluting," "unchaste," "incestuous in breaking down boundaries," or the Platonic "pharmakos" might be more appropriate in context)]. Ovid plays "uterque parens . . . rata verba . . . fecit," which can be rendered "each of his parents fulfilled his wish" or, literally "each of his parents made his words fixed" (Lewis and Short s.v. "reor" 2.b.2) against "nati biformis" [of their two-formed son].^[7] On the one hand, words have the power to determine Hermaphroditus' form. Insofar as they ratify and make permanent limitations of understanding, words reify the hero's sexual inexperience and thereby create a monster: the Hermaphrodite. On the other, Hermaphroditus is more truly biform than he realizes. He is both an emblem of emasculation and an image of male sexuality. Hermaphroditus understands his transformed shape wholly as a sign of emasculation because he naively considers his body solely as an embodied form and not at all as an instrument of physical experience. He presupposes that he can see himself objectively as he emphasizes the power of one parent—Hermes, god of language—over the other—Aphrodite, goddess of love. From our wider perspective, we can see the Hermaphrodite as a biform sign in which arbitrary semiological difference plays against sexual difference. The "he-she" hermaphrodite is neither genuinely androgynous nor genuinely a boundary figure: it is arbitrarily classed with "she." As far as Hermaphroditus is concerned, the critical difference is not he or she, but he or not-he; not male versus female, but male versus not-male. Although Hermaphroditus exercises arbitrary power of making distinctions, the gendered body provides a reality check. In choosing to draw the boundaries as he does, Hermaphroditus excludes his own sexuality and effectively castrates himself.^[8]

The Hermaphrodite is caught between the poles of language and desire. The myth suppresses Hermaphroditus' own desire by assigning it arbitrarily to the female. Hermaphroditus' sexual performance is presented as the object of Salmacis's desire rather than as an attribute of his own. The apparent formal unity of the Hermaphrodite's story excludes the sexual content of his experience. His concluding curse of the waters seems completely to fulfill the opening promise of an etiological explanation of the fountain. When, at Hermaphroditus' prayer, his parents invest the pool with the power to change any man who enters it into half-man, the narrator's initial pledge to tell the hidden cause of the fountain's enfeebling powers seems fully satisfied. Nevertheless, the apparent closure of etiology and curse belies the complications of the story so enframed. In similar fashion, Hermaphroditus' interpretation of the lineaments of gratified desire as an emasculated body forecloses his growth into mature manhood. His final curse, that anyone who enters the pool of Salmacis should emerge half-man, calls for the repetition of Hermaphroditus' emasculation rather than inviting the retrospective understanding of his experience. Nevertheless, in coupling with Salmacis, whatever divine assistance he receives and whatever interpretation he places on the experience, the Hermaphrodite outperforms his own construction of his experience. He is a figure of excess as well as of foreclosure. By naming things in ignorance, Hermaphroditus multiplies entities needlessly and creates monsters. As Hermaphroditus misnames his own desire, he seems to transform the universality of puberty into the anomaly of metamorphosis.

The games Ovid plays with narrative framing, whereby the story of the Hermaphrodite slips in and out of the bounds of the etiological frame, corresponds to shifts back and forth between what now would be called essentialist and constructionist theories of gender.^[9] As the monstrous, anomalous Hermaphrodite, the youth seems to be the ironic victim of his own construction of himself. At the same time, we can see his construction as a misconstruction, as a failure to recognize essential manhood and essential sexual difference. Nevertheless, that essential manhood posited by Ovid's story is denied to the protagonist. He is already the Hermaphrodite from the beginning, a figure known for bisexuality at least as early as Diodorus Siculus in the first century B.C. (4.6.5).^[10] The hapless Hermaphroditus is a pawn of the narrative; the configuration of his story suggests meanings not

available to its hero. His aporia is our entertainment. The play of closure and indeterminacy in the story of Hermaphroditus points to a rhetorical shift in mode. The closure of the etiological fable suggests an explanatory mode of narration: we learn why the waters of Salmacis got to be the way they are. In contrast, Ovid's story, taken with all of its ironies and indeterminacies, presumes a kind of conspiratorial relationship between poet and reader to enjoy the conundrum constructed for the protagonist.

The Ovidian Subtext in Middest Book I

The displacement of the Hermaphrodite from the center of Book I to the conclusion of Book III ratifies the larger structural and thematic shift from the first to the last book of the 1590 Faerie Queene . In Book I the allusion to Ovid's Hermaphrodite occurs in the determinate center of a providential structure. Book III makes allusion to that figure in a conclusion that questions the very possibility of closure.^[11] The Redcrosse Knight's liaison with Duessa and his encounter with Orgoglio represent a turning point, a fortunate fall, the first Pyrrhic defeat in a series of Pyrrhic victories over projections of his own faithlessness and joylessness. The pun error-errare that underlies the narrative of Book I as the hero's epic wanderings proceed from his initial mistake in doubting Una's truth becomes subsumed by the pattern of sin and redemption, which climaxes in the apocalyptic fight between Saint George and the dragon.^[12] The hermaphroditic embrace of Scudamore and Amoret, which concludes the 1590 Faerie Queene , reminds the heroine, "halfe enuying their blesse" that her own quest is unfulfilled and her own love is unrealized.

At the center of Book I, Spenser revises Ovid's myth of the Hermaphrodite in order to emphasize the moral component of the Redcrosse Knight's experience over the merely physical and to define the hero's identity as his moral self.^[13] The indeterminacies Ovid presents for our amusement are transformed into the moral hierarchy Spenser presents for our edification. Spenser separates the Ovidian paradox—that what Hermaphroditus experiences as the loss of manhood can also be regarded as male sexual performance—into moral and physical components. The cause of the enfeebling property of the fountain from which Redcrosse drinks is distinguished from its effect

on the knight. Ovid's "causa latet, vis est notissima fontis" (4.287) [The cause is hidden; but the enfeebling power of the fountain is well known] becomes:

The cause was this: one day when  Phoebe^[*]  fayre
    With all her band was following the chace,
    This Nymph, quite tyr'd with heat of scorching ayre
    Sat downe to rest in middest of the race:
    The goddesse wroth gan fowly her disgrace,
    And bad the waters, which from her did flow,
    Be such as she her selfe was then in place.
    Thenceforth her waters waxed dull and slow,
And all that drunke thereof, did faint and feeble grow.
                                                                                (1.7.5)^[14]

Ovid's erotic myth of the Hermaphrodite purports to reveal the hidden cause. In Spenser's redaction, the cause of the fountain's special properties is presented as an open matter, but the apparently straightforward explanation conceals hidden contradictions in the mythographic commentary that accrued to the Hermaphrodite myth in the centuries between Ovid and Spenser. Mythographic commentators on the Hermaphrodite tended to focus exclusively on either the moral or the erotic dimension of Ovid's story. Spenser secretly shifts from one tradition of interpretation to the other as he establishes a hierarchical relationship between the moral and the sensual. The cause that Spenser initially provides derives from a mythographic tradition that interprets the nymph Salmacis as an emblem of moral laziness.^[15] No reference to the erotic aspect of the myth occurs until Redcrosse actually drinks from the stream; his reaction recalls, in part, the other mythographic tradition, which holds that the fountain of Salmacis is aphrodisiac and promotes impotence through sexual overindulgence.^[16] The Redcrosse Knight is surprised by sexuality, but his sin is the moral loss he brings from the House of Pride.

In Ovid's myth of the Hermaphrodite, the false closure of the promise of an etiological explanation at the opening and the explanatory curse at the conclusion suppress the punning sexual content of the protagonist's experience. In Spenser's revision, repressed desire returns with a vengeance, as Orgoglio. Throughout his errancy the Redcrosse Knight has been naively confident in himself and in the evidence of his senses and inattentive to his surroundings in their relationship to himself: he understands neither how his feel-

ings cloud his perception nor how external nature gives back projections of his own human nature. In return for his heedlessness, he is assaulted by a sense experience. Orgoglio figures forth both an earthquake, sign of divine anger, and an ambulatory erection, image of the hero's own sensuality.^[17] Redcrosse survives his Pyrrhic defeat by Orgoglio because his fall is grounded typologically in Christ's redemption of fallen man. Prince Arthur rescues the Redcrosse Knight by violently demystifying Orgoglio:

    That huge great body, which the Gyaunt bore,
    Was vanisht quite, and of that monstrous mas
Was nothing left, but like an emptie bladder was.
                                                                   (1.8.24.7–9)

The monstrous allegorical figure disappears, leaving nothing behind but a simile. But Redcrosse remains, wasting away, "the chearelesse man" (1.8.43.7) in both appearance and feeling (OED s.v. "cheer" 1–4). Orgoglio's defeat is an Ovidian joke that plays unstable language against insecure sexuality: as a purely rhetorical figure, Orgoglio has no more independent physical existence than an erection post coitum . But the Redcrosse Knight's manhood is not exhausted by the disappearance of Orgoglio. As a man, he is the pattern for physiological tropes as well as the image of something greater than his mere physical being. Orgoglio's destruction educates the Redcrosse Knight morally because it figures the emptiness of pride. Redcrosse experiences the loss that his physical and spiritual sins bring about and is redeemed through that experience of loss.

The physical is clearly subordinated to the moral in the Redcrosse Knight's encounter with Duessa. Although the allegorical significance of the episode is conveyed by quite specific details of Renaissance sexual physiology, those details contribute to a picture of spiritual transgression. As Thomas P. Roche, Jr., has pointed out, the Redcrosse Knight's sin is that of whoring after strange gods.^[18] The seductress Duessa, arrayed in her scarlet robe and papal triple-mitered crown evokes the Whore of Babylon and the Roman Catholic church.^[19] She is a figure of institutional temptation to which Redcrosse falls prey because of his pride. Nevertheless, the relationship of the erotic narrative to its allegorical meaning is not entirely stable. Both Ovid's myth and Spenser's revision treat the problematic aspect of appropriating the female in the construction of discourse. The

Ovidian source reflects critically on the use of the female as a semiotic function that defines the protagonist's manhood.^[20] In Book I, Duessa's function in the allegory is signaled by abundant iconographic detail. At the conclusion of the episode, however, we see the female figure exceeding allegorical control. As Una interprets it for us, the stripping of Duessa presents the true face of falsehood in all of its ugliness. Nevertheless, the graphic detail of the description insists on the female gender of the figure and presents a specifically female body as an object of disgust:

    Then when they had despoild her tire and call,
    Such as she was, their eyes might her behold,
    That her misshaped parts did them appall,
    A loathly, wrinckled hag, ill fauoured, old,
Whose secret filth good manners biddeth not be told.

Her craftie head was altogether bald,
    And as in hate of honorable eld,
    Was ouergrowne with scurfe and filthy scald;
    Her teeth out of her rotten gummes were feld,
    And her sowre breath abhominably smeld;
    Her dried dugs, like bladders lacking wind,
    Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld;
    Her wrizled skin as rough, as maple rind,
So scabby was, that would haue loathd all womankind.

Her neather parts, the shame of all her kind,
    My chaster Muse for shame doth blush to write;
    But at her rompe she growing had behind
    A foxes taile, with dong all fowly dight;
    And eke her feete most monstrous were in sight;
    For one of them was like an Eagles claw,
    With griping talaunts armd to greedy fight,
    The other like a Beares vneuen paw:
More vgly shape yet neuer liuing creature saw.
                                                                   (1.8.46.5–48)

Readers inclined to take this passage as an unambiguous expression of Edmund Spenser's gynophobia should probably turn to the description of Lust in Book IV as a counterexample. The question remains, however, what are we to make of this? My own sense is that an enthusiasm for the camivalesque body and a kind of Grand Guignol delight in grossness animate the descriptions of both the naked Duessa and the hirsute Lust as much as does disgust.^[21] Be that

as it may, the function, in context, of the grotesque physical description of "the face of falsehood" is to mark the appropriation of the female body for allegorical purposes. Although the erotic aspect of the episode is subordinated to the moral, revealed in the stripping of Duessa is the resistance of the female body to the imposition of abstract, gender-neutral meaning. The identification of Duessa's "neather parts" as "the shame of all her kind," underscored by Spenser's blushing Muse, blatantly calls attention to the awkwardness of making female physiology express a general moral. The female pronoun "her" is ambiguous. It is impossible to determine whether "all her kind" refers to all evil witches or to all womankind or, indeed, all humankind.^[22] The potential gynophobia of the reference highlights the extent to which moral allegory may be destabilized when it derives its tropes from female anatomy.

The Battle for Interpretation in the House of Busirane

The original conclusion to Book III of The Faerie Queene , from Britomart's trial in the House of Busirane through the image of the hermaphroditically embracing Amoret and Scudamore, focuses on this issue of appropriating the female in the construction of discourse in a particularly self-conscious way. The text engages its readers in female-gendered constructs by presenting both Britomart and Amoret as reader surrogates. In the House of Busirane, Britomart plays the role of militantly active reader while Amoret is the passive object of Busirane's fiction making. This is a more constraining and coercive variation on the way the reader is engaged in the Gardens of Adonis by the ambivalent image of the boar imprisoned in the mons Veneris . That image, figuring both threat and security, invites an active response from the reader in registering both parts of the paradox. The image of the boar, which figures loss as castration, presents the consequences of conceiving nature metaphorically in gendered terms. The House of Busirane offers no position safe from the ascription of gender and, indeed, from the ascription of female gender. Insofar as femininity is conceived as a metaphor, it can be assigned to any object. Male or female, we are all potentially Marinell being impaled by the fate from which he flees, or Amoret being penned by a manipulative poet.

The House of Busirane reflects critically on conventional, male-authored erotic discourses by exposing the manipulation of gendered constructs. Amoret is the site of battle between Busirane and Britomart over the nature of love. But Amoret is presented as a woman as well as a field of contesting interpretations, and as a woman she offers her own resistance to Busirane's poetic construction of her. As comrades in the struggle against the enchanter, the two female figures enable the text to focus critically on Busirane's art through a kind of triangulation. Both Britomart and Amoret are embattled because Busirane covertly seeks to retain the power of interpretation exclusively for himself. The art both Britomart and Amoret resist, each in her own fashion, is presented as covertly manipulating the reader so as to write the act of interpretation out of the picture:

For round about, the wals yclothed were
    With goodly arras of great maiesty,
    Wouen with gold and silke so close and nere,
    That the rich metall lurked priuily,
    As raining to be hid from enuious eye;
    Yet here, and there, and euery where vnwares
    It shewd it selfe, and shone vnwillingly;
    Like a discolourd Snake, whose hidden snares
Through the greene gras his long bright burnisht backe declares.

And in those Tapets weren fashioned
    Many faire pourtraicts, and many a faire feate,
    And all of loue, and all of lusty-hed,
    As seemed by their semblaunt did entreat;
    And eke all Cupids  warres they did repeate,
    And cruell battels, which he whilome fought
    Gainst all the Gods, to make his empire great;
    Besides the huge massacres, which he wrought
On mighty kings and kesars, into thraldome brought.
                                                                   (3.11.28–29)

The ecphrastic description half conceals active designs on the reader, much as the fabric of the tapestry half conceals serpentine threads of gold. Rhymed puns on "entreat" and "repeate" suggest that what might seem straightforward mimesis can be rhetorical manipulation. "Entreat" can signify "treat of given subject matter" but also "beseech" (OED s.v. 2–3; 7, 9–10). Similarly "repeate" can mean reproduce mimetically but, in context, can also signify refight Cupid's wars. The series of classical rapes presented in the tapestries gives a

highly tendentious picture of sexual love. Moreover, the designation of "Cupids warres" has already imposed an interpretation on love and, indeed, the figure of Cupid himself covertly reifies an interpretation of desire as cupidity.

The interpretation of love as "Cupids warres" is imposed on the audience in an act of warlike aggression. This doubling underscores the homology between sexual love and semiosis that functions throughout Book III. Both are transactions across a gap of consciousness. The embattled reader has a champion, however, in Britomart. Throughout Book III, her adventures have had a strong hermeneutic component, as, indeed, have the adventures of the Redcrosse Knight and Sir Guyon. Nevertheless, Britomart's climactic trial at the House of Busirane is much more explicitly a matter of reading than is either Redcrosse's fight with the dragon at the conclusion of Book I or Guyon's destruction of the Bower of Bliss at the close of Book II. Her struggle with Busirane is cast as an inescapable battle for interpretation. Britomart's movement through the door marked with the inscription "Be bold" explicitly links the act of reading with the active pursuit of her mission to rescue Amoret:

Tho as she backward cast her busie eye,
    To search each secret of that goodly sted,
    Ouer the dore thus written she did spye
    Be bold:  she oft and oft it ouer-red,
    Yet could not find what sence it figured:
    But what so were therein or writ or ment,
    She was no whit thereby discouraged
    From prosecuting of her first intent,
But forward with bold steps into the next roome went.
                                                                                 (3.11.50)

Although the words of the inscription are plain enough, what is meant is mysterious, both because no context is provided in which to place the gnomic imperative and because the source of the inscription—the locus of authorial intention—is unknown. Britomart is unable to decipher the message over the door, but, undaunted by the absence of external validation for what she does, she obeys the command by being bold and passing boldly into the next room. In so doing, Britomart gives the inscription a meaning it did not necessarily have before her particular act of boldness and enacts a model of literary interpretation as invention—simultaneously the creation and discovery of meaning in a collaboration of reader and text.^[23]

Britomart's encounter with Busirane presents a reasonably clear-cut model of the relationship of reader to poet. We see the initial metaphor of Cupid's war staged as the struggle between Busirane as a poet figure and Britomart as an exegete, with Amoret in the middle. The model of reading developed in Book III initially posits subjective engagement in the object of perception, as Britomart must think of what might pertain to herself in order to see the magic vision in Merlin's looking glass. The introduction of Amoret's subjective resistance to the magic visions conjured up by Busirane complicates this model. Amoret's dual role as a character in Spenser's Faerie Queene and as an unwilling participant in Busirane's Masque of Cupid provides a fictive model of the link between a conscious subject and an object of representation.^[24] The episode represents a living person reduced to the status of a fictive object while from a slightly different perspective, the content of the fictive masque apparently comes to life and resists its author's intentions. Spenser's initial model of subjective participation in the object of reading has become an unstable exchange between subject and object as Amoret wavers from one position to the other.^[25] Throughout the House of Busirane, we see the interaction of reader and text as a vigorous and highly charged exchange.

The fact that Amoret, the resisting subject matter, and Britomart, the resisting reader, are both women brings into focus gender identification in transactions between the poet and reader and between artificer and work of artifice. The Masque of Cupid examines the appropriation of the female in erotic fiction-making as a special case of poetic referentiality. The Petrarchan dialectic of absence and presence—the physical absence of the beloved permits her presence in the poet-lover's text, just as the presence of the beloved in the poem inscribes her absence—is revised in the pageant as negotiations of resistance and compliance.^[26] The motif of resistance and compliance gives a psychological dimension to the binary of physical absence and presence and lends a certain psychological verisimilitude to textual negotiations. In the Petrarchan discourse here subjected to critique, female desire is construed as a function of male desire. The woman's desire varies inversely with that of the male poet. Her unwillingness allows him to continue discoursing on his desire, unchecked by satisfaction. In this scheme, the lady's resistance is fictive resistance, determined by the exigencies of the male-authored discourse. The Petrarchan poet gives the impression of reaching out

beyond the bounds of the text, exquisitely rendering the painful desire that is constituted by lack, by the tragic limitations of the individual psyche in an indifferent universe, while at the same time maintaining control over the entire system of discourse.

Amoret upsets this conventional Petrarchan scheme by offering both female resistance and female compliance in one figure. She thereby introduces genuine uncertainty into Petrarchan discourse. If satisfied desire is accepted as a possibility, then unsatisfied desire is something the poet risks, not something that is his tragic destiny. Scudamore's speech to Britomart describing his lady's predicament reveals how incompletely Amoret fits into conventional accounts of romantic love:

My Lady and my loue is cruelly pend
    In dolefull darkenesse from the vew of day,
    Whilest deadly torments do her chast brest rend,
    And the sharpe steele doth riue her hart in tway,
    All for she  Scudamore  will not denay.
    Yet thou vile man, vile  Scudamore  art sound,
    Ne canst her ayde, ne canst her foe dismay;
    Vnworthy wretch to tread vpon the ground,
For whom so faire a Lady feeles so sore a wound.
                                                                         (3.11.11)

Scudamore chivalrously blames himself for the injustice done his virtuous and innocent lady, but his language betrays greater complexity than is explicitly acknowledged. Scudamore's castigation of himself "for whom so faire a lady feeles so sore a wound" is a complicated judgment. By punning on the preposition "for," Spenser indicates the ambiguity of the relationship between Amoret's suffering and Scudamore's responsibility. She feels a wound for his sake—because she will not betray him—and she feels a wound because of him—because of his failure to protect her. Both these meanings accord with Scudamore's explicit self-condemnation. There is, however, a third sense that subverts Scudamore's tacit assumption of responsibility, namely that Amoret feels a wound of desire for him. As a conventional lover, Scudamore appropriates all of the active role for himself. In so doing, he connives at Amoret's enforced passivity and, because he has assumed an impossible role, he prevents himself from pursuing it successfully. Like the Petrarchan poet whose attitudes he replicates, Scudamore confines the scope of his action to

lyric outburst. Scudamore's explanation for Amoret's predicament, "All for she Scudamore will not denay," reveals through the double sense of the words how Amoret exceeds Scudamore's conventional expectations of her and transgresses the conventional role of female beloved. In the context of Scudamore's account, denay has the sense of "to say 'no' to the claims of" (OED s.v. "deny" 2). That is to say, Busirane continues to torment Amoret because she will not deny her commitment to Scudamore. However, another meaning of "denay" as "to withold anything desired" (OED s.v. "deny" 3.5) suggests that Amoret is tormented by Busirane because she will not deny anything to her lover Scudamore. Scudamore's words reveal both a traditional view of Amoret as a passive object of desire and an unconventional picture of her as a desiring subject.

Critics frequently interpret Amoret's problem as a fear of marriage or of unbridled sexuality, but it makes more sense to see her as the lady who says yes and thereby incurs the animosity of the Petrarchan poet Busirane.^[27] Moreover, giving Busirane's torture of Amoret a primarily psychological interpretation risks oversimplifying the critical examination of psychology as a structure of knowledge at work in the episode.^[28] Critics tend to read the Masque of Cupid as a representation of Amoret's fear of marriage or as a representation of male erotic psychology, the sight of which terrifies Amoret.^[29] Missing in those readings is an appreciation of the extent to which the terms of the masque itself, rather than the particular message it is intended to convey, are subjected to critique. The description of the phantas-magoric close of the masque raises the issue of female fear in order to put it in question:

There were full many moe like maladies,
    Whose names and natures I note readen well;
    So many moe, as there be phantasies
    In wauering wemens wit, that none can tell,
    Or paines in loue, or punishments in hell;
                                                                   (3.12.26.1–5)

The near pun on the preposition "in" raises a genuine question about the location of the masque. Is the pageant the product of Amoret's sexual fears and fantasies: does it represent the pain that naturally accompanies love? Or is the masque torture inflicted from without, like the punishments in hell? Is the masque occurring in Amoret's

mind, in Britomart's mind, in Busirane's castle, or simply on the page of Spenser's text? Busirane abuses poetry by passing off his own cruelty as both an objective statement about love and as a representation of Amoret's subjective fears. Both men in Amoret's life join in misrepresenting the state of Amoret's psyche. The Petrarchan lover Scudamore describes Amoret in such a way as to suppress her active desire for him. The Petrarchan poet Busirane sets forth an allegorical pageant that presents psychology as a function of his writing. The figures representing mental states are deployed by the poet Busirane in an effort to control meaning.

The pageant consists of traditional figures of erotic personification allegory that might have stepped out of the Roman de la rose .^[30] After Ease disappears, twelve paired figures march out: Fancy and Desire, Doubt and Daunger, Feare and Hope, Dissemblaunce and Suspect, Griefe and Fury, Displeasure and Pleasaunce. The pageant gives the impression of expressing a coherent meaning, but that is an illusion promoted by its apparent formal coherence. Looking closely at the individual figures, how each expresses its meaning and how each relates to its companion figure, we see a picture of extreme incoherence, systematic discontinuity masquerading as continuous allegory. For example, Doubt exemplifies doubt; Hope does not exemplify hope but provokes it in others. Fancy is linked to its companion Desire through moralized genealogy: Fancy begets Desire. Suspect is defined in relationship to his partner Dissemblaunce: she laughs at him and he lowers at her. But, although Dissemblaunce dissembles, she does not fool Suspect; she just teases him. The iconography of those figures seems rich and complex, but the real poetic point of the masque lies in how the language comes to life the moment Amoret enters. The appearance of a flesh-and-blood woman among the walking allegories gives a genuine shock:

After all these there marcht a most faire Dame,
    Led of two grysie villeins, th'one  Despight ,
    The other cleped  Cruelty  by name:
    She dolefull Lady, like a dreary Spright,
    Cald by strong charmes out of eternall night,
    Had deathes owne image figurd in her face,
    Full of sad signes, fearefull to liuing sight;
    Yet in that horror shewd a seemely grace,
And with her feeble feet did moue a comely pace.

Her brest all naked, as net iuory,
    Without adome of gold or siluer bright,
    Wherewith the Craftesman wonts it beautify,
    Of her dew honour was despoyled quight,
    And a wide wound therein (O ruefull sight)
    Entrenched deepe with knife accursed keene,
    Yet freshly bleeding forth her fainting spright,
    (The worke of cruell hand) was to be seene,
That dyde in sanguine red her skin all snowy cleene.

At that wide orifice her trembling hart
    Was drawne forth, and in siluer basin layd,
    Quite through transfixed with a deadly dart,
    And in her bloud yet steeming fresh embayd:
    And those two villeins, which her steps vpstayd,
    When her weake feete could scarcely her sustaine,
    And fading vitall powers gan to fade,
    Her forward still with torture did constraine,
And euermore encreased her consuming paine.
                                                                   (3.12.19–21)

Busirane's attempt to impose on Amoret the conventions of courtly love is a forcible troping. He forces her to embody a metaphor, a profane version of the sacred heart, in order to alienate Amoret's chaste affection for Scudamore. Busirane assaults her integrity with those Petrarchan conventions that identify a woman with a heart and mind of her own as Cruel and Despitious.^[31]

Busirane's violation of Amoret employs a strategy of literalizing the language of desire and feeling and appropriating her body as a means of achieving exclusive control over psychological states. By imprisoning Amoret in the Masque of Cupid, Busirane has "pend" her in both senses of the word (3.11.1). He seeks to sequester her from any social context in order to assert his own absolute control over states such as fear and desire, which customarily lie in the realm of the interpersonal and, at the very least, are states accessible to multiple consciousnesses. Busirane seeks both to ground his fiction in the mutilated body of Amoret and to transform her body into the spoil of Cupid, the free-floating sign of his power.^[32] As Busirane's artworks become increasingly three-dimensional and lifelike—from the tapestries and the idol, to the relief figures and the broken swords and spears, "warlike spoiles . . . of mighty Conquerours and Cap-

taines strong" (3.11.52.2–3), to the Masque of Cupid—they become not more perfect imitations of reality but more perfect spoils.^[33]

The final battle of Book III pits Britomart, the champion of chastity, against Busirane, the perpetrator of abuse. At issue in Britomart's rescue of Amoret from the power of Cupid is how meaning is to be determined.^[34] By imprisoning Amoret in the Masque of Cupid, Busirane attempts to assert the power of the poet to be supreme arbiter of meaning.^[35] By thwarting his attempt, Britomart reaffirms the view of allegory as a shared enterprise figured by the hermaphroditic embrace of the lovers at the conclusion of the 1590 Faerie Queene .

Busirane seemingly violates Amoret's physical integrity as he attempts to usurp the steadfast love that is her chastity. But as Britomart discovers, Amoret's wound is an illusion. The version of love named Cupid denies sexual difference in making both men and women Cupid's spoil. Like Hermaphroditus, Amoret suffers spoliation because desire is misnamed. Both are disfigured by a system of signs that repudiates bodily integrity. The Hermaphrodite emasculates himself by misreading his metamorphosed body. In distinguishing male from not-male, he denies physical sexuality and consigns desire to the female other. Amoret is assaulted by the art of Busirane, who attempts to redefine her chastity in order to violate it. Amoret's torment, her heart drawn forth from the orifice riven in her breast, transfixed with a deadly dart, evokes both the literalized alienation of her affections and the graphic penetration of her body. By misrepresenting Amoret's chastity in reductively physical terms, Busirane seeks to deny her desire. In this case, however, desire is not mistakenly assigned to the female in an inadvertent self-castration but deliberately suppressed by Busirane in an attempt to violate both Amoret and audience. The art of Busirane reifies desire by naming it "Cupid" in order to assert the absolute authority of the artificer.

Busirane's duplicity will not withstand a second look, however. When the masque appears the next night, Britomart follows the figures back into the room from which they came and sees Amoret chained to a pillar and Busirane "figuring straunge characters of his art" (3.12.31.2). The masque has been demystified, but not because its characters turn out to be nothing but a pack of tropes. The transformation of the masque into marks on the page is just another of Busirane's tricks. Rather, it is the continued presence of Amoret, her wounded heart still in her breast, that reveals the limitations of

Busirane's authorial control. Busirane can only pen Amoret. He can only confine her; he cannot move her emotionally. "A thousand charmes her formerly did proue; / Yet thousand charmes could not her stedfast heart remoue" (3.12.31.8–9). Busirane's charms are merely incantations; they have no power to move the heart. "The cruell steele which thrild [Amoret's] dying hart" (3.12.38.1) thrills her heart in the sense of "to pierce" (OED s.v. "thrill" 1), but her heart is thrilled with desire (OED s.v. "thrill" 4–5) only when she is reunited with Scudamore. The pun on "thrill" emphasizes female consciousness as something that eludes Busirane's Petrarchan poetics. Similarly, the narrator's exclamation, "Ah, who can loue the worker of her smart?" (3.12.31.7) suggests Busirane's limitations by pointing to a complex female sensibility and to a linguistic polyvalence both of which are beyond the scope of Busirane's theater of cruelty. The narrator's question seems to point rhetorically to Busirane. The rhetorical answer is, No one. Amoret cannot love Busirane for his abuse of her. But another, real answer to the question is, Britomart.^[36] She loves Artegall, the worker of her smart. Resistance to Busirane comes from both Amoret and Britomart as both participate in erotic discourses that elude the control of Busirane.

The Ovidian Subtext and the 1590 Conclusion

Book III moves from depicting a poet figure and representing the limitations of his powers of artifice to evoking the limitations of poetry through strategies of aesthetic distancing, as the narrative moves from the defeat of Busirane to the reunion of Amoret and Scudamore. If in the House of Busirane both Britomart and Amoret are figures of the embattled reader, at the conclusion of the 1590 Faerie Queene Britomart becomes the reader's surrogate as an onlooker whereas Amoret is sequestered, not in a pageant of erotic cruelty, but in a private space not fully amenable to representation:

Had ye them seene, ye would haue surely thought,
    That they had beene that faire  Hermaphrodite ,
    Which that rich  Romane  of white marble wrought,
    And in his costly Bath causd to bee site:
    So seemd those two, as growne together quite,
    That Britomart  halfe enuying their blesse,

    Was much empassiond in her gentle sprite,
    And to her selfe oft wisht like happinesse,
In vaine she wisht, that fate n'ould let her yet possesse.
                                                                               ( 1590 .3.46)

The image is not a direct reference to a Hermaphrodite, nor to a statue of a Hermaphrodite, nor even a simple metaphor likening the embracing Amoret and Scudamore to a Hermaphrodite. Spenser refers to a specific statue that is not present in the scene he is describing: the reader, were he or she observing the scene directly and not reading about it, would have mistaken the fictional characters for the statue.^[37] Britomart's response to the scene is likewise a complex combination of engagement and detachment. Her half-envy is both a desire for the bliss she observes and an awareness that her own love is unsatisfied. She is moved both to wish the like for herself and to pursue her yet unrealized quest.

Britomart's wish for the happiness she sees but does not herself enjoy evokes the theme of imitation in a context of uncertainty and insecurity. Brought together at the original conclusion of Book III are the concerns, present throughout the book, of the epistemology of risk and the efficacy of imitation. The 1590 conclusion imitates Ovid in such a way as to retain the threat implicit in Ovid's myth of the Hermaphrodite while pointing to the possibility of positive revision. The tout ensemble of the Hermaphrodite statue set in the Roman bath recalls the most sinister aspects of Ovid's myth. If the statue represents the metamorphosed Hermaphroditus, the bath itself must evoke the infamous fountain of Salmacis, whose waters caused men to become effeminate. The danger presented by this tableau is the danger of repeating the Hermaphrodite's act and fulfilling his curse by misusing art. Just as the rich Roman reduces art to pool decoration, so the reader risks abusing art by avoiding the role of interpreter and by unreflectively treating art as imitation experience rather than as a model for imitation. Underlying the Ovidian-Petrarchan discourse of desire, which Book III subjects to critique as the creation and projection of one consciousness, is the narcissistic self-abuse ironically forced on Marinell by his mother and receiving graphic expression with the image in Busirane's pageant of Cupid pricking himself "that he might tast the sweet consuming woe" (3.11.45.4). The reader is challenged to moralize art, to engage the text in a process of sense-making, rather than to reify art as an instrument of gratification, to undertake humanist, not hedonist imitation.

In this process of humanist, morally productive imitation, the reader has Britomart as a role model. Crucial to her wish for "like happinesse" when faced with the embracing couple is the implied possibility of repetition with a difference.^[38] Her response is not simple identification or appropriation. In this respect, she differs from characters such as Cymoent, who sees in her son the "deare image of [her] selfe" (3.4.36.1), the witch's son, for whom the False Florimell is "enough to hold a foole in vaine delight" (3.8.10.7), Paridell, for whom the story of Troy is a blueprint for the seduction of Hellenore, or Malecasta, who furnishes Castle Joyeous with erotic tapestries as well as beds to facilitate the orgiastic goings-on.

The hermaphroditic couple presents a complex object for Sidnean imitation. The project of Sidney's poet, who seeks "to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses" (24), recalls uncomfortably Ovid's Hermaphroditus, who seeks to give the world many Hermaphrodites by cursing the fountain of Salmacis. The concluding image is an invitation to resist the potentially debilitating and deforming conventions of erotic discourse. Ovid's Hermaphrodite unwittingly emasculates himself when he misreads his own body and distinguishes male from female in such a way as to identify desire with the female. The stanzas originally concluding Book III offer a creative revision of constricting attitudes toward love. The picture of chaste love presented for our edification does not evoke the traditional notion of two becoming one. Rather, the two lovers become a new entity: a couple.^[39] Amoret and Scudamore are not the Hermaphrodite precisely because their embrace does not depend on the effacement of sexual difference and the disfigurement of bodily form. Rather, Spenser practices a kind of alternative discourse as he subjects conventional images of the body and of gender to reconfiguration:

Lightly he clipt her twixt his armes twaine,
    And streightly did embrace her body bright,
    Her body, late the prison of sad paine,
    Now the sweet lodge of loue and deare delight:
    But she faire Lady ouercommen quight
    Of huge affection, did in pleasure melt,
    And in sweete rauishment pourd out her spright:
    No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt,
But like two senceles stocks in long embracement dwelt.
                                                                        ( 1590 .3.12.45)

Amoret's body is first a prison, then a lodge, then both lovers dwell in a mutually defined embrace. Her body is metamorphosed, not to the monstrous form of the Hermaphrodite, but to an instrument of mutual pleasure. Considered solely as a dividing barrier, the body is a prison, painfully imprisoning experience.^[40] The prison is transformed to a lodge as the body is considered an instrument of sense experience. The lovers' union is a mutually defined relationship—not a monster—which accounts for sexual difference and sexual desire.

Replacing the Hermaphrodite's denial of sexual difference is an androgynous reversal of roles. In an inversion of traditional Petrarchan imagery, Scudamore is compared to a deer "that greedily embayes / In the cool soile, after long thirstinesse" (1590 .3.12.44.7–8). Amoret "in sweete rauishment pourd out her spright," a transformed allusion to the Redcrosse Knight "pourd out in loosenesse on the grassy grownd" (1.7.7.2) with Duessa. This ravishment is not the violation attempted by Busirane, but physical and emotional transport, which Spenser renders with great circumspection. Although we are invited to see through traditional formulations of gender to understand how conventional categories may be manipulated and revised, we are also confronted with the limitation of our understanding. The ideal of chaste love figured by the embracing couple is framed as an ideal and therefore not something fully available to us in our sublunary existence. The simile "like two senceless stocks" suggests both that the lovers have gone beyond earthly things and that the onlooker is not privy to their experience. Seen from without, the embracing couple appears like two senseless stocks—whether through transcendence of earthly things or through mere senselessness is a matter we as observers are left to ponder. Saved from the spoils of Cupid, the lovers "each other of loues bitter fruit despoile" (1590 .3.12.47.2), while readers, like Britomart, are left with the quest of making sense unfinished.