1—
Britomart's Quest:
Fashioning Heroine and Reader
In the proem to Book III of The Faerie Queene , the poet invites his sovereign and most important reader to see herself in the Legend of Chastity in mirrors more than one. In so doing, Spenser places the book in the medieval and Renaissance tradition of the mirror of princes, which offered rulers exemplary and cautionary representations of rulership in order to encourage them to emulate the exemplary and avoid the blameworthy.[1] Supporting the moral force of these examples is the belief in divine Providence, which manifests itself in human history through the eventual distribution of reward and punishment. Spenser revises the mirror tradition as he adapts it for Book III. Instead of presenting the reflection in human history of the divine will, Book III focuses on the partiality and contingency of the mirrors. Book III does not repudiate divine Providence. Rather, it concerns itself with the limitations of human understanding. Underlying Spenser's adaptation of the mirror tradition is the verse from St. Paul's first Epistle to the Corinthians, "videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate / tunc autem facie ad faciem" (1 Corinthians 13:12) [For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face].[2] Although Book III concerns itself with what is seen imperfectly, the truth of revelation provides the implicit contrast and corrective to the darkness of earthly vision. It is the illusion of seeing in the glass plainly that is stigmatized in Book III as narcissism, understood as being enamored with the objects of one's own perception.
Book III pairs with Book I as both address the issue of truth, Book I from the perspective of Christian eschatology, Book III from the perspective of the fallen world.[3] In order to accommodate this shift in perspective, the allegory shifts focus from transcending the world of the senses and attending to the evidence of things unseen to engaging the world of the senses and accepting the uncertainty of mortal
understanding. The shift from transcending to making sense of the sensual world is defined largely in erotic terms. In Book I, the spiritual goal of the Redcrosse Knight is represented allegorically as marriage to Una and his most serious fall from holiness is figured as his liaison with Duessa. In Book III, the sexual relation becomes a paradigm of all relationships between the individual and what is in the world. Spenser makes use of very traditional habits of allegorizing what is worldly and sensual as female to construct an alternate discourse.[4] He revises conventional discourses of love from within in order to explore the problem of addressing the mortal world from within, rather than sub specie aeternitatis. In adapting conventional habits of treating femininity as metaphor, the allegory of Book III remains very conscious of how deceiving and destabilizing that strategy can be.[5]
The conventional erotic discourses revised in Book III figure love as a hunt. Spenser both reveals the narcissism of such conventional configurations and presents Britomart's pursuit of love as a more productive alternative. In conventional versions of the erotic chase, the object of pursuit is the projection of male desire. In contrast, Britomart's pursuit of Artegall figures her engagement with something not wholly dependent on or answerable to her own desires.
Shifting Allegory to Address This World
Book III opens, as Book II does, with a narrative continuation of the previous book. In canto i, stanza 1 of Book II, Archimago escapes the shackles with which he was bound at the conclusion of Book I and, with the help of a newly accoutred Duessa, proceeds to stir up trouble between Sir Guyon and the Redcrosse Knight. The opening of Book III sees Guyon and Prince Arthur riding out together after having recovered at the House of Alma from the battles that concluded Book II. On the one hand, these transitions from one book to another give narrative continuity to The Faerie Queene . On the other, they suggest at the outset of each book how that book is positioned in an intellectual, rather than a strictly narrative, framework.[6] As has long been observed, the Palmer's comment to Redcrosse about "like race to runne" signals that Guyon's quest will be parallel to that of Redcrosse but in a different context.[7] Similarly, Britomart's summary
overthrow of Guyon early in Book III announces that the virtue of chastity will supersede temperance.[8]
The insights of A. S. P. Woodhouse ("Nature and Grace"), A. C. Hamilton ("Like Race to Runne"), and others about the continuities and shifts from one book of The Faerie Queene to another can be taken much further into a consideration of how each book traces a paradigm shift as it addresses issues deferred by previous books.[9] Indeed, this shift is prefigured in the bifurcated title of each book of The Faerie Queene , which signals generic affinities with both the saint's legend and the essay.[10] Each book is in significant ways an essay, a discrete and coherent examination of an intellectual problem. The shift from one book to another involves not just what Spenser says but how he says it, not just themes but allegorical strategies deployed to explore those themes.
The pattern of allegorical paradigm shift is established at the conclusion of Book I. The Redcrosse Knight's battle with the dragon is an allegorical set-piece that reveals Christian eschatology as both fundamental to the allegory of The Faerie Queene and necessarily focused beyond the here and now of fallen existence. The climactic dragon fight is a virtual tour-de-force of fourfold Christian allegory.[11] In the literal sense, it is a representation of Saint George's legendary fight with the dragon. Tropologically, Redcrosse imitates Christ and enacts the pattern of every Christian's battle with sin. Allusions to both Genesis and Revelation demonstrate the typological sense. Anagogically, Saint George's dragon figures the dragon of the apocalypse.[12] Nevertheless, despite the textbook completeness of the fourfold allegorical pattern, the episode is curiously dislocated. Spenser's witty comment on the climactic dragon fight, "The ioyous day gan early to appeare" (1.11.51.1)—it is indeed early for Judgment Day—calls attention to the historical gap between the Redcrosse Knight's battle and the Last Battle it figures forth.[13] The actual fallen world, which ostensibly provides a ground for the redemptive dragon fight, teasingly resists redemption. Eden menaced by the dragon is necessarily a fallen Eden. When the dragon falls to the ground in defeat, he becomes one with the unredeemed physical world and "like an heaped mountaine lay" (1.11.54.9). Although the dragon fight points allegorically toward ultimate redemption, the world remains fallen.
In pointing allegorically toward the apocalypse, Spenser evokes a transcendental signified, knowing as an article of faith its full apoca-
lyptic force as the end of signification.[14] Corollary to the belief in an apocalyptic end of the chain of mortal signifiers is conviction of the unrepresentability of that apocalypse. Spenser casts the hermeneutics of skepticism as a kind of folk wisdom.[15] Doubt in the finality of this representation of apocalyptic closure is comically demonstrated by the mother who worries when her child plays too close to the fallen dragon and the townspeople who are not fully convinced that the dragon is really dead. J. R. R. Tolkien observes that when children ask whether stories about dragons are true, what they want to know is, Am I safe in my bed? (Tolkien 63n). Abstract, categorical knowledge is not necessarily what allows children (or others) to sleep soundly. Similarly, believing in ultimate salvation does not obviate having to cope with the fallen world. Spenser shows that although truth is one and given to faith alone, Duessa and Archimago keep making their appearances in the world.
Even after the Redcrosse Knight has slain his dragon, Archimago and Duessa attempt to prevent his promised marriage to Una. The discrediting of Archimago, despite the literal accuracy of his charge of fornication with Duessa, and the postponed consummation of the marriage until Redcrosse fulfills his promise to the Faerie Queene to "serue six yeares in warlike wize, / Gainst that proud Paynim king, that workes her teene" (1.12.18.7–8) establish the terms of the shift from allegory that points toward and is authorized by Christian revelation and allegory that addresses the contingent and interim nature of the world of appearances. Although Redcrosse is forgiven his involvement with Duessa, the accomplishment of his marriage vows is deferred for the hexameral period of six years. Marriage of Holiness and Truth must await the completion of human history.[16] Book I achieves its allegorical vision of spiritual oneness and truth by transcending the sensual world and deferring the problem of actually coping with earthly experience to later books. Throughout Book I, psychosexual issues seem to be raised only to be deferred beyond the conclusion of that book. For example, as Mark Rose points out, the initial flight of Redcrosse and Una into the Wandering Wood to seek refuge from Jove's rainstorm suggests avoidance of sexuality and a childlike misreading of the loving father as an angry father (Spenser's Art 5). Granted that, what else are Una and Redcrosse to do but get out of the rain?[17] The allegory raises the issue of sexuality and sexual repression in such a way that the allegorical significance of the
episode cannot determine the action of the figures. Although at the conclusion of Book I, Redcrosse is described "swimming in that sea of blisful ioy" (1.12.41.5), he shortly leaves Una "to mourne" while her betrothed completes six years' service to the Faerie Queene.
When the Redcrosse Knight makes a brief appearance in Book III, his loyalty to Una is again being tried, but in a much different register. He is held at bay by Malecasta's six knights: Gardante, Parlante, Iocante, Basciante, Bacchante, and Noctante, representing the gradus amoris , or ladder of carnal love.[18] Although their attempt to force him to forsake Una is unsuccessful, Redcrosse needs the intervention of Britomart to break the standoff. Just as it is the role of the Knight of Chastity to defeat the gradus amoris figures, so is it the project of the Book of Chastity to address directly issues of eroticism deferred by Book I, to accommodate, rather than to transcend, fallen experience.[19]
Book I demonstrates the ascendancy of faith as the evidence of things unseen over observed truth. Book III takes as its epistemological model Britomart's uncertain quest for the body that corresponds to the image of Artegall seen in Merlin's mirror. Both the faith that is the focus of Book I and the uncertainty that appears in Book III are part of the same epistemological structure.[20] The conviction of transcendent truth saves the concept of uncertainty from being either logical nonsense or programmatic nihilism.[21] Spenser writes in the tradition of Cusanus, as he focuses concomitantly on divine ineffability and the progress of human understanding.
Spenser explores issues of epistemology and poetic process by means of focus on the erotic.[22] In Book III, the sexual relation becomes a primary model of the relationship of the self to something Out There.[23] In moving from a consideration of spiritual truth in Book I to the sensual world in Book III, Spenser shifts his allegory from one that grounds the word of the text in the Word of God to one that reflects critically on its own bases. Book III examines from within extant discourses of love—primarily the Ovidian and Petrarchan—as a way of locating his allegory in a field of contingent understanding and representation.[24]
Rewriting the Language of Love
Spenser announces his project of rewriting erotic discourse from within at the opening of canto ii, with he first of two encomia to un-
sung heroines, in imitation of Ariosto's Orlando furioso (O.f. 20.1–3; 37.1–10). Ariosto pays women a rather backhanded compliment. He poses as the honest historian of their achievements while calling attention to his own invention as a poet, since the Martial Maids Marfisa and Bradamante never existed outside his poem.[25] There have been many renowned women, Ariosto assures us; it is just that somehow or other no one has ever heard of them. Ariosto's pose of ironic superiority becomes a more engaged and uncertain stance in Spenser's version. In revising Ariosto, Spenser shifts emphasis from fictitious heroines to the false men who have suppressed the exploits of heroic women as the narrator takes the opportunity to praise Elizabeth and question himself:
HEre haue I cause, in men iust blame to find,
That in their proper prayse too partiall bee,
And not indifferent to woman kind,
To whom no share in armes and cheualrie
They do impart, ne maken memorie
Of their braue gestes and prowesse martiall;
Scarse do they spare to one or two or three,
Rowme in their writs; yet the same writing small
Does all their deed deface, and dims their glories all.
But by record of antique times I find,
That women wont in warres to beare most sway,
And to all great exploits them selues inclind:
Of which they still the girlond bore away,
Till enuious Men fearing their rules decay,
Gan coyne streight lawes to curb their liberty;
Yet sith they warlike armes haue layd away,
They haue exceld in artes and pollicy,
That now we foolish men that prayse gin eke t'enuy.
Of warlike puissaunce in ages spent,
Be thou faire Britomart , whose prayse I write,
But of all wisedome be thou precedent,
O soueraigne Queene, whose prayse I would endite,
Endite I would as dewtie doth excite;
But ah my rimes too rude and rugged arre,
When in so high an obiect they do lite,
And striuing, fit to make, I feare do marre:
Thy selfe thy prayses tell, and make them knowen farre.[26]
(3.2.1–3)
Ariosto sets women up as the butt of his ironic humor. Spenser chooses women's excellence as a topic that will allow him to subject
his own writing to scrutiny. He addresses his most powerful female reader and his female protagonist directly, while offering to write about a reality for which men have made no room in their writs. Instead of echoing Ariosto's ironic espousal of feminism, Spenser focuses on the male point of view as it engages or fails to engage female experience. The complex pun, that men "in their proper prayse too partiall bee," suggests that the improper partiality that leads men to slight women produces only incomplete, partial praise of themselves. Spenser's treatment of women throughout Book III is often sympathetic, but that sympathy is part of a larger project of reflecting on the processes of his own poetry. This project affirms the intellectual value of imaginative sympathy and the moral importance of critical self-consciousness. Spenser adapts a long-standing tradition of using female figures as a poetic instrument for exploring aspects of the male, but he does so with a great deal of self-consciousness, both about the danger of arbitrarily appropriating the female for male-identified purposes and about the underlying affinity of male and female that enables such appropriation. From the first appearance of Britomart in male disguise to the image of the Hermaphrodite at the conclusion of Book III, the poem maintains critical tension between the poetic representation and appropriation of gender difference and the biological and social reality that they represent and appropriate.
Improvisational Fashioning
Britomart is both Spenser's fictional creation and the poet's counterpart. This connection is emphasized when we see Britomart engaged in fiction-making herself. She lies to the Redcrosse Knight about her childhood so she can provoke talk about Artegall without betraying her own interest:
Faire Sir, I let you weete, that from the howre
I taken was from nourses tender pap,
I haue beene trained vp in warlike stowre,
To tossen speare and shield, and to affrap
The warlike ryder to his most mishap;
Sithence I loathed haue my life to lead,
As Ladies wont, in pleasures wanton lap,
To finger the fine needle and nyce thread;
Me leuer were with point of foemans speare be dead.
All my delight on deedes of armes is set,
To hunt out perils and aduentures hard,
By sea, by land, where so they may be met,
Onely for honour and for high regard,
Without respect of richesse or reward.
For such intent into these parts I came,
Withouten compasse, or withouten card,
Far fro my natiue soyle, that is by name
The greater Britaine , here to seeke for prayse and fame.
(3.2.6–7)
Britomart appropriates the childhoods of the epic characters Camilla and Clorinda, just as Spenser adapts his literary predecessors Virgil and Tasso. In the same canto, we see another version of Britomart's early years in an extended flashback that parodies the enfances of her literary precursors. Spenser emphasizes the gendered nature of Britomart's growing up, in an ironic commentary on Virgil and Tasso. Virgil's Camilla is given a symbolic, male-identified rebirth when she is bound to her father's spear and cast across the river to safety (Aeneid 11.544–566).[27] In contrast, Britomart's formative experience carries connotations of menarche:[28]
Sithens it hath infixed faster hold
Within my bleeding bowels, and so sore
Now ranckleth in this same fraile fleshly mould,
That all mine entrailes flow with poysnous gore,
And th'vlcer groweth daily more and more;
Ne can my running sore find remedie,
Other then my hard fortune to deplore,
(3.2.39.1–7)
The novel emphasis on the fact of specifically female physiology calls attention to the literariness of literary genealogy. Having accentuated the discrepancy between the literary formation of Britomart as she inherits traits from her literary predecessors and the biological development of a young woman as she achieves maturity, Spenser focuses on the constructedness of his fictional character. By introducing menarche to the literary tradition of the Martial Maid, Spenser calls attention to his rewriting of that tradition in a strategy of emphasizing the feminine. Whereas Virgil and Tasso describe the extraordinary infant diet and childhood training program of their virago to account for her military prowess, Spenser accounts for Britomart's chivalric vocation in a conspicuously improbable piece of
bricotage .[29] Although magical visions enframe Britomart's career as a Martial Maid—her vision of Artegall in Merlin's mirror and Merlin's prophecy of their dynastic future represent termini ad quem and a quo—the arrangements Glauce and Britomart make in order to bring the prophesied marriage to pass are, if anything, stranger because they purport to be practical. Britomart's father is conveniently away at a war with a pair of paynim brothers, so Britomart and Glauce can leave the castle as they please. A band of Britons has happened a few days before to capture a hoard of Saxon goods, among which there happily chances to be a suit of ladies' armor, previously belonging to the Saxon queen Angela. Since Britomart is a big, healthy girl, she can simply disguise herself as a knight. As Glauce assures her: "Ne ought ye want, but skill, which practize small / Will bring, and shortly make you a mayd Martiall" (3.3.53.8–9). The string of coincidences suggests that Britomart and Glauce are not the only ones willing to make things up as they go along. Spenser emphasizes improvisation as a principle both of individual self-fashioning and of narrative.[30] Unlike Redcrosse or Guyon, Britomart is not assigned a quest by Gloriana. She puts on armor as a pragmatic means of achieving her desire, much as Spenser adapts the form of quest romance in Book III as a way of reflecting on his own art and on the relationship of art to desire.
The Prospective Model and the Perilous Quest for Meaning
The carefully orchestrated improvisation that characterizes Britomart's career as the Knight of Chastity directs attention to what will be a major concern of Book III: the shift from an epistemology of authoritarian certitude, which emphasizes origins, to an epistemology of learned ignorance, which de-emphasizes origins and focuses on the growth of knowledge. Having attested to the absolute authority of divine truth, given to faith alone, in Book I, Spenser turns to the question of making sense of the fallen world by opposing to a largely Platonic focus on origins a protoscientific epistemology in the tradition of Cusanus, Erasmus, and Montaigne, which treats knowledge as an evolutionary process and focuses on how a given judgment can be tested.[31] Spenser establishes Platonic authoritarianism as an antithetical position against which he develops an evolutionary
model of knowledge in the proem to Book II. There Spenser defends his fiction against the charge that it is the painted forgery of an idle brain rather than matter of just recollection not, as John Guillory suggests, by associating allegory with anamnesis, but by shifting ground away from the Platonic theory of recollection (Poetic Authority 37). Spenser defends his allegory by asserting the growth of knowledge as the corollary of human ignorance and cites two areas in which Elizabethan knowledge had grown spectacularly: geographic exploration and astronomy. The narrator asks rhetorically, "Who euer heard of th'Indian Peru ?" (2.P.2.6) and "What if in euery other starre vnseene / Of other worldes he [Spenser's judge] happily should heare?" (2.P.3.7–8).
The origin of Britomart's desire, which fetches her from Britain to Faerieland and motivates her quest in Book III, is raised as an issue only to be subordinated to the matter of satisfying that desire. Although Merlin's mirror gives a supernatural éclat to the commencement of Britomart's love for Artegall, that love is described as what "lay hidden in the bottome of the pot" (3.2.26.5). The phrase suggests both that love is commonplace and that it comes as an aftereffect. It is not until after she has been wounded by desire that Britomart realizes she is in love. The actual point of origin is occulted.
Merlin's mirror figures an alternative epistemology, prospective in orientation rather than focused on origins, by manipulating categories of subject and object along with the sexual values—male subject and female object—traditionally given those categories. The magic mirror is presented explicitly as an alternative to Ptolemy's tower:
Who wonders not, that reades so wonderous worke?
But who does wonder, that has red the Towre,
Wherein th' Ægyptian Phao long did lurke
From all mens vew, that none might her discoure,
Yet she might all men vew out of her bowre?
Great Ptolomæe it for his lemans sake
Ybuilded all of glasse, by Magicke powre,
And also it impregnable did make;
Yet when his loue was false, he with a peaze it brake.
(3.2.20)
Unlike the phallic tower, Merlin's mirror "round and hollow shaped was, / Like to the world it selfe, and seem'd a world of glas"
(3.2.19.8–9).[32] Ptolemy's glass tower offers a parody of the traditional pairing of male subject and female object. With his artifice, Ptolemy makes Phao a subject of perception—she can see from within her tower but cannot be seen—in order to make of her a private sexual object. Ptolemy obstructs the give-and-take of social interaction, in which people are objects of others' perception and subjects of their own, in order to exercise power over Phao and ensure her fidelity. But the security sought by means of sequestering the woman, both in the glass tower and in male-defined categories, proves illusory. Ptolemy's phallic model of artistic creation will not stand up against female autonomy. In contrast, when Britomart looks into the world of glass, we see a more complex image of woman-as-subject. In place of the epistemological shell game, whereby mutually exclusive categories of subject and object are switched around to serve the will to power and desire for security, we see a model of subjective participation in the object.[33] In Merlin's looking glass, subject and object are interdependent. Since the categories are not entirely separable, it is impossible to accord one or the other primacy:
It vertue had, to shew in perfect sight,
What euer thing was in the world contaynd,
Betwixt the lowest earth and heauens hight,
So that it to the looker appertaynd;
(3.2.19.1–4)
The phrase "so that" is deliberately ambiguous. The phrase can be construed as introducing a result clause: the mirror could show sights in such a way that they pertained to the looker. The phrase can also be construed as the equivalent of "provided that": the mirror will reveal any sight, provided that it pertains to the looker. The double meaning keeps unclear to what extent the vision in the mirror is a subjective transformation of the object—that whatever appears in the mirror is distorted in such a way as to pertain to the looker—and to what extent the pertinence of the object to the subject is a necessary precondition for the magic vision—that the observer can see anything provided it pertains to him or her. Spenser questions the ideal of objectivity while refraining from idealizing subjectivity in its place. The epistemology presented by the magic mirror does not permit the reductive confidence in either ideal. Rather, it offers an engaged subjectivity in which admitting the danger of illusion is the price of vision.
Spenser addresses the problem of epistemological uncertainty by positing uncertainty as the condition of mortal knowledge. He uses the image of the mirror, which engages a complex and ambivalent set of traditions as a focus of those epistemological concerns. St. Paul's text 1 Corinthians 13:12 ("videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate / tunc autem facie ad faciem"), one of the most powerful statements in Western culture of the illusion of unmediated earthly vision and the necessity of finding authority for vision in what lies beyond the senses, underlies Britomart's vision of Artegall in the magic looking glass and her quest to encounter him face to face.[34] Although Britomart's vision of Artegall draws on a Pauline sense of the necessary uncertainty of mortal perception, her pursuit of that vision is played out in this world, not the next. Book III focuses on the calculus of risk as its heroine braves uncertainty in her pursuit of the looking-glass image and uses the complex tradition associated with Narcissus in exploring that risk. The initial description of Britomart's encounter with the magic mirror teases us with hints of narcissism:
One day it fortuned, faire Britomart
Into her fathers closet to repayre;
For nothing he from her reseru'd apart,
Being his onely daughter and his hayre:
Where when she had espyde that mirrhour fayre,
Her selfe a while therein she vewd in vaine;
Tho her auizing of the vertues rare,
Which thereof spoken were, she gan againe
Her to bethinke of, that mote to her selfe pertaine.
(3.2.22)
The word "vaine" raises the specter that Britomart may be guilty of narcissistic vanity and self-delusion.[35] Britomart does not know whether she has fallen in love with a man or, Narcissus-like, with the image of her own fantasy. Spenser's joke is that vanity or self-love is not the primary connotation of "vaine" in context. As long as Britomart sees her own face in the looking glass, its magic is vain: it does not work. Like any ordinary mirror, Merlin's glass gives back an image of Britomart's own face until she begins to contemplate something that pertains to herself and thinks about her future husband. Britomart cannot be content to be an objective observer with no prior interest in what she sees; that is what is truly vain.
This episode attaches the moral opprobrium habitually associated with self-love to the danger of mistaking appearance for reality. The
dialogue between Britomart and Glauce about the moral judgment appropriate to Britomart's new love reproduces traditional schools of interpreting the Narcissus myth. In the mythographic commentaries that Spenser would have inherited, either Narcissus is treated as an icon of moral failure, of self-love, and of materialism, or he is considered the hapless victim of a mistake.[36] Britomart interprets Narcissus' fault to be that he mistakenly loves an empty image, Glauce that he ignobly loves himself. When Glauce cites a list of classic sexual monsters by way of contrast to Britomart's healthy passion, Britomart counters that, worse than any in Glauce's catalogue, she is a decadent version of Narcissus. At least, Britomart argues, Myrrha, Biblis, and Pasiphäe satisfied their desire, however monstrous; she vainly loves a shadow.
The morally charged debate about versions of narcissism allies Book III to the medieval and Renaissance mirror tradition.[37] Books, such as The Mirror for Magistrates or The Steele Glas , were metaphoric mirrors "to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image" and to move the reader to recognition and reform. The mirror tradition provides both a focus on the ethical dimension of reading and a concern for the place of reading in the reader's self-fashioning. Britomart's quest draws on the mirror tradition insofar as her adventures often seem to be morally freighted lessons in reading. Identification of the risk against which Britomart's heroism is measured with epistemological uncertainty draws on the Ovidian myth of Narcissus, which ironically opposes security and knowledge. In Ovid's story, Tiresias prophesies that the infant Narcissus will prosper "si se non noverit" (Metamorphoses 3.348), if he does not know himself.[38] Ovid exploits the paradox that, although Narcissus' ultimate recognition of himself in the beloved reflection destroys him with the despair of unrequitable love, he initially fell victim to that deadly passion because he did not know himself when he encountered his own image. For Narcissus, self-knowledge and self-ignorance are both inescapably deadly. Tiresias' cryptic warning, in fact, doubles the curse of the rejected youth who prays, "sic amet ipse licet, sic non potiatur amato!" (3.405) [So may he himself love, and not gain the thing he loves!].[39]
Britomart's encounter with the narcissistic Marinell affirms the superiority of facing risk to seeking security. The danger Britomart faces as she pursues her quest is identifiable with narcissism insofar as she risks loving a mere image. The question of referentiality is invested with considerable moral seriousness as well as erotic signifi-
cance. When Britomart high-mindedly condemns herself as worse than Myrrha, Biblis, and Pasiphäe, she tacitly asserts that incest and bestiality are better than nothing. In pursuing the referent to Artegall's image, she seeks a full presence not strictly Platonic. Glauce's response to Britomart's anxiety combines an ingenuous faith in the referentiality of her vision—"No shadow, but a bodie hath in powre" (3.2.45.7)—with a cheerfully forward-looking epistemology. She assures Britomart that "things oft impossible . . . seeme, ere begonne' and promises "to compasse thy desire" and find that loved knight (3.2.36.9; 46.9). Britomart's decision to risk empty narcissism in the pursuit of true love is ratified when she defeats Marinell, whose life embodies the attempt to play it safe.
Narcissism and False Security
Marinell's life story is an elaborate Spenserian revision of Ovid's myth of Narcissus.[40] Tiresias' prophecy that Narcissus will prosper if he does not know himself becomes Proteus' prophecy that "of a woman he should haue much ill, / A virgin strange and stout him should dismay, or kill" (3.4.25.8–9). While Tiresias' warning, apparently contingent on circumstance, conceals Narcissus' inescapable fate, Proteus' prophecy of seemingly inescapable misfortune is transformed into the needless defeat and ensuing salvation of Marinell. As the narrator comments:
So tickle be the termes of mortall state,
And full of subtile sophismes, which do play
With double senses, and with false debate,
T'approue the vnknowen purpose of eternall fate.
(3.4.28.6–9)
The false closure of the prophecy plays, with double sense, against the self-fulfilling nature of the sexual fears it secretly embodies: a man who gives himself over to fear of women has not much left to lose to them.[41] Marinell's response to the prophecy, to avoid danger from women by waiving his manhood and refraining from all contact with women, is precisely what makes him vulnerable to Britomart. The narrator's comment, "This was that woman, this that deadly wound" (3.4.28.1), makes it seem that Marinell's doom is both final and inevitable. Yet on the one hand, he has quite a future ahead
of him, and, on the other, Marinell is "dismayed" by Britomart's spear precisely because of his virginal refusal to be dismayed in a less bellicose sense.[42] The apparent closure of Marinell's life story, whereby Britomart's attack fulfills Proteus' prophecy, is subverted by the possibility of multiple interpretations. Marinell's mother chooses her interpretation of Proteus' prophecy according to her own self-interested desire to keep her son boy eternal. Her fear—"Least his too haughtie hardines might reare / Some hard mishap, in hazard of his life" (3.4.24.5–6)—seems at least as much a dread of having her son reach sexual maturity as it is a worry about his health and safety. The bad faith of a castrating mother, who wants to reduce her son to the "deare image of [her]selfe" (3.4.36.1), determines Cymoent's interpretation of Proteus' words, which, in turn, affects the fulfillment of his prophecy. As the narrator notes, "So weening to haue arm'd him, she did quite disarme" (3.4.27.9). Marinell's mother has induced him to secure the integrity of his being by fleeing from love, only to discover too late that "they that loue do liue" (3.4.37.5). Marinell is nearly destroyed by Proteus' prophecy because he fails to understand it as a call to courage, both in reading his fate and living his life.
Britomart's encounter with the enchanted mirror concerns the origin of desire and shows that origin subordinated to other considerations. The story of Marinell, as it revises the myth of Narcissus, concerns the origin of gynophobia. Canto iv opens with Spenser's second Ariostan encomium to unsung heroines. The first, which introduces the story of Merlin's mirror, treats female excellence and male partiality. The second, which introduces Marinell's story, concerns women who kill men. The narrator's own reaction to the legends of female-inflicted homicide is emphasized, but the nature of that reaction remains highly ambiguous. Upon hearing the stories of Penthesilea, Deborah, and Camilla, the narrator begins to "burne with enuy sore" and "swell with great disdaine" (3.4.2.3, 9).[43] The reaction to deadly female violence acknowledged by the narrator ranges unstably from arousal to hostility. The story of Marinell is likewise ambiguous in tracing the source of gynophobia. Apparently, the blame falls squarely on Mom. Marinell's jeopardy seems to derive from an originary castration in which Cymoent makes her son the image of her own feminine lack. But as the story goes on, the force of metamorphosis and romance dilation takes precedence over the
power of origins.[44] Proteus' prophecy seems to guarantee Marinell's doom from the start, but the fulfillment of the prophecy does not quite kill him. When Cymoent takes her son to her bower in the bottom of the sea, this metaphoric return to the womb becomes the occasion for an extended recuperation, to be followed, in Book IV, by further adventures with women. The impulse to seek the security of a priori knowledge is linked in Marinell's story both to narcissistic self-absorption and to the daemonization of the female as the source of threat. This narcissistic closure is set against the forward movement of narrative change and revisionary interpretation.
Whoso List to Hunt: Love as the Chase
Not only does Marinell's encounter with Britomart provide specious closure to Proteus' prophecy, it disrupts the narrative coherence of Book III. In so doing, Marinell's story calls attention to the major narrative motif of the chase in such a way as to highlight the potentially narcissistic way the pursued can reflect the desires of the pursuer. As has been observed, Britomart defeats Marinell after having seen Florimell riding through Faerieland, although Arthur is later told that Florimell left Gloriana's court to seek Marinell a day after he was wounded:
Fiue dayes there be, since he (they say) was slaine,
And foure, since Florimell the Court for-went,
And vowed neuer to returne againe,
Till him aliue or dead she did inuent.
(3.5.10.1–4)
The repeated time references make the temporal discrepancy quite explicit. Marinell seems to be in a narrative loop in which pursuit circles back on itself. Britomart's own pursuit of love takes place in contradistinction to that closed loop. She rides off in steadfast pursuit of her quest as Arthur and Guyon chase after Florimell in canto i and again after she has unhorsed Marinell in canto iii, a violent intervention that ironically initiates the chase that Britomart has disdained in the earlier canto. Britomart's quest is positioned against a discursive field that comprises traditional constructions of love as pursuit. These traditional discourses are principally, but not exclusively, Ovidian and Petrarchan.[45] The pun on "venery" as the sport of hunt-
ing game (OED s.v. "venery" 1.1) and as the indulgence of sexual desire (OED s.v. "venery" 2.1) has a long itinerary in its derivation from the Latin.[46]
As Harry Berger, Jr., points out, Book III emphasizes the reversibility of such traditional hunts: the male pursuer is goaded by his own desire to chase an object constructed by those desires. He points to the myth of Actaeon, a crucial Petrarchan borrowing from Ovid, as the major subtext of the erotic chases of Book III in which the pursuer becomes the pursued ("Kidnapped Romance" 212–235).[47] As Arthur and Guyon pursue Florimell, they seem, like Actaeon, to be victims, to the extent that they are subject to forces beyond their conscious understanding. Although attempting to rescue Florimell, they irrationally ride after her rather than her persecutor. Indeed, the two seem a bit like horses who break into a gallop simply because they observe other horses galloping. The language describing their motives is highly ambiguous. They are "full of great enuie and fell gealosy" (3.1.18.2) in hopes of winning "most goodly meede, the fairest Dame aliue" (3.1.18.8).[48] The impression is that the knights are at the mercy of discourses beyond their control.
By comparison to both the knights who are impelled to pursue and Florimell who provokes pursuit, Britomart seems to be operating in a much freer discursive field. A critical difference between Arthur and Guyon's pursuit of Florimell and Britomart's quest for Artegall lies in the Neoplatonic underpinnings of each pursuit. The designation "beauties chace" gives a Neoplatonic patina to erotic transactions between the male knights and Florimell that are not self-transcending but are, in a metaphysical sense, going nowhere. In contrast, the Neoplatonic doctrine that the lover is transformed into the beloved[49] authorizes free improvisation, as Britomart readily transforms herself into a knight, after the image of Artegall she has seen in the mirror.
The Chase as Indoor Sport and Moral Comedy
Britomart's adventures in Castle Joyeous complicate the erotic chase as pursuit across the landscape is domesticated and transformed into bedroom farce. The reversibility of hunter and hunted is transformed into the androgynous combination of traits identified with Britomart:
For she was full of amiable grace,
And manly terrour mixed therewithall,
That as the one stird vp affections bace,
So th'other did mens rash desires apall,
And hold them backe, that would in errour fall;
As he, that hath espide a vermeill Rose,
To which sharpe thornes and breres the way forstall,
Dare not for dread his hardy hand expose,
But wishing it far off, his idle wish doth lose.
(3.1.46)
The Malecasta episode focuses directly on the issue of gender identity, which is both assumed and elided in the discourse of hunter and hunted. A fundamental strategy of the episode is the defamiliarization of heterosexual desire that Spenser achieves throughout Book III by focusing on the female point of view. This episode goes further. As Spenser adapts the Fiordespina episode from the Orlando furioso (25.4–70), he suppresses the undercurrent of lesbianism and, in its place, explores the permutations of heterosexuality. In Ariosto's text, ironic humor is generated by Fiordespina's confusion about her feelings for Bradamante. Although her desire persists after it has been revealed that the cross-dressed Bradamante is a female knight, Fiordespina dismisses her feelings because she is unaware of the possibility of love between women:
—Quai tormenti (dicea) furon mai tanto
crudel, che più non sian crudeli i miei?
D'ogn'altro amore, o scelerato o santo,
il desiato fin sperar potrei;
saprei partir la rosa da le spine:
solo il mio desiderio è senza fine!
Se pur volevi, Amor, darmi tormento
che t'increscesse il mio felice stato,
d'alcun martìr dovevi star contento,
che fosse ancor negli altri amanti usato.
Né tra gli uomini mai né tra l'armento,
che femina ami femina ho trovato:
non par la donna all'altre donne bella,
né a cervie cervia, né all'agnelle agnella.
In terra, in aria, in mar, sola son io
che patisco da te sì duro scempio;
e questo hai fatto acciò che l'error mio
sia ne l'imperio tuo l'ultimo esempio.
La moglie del re Nino ebbe disio,
il figlio amando, scelerato ed empio,
e Mirra il padre, e la Cretense il toro:
ma gli è più folle il mio, ch'alcun dei loro.
( O.f. 25.34.3–36)
["Never was any torment so cruel," she lamented, "but mine is crueller. Were it a question of any other love, evil or virtuous, I could hope to see it consummated, and I should know how to cull the rose from the briar. My desire alone can have no fulfillment. / If you wanted to torment me, Love, because my happy state offended you, why could you not rest content with those torments which other lovers experience? Neither among humans nor among beasts have I ever come across a woman loving a woman; to a woman another woman does not seem beautiful, nor does a hind to a hind, a ewe to a ewe. / By land, sea, and air I alone suffer thus cruelly at your hands—you have done this to make an example of my aberration, the ultimate one in your power. King Ninus' wife was evil and profane in her love for her son; so was Mirra, in love with her father, and Pasiphae with the bull. But my love is greater folly than any of theirs."][50]
Ariosto titillates us as Fiordespina unwittingly alludes to a love that cannot speak its name without appropriate terminology. Although some of the episode's humor comes from Fiordespina's naïveté, much of it derives from Bradamante's speedy comprehension of the other woman's intentions, and from their shared viewpoint about what constitutes masculine honor. As Bradamante's twin brother Ricciardetto explains when he narrates the story:
La mia sorella avea ben conosciuto
che questa donna in cambio l'avea tolta;
né dar poteale a quel bisogno aiuto,
e si trovava in grande impaccio avvolta.
—Gli è meglio (dicea seco) s'io rifiuto
questa avuta di me credenza stolta
e s'io mi mostro femina gentile,
che lasciar riputarmi un uomo vile.—
E dicea il ver; ch'era viltade espressa,
conveniente a un uom fatto di stucco,
con cui sì bella donna fosse messa,
piena di dolce e di nettareo succo,
e tuttavia stesse a parlar con essa,
tenendo basse l'ale come il cucco.
Con modo accorto ella il parlar ridusse,
che venne a dir come donzella fusse;
( O.f. 25.30–31)
[It was clear to my sister that the damsel had illusions about her; my sister could never have satisfied her need and was quite perplexed as to what to do. "My best course is to undeceive her," she decided, "and to reveal myself as a member of the gentle sex rather than to have myself reckoned an ignoble man." / And she was right. It would have been a sheer disgrace, the conduct of a man made of plaster, if he had kept up a conversation with a damsel as fair as Fiordespina, sweet as nectar, who had set her cap at him, while like a cuckoo, he just trailed his wings. So Bradamante tactfully had her know that she was a maiden.]
After Ricciardetto hears that his twin sister has acquired the affection of a woman he himself had despaired of winning, he decides to renew his attentions disguised as Bradamante. When he takes his twin sister's place in Fiordespina's bed, he accounts for the difference by telling her that, while they were apart, he rescued a nymph and was granted one wish. They enjoy the serendipity until caught at it, at which point Ricciardetto is sentenced to be burned at the stake.
In the Ariostan episode, dizzying sexual disorientation contrasts pointedly with an almost cynical determinacy of sexual intention. Not only has Bradamante "well understood" Fiordespina, despite the ambiguity of Fiordespina's desire, but Ricciardetto has very carefully calculated the likely outcome of his masquerade before he puts on his sister's clothes. In Spenser's version, the ambivalence is shifted from the realm of sexual orientation to that of interpersonal intentions and expectations. Unlike Bradamante, Britomart does not realize the full implications or consequences of her hostess's false impression of her. Consider the description of Malecasta's overtures and Britomart's response:
And all attonce discouered her desire
With sighes, and sobs, and plaints, and piteous griefe,
The outward sparkes of her in burning fire;
Which spent in vaine, at last she told her briefe,
That but if she did lend her short reliefe,
And do her comfort, she mote algates dye.
But the chaste damzell, that had neuer priefe
Of such malengine and fine forgerie,
Did easily beleeue her strong extremitie.
(3.1.53)
Britomart is too ingenuous to understand the significance of Malecasta's pleas for "comfort" and "short reliefe." Although she chastely disapproves of Malecasta's seeming lightness, Britomart entertains her advances out of a naive courtesy and wish to please, totally unaware of the unfortunate surprise she thereby prepares for Malecasta.
Spenser writes a comedy of mistaken identity that reaches a point of maximum confusion with the two principals in bed together, each thinking that the other is a man. Ariosto writes a comedy of protean identity, in which sexual difference and sexual preference are virtually arbitrary matters. Ariosto's comedy is thoroughly destabilizing, but the Spenserian comedy puts more at risk. Ricciardetto nearly dies, but that is the result of being found out as a seducer, not of being mistaken for one. There is a sense of moral ambiguity in Britomart's involvement with Malecasta absent from the Ariostan source.[51] Mistaking Malecasta's intentions and being herself mistaken results in Britomart's being wounded by Gardante. The final image of Britomart, with drops of purple blood staining her lily-white smock, is morally indeterminate. The imagery suggests vulnerability, the beginnings of passion, the loss of virginity; it mirrors Britomart's enrapturement at the sight of Artegall and foreshadows her own wounding by the evil Busirane. Britomart's wounding by Gardante, the figure who represents sight, refigures the fate of Actaeon. In place of the erotic chase in which nominally distinct male subject and female object fatally exchange the roles of predator and prey, Britomart pursues a quest in which risk and subjective engagement are necessary conditions for going forth.