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.