4—
Book IV:
Retrospection and the Undoing of Book III
As Spenser moves from Book III to Book IV of The Faerie Queene , he shifts focus from discourse to textuality. He moves from considering the function and effect of linguistic constructs and directing attention to the act of reading, to examining how a discursive construct conveys meaning. This shift in focus reflects, in part, the fact that when Book IV appeared in 1596, the first installment of The Faerie Queene had already been committed to print. The 1596 edition of The Faerie Queene thus incorporates in itself a previously published text. The continuation of the original Faerie Queene in the 1596 edition focuses attention on the status of the poem as a text and how, as a text, it absorbs and refracts processes of reading and writing.[1] The existence of The Faerie Queene as text takes on particular emphasis through the cancellation of the original 1590 conclusion—that is, by the substitution of one set of printed stanzas for another—and by the reflection in the proem to Book IV on reception of the earlier installment of The Faerie Queene .
Book III showcases the pursuit of love. It focuses on the chase as a discursive structure that determines how Eros is understood. Book III treats sexual relations as paradigmatic of other relationships: self and other, reader and object of reading, artificer and objects of artifice. Book III posits a homology between Britomart's quest in pursuit of love and the reader's quest in reading the poem. The major focus is on reading as paradigmatic, morally charged, heroic activity. The icon of the blinded dragon lying at Cupid's feet with a shaft piercing each eye and the narrator's ironic comment "(Ah man beware, how thou those darts behold)" (3.11.48.5) dramatize the agonistic character of reading. Punning on "behold," the passage threatens to reward an injudicious consideration of traditional erotic iconography with graphic violence to the reader. The reader beholds the darts amiss and risks being blinded. Although the subtextual, metaphoric evo-
cation of reading is strong, reading is figured as a purely visual activity. Indeed the violent image of the arrow shafts makes the visual component graphically palpable. Here as elsewhere in Book III, the issue of signification is presented primarily and fundamentally as a question of reading. In Book IV, the text as such is much more the focus. While in Book III Britomart's second look at the Masque of Cupid makes the figures disappear, transformed and diminished by a militant reader to marks on the page, at the opening of Book IV, we see that texts have unsuspected staying power since Busirane's pageant refuses to go away. Not only does Book IV direct attention to the processes by which texts convey meaning, but it emphasizes the institutional power of the received ideas codified textually.[2]
The Hermaphrodite Canceled and Amoret Reconstrained
As the 1596 Faerie Queene moves from Book III to Book IV it revises both the stanzas originally concluding Book III and the themes affirmed by the 1590 conclusion.[3] Not only has the triumphant reunion of Amoret and Scudamore, with which the 1590 Faerie Queene concluded, been rewritten, so that, in the 1596 version, Scudamore has left to get help by the time Britomart emerges with Amoret from the Castle of Busirane, but Britomart's liberation of Amoret seems oddly nullified as well.[4] Amoret remains subject to all of the attitudes represented by Busirane and his pageant of Petrarchan allegories of male domination. She sees herself as Busirane sought to present her: as an object, the legitimate spoil of her apparently male rescuer. Moreover, Britomart, Amoret's erstwhile champion, now seems to be taking over from Busirane in abusing Amoret with her own imitation of male sexual aggression:
Thereto her feare was made so much the greater
Through fine abusion of that Briton mayd:
Who for to hide her fained sex the better,
And maske her wounded mind, both did and sayd
Full many things so doubtfull to be wayd,
That well she wist not what by them to gesse,
For other whiles to her she purpos made
Of loue, and otherwhiles of lustfulnesse,
That much she feard his mind would grow to some excesse.
(4.1.7)
Busirane's Masque of Cupid attempted to blur the boundaries between male ideology and female psychology in order to violate Amoret. The comedy of mistaken identity and gender masking that opens Book IV puts sexual ideology in a new perspective as The Faerie Queene moves from an exploration of private virtues in the first three books to an exploration of public virtues in the second. The comic scene evoked at the opening of Book IV shows us what it is like for those attitudes figured allegorically in Busirane's castle—for example that sexuality is a battle and woman is the spoil—to be unexamined cultural assumptions. We view a dramatic rather than an explicitly allegorical representation of social constructs. If in Book III, Amoret was imprisoned among Petrarchan allegories, she now finds herself in a socially untenable situation. As the narrator observes:
When her from deadly thraldome he redeemed,
For which no seruice she too much esteemed,
Yet dread of shame, and doubt of fowle dishonor
Made her not yeeld so much as due she deemed.
(4.1.8.4–7)
It is ironic that Amoret's passive resistance here maintains Britomart's bluff since in Book III Amoret suffered Busirane's enmity, "All for she Scudamore will not denay" (3.11.11.5). The chastely loving wife provokes the hostility of Busirane, whose Petrarchan art requires a lady who just says no. In Book IV, we see Amoret assuming as a social constraint what in Book III she resisted as an allegorical agon . The fundamentally inner-directed conflict over how Amoret's chastity is to be read has been transformed into a question of how she fits into a social matrix.[5]
Even before the opening episode, the introductory stanzas reveal how much Busirane is a part of the social milieu of Book IV:
For that same vile Enchauntour Busyran ,
The very selfe same day that she was wedded,
Amidst the bridale feast, whilest euery man
Surcharg'd with wine, were heedlesse and ill hedded,
All bent to mirth before the bride was bedded,
Brought in that maske of loue which late was showen:
And there the Ladie ill of friends bestedded,
By way of sport, as oft in maskes is knowen,
Conueyed quite away to liuing wight vnknowen.
(4.1.3)
Unless one is either very tolerant or very jaded, it registers, I think, as a shock that what was presented in Book III as a horror show provided part of the entertainment at the wedding of Scudamore and Amoret. In Book III, Britomart's second look at the pageant reveals the emptiness of Busirane's Petrarchan fictions. The second "second look," directed by Book IV at the Masque of Cupid, reveals their power and a reality of socially authorized rape more horrifying than the lurid fantasies Britomart overcomes in Book III. James Nohrnberg observes that epithalamia focusing on male sexual violence were a common feature of Elizabethan weddings (Analogy 475). That, I think, is Spenser's point. As Oscar Levant once observed of Hollywood, "When you strip away the phony tinsel, what you have left is the real tinsel." The move from a private experience of the Masque of Cupid to its function as a part of a public celebration gives us a critical perspective on Elizabethan social conventions.
The opening of Book IV calls attention to the contextualizing of the Masque of Cupid. In Book III, Busirane is said to have "pend" Amoret: imprisoned her with language. In Book IV, we see Amoret embedded in social conventions, as are we as readers. Book IV reflects critically on the force of conventions to which a society subscribes as it develops a critique of reading conceived as a solitary, context-free activity. Accordingly, Book IV directs a second look at the quest structure of Book III, which posits the homology between individual heroine and individual questing reader.
Retrospection as a Way of Looking
In a number of ways, the continuation of The Faerie Queene into Book IV involves retrospection. In Book IV, flashback is a major narrative strategy. The story of Cambel and Triamond, eponymous heroes of the book, is told in flashback, for example. Temporal slippages, particularly with Scudamore's narrative of winning Amoret, call attention to the flashback as a discursive construct. Not only does Amoret apparently disappear from the local present of the story, but pointers in the narrative sequence make the chronology of the story seem inconsistent. In stanzas 20–22 of canto ix, it seems that Arthur and Amoret come upon Britomart and Scudamore observing four knights fighting. There is a flashback to the origin of the quarrel among the four, which goes on to tell of how Britomart and Scudamore are brought into the fight. The flashback apparently ends with stanza 32,
which begins, "Whom when the Briton Prince a farre beheld. . . ." Narrative clues indicate both that we are back to Arthur's initial sight of the quarrel and that the quarrel has progressed beyond that initial sight, subverting our expectation that time stands still in the larger story while the narrator addresses a flashback to the reader.
A second look directed at some of the ideas of Book III focuses on problems previously held in abeyance. Book IV reconsiders specular substitutions unproblematically assumed between Britomart and reader, whose projects in Book III can be considered mirror-image quests, as well as the specular exchange of male and female, who are presented as relatively interchangeable. In canto ii of Book III, upon seeing the image of Artegall in a mirror, Britomart expeditiously fashions herself after that image into a knight of chastity. At the conclusion of the 1590 Faerie Queene , each of the two lovers united in an embrace is described in terms associated with the other sex. Like the Petrarchan beloved, Scudamore is the deer "that greedily embayes / In the coole soile, after long thirstinesse" (1590 .3.12.44.7–8). Amoret, in an androgynous reversal of the Redcrosse Knight "pourd out in loosenesse on the grassy grownd" (1.7.7.2), "in sweete rauishment pourd out her spright" (1590 .3.12.45.7).
The cancellation of the original conclusion of The Faerie Queene as the poem is continued in 1596 emphasizes how revision can mean change as well as looking again. Indeed, the manipulation of certain classical myths underlying Books III and IV reveals ironic connections between looking again and effecting change. The Hermaphrodite figured the union of the two lovers at the conclusion of the 1590 Faerie Queene . When Scudamore compares winning Amoret to Orpheus' recovering "his Leman from the Stygian Princes boure" (4.10.58.4), he explicitly names the myth that has informed the lovers' search for reunion throughout Book IV. Book IV places the 1590 conclusion in a context of retrospection that undoes the sexual union figured by the Hermaphrodite, as Orpheus' gaze undid Eurydice.[6] Concomitantly, Book IV examines retrospection as an intellectual construct, as a way of looking, in short, as theory.[7]
Losing and Finding vs. Losing and Winning
The examination of retrospection in Book IV focuses on the complexities of loss. Spenser opens up an exploration of loss with a play
on words. In the revised conclusion to Book III, we are told that when Britomart returns to where she left Scudamore and Glauce, "Neither of them she found where she them lore" (3.12.44.4). In the sixteenth century, "lore" was the past participle of "to lose" (OED s.v. "leese" vb. 1, 6), but, as the OED suggests, Spenser uses it as the simple past of the participle "lorn," left or abandoned. Most obviously, Britomart has not found the pair where she left them, but also, in a sense, she has not found them where she lost them because, as the story continues, finding is not the only counterpart to losing: winning is a counterpart as well. The nature of loss is not, therefore, an inescapable given but is theoretically determined. It all depends on how one looks at loss: whether it is seen in relation to finding or to winning. In Book III, the emphasis is on finding and the orientation is prospective. The narrative takes the form of a quest romance to posit an epistemology of learned ignorance in which the truth is always more fully, but never completely, known, as an alternative to Platonic recollection, which postulates origins as the source of authority. Book III traces a shift in focus from origins and certainty to creative growth and risk. Britomart is not conscious of her love for Artegall until it has already taken hold of her. Her anxiety that her love might be illusory, that the image with which she has fallen in love might not correspond to a real person, is eased by Glauce's promise to "find that loued knight" (3.2.46.9). Both heroine and reader are progressively fashioned as part of that ongoing quest.
In Book IV, winning replaces finding as the counterbalance to loss. Throughout Book IV, knights engage in jousts to win a lady, or an artificial lady, or a lady's girdle, with the joust marked as an institutional response to male desire. Scudamore's description of winning Amoret occurs at the point at which, by narrative logic, Amoret and Scudamore should find each other. The nature of the opposition of loss to winning differs from that of loss to finding. Winning and losing are a binary pair as reversible as mirror images in a perpetual zero-sum game of specular exchange. In short, everybody wins some and loses some. Finding pairs in a different way with loss. It does not depend on a binary opposition to losing. No one has to have lost Artegall for Britomart to find him. And while it might be theoretically possible to find again what one has lost, in Book IV what has been lost cannot be found because the theoretical orientation has shifted from an economy of finding and losing to an economy of winning
and losing, and this way of looking at things presents itself as all there is. This shift from a view of loss as the counterpart of finding to an economy of winning and losing accompanies a shift from the emphasis on risk in Book III to the critical examination of strategies of logical entailment in Book IV. Book III posits the risk of error and illusion as the precondition of creative growth and knowledge. Book IV examines structures that circumscribe knowledge and purpose to guarantee certainty. It shows how the effort to eliminate uncertainty can be an unwitting strategy of foreclosure, much as Orpheus' backward look to make certain of Eurydice resulted in their separation.
Two narratively inscribed failures of Scudamore and Amoret to be reunited explicate in detail how the binary structure of winning and losing undoes the hermaphroditic union of the lovers. In canto 1, the two lovers miss each other as Amoret's companion Britomart and Scudamore successively engage in jousts with the same group of characters: Amoret rides off before Scudamore rides up. In cantos 9 and 10, Scudamore's flashback account of winning Amoret substitutes for Spenser's narration of their reunion. Canto 1 begins a critique of friendship conceived as sameness, which both perpetuates discord and excludes the sexual relation. The after-you-Alphonse number played by the knights Paridell and Blandamour, as the pair trade the right to attack Britomart and win Amoret back and forth like a hot potato, may well parody the classic story of male friendship, that of Titus and Gesippus.[8] The pattern is comically repeated when Blandamour, having been knocked flat by Britomart, volunteers Paridell to take on Scudamore. These are two of many jousts in Book IV that have the dual purpose of proving martial prowess and either winning a lady or proving the superior beauty of one's own. The joust represents a circumscribed discourse based on the binary opposition of essentially like participants; both are equipped to play the same game, and if one wins, the other loses. In these contests, the logical coherence of the male transaction contrasts markedly with the speciousness of its extension to women. Whoever wins a fight can be designated the better fighter by definition. There is a much more tenuous connection between the military success of a knight and that knight's social and sexual relations, as Britomart ironically demonstrates at the beginning of canto 1 by claiming arbitrarily to be both Amoret's knight and her young opponent's lady so all can spend a Platonic evening together. The sexual ideology attaching to chivalry
seems seriously askew in actual practice in Book IV. We see the traditional view of chivalry as the romantic relations of brave knights and fair ladies giving place to what Eve Sedgwick has called the homosocial transactions among men and to a general sense of things running out of control. The knights at Satyrane's tournament award the prize of Florimell's girdle to the False Florimell although only the chaste Amoret is able to wear it—it falls off any who is not a virgin—and then the knights try in vain to award False Florimell to the winner and first two runners-up of the tournament. Third runner-up Satyrane decides that giving False Florimell her free choice of the remaining suitors is preferable to renewing the combat, which seems at least as much motivated by mutual jealousy as desire for the artificial lady. Similarly, Blandamour is hostile to Scudamore "both for his worth, that all men did adore, / And eke because his loue he wonne by right" (4.1.39.5–6). Since not only is his love Amoret not present at the fight between Blandamour and Scudamore, but Blandamour has just tried unsuccessfully to give his friend Paridell the right to win her from Britomart, one sees here as well as in the burlesque tournament of Satyrane male jealousy of another man taking precedence over any transaction between the sexes. Significantly, Scudamore's reaction to the allegorical troublemaker Ate's lie that Britomart "ha[d his] Amoret at will" (4.1.49.1) echoes the canceled 1590 conclusion. Again Scudamore is likened to a deer and again he is silent, but in Book IV the deer is struck with a dart and Amoret does not share his silence. "No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt" (1590 .3.12.45.8) becomes "ne word he had to speake for great dismay" (4.1.50.2).
Scudamore's narrative of winning Amoret explicates how the binarism of winning and losing excludes the heterosexual relation. As he explains his motives in seeking the lady:
What time the fame of this renowmed prise
Flew first abroad, and all mens eares possest,
I hauing armes then taken, gan auise
To winne me honour by some noble gest,
And purchase me some place amongst the best.
I boldly thought (so young mens thoughts are bold)
That this same braue emprize for me did rest,
And that both shield and she whom I behold,
Might be my lucky lot; sith all by lot we hold.
(4.10.4)
The pun "prise/emprize" sheds light on Amoret's role in Scudamore's adventure.[9] Made into a prize she enables his enterprise. She is part of the enterprise—as prize is literally part of the word emprize—as the nominal goal. Nevertheless, Scudamore initially names honor and a place among the best as his goals and—significantly, I think—only names Amoret by periphrasis as "she whom I behold." If this is, as A. C. Hamilton suggests in his annotations to The Faerie Queene , an indication of Amoret's presence, it is a singularly feeble one, since "behold" might mean "relate or belong to" or "consider" as well as "look at" (OED s.v. "behold" 3, 6–7). Amoret's presence is marginal at best because the woman's role in the economy of winning and losing is at a categorical remove from the man's. It is not that when the man wins, the woman loses but that when he wins, he wins her. She is not part of the transaction in the same capacity as the man. Her constancy camouflages the reversibility of the structure of winning and losing—the fact that there can always be another rematch—in order to give a specious sense of closure and fixity to an open-ended process.[10]
By regarding both the shield of Love and Amoret as his prizes, Scudamore makes himself into Cupid's man instead of being half the androgynous Scudamoret.[11] While the shield and the lady are doubled as prizes, the metaphoric connection between the two—both, as it were, on the receiving end—is suppressed. Having defeated the knights guarding the shield, Scudamore rereads the inscription by the shield, Blessed the man that well can vse his blis: / Whose euer be the shield, faire Amoret be his (4.10.8.8–9). By doubling the shield and Amoret, Scudamore fails to use either well; by merely repeating the inscription, Scudamore fails to understand the challenge of its optative mode—faire Amoret be his. As a reader, he contrasts with Britomart before the enigmatic inscription, Be bold:
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.
(3.11.50.4–9)
Britomart "reads" the injunction to be bold by being bold; she goes forward and finds meaning not known a priori but confirmed post
hoc, as she succeeds in being bold. The term bold is likewise applied to Scudamore in canto 10 of Book IV. He says, "I boldly thought (so young mens thoughts are bold)" (4.10.4.6) and "Whom boldly I encountred . . ." (4.10.10.1) But his boldness is of a different sort.[12] Britomart's boldness, like her reading, is inventive and improvisatory, open to uncertainty and risk. By way of contrast, consider Scudamore's exegetical performance with the shield:
Then preacing to the pillour I repeated
The read thereof for guerdon of my paine,
And taking downe the shield, with me did it retaine.
(4.10.10.7–9)
His repetition accompanies an impulse toward possession and control.
Looking Back to Make Sure: The Retrospective Stance and the Totalizing Gaze
The difference between Britomart and Scudamore as readers underlines the shift in attitudes to origins and retrospection from Book III to Book IV and suggests why Amoret will never be Scudamore's.[13] While the prospective orientation of Book III simply de-emphasizes origins, in Book IV retrospection is a principle of confirmation. The informal, post-hoc confirmation of invention in Book III is raised to a higher level of abstraction in Book IV as a built-in guarantee: retrospection becomes part of a strategy of totalization. This impulse to build in a guarantee underlies the categorical problem inherent in Scudamore's enterprise of winning his lady, namely the collapsing of discrete logical categories into each other to suppress the fact that one frames the other. In seeking to win Amoret, Scudamore pursues what is nominally a sexual relationship, but the woman stands outside the transaction of winning and losing, remaining aloof and intact as the prize for the victorious male.
For such a totalizing strategy to work, what is seen must be taken for all there is. Spenser traces this reduction specifically as it operates on sexuality as Scudamore describes the Temple of Venus in a revision both of Britomart's gaze at the Hermaphrodite and the Gardens of Adonis in Book III:
No tree, that is of count, in greenewood growes,
From lowest Iuniper to Ceder tall,
No flowre in field, that daintie odour throwes,
And deckes his branch with blossomes ouer all,
But there was planted, or grew naturall:
Nor sense of man so coy and curious nice,
But there mote find to please it selfe withall;
Nor hart could wish for any queint deuice,
But there it present was, and did fraile sense entice.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Which when as I, that neuer tasted blis,
Nor happie howre, beheld with gazefull eye,
I thought there was none other heauen then this;
And gan their endlesse happinesse enuye,
That being free from feare and gealosye,
Might frankely there their loues desire possesse;
(4.10.22, 28.1–6)
The repeated locution "no . . . but" bases its claims of universality on taking what Scudamore sees and denominates as a totality. In tracing the reduction from the Gardens of Adonis to the Temple of Venus, Spenser seems to be drawing on certain sixteenth-century mathematical ideas, specifically the distinction between denumerability and non-denumerability. A set of numbers is denumerable if there is a one-to-one correspondence between its members and the set of positive integers; it is non-denumerable if no such correspondence can be established. Thus, the set of rational numbers, although infinite, are denumerable, whereas the real numbers (rational plus irrational) are not.[14] Scudamore's description of the Temple of Venus posits a one-to-one relationship between what Scudamore sees and what is. Spenser reserves the category of non-denumerability to characterize the uncircumscribed plenitude described in the marriage of Thames and Medway at the conclusion of Book IV.
The variant "none other then" hints at the denial of otherness implicit in the totalizing process. Although Scudamore alludes to presumably mixed-sex pairs of lovers, it is "another sort" of lovers, male friends who usurp his attention. Scudamore, pitying his bliss-free past, envies their endless happiness, in contrast to Britomart who, in an alternative reality or at least an earlier edition, half-envies Scudamore and Amoret their bliss and wishes herself similar happiness in the future. There is perhaps an etymological play on the word
"envy," a shift from the French "envie," desire, to the Latin "invidia," a looking askance. Britomart, "empassioned in her gentle sprite," is moved to hope. Scudamore is looking at things the wrong way. The happiness he sees seems endless because he is looking back. He is standing on the endpoint and does not know it.
Reducing Sexuality and Controlling Plenitude
The plenitude on which Scudamore's way of looking works its reduction is associated directly with sexuality. One indication of this occurs with the extended allusion to De rerum natura in stanzas 44 through 47 of canto x. Lucretius begins his poem by invoking Venus as the universal principle of generation. The prayer addressed by the lovers to the idol of Venus paraphrases Lucretius' invocation to Venus beseeching the goddess to temper the violence of Mars in an erotic enactment of cosmic discordia concors :
Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas,
alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa
quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis
concelebras, per te quoniam genus omne animantum
concipitur visitque exortum lumina solis:
te, dea, te fugiunt venti, te nubila caeli
adventumque tuum, tibi suavis daedala tellus
summittit flores, tibi rident aequora ponti
placatumque nitet diffuso lumine caelum.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Effice ut interea fera moenera militiai
per maria ac terras omnis sopita quiescant;
nam tu sola potes tranquilla pace iuvare
mortalis, quoniam. belli fera moenera Mavors
armipotens regit, in gremium qui saepe tuum se
reiicit aetemo devictus vulnere amoris,
atque ita suspiciens tereti cervice reposta
pascit amore avidos inhians in te, dea, visus,
eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore.
(1.1–9, 29–37)
[Mother of Aeneas and his race, darling of men and gods, nurturing Venus, who beneath the smooth-moving heavenly signs
fill with yourself the sea full-laden with ships, the earth that bears the crops, since through you every kind of living thing is conceived and rising up looks on the light of the sun: from you, O goddess, from you the winds flee away, the clouds of heaven from you and your coming; for you the wonder-working earth puts forth sweet flowers, for you the wide stretches of ocean laugh, and heaven grown peaceful glows with outpoured light. . . . Cause meanwhile the savage works of war to sleep and be still over every sea and land. For you alone can delight mortals with quiet peace, since Mars mighty in battle rules the savage works of war, who often casts himself upon your lap wholly vanquished by the ever-living wound of love, and thus looking upward, with shapely neck thrown back, feeds his eager eyes with love, gaping upon you, goddess, and, as he lies back, his breath hangs upon your lips.]
In contrast, Spenser's worshipers pray:
Great God of men and women, queene of th'ayre,
Mother of laughter, and welspring of blisse,
O graunt that of my loue at last I may not misse.
(4.10.47.7–9)
Venus genetrix has been demoted to the status of a dating service, and the desire that is the motive power of the universe has been reduced to getting what one wants.[15] Sexual desire, conceived by Lucretius as a cosmic force, is here circumscribed when sexuality is separated from a cosmic matrix and presented as a one-to-one relationship between lover and object of desire. The description of the idol as it harks back both to the Gardens of Adonis and to the Hermaphrodite engages Spenser's previous text in the reduction of sexuality. The claim that the idol "in shape and beautie did excell / All other Idoles" (4.10.40.1–2) echoes the earlier statement that the Gardens of Adonis "All other pleasant places doth excell" (3.6.29.7). Scudamore's hearsay conjecture that under the veil, that statue "hath both kinds in one, / Both male and female, both vnder one name" (4.10.41.6–7) recalls the Hermaphrodite of Book III, but with some differences. The hermaphroditic union of Scudamore and Amoret is described with a complexity that resists being reduced to the univalence of two becoming one, a univalence that easily
becomes male hegemony. For all of Scudamore's approval, the veiled statue, concealed from the people by her priests, placed "vpon an altar of some costly masse" (4.10.39.2) appears Papist—veiled, perhaps, like a Roman Catholic ciborium.[16]
The reduction of sexuality from a cosmic force to a circumscribed desire is accomplished through the degradation of specifically female sexuality. The mons Veneris , which in Book III represents the unfolding of cosmic generation in successive states, as allegory, as geography, as physiology, is reduced in Book IV to the lap of Womanhood, which is what Amoret is sitting on when Scudamore finds her. Another revision of Book III links the degradation of female sexuality to narratological retrospection. Glauce's encouragement of Britomart in her pursuit of Artegall, "things oft impossible . . . seeme, ere begonne" (3.2.36.9), is echoed by Scudamore's reflection on his pursuit of Amoret:
For sacrilege me seem'd the Church to rob,
And folly seem'd to leaue the thing vndonne,
Which with so strong attempt I had begonne.
(4.10.53.3–5)
An obscene reduction and reification of Amoret as "the thing vndonne" indicates the difference between Britomart's quest of an as-yet-unknown lover and Scudamore's conquest of a woman reductively defined a priori.
Orpheus and the Loss of Amoret to the Quest for Certainty
Scudamore's usurpation of the narrative voice from the opening of canto x signals the exclusion of Amoret. Scudamore's assertion,
For since the day that first with deadly wound
My heart was launcht, and learned to haue loued,
I neuer ioyed howre, but still with care was moued.
(4.10.1.7–9)
echoes the opening of Book IV, "for from the time that Scudamour her bought / In perilous fight, she neuer ioyed day" (4.1.2.1–2) but Scudamore has substituted self-pity for the pity Spenser's narrator expresses for Amoret. In effect, the autobiographical "I," which is both
present narrator and historical subject of narration, leaves no room for Amoret.[17] The complex structure of Scudamore's narrative functions as a strategy for assuring control as it reveals the solipsism of such efforts. The closure of autobiographical narrative is presented as a substitute for ambiguity of signification. The conflation of rape and rescue in the narrative reworking of the Orpheus myth replaces the semiological complexity of love's wound. In Book III, the bittersweet and complex experience of love is expressed by the paradoxical valuation given to the motif of wounding. When Scudamore accuses himself, "vnworthy wretch to tread vpon the ground, / For whom so faire a Lady feeles so sore a wound" (3.11.11.8–9), his words point with unconscious irony both to Amoret's suffering at the hands of Busirane and to the wound of love that leads her to resist the enchanter. Book IV, in reworking its Virgilian and Ovidian subtexts, conflates the cause of Eurydice's wound—her attempted rape by the bee-keeper Aristaeus as given in Virgil's Fourth Georgic—with the attempted remedy, as Scudamore journeys to the Temple of Venus, not to restore Amoret, but to carry her off. Although Scudamore's autobiographical account of the combined rape and rescue of Amoret is the last we read about the unhappy lovers, it is retrojected to a position of origin. This totalizing gesture suppresses the emotional complexity signified by love's wound as it projects the complexity and uncertainty of signification onto a closed loop of narrative.[18]
The effacement of desire is linked to the silencing of Amoret through the revision of classical subtexts. Scudamore's response to the rebukes of Womanhood,
Nay but it fitteth best,
For Cupids man with Venus mayd to hold,
For ill your goddesse seruices are drest
By virgins, and her sacrifices let to rest.
(4.10.54.6–9)
echoes Musaeus' Leander, who lectures Hero on the contradictions of being Venus' nun (Hero and Leander , 141–165). But while Hero's speechlessness betokens her silent arousal at Leander's speech, Womanhood's silence results from terror at the sight of "Cupid with his killing bow / And cruell shafts" (4.10.55.3–4) on Scudamore's shield. In direct contrast to Hero, Amoret is both voluble and unwilling:
She often prayd, and often me besought,
Sometime with tender teares to let her goe,
Sometime with witching smyles: but yet for nought,
That euer she to me could say or doe,
Could she her wished freedome fro me wooe;
(4.10.57.1–5)
Not only does Scudamore ignore Amoret's words, but he suppresses her voice by giving her protests in indirect discourse. In so doing, Scudamore imitates Ovid who, in his version of the Orpheus legend, reduces the long protest Virgil gives Eurydice to "quid enim nisi se quereretur amatam?" (Met. 10.61) [for of what could she complain save that she was beloved?]. Just as Ovid's Eurydice is reduced to silence in the economy of male desire, so Amoret is reduced to a figment of Scudamore's autobiography as she disappears from Spenser's story. Ironically, although the narrator imitates Ovid in silencing the woman's voice, Scudamore the character does not imitate Orpheus in looking on the face of his beloved. Rather, he tells us:
And euermore vpon the Goddesse face
Mine eye was fixt, for feare of her offence,
Whom when I saw with amiable grace
To laugh at me, and fauour my pretence,
I was emboldned with more confidence,
(4.10.56.1–5)
Has Scudamore seen through the veil for an unmediated vision of truth, or, having turned from Amoret, does he gaze on the face of his own desire? Scudamore's autobiographical account of the origin of his love forecloses any other representation of that love because the origin, conceived as the object of desire, reflects specularly the endpoint from which Scudamore looks back. Instead of losing himself in an embrace, as at the conclusion of the 1590 Faerie Queene , Scudamore finds perfect closure at last, but closure represented in the text, not closure of the text.[19] Scudamore has been led by historically authorized ways of looking to pursue an enterprise with builtin guarantees, but in the larger context of Books III and IV, we can see him embracing the sort of narcissism against which Britomart has struggled. If Book III posits risk as the precondition of creative growth and understanding, Book IV explores the impulse to foreclose risk and examines what might be sacrificed in the attempt to guarantee certainty.