Spenserian Love and Sexuality: Classical Substructures in The Faerie Queene 2/3

Unfortunately, Redcrosse, an all too guileless, youthfully solemn and impetuous knight, is not forward looking enough to avoid Duessa after his escape from the House of Pride. In canto vii, after returning to the House of Pride to find Redcrosse gone, Duessa quickly finds Redcrosse disarmed by a fountain. Like Ovid’s weary nymph who rests in the middle of the hunt, Redcrosse also stops to foolishly rest—instead of continuing on his quest of holiness—and drink from the fountain cursed by Diana the virgin goddess of the moon, the hunt, and birthing. Now cursed by the virgin goddess of classical antiquity, Redcrosse immediately begins to suffer both chill and fever, contrasting states that “anticipate the suffering of the damned” (1 vii 6 7 7-9).[1] Duessa, like a caring lover, embraces Redcrosse, who “[a] goodly court he made still to his Dame,  pourd out in loosnesse on the grassy grownd”, implying that not only is he committed to her, but that she is his mistress, with whom he ultimately has sex. As a result, Redcrosse is easily subdued by Orgoglio and becomes his captive, just like one of the mighty and proud classical figures in the House of Pride. Redcrosse is a captive not only because he is weakened by sex, but also because he fails to heed Una’s dwarf’s warning to avoid pride, through avoiding fighting Errour, in the beginning of Book I. He then fails to heed the warnings presented to him through Spenser’s use of classical elements— from the structure of Virgil’s Aeneas to the myths of classical antiquity. Sex and pride almost destroy him, and it is only through Una’s reappearance and subsequent help and forgiveness that he is able to kill Orgoglio and continue on his quest of holiness with his true love by his side once again.

The Knight of Temperance: Destroy the Bower of Bliss or Be Destroyed By Lust and Sex

            If Spenser employs the classical epic structure (Aeneid) and classical historical and mythological figures (in The House of Pride and Diana, respectively) in Book I to warn Redcrosse to avoid the destructive forces of pride and sex, then he employs similar classical elements in Book II to force Guyon to destroy the very source of that abomination: the Bower of Bliss. As C.S. Lewis puts it, for Spenser, the Bower of Bliss represents “male prurience and female provocation, sexual nature in disease.”[2] The Bower of Bliss presents a grave threat to Guyon and the virtue of temperance itself, for the threat of absorption to the Bower means that Guyon must act and fight to destroy it. In order to guide Guyon in this fight, Spenser once again borrows a pattern out of an epic from Classical Antiquity: Guyon is guided by the wise and holy Palmer, following the pattern of the temperate Odysseus guided by the divine Hermes so that he can escape from Circe’s enchanted island, emblematic of temptation and lust itself.  Unlike Odysseus, Guyon must not only escape from the Bower of Bliss but also destroy it.

Spenser draws on the classical structure in Odyssey 10 to highlight the dangers of sexuality, personified by Acrasia, in Book II canto xii. However, though Acrasia is similar to Circe in many respects—their potent witchcraft turns men into beasts—her place or residence, the Bower of Bliss, a “most daintie Paradise on the ground [with] painted flowers [and] hills for breathing space,” is even more dangerous than Circe’s because of exquisite beauty (2 xii 58).  Spenser further classicizes the Bower of Bliss when describing its outer gate. Just like the Virgilian gate of Hades, “through which pass false dreams,” the gate of the Bower of Bliss is made of ivory.[3] With the utmost beauty, (which itself is a destructive force of deception and “false dreams”), the gate is engraved with a hideous story of lust and crime from classical mythology, the story of Jason and Medea. Medea, an enchantress not unlike Circe and Acrasia, burns with lustful passion for Jason, leading her to betray her father, kill her brother, and burn alive Jason’s new lover, Creüsa. Spenser describes this scene in the following verse with a tone of an admiration for the art, yet in gruesome detail:

“Ye might have seene the frothy billowes fry,

            Under the ship, as through them she went,

            That seemd the waves were into yvory,

            Or yvory into the waves were sent;

            And other where the snowy substaunce sprent,

            With vermell, like the boyes bloud therin shed,

            A piteous spectacle did represent,

            And otherwhiles with gold besprinkeled;

Yt seemd th’ enchaunted flame, which did Creüsa wed.” (2 xii 44)

Medea is driven mad by lust and therefore unleashes death to all those around here. Just like Jason remains seductive to her until the vary end, so does Acrasia throughout canto xii. She offers not just “simply sexual pleasure—‘long wanton joys’—but self-abandonment, erotic pleasure, aestheticism, the melting of the will, the end of all quests.”[4] Guyon must exercise extreme temperance to avoid Acrasia’s seduction, and the intensity of pleasure and release that Acrasia offers must be overmastered by a still more intense practice of temperance, perhaps even a fear of release. Ironically, the engraving of Medea’s death and destruction on the gate invites Guyon to not only fear the release of lust and pleasure in the Bower of Bliss, but to destroy it, just like Medea destroy all that she came in contact with. There is an erotic appeal of the Bower of Bliss that elicits Guyon’s destructive violence. In this episode, everything that Guyon does and is surrounded with belongs to the order of natural ethics, even the angel that descends from heaven to nurse Guyon back to health after he faints in the Cave of Mammon feels out of place in this book. Nevertheless, Guyon cannot overcome the seduction and destruction around him in the Bower of Bliss all by himself: the story of Jason and Medea invites destruction; either Guyon destroys the Bower of Bliss or be destroyed himself. He can only do with the Palmer’s guidance, and through Grace, just as Odysseus could only escape from Circe through the divine guidance of Hermes and Aeneas could only bring himself to leave Carthage and his lover, Dido, through the divine instruction of Mercury (the Roman Hermes).

Word Count: 1082

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[1] Ibid., Spenser, Hamilton, pp. 92-93.

[2] Greenblatt, Stephen "Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare". “Chapter Four: To Fashion a Gentleman”, pp. 174-177.

[3] Virgil, Aeneid 6.893-6.

[4] op.cit., Greenblatt, p. 172.

Spensieran Love and Sexuality: Classical Substructures in The Faerie Queene 1/3

Professor Leah Whittington

Paper #1: The Faerie Queen

By Bledar Blake Zenuni

Spenserian Love and Sexuality:

Classical Substructures in The Faerie Queene

Classicizing Elements in Spenser’s Ontology of Love and Sex

English 985lw: Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Renaissance Imagination

Harvard University, Fall 2013

Shortly after the publication of The Faerie Queene Books I-III in 1590, Edmund Spenser addressed the question of his work’s intent: “the generall end therefore of all the booke,” he wrote to Sir Walter Raleigh,  “is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline”. In the next sentence of the letter, Spenser further explains that he chose to write this epic, “being coloured with an historicall fiction”, because his audience—ideally everyone who could read and write, but probably only the nobility in the late 16^th century—will enjoy reading it.[1] To Spenser, fiction is both what people take pleasure in reading and a means to educate.  Therefore, although Spenser’s concept of “fashioning a gentleman” raises difficult political and moral questions, (as does the question ‘what does it mean to be a nobleman?’), The Faerie Queene, widely popular in Queen Elizabeth’s court and all of England, is nonetheless able to captivate its intended audience because it is a work of colorful, ‘historicall’ fiction. [Emphasis added].

As a consequence of enthralling people who read it, The Faerie Queene incrementally educates line-by-line, verse-by-verse, canto-by-canto, and book-by-book. In particular, in Books I-III Spenser would like to educate the reader on one of the most taboo and controversial topics of his day: the dynamics between love and sexuality. To take the most obvious allegorical examples, Book III is dedicated to the heroine female Knight of Chastity, Britomart, who appears to promote chastity as a virtue within marriage. Britomart is chastity itself, a virgin who loves the knight Arthegall faithfully, as she endures the trials and tribulations of her quest so that she may find Arthegall, marry him, and then lose her virginity to found a dynasty, thereby preserving her chastity through regeneration. Book II is dedicated to Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, as he struggles against temptations and ultimately succeeds in destroying the Bower of Bliss, an artificial garden harboring unrestrained lust and the sexually deviant Acrasia. In Book I, the Knight of Holiness, Redcrosse, commits a most grievous sin by first abandoning Una, or Truth, and then having sex with Duessa, or Duplicity; Redcrosse is subsequently severely weakened, making him easy prey for the giant Orgoglio, or Pride. By presenting vastly different episodes of love and sexuality in Books I-III, Spenser’s sexual politics in The Faerie Queene, remain a matter for considerable debate.

However, in every major encounter with love and sex presented to the knights of Books I-III, classical figures, ideas, or myths appear. In Book III, for instance, the goddesses Venus and Diana are central to how chastity and love are presented. In Book II, when Guyon enters the Bower of Bliss he can’t help but be almost spellbound by the ivory gate with reliefs from the story of Jason and Medea, let alone the beautiful meadow compared to Rhodope, Tempe, Ida and Parnassus. In Book I, Redcrosse encounters numerous captives, once powerful and mighty, from classical antiquity in the House of Pride; he escapes immediately, only to have sex with Duessa and drink from a cursed fountain that renders him too weak to defeat Orgoglio. In Books I-III, then, one way of making sense of Spenser’s ontology of love and sex is to look at how Spenser uses classical elements to create paradigms of understanding what sexuality means, and how the paradigms change or evolve throughout the first three books. In Books I and II, classical elements are harbingers of a demoralizing, destructive, and deadly force of sexuality, but in Book III Spenser presents something all too different; instead of equating classical figures and the ideas they embody with destructive sex, Spenser classicizes love; love is a means to reproduce, just as the sexual activity between Venus and Adonis is necessary to sustain creation, so too must Britomart fulfill her quest in order to engage in sexual activity with Arthegall to found a dynastic line that will sustain all of England.

Redcrosse, Una and Duessa: How Classical Figures Are Warnings Against Sex

In Book 1, Spenser uses classical elements, both from the Virgilian epic Aeneid and classical mythology, to define what his own epic has to say about love and sex. Spenser begins the opening lines of Book I by invoking the Aeneid. Structurally, the opening of the Aeneid serves as a model for the Faerie Queene, for the Aeneid begins with the lines: “I am he who once turned my song on a slender oaten reed… but now I sing of the terrible arms of Mars and the hero”; Book I’s opening lines echo not only the words, but also the pattern established by Virgil of a movement from pastoral to epic poetry:

            

“Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske,

            As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds,

            Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,

            And sing of Knights and Ladies Gentle deeds" (1 i 1-6)

            

Spenser relies on Virgil’s classical model so that he can use it to build his own. When he introduces Duessa, Spenser again borrows from the Virgilian classical substructure, for Duessa’s descent to the underworld in canto v borrows heavily, both in detail and in style, from the episode when Aeneas descends to Hades in Aeneid 6. But before Duessa descends to the underworld, Redcrosse is tricked by a false vision, implanted in him by Archimago, of Una, his one true love, having sex with a squire. He then deserts Una and meets up with Duessa. Shortly after, Duessa takes Redcrosse to Lucifera’s House of Pride where he encounters numerous figures from classical antiquity. These figures are arguably meant to be immediate red flags for Redcrosse, since their tragic flaws landed them there in the first place. In Canto v, some of the following captives Redcrosse encounters were once the most proud men of the classical era:

“All these together in one heape were throwne,

            Like carkases of beasts in butchers stall.,

            And in another corner wide were strowne,

            The Antique ruins of the Romanes fall,

            Great Romulus the Grandsyre of them all,

            Proud Tarquin, and too lordly Lentulus,

            Stout Scipio, and stubborne Hanniball,

            Ambitious Sylla, and sterne Marius,

 High Caesar, great Pompey, and fers Antonius.” (1 v 49)

Such figures are all lumped together for Redcrosse to observe, which should lead him to question his relationship with Duessa because she brought him there in the first place. It is clear that this episode is a warning to Redcrosse to either get out of the House of Pride, or risk being chained along with the rest of the captives; it is only with the aide of Una’s dwarf, however, that Redcrosse is able to escape by sneaking out the back way.

Word Count: 1187

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[1] Spenser, Edmund, A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki. The Faerie Qveene. "Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh”, pp. 713-718.

For Better or Worse, The Euro is Here to Stay [2/2]

Costs and Benefits Compared

Eichengreen does not discuss the costs and benefits to European countries for maintaining (or adopting) the euro. In order to get a better picture as to why the euro may survive over the long run, we must first understand the costs and benefits associated with it.  In this paper, we identified one of the foremost benefits as reducing price uncertainty because a common currency improves the allocative efficiency of the price mechanism. Several other key benefits include reducing transaction costs between European countries, major welfare improvements resulting from eliminating extreme movements in the exchange rates, and greater price transparency provided by a common currency. By far, the most significant costs associated with the euro are that a country relinquishes monetary policy when joining the currency union. If they tried to implement monetary policy when under a currency union, then capital would flow out of the country, its currency would depreciate, and output would drastically fall. Therefore, when confronted with a loss of domestic competitiveness, that country cannot simply reduce wages and prices to try to regain competitiveness. In figure 1 illustrated below, De Grauwe helps us draw some important conclusions concerning the importance of costs and benefits associate with a common currency (De Grauwe, 2010).

            The intersection point of the benefit and the cost lines “determines the critical level of openness that makes it worthwhile for a country to join a monetary union with its trading partners” (De Grauwe, 2009). To the left of that intersection, the country is better off keeping its national currency, and to the right it is better off when it relinquishes its national currency, replacing it with that of its trading partners’. In figure 1(a) the extreme view of the ‘monetarists’ is shown, claiming that national monetary policies are ineffective as instruments to correct for asymmetric shocks, regardless of such shocks being temporary or permanent; even if they are effective, the use of such instruments invariably makes countries worse off over the long run. Since the critical intersection point that makes it worthwhile to form a union is close to the origin in this graph, many countries in the world would gain by relinquishing their national currencies to join a monetary union. On the other hand, figure 1(b) presents the ‘Keynesian’ view that the world is full of rigidities, i.e. wages and prices are rigid and labor is immobile, therefore leading one to conclude that national monetary policies and the exchange rate are powerful instruments in absorbing asymmetric shocks (De Grauwe, 2009). Such a view is also represented by the original Mundell model: the cost curve is far away from the origin, implying that relatively few countries should find it in their interest to join a monetary union. Lastly, such a view also implies that many large countries that now have one currency would be better off splitting the country into different monetary zones (De Grauwe, 2009).

Why Euro Crisis Isn’t Over: “The Rotten Heart of Europe” or Hope for the Future

The question that still remains to be answered in this paper is: are the reasons that Eichengreen outlines in his article (and the view presented by monetarists in figure 1a) strong enough to silence the vocal naysayers of the euro’s survival such as the Keynesians and Bernard Connolly in The Rotten Heart of Europe? On one hand, there can be no doubt that the euro has the potential of becoming a major international currency. It has already done so in the international bond market and by acting as an international reserve currency. But is the situation in Europe getting worse and worse from the perspective "of real live people, and families and firms and economies," as Bernard Connolly still holds (Carny, 2013).  For example, “in early 2013 the EU reported that the euro-zone economy shrank by 0.9% in the fourth quarter of 2012. For the full year, gross domestic product fell 0.5% in the euro zone” (Carny, 2013).  Connolly predicts that, in the foreseeable future, probably the same members of the currency will be in place, though the monetary union will emerge more closer to something like a banking union or disguised transfer union; in a doomsday scenario, Connolly also predicts that there will be further threats of cycles of deflation, depression, and default in southern Europe, the Iberian peninsula, and potentially other regions in Europe. Whether or not Connolly is right is a controversial matter of debate.

However, in both Connolly’s and Eichengreen’s assessment, the Euro is probably here to stay, for better or worse. What is contended, then, is whether the euro will act as a source of stability in the European market and whether it will establish a firm position as a world currency. In order to achieve these two objectives, it is imperative that the economic size of the Eurozone increases, that there be macro and monetary stability, and that there is depth and sophistication of the financial markets backing the currency. Beyond that, the precise policies on which European governments cooperate will tell the tale of the euro’s future.

Word Count: 847

For Better or Worse, The Euro is Here to Stay [1/2]

For Better or Worse, the Euro is Here to Stay:

A Response to Eichengreen’s “Is Europe on a Cross of Gold?”

Since the introduction of the euro as a common currency on January 1^st 1999, it was apparent that the European monetary union is at the heart of the whole European Union project. The common currency is the foundation on which the European Union is built, not least because it improves the allocative efficiency of the price mechanism by reducing price uncertainty. After all, the reason to have a monetary union in the first place is to have a strong source of stability in Europe, not just economically but also politically, by establishing a fully integrated single goods, services, and financial market. However, since the advent of the Great Recession, the monetary union has produced disasters, particularly in the Iberian peninsula and southern Europe: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain (the so called PIIGS) have gone the way of the 1930s with cycles of deflation, massive banking crises, more sovereign debt, and social and political crises. Because European governments lack a national currency to depreciate, and lack the power to relax credit, they face an unbreakable constraint on reflationary action to counter the massive deflationary shock of the Great Recession. One popular argument in response to this constraint is to abandon the euro: just as the gold standard was abandoned after the Great Depression, so too should the euro be abandoned so that countries have the ability to depreciate their currencies, and loosen credit. This argument has both pros and cons, but, ultimately, will not hold: for better or worse, the euro is here to stay.

Four Key Differences Between the Arguments Against the Gold Standard and the Euro

In his article, “Is Europe on a Cross of Gold”, Eichengreen states four key differences between the arguments against the gold standard and the arguments against the euro that leads him to believe “that maybe—just maybe—the euro will survive” (Eichengreen, 2012).  First, the European Central Bank (ECB) has the capacity to quickly mount a monetary response. By contrast, when there were many central banks, it was difficult to get them all to move together because they

viewed economic prospects through different lenses. Though Eichengreen’s first difference that the ECB can adopt decisive matters quickly is supported by empirical evidence, it is not clear to what extent the ECB’s measures, such as its role in austerity, needs to be adjusted. If the euro were to survive over the long run, the ECB must be able to quickly identify the outcomes of its measures, and adjust them as quickly as they implement them. Eichengreen’s second difference is that the unemployed receive more extensive public support than in the 1930s (not withstanding recent cuts in social programs), making pressure to abandon the euro less severe (Eichengreen, 2012). The question that remains to be answered, however, is “how much less severe and whether the political center can hold” (Eichengreen, 2012).

Eichengreen’s third key difference is that political preconditions for a cooperative response are better today: though political tensions still do exist, particularly between France and Germany, it is almost certain that they will not begin to rise to the level they were at during the early 1930s. One important corollary to this argument is that European countries today are more interconnected—culturally and economically—and are prepared to work together to save the euro, “fearing that its collapse would jeopardize their single market” (Eichengreen, 2012).  Finally, Eichengreen’s fourth key difference highlights that abandoning the euro would be substantially more disruptive than abandoning the gold standard was: “reintroducing the national currency in order to depreciate it, but leaving the euro value of other financial instruments untouched, would destroy balance sheets and wreak financial havoc” (Eichengreen, 2012). In the 1930s, by contrast, bank deposits, along with most other public and private debt, were denominated in that national currency; when a European country abandoned the gold standard, all it had to do was, literally overnight, stop backing their national currency with gold. In short, though Eichengreen argues that the greater scope of cooperation that exists today bodes well for the euro, he is quick to highlight that it is the precise policies on which European governments cooperate that will tell the tale (Eichengreen, 2012).

Word Count: 718