Copyright @2001 Sarah Kennedy, All Rights Reserved
Jonathan Goldberg showed us, in Endlesse Worke
(6-7) that the endlessness of the Faerie Queene is inherent in Spenserian
narrative. Many other readers have noted the problematics of the political
allegory surrounding representations of Elizabeth: the embarrassingly subservient
role of apologist for Elizabethan brutality that Spenser takes on, the
unlikely prospect of the reward Spenser craved?return to England?from an
increasingly irascible queen. I'd like to focus on the cultural boundaries
of narrative representation and to suggest that the allegorical elements
of the Faerie Queene presents characters who participate simultaneously
in literary convention and political representation?what we might call
the text's "two bodies." The literary conventions of characterization can
be read as psychological play on the author's part, which finally breaks
down as the poem's project disintegrates in the shadow of the real queen.
This "shadow" of Elizabeth appears in a number of important female characters,
but her most obvious and problematic portrait is the Faerie Queene herself?elusive,
unpredictable, and powerful. Spenser's allegory is driven by two competing
desires: literary achievement and political advancement. As the conventional
female characters?often limited in scope of power and development?clash
with the political reality of Elizabeth's single reign, however, the possibility
of closure evaporates.
This conflict may be read primarily as a psychological
one played out through literary choices. Seen through a Lacanian lens,
the Faerie Queene has an immediate problem: "insofar as the elemental
illusion of sameness is concretely attached to the mother, primary Desire
is enigmatically linked to the female; insofar as the secondary experience
of difference is both abstract and attached to the father, law is likened
to the male" (Ragland-Sullivan 269). Lacan's mirror stage, we should remember,
is a metaphor; even so, however, female literary types available on hand
for Spenser tend to follow this description to the point of prescription.
But what to do when your phallus is in a powerful woman's hand? Speak carefully
and try to take back power, in Spenser's case, through a story that celebrates
the queen. The problem of conventional narrative representation, however,
remains, and representations of Elizabeth fragment as the text attempts
to locate and fix the body of the historical queen within its linguistic
borders.
One theoretical site for exploring the structures
of the Lacanian problem in the Faerie Queene is Jung's theory of
archetypes. Lacan and Jung are strange theoretical bedfellows, even when
we're discussing desire. For both, however, the unconscious seeks its expression
through linguistic patterns: for Lacan, the unconscious is structured like
a language (Lemaire 7); for Jung, the unconscious is structured like a
narrative (19-22). We need Lacan to understand language as "always pushing
the mother away" (Lisberger). Jung's theoretical model of archetypal images?what
I have called elsewhere "culturetypes"?tempers this with the possibility
for a double-gendered unconscious set of characters. If Jung is right (23-36),
then what appears in the Faerie Queene is a sort of literary cross-dressing:
the male poet trying on the queen's body to see how he looks in it. Lacan's
system, however, suggests that he can't get there from where he begins,
and Jung's short list of female archetypal characters?who reflect the patriarchal
assumptions inherent in the journey-myth model to which Spenser's epic
adheres?short-circuits closure as well. Any attempt to language the queen,
mother of the country, virgin mother of the political and religious realms,
is going to fail, self-destruct, fragment in the absence of the literary
powers?the knight, the king, and, finally, the Christian God?that embody
the Law of the Name-of?the-Father.
In the Faerie Queene, the impersonation of
divinity is problematic from the beginning; Elizabeth, the "holy virgin"
of Protestantism, so permeates the poem that the Muse is confused not only
with the Catholic Mary but also with the queen. Elizabeth has assumed the
status of divinity for herself before the poem's construction. Hamilton's
note to stanza two of the Proem suggests that the "holy virgin, chiefe
of nine" to whom the poet appeals for inspiration is "perhaps Clio, the
Muse of History: chiefe being the 'eldest'. . .of the nine Muses.
. . . She is named 'holy virgin' to link her with the 'Goddesse', Elizabeth.
. .who is the source of the poet's inspiration."
This linkage of some of the more important characters
in the Faerie Queene to contemporary figures serves a double purpose.
First, it allows the text to mirror members of the royal entourage, outlining
what the poet perceives to be the "real" parameters of the story: the need
for correction and guidance as well as glorification. Second, it might
be suggested that, if her subjects, such as the housewife who supposedly
saw Elizabeth on the street and exclaimed "Oh, Lord! The Queen is a woman!"
(Hibbert 66), saw their queen as a material, human body as well as the
monarchical body politic, then the Faerie Queene might serve as
the vehicle for accessing that materiality. In other words, the Faerie
Queene's double focus glorifies the political queen to make the person
of the woman accessible to the poet's literary desire.
Literary types available to Spenser, however, complicate
this process, and here, Jung's binary of "maiden" and "mother" archetypes?the
two figures who frame the epic hero's journey?is useful. In the Faerie
Queene, the virgin queen is the locus of divine authority, because
the imagery of Mariolotry has been appropriated by the queen for Protestant
politics. The divine authority of the Maiden is invoked as early as the
Proem to Book I, in which the writer names his muse the "holy Virgin chiefe
of nine" (2) and his queen a "Goddesse heavenly bright,/ Mirrour of grace
and Maiestie diuine" (4). The virgin becomes the queen; the queen is the
divine virgin. When Una appears in Book I, then, the apparatus for her
appropriation by the absent figure of Gloriana rather than her expected
union with Redcrosse knight is already in place. Gloriana, the "greatest
Glorious Queene of Faerie lond" (I.i.3), reflects the queen of the Proem,
"Great Lady of the greatest Isle" (4), and simultaneously anticipates Una.
Una is Gloriana in miniature, and she will finally
be superseded by the queen's command for service. That service is reciprocated
by Una, by the offer of her body in marriage and the service of her kingdom
to Redcrosse, but reciprocation is not allowed within the confines of this
poem. Una's offer is overturned by Gloriana, who demands service without
sure promise of reciprocation even beyond the confines of the poem. The
service to Gloriana, in turn, reflects the service required to the "real"
virgin queen, Elizabeth. Book II suggests the futility of that exercise
insofar as the virgin queen is unapproachable. She exists certainly beyond
the reach of any character, and is attainable by the poet only indirectly:
Then pardon me, most dreaded Soveraine,
That from your selfe I doe this vertue bring,
And to your selfe doe it returne againe:
So from the Ocean all rivers spring,
And tribute backe repay as to their King.
(VI.Proem.7)
If Elizabeth/Gloriana is the source of courtesy, then return to
her, in both Lacanian and Jungian terms, is return to the Mother, but the
mother in this text, upon the language's re-turn (or repayment) becomes
the Father?the King. And in the court of the maiden queen, that Father
is absent. He only appears in such characters as Artegall, who, within
the worldly court, is the queen's servant. Theoretically, a queen in her
own right should not exist; but she does, and her power is maintained only
through a very unProtestant reliance on perpetual virginity. The Father
is present theologically and absent politically. The text has reached a
narrative impasse.
By this point, the containment of the queen seems
unlikely. The initiation of the royal line to be begun by Britomart is
deferred to a post-narrative moment. Dislocations in love relationships
are never adequately resolved. The display of the nude female form in Book
VI, such as Serena and the "hundred naked maidens lilly white" (VI.x.11)
creates the illusion of accessibility through exposure, but possession
is denied. Certainly Serena becomes "knowen to [Calepine] at last" (V.viii.51),
but her nudity is a sign of shame to her which causes her to conceal her
identity until the "day, that doth discover bad and good" forces her. The
union of Calidore and Pastorella results in his being "to her grace commended"
(VI.ix.46), but that grace evaporates in the following canto, when Calidore
is confronted by the sight of the "real" Graces. His blundering lack of
courtesy, the desire to possess the vision, to "know" them (VI.x.17), causes
the vision to vanish and the poet to destroy his pipes, and to disrupt
the poem itself. Goldberg claims that the "failed pleasures" of the 1596
edition are the "pleasures of this text," (3), but this scene points less
to pleasure than to frustration, the inability to capture the language
of the other in representational narrative.
Calidore restores Pastorella, not as his wife, but
as the daughter of her true parents. He leaves the father-mother-daughter
triad in regressive "ioy" which demands the perpetual infantilization of
the daughter (VI.xii.22) while the husband continues the quest that should
have ended, in the expected journey-myth structure, with the recovery of
the bride. His further quest moreover--the taming of the Blatant Beast--is
played out by the poet beyond the confines of the poem, which is now irrecoverably
fragmented. The Beast "now. . .raungeth through the world againe,/ And
rageth sore in each degree and state;/ Ne any is, that may him now restraine,/
He growen is so great and strong of late" (VI.xii.40). The Beast devours
all language; science, the language of "learned wits" and art, "the gentle
Poets rime," are both ruptured and split apart by the "vile tongue" of
the Beast which is "venomous" rather than signifying (VI.xii.40;38;41).
The orality of the Beast points to its femininity; the Beast devours by
mouth, "Barking and biting all" (xii.40). The Beast is the product of the
virginal--and still patriarchal--court over which Elizabeth/Gloriana reigns
alone.
The "mother" type is only tenuously present in the
poem, as an image of the realm of the Fairy Queen and Elizabeth. The Mother
is ultimately an impediment to, rather than a goal of, the quests of the
Faerie Queene; as a marginal figure, she cannot be the generative power
under whose auspices the male characters would be expected to open and
close their journeys. As the knight of chastity, Britomart is too closely
tied to Elizabeth to embody a present maternity, but as the mother of British
royalty, she is the central mother of the Faerie Queene. Britomart's
maternity, however, remains cast in metaphor or potentiality, deferred
out of the text's time frame; the biology of good motherhood remains implicit,
to be realized in some unspecified future, certainly beyond the time of
this narrative.
Power and respect, in the "real world" of the
Faerie Queene, are reserved for potential mothers, such as Cambina
(the daughter of Agape, who is "well instructed by the Fay her mother"
IV.iii.40 and so replaces her), and internalized maternity in male knights.
The emotional wound inflicted upon Scudamour by Ate, the "mother of discord,"
becomes a nurturant mother to itself, which "inly feeds it selfe with thoughts
unkind,/ And nourisheth her owne consuming smart" (IV.vi.1). Nature, that
ambivalent mother, becomes divinized as a result of her connection with
Britomart, the most fiercely potential mother in the text. Britomart is
"That peerelesse paterne of Dame natures pride,/ And heavenly image of
perfection" (IV.vi.24), so divine despite her materiality that she restores
the positive quality of Nature that the appearance of so many giants and
dragons has tarnished. These mothers, however, because of their deferred
maternity, can't adequately push this journey myth forward.
As we might expect, the mother virtually disappears
in the first half of Book V. The Book of Justice, a discriminatory virtue,
belongs, at least in its narrative manifestation, to the male principle.
Masculine justice, however, which hierarchizes and then obliterates the
unjust, is effected by Talus, whose unrelenting violence makes clear Spenser's
self-imposed role as apologist for Elizabethan political brutality. The
Law of the Father appears here as a genocidal drive and proleptically informs
us that (masculine) culture is going to have to win over (feminine) nature,
even a powerfully allegorical Nature. But then, as Lacan reminds us, phallic
law is inherently tyrannical in its artificiality and arbitrariness (Ragland-Sullivan
273).
The marginality of the nurturant Mother to the courtly world of the
Faerie
Queene is reinforced by her absence from Book VI, the Book of Court-esy.
In the complex set of rules and fine class discriminations that make up
courtly conduct, the one contribution made by "dame Nature" is the generation
of some who are "goodly gratious. . .by kind" (VI.ii.2). She does not,
however, grant this grace according to "correct" genealogical rules; the
wild man displays a nobility and courtesy "which nature did him teach"
(VI.iv.11), that submits itself to neither court nor chivalric "code."
He does it by nature, through his "mother" nature, rather than being taught
by his monarch.
Nature as Mother reasserts herself in the Mutabilitie
Cantos, in opposition not to the Law of the Father, to culture, but to
another female character, Mutability, "For, she the face of earthly things
so changed,/ That all which Nature had establisht first,/ In good estate,
and in meet order ranged/ She did pervert. . ." (VII.vi.5). Mutability
has apparently upset the order of both heaven--by attempting to overthrow
Jupiter's reign--and earth--by simply existing. Her influence, however,
only extends as far as Mother Nature's realm, where all things--both good
and evil--are allowed to co-exist. Jupiter, in his masculine realm, rejects
the presence of Mutability, even though her stature is "tall as any there/
Of all the Gods, and beautifull of face,/ As any of the Goddesses" (VII.vi.28).
Her ability to transform, which places her dangerously close to the Mother
herself, keeps Mutability out of Jupiter's heaven, and her appeal to Nature
to correct this situation is doomed by definition.
The narrator's final appeal to "Him that is the
God of Sabbaoth hight" (VII.viii.2) for a vision of Mutability's demise
has at its core the absent Mother, whose decree (perhaps reiterated in
the "fates decree" which granted Jupiter his throne [at VII.vi.33]) allows
the god to maintain his power; "the mirror is splintered by the word" (Ragland-Sullivan
279). Her absence prevents the prayer for a vision of Mutability's demise
from being answered; the Mother remains an unreachable power, as mutable
as her allegorical daughter.
Elizabeth remains unreachable, as well. Representations
of the feminine narrow the possible ways Spenser can successfully bring
his epic to closure, and the trajectory of the Faerie Queene's narrative
is destabilized and finally destroyed by the continued presence of the
historical queen outside the text that seeks to contain her. As the "real
person" of Elizabeth disrupts the representative Virgin Queen, the text
disintegrates, and it concludes with the fragmentary Mutabilitie Cantos.
The title of the final Canto suggests that the project is not simply a
failed one, but shifting, changeable. Unfortunately, there was little literary
precedent for this sort of mutability in epic, or in conventional feminine
character. Goldberg finds that the text of Book VI "discovers the poet
in his essential position of loss" (170). In attempting to capture the
body of the queen in text, Spenser ends up dissecting his own story. The
Faerie
Queene's exploded allegory remains an ironic commentary on Spenser's
competing literary goals, to bind two mutually incompatible bodies, one
conventional, one political, within his text. The father can't come; the
mother can't bear. Language gives out, and Lacanian desire fuses with political
desire as the psychic uneasiness that underscores the narrative
representations of the Faerie Queene begins to undermine
them as well. Spenser can't get to the end from where he begins: outside
the court of Elizabeth, which is defined by the unpenetrated space of her
female body. The Faerie Queene is dismembered, but the queen continues
to reign. The male poet is left in the wilderness of nature, the locus
of unappeased desire, tracing and retracing his linguistic wanderings.
Goldberg, Jonathan. Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of
Discourse. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.
Hibbert, Christopher. The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius of the
Golden Age. Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991.
Jung, Carl Gustav. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the
Self. 2nd ed. The
Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Vol. 9.2. R.F.C. Hull, trans.
Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1968.
Lemaire, Anika. Jacques Lacan. David Macey, trans. London: Routledge, 1977.
Lisberger, Jody. "Feminist Critical Theory." Unpublished paper presented
at Vermont
College. Montpelier, VT: 5 July 1999.
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie. Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis.
Urbana:
U of Illinois P, 1987.
Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. A.C. Hamilton, ed. New York: Longman, 1977.
Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques in Hollywood and Out.
London: Routledge,
1992.