The Faerie Queen and the Bower of Bliss
This blog began partly through my interest in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Specifically the image of the magical, enchanting, and evil gardens.
Here follow some musing I have taken on the whole of the first and fifth books….
When the Redcrosse knight sees false-Una in bed with Archimego’s conjured squire, he becomes restless and agitated, and decides that he must ‘hastily…fly’ for ‘he could not rest’ in this now tainted hermitage(I.ii. 5-6). The lustful sin which he witnesses spurs the knight into action and encourages the next steps in the adventure to battle Sansfoy, and so on. Most critics agree that the narrative of Spenser’s Faerie Queene impinges on Redcrosse’s (and other chaste knights’) active reactions against such instances of sexual sin with their own virtuous ambition in mind. However, by over-focusing on chastity in the narrative, Spenserian critical discourse fails to acknowledge the other narrative driving force: a rebellion against sloth, ignorance, and despair. Indeed, had Redcrosse decided to languish after witnessing false Una in flagrante, he would not embark on his next exploits. Moreover, if he decided to linger with the real Una at the coles of Book I, then the subsequent books could not take place. If Britomart found and married her lover, she would no longer be the almost divinely virginal knight which she is billed as. If Guyon took any of Mamon’s offers, or if Timias submitted to any of his romantic interests, there would be no more pursuit – no more striving – and their heroism would abruptly end. In all of the instances where lustiness occurs, it is accompanied by this triad sins of; sloth, ignorance, and despair. These sins are drivers of failure and disaster in conjunction with Spenser’s values of chastity – and most significantly: the failure of ambition which accompanies prurience. Consider that in Book II, the term ‘idle’ appears 28 times, ‘lust’ appearing only 24; and in Book III both words appear exactly 20 times.
When his lords and knights give into the temptations of enchanters, Spenser is careful to point out that their failure is not only sexual, but ends badly because it primarily hints at intellectual and spiritual corruption. Secondly, violent ends come from sexual incontinence (not through unchasteness per se) but through the sense of despairing hopelessness after giving into temptation. Thirdly, sexual sin leads to beastliness in mankind as lovers ‘give in’ to baser desires, and no longer strive for nobility or holiness. Beyond this, Spenser also shows the sin in sex through the sloth and laziness which comes after sexual conquest – the knight must end his questing with the lady, and the lady is no longer the object of virtue after she has been ‘conquered’ (Mesley, p30). With the relaxation from the conquering – the ‘completed’ sexual and narrative mission, there is not more ‘point’. Necessarily then, we see that the sin of lust is not inherently awful in Spenser’s Faeryland – but the accompanying despair, ignorance, sloth, and the end of striving, which is truly the Devil’s work (Wofford, p121). Maybe this is why the Faerie Queene herself is never found, and her hunt must go on in perpetuity – once she is found, the knights may rest – but with rest is the end of self-improvement, and arguably, the end to writing and producing moralising works of literary fiction.
Most obviously, giving in to sexual sin anticipates gore and villainy in The Faerie Queene, and less obviously in Amoretti. Lewd sex for Spenser is a source of ‘antisocial impulses’ and creates moments which serve to both entice the knights and ‘sicken them’ (Greenblatt in Eggert, 2000). Then, giving into sexual sin inevitably leads to violent ends. In Book I, Redcrosse meets Fradubio, ‘once a man, now a tree’ . The tree-man implicitly had sexual encounters with the enchantress, evidenced by the innuendo he states in having; ‘took Duessa for my Dame’. But the warning against ‘play’ was there from the beginning – as Spenser shows using a pun in the following stanza: ‘and in the witch unweeting joyd long time’. This line is pivotal in Spenser’s melding of lust-sin and ignorance-sin. Fradubio not only gives into temptation, but does not recognise that in ‘witch (which)’ time he spends with Duessa, he is encountering a ‘Witch’. The pun is emphasised for the reader with the alliteration on ‘unweeting’ which emphasises that the witch is tied to unwittingness and ignorance on his part (Maley closely analyses Spenser’s careful punning in many more contexts). Interestingly, the only other recorded uses of ‘unweeting’ occur in the Wycliffite Bible (Acts iii. 17 ) and in a work by Usk misattributed to Chaucer – both in contexts which emphasise intellectual rigour over earthly pleasure. To return to Fraudubio’s fate we see that his false Love and combined ignorance lead to an horrific fate. But Spenser does not allow too much sympathy, anaphorically repeating that the knight ‘now a tree’ was a ‘wretched man, wretched tree’. Then he rhymes Fradubio’s real sin of having ‘nature weake’ with his fateful end when Duessa uses her ‘cursed will to wreake [his transformation]’. Evidently, the disaster ‘wreak[ed]’ is tied to his nature ‘weake’ by the end rhymes. This is compounded by tree-Fradubio’s literal weakness as his branch breaks off, and blood spurts out of the violently plosive, ‘bleeding bough’. Luckily, the Redcrosse knight is able to seal the hole, ‘And with fresh clay did close the wooden wound’. Unluckily he is not able to recognise that Fidessa is in fact the ‘monstrous’ witch, the ‘false sorceresse’ named Duessa. Thus the next trial at the House of Pride begins, and increasing violence ensues.
Ignorance, then, is a warning precursor to sexual sin – in Fradubio’s example, as with Sonnet 47 – that ignorance holds equal culpability for the knights and lovers as lust does. However, the sin of sloth manages to overturn and overtop sexual sin more than ignorance does. In some instances Spenser leaves sloth alone as a sin, but to start with I will analyse it in conjunction with its partner: despair. In the start of Book II, Amavia speaks of her late husband’s lusty weakness in the Bower of Bliss. Leaving her ‘enwombed of his child’ he went to ‘to seek aduntures wilde’, but fell prey to Acrasia’s enchantments. His flaw is not the lust alone, but his carnal weakness; ‘for he was flesh’. Significantly, Spenser uses parentheses to demarcate comments which frequently feel like they go beyond the text and address us: ‘ye…’. Thus in writing ‘(all flesh doth frailitie breed)’, we hear the voice not of any character, nor even of the in-story narrator, but a greater narrator – the same parenthetical voice which is used to report speech. This might be closest to Spenser’s implied author. Clearly, the bodily frailty of Sir Mortdant is the real failure. His sin is not of the lust alone, but that he has no ‘better will’, that he is unable to strive and overcome her advances. Soteriologically, Mortdant has stopped striving and has effectively given in and given up. In doing this, he has transgressed Spenser’s strongly religio-political ethos that life on earth must be spent in perpetual striving to do work, against a fear of lethargic passivity (Cefalu, p71).
It is important to note that in most cases, Spenser asserts that such lethargy is not totally distinct from lust. When Phaedria takes Cymochles to the island, he is lulled into a seductive ‘slumbere’. Like the liminal state of his passive sleepiness, the boundaries between stupor and sensuality are blurred. Spenser fronts the line with the term ‘carelesse’, which also appears in the stanza before, to suggest Cymochles’ increasing ignorance. This is reinforced as the verse envelops ‘the man’ with the chastising line ending ‘weake wit’. This is extremely similar to the complaint made against Fradubio: lust is bad, but first and foremost, his sleepy weakness is sinful. The images of rest and sex twist together in the next Spenserian verse; Phaedria makes a dream for him wherein the peaceful ‘shadie dale’ he experiences ‘false delights’. Slumber facilitates his unchaste thoughts and deeds, and the verse ends in a more concrete state of her actually ‘lay[ing]’ him down ‘vpon a grasie plaine’. Yet still, the narrative at this point is hard to untangle from dream vision vs. narrative reality. Surely this is intentional, as Spenser encourages our own literary lulling into a dreamy state of murky perception. Like Cymochles does not, readers must work hard to keep their heads above the lilting rhymes (harm’d/charm’d, pleasures vaine/grassie plaine), rolling alliteration (sweet selfe, soone slumbered, blossom fresh and faire &c.), allegory and dreamy narrative, in order to locate proper progress and intended meaning. If the sin of stupor was not evident enough, Spenser clarifies his point with explicit nominative determinism: Phaedria sails to ‘Idle Island’.
We have established from these examples that for Spenser, lust is a sin intimately tied to sloth. These together make a powerful statement for Spenser’s writing against perceived indolence. But the sin of lust and subsequently acting on unfaithful desire prompts a further sin: despair. There are two named examples of despair in The Faerie Queen, firstly when the Redcrosse knight is lured in by despair, and secondly in Amavia’s suicide- both are an acknowledgement of Spenser’s complex relationship with the despair, an utterly sinful state, ‘since it presume[d] to overrule God’s mercy’ (Ryrie, p28). However, the latter example ties closely into my analysis of lust precipitating a domino-effect of sin, and so is worth closer investigation. When we meet Amavia, she is in the process of dying by suicide, having stabbed herself in her now ‘bleeding hart’. She is in such despair precisely because her husband has abandoned her and been killed by his own lusty ambition – but she is not free from sin herself. From his transgression springs her transgression: despair – a veritable evil. Indeed, despair was something quite diabolic and ‘Protestants of all stripes blamed despair not on their doctrines but on the Devil’ (Ryrie, p32). In Spenser’s view both members of this marital union are suffering from spiritual laziness, one has given into temptation, the other has given into despair. This is emphasised through the graphic visual imagery embedded in the narrative. Amavia lies in an uncanny duel state of departing from and providing life, ‘Of death and labour lay, halfe dead, halfe quicke’, indeed this is a protracted and lingering death. From her untainted ‘alabaster brest’ sticks up a ‘cruell knife’. This makes a strikingly crimson and bloody chromatic juxtaposition against her flesh. The compound word ‘goreblood’ summarises the macabre scene, being also a dactylic foot, this puts a real emphasis on the physical ‘gore’ coming from the spiritual failing of despair. Unable to save her, Amavia dies at the hands of Guyon and Palmer, and whilst they acknowledge she is a ‘pitifull spectacle’ and not entirely to blame, she is still flirting with the prospect of ‘eternall doome’ from an unholy death (Johnstone, p203). There is a silver lining because apart from this, she is an otherwise good lady. However, Spenser’s Protestant sentiment remains that ‘the message was—as always—one of perseverance’, and that yielding to anything base and human, whether it be sex or despair, is a categorically sinful failure.
If it was not obvious enough that lust precludes even baser sins, Spenser this shows this through the degradation of human to animal in The Faerie Queene (specifically Book II) and a selection of sonnets from Amoretti. In Book II, the enchantress who hides in the Bower of Blisse turns lust-seeking men into beastly creatures who appear totally ‘lethargic and oblivious’ (Bullard, p172). When Guyon rescues some of the men from the island they are in beast form – but importantly, many of them do not want to return to mankind and the inherent responsibility the life of the questing knight entails. Bullard accurately notes that the power of the Bower is to ‘shape the sojourning knights and mold their sensibilities’ – specifically it turns them into animals and makes them slothful. When the knight Grille is rescued, he ‘repine[s]’ his ‘hoggish forme’. Such an anthropomorphisation of the ‘beastly man’ is not the only problem. As Guyon notes, Grille is in trouble because he ‘hath so soone forgot the excellence/Of his creation’. Contrastingly, Canto IX tells us that, ‘Of all God’s works..There is no one more faire and excellent,/ Then is mans body both for powre and forme’, therefore in giving up his powerful manly form, Grille is effectively refuting God’s work. This is absolute laziness from Guyon and Palmer’s point of view – Grille is not bound to his animal state but ‘chooseth’ it as an easier and less taxing existence. Moreover, the closely paired rhymes and ‘foule’ lexical clusters in this stanza; ‘donghill kind/…hoggish mind’, cement Grille into his beastliness, and provide no room for linguistic escape. Instead, the ‘escape’ is made through Guyon and Palmer – their virtue outshines Grille’s because instead of the apathetic beastliness caused by lusty inclination, they choose to continue their quest (‘hence depart’) and travel rapidly onwards, always seeking, persevering, and striving to move to a nobler place and achieve nobler goals. A similar sentiment is met in Sonnet XXXVII of Amoretti, where the narrative voice self-reflexively warns; ‘take heed therefore, myne eyes’, against the ‘guyle[ful]’ power of the lover who is figured as a similarly ensnaring enchantress, and metaphorically turns him into an animal. Indeed, he is turned into a creature twofold, firstly by physical cornering in an extended conceit of hunting and entrapment by her hair, ‘vnder a net of gold…entangle in that golden snare’. Secondly, he is made an animal through amazement, and by not overcoming his inner, weaker, and baser nature, ‘weaker hart’. Furthermore, the constant pun on hart/heart (Sonnets XXXVII, VII, LVII) brings back the weakness of an animal hunted and a lover’s enchanted heart – both of which refuse to fight against ensnaring powers. Although, as Prescott notes, some of these metaphors are not meant to be entirely serious (consider the lover-as-dolphin in Sonnet XXXVIII), there is a real anxiety of love-sick lethargy behind Spenser’s writing. At every point, the image of the lover giving-up, being caught, or giving-in has a ‘disturbing’ element (Prescott, p154). Indeed, there cannot be a satisfaction of lust without ‘loss’ – as Book II of The Faerie Queene so explicitly demonstrates. To settle into a relationship with a fair woman means to be ‘fetter’d’ in some aspect – and to be caught is necessarily to stop labouring.
When finally this moment occurs towards the end of Amoretti, and the narrating voice is married/bound to his lover it seems the stiving does end. As my argument has argued towards, Spenser does not present this wholly positively, but rather the final love has a certain ‘darkness’ and ‘ambivalence’ (Prescott, p154). The lover lingers at the end like a ‘dove moping in the cold’, void of hope and joy ‘Lyke as the Culuer…mourning for the absence of her mate’.
Is this lover so different from the men turned into beasts by Arcasia? Most significantly, the sense of aspiration and ambition which defines the noblest characters of The Faerie Queene is gone too, with carnal pleasure as his new set-standard, he has stopped striving thus he must complain that ‘dead [is] my life that wants such liuely blis’. Ultimately, Spenser warns us of the lethargic despair which turns us animal and turns us away from a determinedly religio-political state of personal perseverance which comes from believing oneself to be an inherently God-fearing person (Stevens, 2018). Indeed, these sonnets and the sequence of The Faerie Queene express a frustrated anxiety at lazily ‘abandoning’ the mission to complete the quest of holiness and successful authorship (Hadfield, p43).
To finally turn back to the initially presented problem of lust as a precursor to other sinful failures, Spenser presents the object of a desire driven quest as ultimately self-effacing. By this I mean that in obtaining the virginal maiden and satisfying the urge towards sexual pleasure, the object of the hunt is necessarily destroyed. The virginal maiden is no longer virginal once the ‘quest’ is completed, and as such the object of the mission is transformed by the mission itself. After an initial fleeting sense of success, this subsides into a lethargic state. Only this time the lethargy is tarnished, because the chastity once held can never be regained. This goes some way to explaining Britomart’s ambivalent state at the end of Book III. The narrative speaker for a moment seems to voice her own view as she gazes on at Amoret and Scudamour who ‘like like two senceles stocks in long embraceme[n]t dwelt’. Of course the ‘embrace’ is a pleasant enough image, but their reduction to ignorant ‘senseless’ lumps of wood undermines the sweetness of the image. Furthermore, the cutting sibilance of the alliterative ‘senseless stocks’ – encourages a slightly acerbic tone. Spenser’s point is this: that although Britomart ‘oft wisht like happiness’ she must be denied it forever; ‘that fate n’ould let her yet possesse’. For she is an inherently pious character, and as such is pre-destined to lead a good and chaste life. Her life will be eternal questing, eternal striving, and eternal work. As Spenser realises to himself in Amoretti, ‘the heauens know best what is the best for me’ – and that ought to be a state of perseverance. Unfortunately, this lover paradoxically rallies against his prefixed fate, questioning ‘Whom then shall I or heauen or her obay’ – and ultimately allows himself to lustily and lazily make the false choice, the easier choice, and the ideologically unambitious choice of a baser love, and working far less hard.
Yet my argument so far has not addressed the underlying sense behind Spenser’s protestations against lust and the sloth, ignorance, and despair stemming from its action. That is namely an anxiety that by falling into lusty slumber, personal ambition will be slowed and ceased. Specifically, his own role as writer and creator of narratives.
Most literally this happens in Amoretti (sonnet 80) where the book intertextually weaves another of Spenser’s works into its lines. He speaks of metaphorically ‘run[ning’ a ‘race…through Faery land’ in order to compile the full six Faery Queene books. But now in the state of romance which he finds himself in – pining for and eventually successfully wooing the love interest (who is most likely styled on Elizabeth Boyle) – he seeks permission to stop his work and ‘gather to my selfe new breathe awhile’. At once endearing and tense, the narrator’s voice (which is tied extremely closely to Spenser’s own) seeks permission from a multitude of sources to invest in his romance over his work. On one hand, it seems fair enough to rest while he gathers the strength spent on his lusty pursuits – but on the other hand the state he lingers in is remarkably close to the men seduced by the sinful Bower of Blisse. Sonnet 80’s narrator claims that he will soon break from the prison and start his work ‘endevour’ anew. However, as the Bower of Blisse demonstrates, the ‘prison’ of love is impossible to enter ‘Goodly it was enclosed round about’ and equally impossible to exit: ‘As well their entred guestes to keepe within’. The only escape is through destroying the Bower and the love associated with it.
Moreover, this sonnet’s narrator claims that he will linger only briefly ‘in pleasant mew, to sport my muse and sing my loues sweet praise’. Such an image is uncannily close to that of Acrasia’s Bower and surrounding lands which are at once a site of ‘deadly daunger’ and verdantly described as, ‘faire and fruitfull, and the ground dispred/ With grassie greene of delectable hew’. Indeed, the rhyme from The Faerie Queene of ‘hew/vew’ slots neatly into sonnet 80’s ‘dew/mew…/hew’. This links the two otiose and fertile spots dangerously closely. It seems that consciously or semi-consciously, the Amoretti’s narrator is aware of The Faerie Queene’s message against lustful lethargy, but willfully ignores it. Indeed, Spenser himself seems aware and anxious of this – the strange duality of tempting love, and the pressing problem of halting the quest, failing in his pursuit and ultimately ‘not finishing her Queene of faëry’ (Sonnet 33).
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