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

Losing Virginity and Preserving Chastity: A Quest of Sex and Regeneration

            “It falls on me here to write of Chastity,” Spenser announces in the opening lines of Book III, “the fairest virtue, far aboue the rest.” Undoubtedly, to Spenser Chastity is the greatest virtue of all, attaining the “highest place in maintaining the autonomy of the human (traditionally female) body, that is, preserving its integrity inviolate.[1] As the climax of the first three books, Book III is an allegory about a female night, the personification of (and perhaps an emblem of?) Chastity itself, Britomart. Britomart is invincible while she wields her magical lance, and remains unconquered, easily defeating Guyon when they cross paths for the first time. At the heart of Book III is Britomart’s quest to find the man she’s fallen deeply in love with, the knight Arthegall, marry him, have sex, lose her virginity, and found a dynasty that will sustain all of England. Up until this point, sex and love were seemingly incompatible, for in the first two Books sex is both seductive and destructive: love is barely mentioned at all in Book I (except for Redcrosse reuniting with Una after being captured by Orgoglio) and never mentioned in Book II; and sex is either to be avoided or destroyed. In Book III love and sex are not at all incompatible; in fact Britomart loves Arthegall and must therefore have sex with him to consummate that love. She falls in love with him by looking in Merlin’s mirror, perhaps seeing a part of herself in him and highlighting a sense of self-love in the process.

            Love and sex, then, are not only compatible with each other but also compatible with Chastity in Book III. Book III is interested in physical regeneration (whereas Books I and II were interested in spiritual regeneration). Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that Britomart have sex with Arthegall in order to give birth and keep her family line functional. Here, Spenser highlights love in a version of chastity, a love that is meant to reproduce. When Britomart looks in the mirror and falls in love with Arthegall, Spenser immediately invokes the story of Narcissus from classical mythology. The ontology of love can thus be understood, at least in one respect, in the classical substructure of self-love. Though Spenser is careful to point out that, for Britomart, this doesn’t lead to more self-love which is ultimately destructive (as it was for Narcissus), he nonetheless invokes the classical story for the reader to make sense of where love comes for from Britomart: within. In order to guard her from the perversions of outward love and sex, Spenser adorns Britomart with protective armor and a magic lance, thereby representing the idea of the female soul as a castle to be guarded. Like the virgin Belphoebe, who was raised and guarded by Diana, the virgin Britomart, must be guarded and protected from all outward perversions. Unlike Belphoebe, Britomart’s quest is to not stay a virgin, but to devote her love and her whole self to Arthegall so that she may bear offsprings, just like Belphoebe’s twin Amoret, raised by Venus, whose quest is to devote her love and her whole self to her love, Scudamore.

Britomart shares traits from both Belphoebe and Amoret, being a virgin and being a woman dedicated to only one man. Spenser begins to blend characters and stories from classical antiquity to exfoliate versions of love into one, culminating in one comprehensive philosophy of love and sex in the story of Britomart: the quest to remain a chaste and noble virgin, guarded by armor and guided by self-love, and ultimately find Arthegall so that she may consummate her relationship with him, and give birth to a royal line that will lead the people of the land, thereby preserving losing her virginity yet preserving her chastity through regeneration. Another way that Spenser highlights what love and sex means in Book III, is by presenting Venus, the personification of love. One version of Venus is as an overprotective, suffocating force of love keeping her lover, Adonis, from his hunt and therefore from being a man; yet another version is death itself—following from the tradition of Virgil and Ovid—as Venus, Love personified, is on her knees weeping over the wounded Adonis. And yet another version of Venus, that is presented is a force necessary to repopulate and sustain the world, for the sexual activity of Venus and Adonis is necessary to reproduce. In the Garden of Adonis, the reader is introduced to this version in a vivid detail and dramatic fashion through the image of thousands upon thousands of naked babies:

“He letteth in, he letteth out to wend,

            All that to come into the world desire,

            A thousand thousand naked babes attend

            About him day and night, which doe require,

            That he with fleshly weeds would them attire,

            Such as him list, such as eternall fate,

            Ordained hath, he clothes with sinfull mire,

            And sendeth forth to liue in mortall state,

Till they agayn returne backe by the hinder gate.” (3 vi 32)

Though Spenser’s allegory of the Garden of Adonis is not necessarily stable and thus subject to much controversy of interpretation, one thing is clear: mortal love is necessary for regeneration, with death being a natural outgrowth of love. The “thousand thousand” naked babes are mortal but part of the natural cycle of love and death. Britomart, too, is part of the natural cycle of love and death, for when she dies, her children and her children’s children will have to love and have sex so that they can make sure that her line survives. Therefore, what Spenser presents in Book III are different exfoliations of versions of love and sex that arguably all blend into a justification of sex for Chastity: Britomart will fully preserve her chastity if she has sex with the right person (Arthegall) at the right time (perhaps after consulting Merlin again) that brings forth lots of naked babies. 

Conclusion: Classicizing Love and Sex

            In Books I-III Spenser uses classical elements—in the form of historical and mythological figures, and patterns and substructures borrowed from Classical Antiquity— to move from first warning the knights against sex, then justifying the zealous destruction of sex, and ultimately accepting the necessity of sex in love for the purpose of regeneration. In Book I, Una’s dwarf warns leads Redcrosse out of the House of Pride, where classical characters are chained because of their lustful and proud ways; it is only through Una, his love and Truth, that Redcrosse survives

from his fall from grace when he has sex with Duessa; in Book II the inscription of Medea’s destructive nature on the ivory gate of the Bower of Bliss foreshadows Guyon’s destruction of the Bower itself; in Book III the stories of Venus, Adonis, Amoret, and Belphoebe and the description of the Garden of Adonis serve to not only highlight different aspects of love and sex, but ultimately fuse to justify the preservation of chastity through sex for the purpose of regeneration. Classicizing elements in The Faerie Queene, Books I-III, then, are employed by Spenser to warn against the evils of false love and non-purposeful sex (Redcrosse with Duplicity), to justify the destruction of enticing beauty harboring unrestrained lust (Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss), and to advocate for an anatomy of love that “extends outwards to the natural order and the cosmos, and to the political order in which ‘most famous fruits of matrimoniall bowre’ (3 iii 3-7) are the progeny of the English kings.”[2]

Word Count: 1273

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[1] op.cit., Spenser, Hamilton, pp. 1-10.

[2] op.cit., Spenser and Hamilton, pp. 14-16.

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