Waiting for Hymen: Literary History as "Symptom" in Spenser and Milton

Elizabeth J. Bellamy

"It falles me here to write of Chastity," announces Spenser--with perhaps some trepidation--in his proem to Book 3 of The Faerie Queene. ¹ Had he chosen, at this moment, to deploy one of his many enigmatic and punning slippages that recur throughout his epic, Spenser could have just as appropriately announced that it "fails" him here to write of chastity; for if it is true that, unlike the more properly epic legends of holiness in Book 1 and of temperance in Book 2, it is chastity that is the subject of Spenser's first "failed," self-unravelling narrative in his epic, then we might consider the possibility that the concept of chastity, despite its surface innocence, may be a kind of representational scandal. ²

It "falles me here" within the bounds of this essay to examine two key representations of chastity in English literary history. Of one thing we can be certain from the outset: the concept of chastity ("that fairest vertue, farre aboue the rest" [proem.3]) and its privileging of the female body as the site of its operations always make their appearance at the intersection of what has come to be known as sexual politics. In her recent book Chaste Thinking, Stephanie Jed, for example, uses the metaphor of "chaste thinking" to show how Florentine humanism was structured on a virtual "ideology" of chastity. ³ Examining the ways in which the rape of Lucretia and the subsequent expulsion of the Tarquins were used to mark Rome's transition from a monarchy to a republic, Jed analyzes the public writing of fifteenth-century Florence and its reproductions of the rape of Lucretia (and Brutus's subsequent "castigation" of her violated chastity) as nothing less than a literary topos for the expression of the city's own political ideals. The larger implication of Jed's study is that the relationship between sexual violence (to the female body) and humanistic discourse is directly motivated; it is a relationship that insists on the priority of a socio-political reading whenever chastity is invoked in Early Modern literature.

Thus chastity may be viewed as an inherently materialist concept that will always exceed the textual bounds of a merely literary representation. [End Page 391] And certainly ever since Maureen Quilligan's ground-breaking assertion, in her Milton's Spenser, that "Elizabeth's virginity was a political act," readers of The Faerie Queene have been well aware that the intractable and highly public fact of Elizabeth's own chastity has resulted in a distinctly feminist materialist inflection to any Elizabethan literary representation of chastity. ⁴ All of which returns us to the "failed" narrative of Spenser's Book 3. The proliferation of Spenser's many partial embodiments of Elizabeth's chastity (Florimell, Belphoebe, Britomart, Amoret), entangled, as they become, in a kind of Ariostan deferral, presents such troublesome questions as: what does it mean to represent (materialist) chastity in fictional narrative? Can there be such a thing as a coherent political allegory of chastity? Is chastity a kind of extreme limit case for representation itself?

In more ways than one, these questions concerning the difficulties of representing chastity lead to one of the larger and more enduring questions within the literary history of Early Modern England: what precisely does it mean to trace a literary continuum between Spenser and Milton--or, put another way, what are we implying when we speak of "Milton's Spenser"? Despite Milton's oft-cited praise in his Areopagitica for "our sage and serious Poet Spencer," the issue of Milton's ambivalent reception of his admired precursor is enormously complex and not easily resolved. ⁵ And in any attempt to determine the extent to which Spenser's reproductions of chastity in Book 3 (and, in particular, the "symptomatic" chastity of Amoret) contributed to Milton's representations of the chaste Lady in his masque Comus (or, more formally, A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle), the issue is not further clarified by simply invoking the rather worn-out concept of literary influence. John Guillory asks provocatively, "Can Milton, after all, do without Spenser?" ⁶ For the purposes of my essay, I take Guillory's question to be another way of asking: can we simply say that Milton borrowed from Spenser? Or rather, did Milton forget that any literary representation of chastity can only be a symptom--a symptom, that is, not just of larger socio-political forces exerting their pressure on the text, but the symptom that is the intertextual phenomenon of literary history itself?

First, I wish to be clear about how I will be using the concept of "symptom" in my essay. I have borrowed this highly resonant (and, for that very reason, highly problematic) term from Christopher Kendrick's "Milton and Sexuality: A Symptomatic Reading of Comus," a brilliant essay that nevertheless overlooks some crucial points about why the Lady's chastity is indeed "symptomatic." ⁷ In his essay, [End Page 392] Kendrick first offers a psychobiographical, Freudian reading of Milton. He then rejects this reading, arguing that the Lady's chastity is a highly contradictory and overdetermined moment in Comus, a moment that the author is not fully in control of. Kendrick, in effect, rejects Freud and favors Foucault, interpreting the Lady's symptomatic chastity as overdetermined because it marks the moment of sexuality's emergence as an episteme. In the essay's final stage, this Foucaultian reading is, in turn, also rejected in favor of a Marxist interpretation: the Lady's chastity is symptomatic because it signals the emergence not so much of sexuality, but of bourgeois virtue within an increasingly capitalist England. Kendrick's deployment of the term "symptom," in other words, gradually becomes a kind of floating signifier, not fully Foucaultian, not fully Marxist--but, most emphatically, not at all psychoanalytic. ⁸

Kendrick's essay is an impressive display of how contemporary critical theory can enrich our understanding of representations of chastity in Early Modern England. But I argue that in Kendrick's theoretical progression from Freud to Foucault to, finally, Marx, what has been occluded are some of the more intriguing and enriching psychoanalytic implications of the term "symptom," which (it bears remembering) is a term that originated with psychoanalysis. A symptom appears, after all, because something has been repressed. It is not that I intend in my essay to argue for a return to Freud. But I would like to emphasize that if the Lady's chastity is symptomatic (that is, if Milton's representation of the Lady's chastity is so complex that it cannot be fully articulated in the text itself), it may also be due to the contradictions and overdeterminations of literary history--contradictions that assume a distinctly psychic resonance.

I will argue that to trace a literary historical continuum from Spenser to Milton is to do nothing less than to trace a genealogy of chastity in the English Renaissance. But there is much more at stake in my argument. If we remember that the concept of literary history has, in recent years, been rendered virtually obsolete by the new historicism (and its sweeping paradigm shift away from often outmoded questions of literary influence as such), then, in its broadest scope, tracing a genealogy of chastity from Spenser to Milton is also to offer a possible means for a rapprochement between literary history (a literary history conceived psychoanalytically) and socio-political critique. If the chastities of Spenser and Milton are symptomatic, it may be not just because of a political unconscious that (de)structures the concept of [End Page 393] chastity, but also because of the more private but equally discontinuous repressions that constitute literary history itself. Is the Lady's chastity symptomatic because Milton could not articulate his own repression of Spenser?

Specifically, I intend to focus on the symptomatic chastities of Spenser's Amoret and Milton's Lady in Comus, published some forty years after The Faerie Queene in 1634. What these two avatars of chastity have in common is that both are immobilized captives of the malign enchanters, Busyrane and Comus, respectively; and in both cases, their respective rescues by Britomart and Sabrina emerge only as the most arbitrary of solutions to Spenser's and Milton's stalled narratives, the reason for which I intend to examine in detail. I will also state from the outset that my argument will trace a reverse chronology, starting with Milton and then moving back in time to Spenser. Such a reverse chronology suggests a reluctance to follow the conventional chronology of accounts of literary influence; and it will, I hope, serve as a more useful underscoring of how the Lady's chastity in Comus emerges as, in effect, a successful repression of Spenser's Amoret. It is my contention that, in a literary historical approach to a genealogical concept such as chastity, we do well to proceed backwards (the privileged direction of a psychoanalytic temporality); for the full meaning of chastity as a symptom can be revealed only, as Freud would say, nachträglich--only retroactively, that is, as the return of the repressed in literary history. The full meaning of chastity becomes fully manifest only (and ironically) when we can discern a latent Spenser in Milton.

Before moving to the symptomatic chastity of Comus, it might be useful to rehearse briefly some recent feminist new historicist approaches to the concept of marriage in Milton. Such an overview will prepare us for a discussion of why literary representations of chastity (unlike, say, those of the institution of marriage) seem so resistant to interpretation, and, oddly enough, to feminist interpretation in particular. Within Milton studies, one of the more significant and highly successful alliances between feminism and the new historicism has recently been forged by Mary Nyquist. Her essay, "The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost," is a reaction not so much against traditional male criticism in Milton studies as against the so-called second-wave, liberal-feminist Miltonists, such as Barbara Lewalski, Joan Webber, and Diane McColley, and their focus on marriage as a means of defining an essential "female autonomy" for Eve in Paradise Lost. ⁹ Critiquing [End Page 394] the likes of such first-wave feminists as Marcia Landy and Sandra Gilbert, who interpreted Eve simply as a victim of Miltonic misogyny (with the notorious line "Hee for God only, shee for God in him" serving as its locus classicus), Lewalski, Webber, and McColley argue that Eve (and, by implication, the Lady in Comus) can be perceived as benefiting from Protestant reconfigurations of the role of women in what Laurence Stone has called the seventeenth-century phenomenon of the "companionate marriage." ¹⁰ For liberal feminism, Eve is not a victim of misogynist subjugation, but is rather the benefactor of a progressive redefinition of marriage, whereby woman is fashioned to serve as the companion, the "helpmeet" of her husband, in a relationship of beneficent mutuality.

The salutary insight of Nyquist's feminist new historicism is her exposure of the inevitably class-inflected nature of Stone's "companionate marriage" and the consequences for women of its inherently bourgeois emphasis on a private space of interiority. Puritan domestic theory is efficiently summarized by Milton's assertion in Tetrachordon that "marriage is a divine institution joyning man and woman in a love fitly dispos'd to the helps and comforts of domestic life." But the presumed mutuality and sexual compatibility shaping the interiority and bourgeois individuality of the "domestic life"--its "apt and cheerfull conversation," as Milton outlines in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce--disguise the extent to which marital affections must, in the final analysis, be "apt and cheerfull" for the husband. What is occluded in the concept of "conjugal duty" as defining the space of the "companionate marriage" is the inevitability that it is the wife who will be called upon to give up her body to insure that "domestic life" is always a happy space of interiority. ¹¹ It is in this regard then that, as Nyquist argues, the bourgeois married woman must be properly seen as leading a contradictory and discontinuous life: she is part beneficiary of a newly emerging life of companionate leisure, but also part sexual victim within Protestant marriage and its (male) determination of sexual compatibility.

All of which brings us to chastity (and to Milton's Comus) which, of course, plays a particularly significant role in the shaping of the "companionate marriage" because it is only the pre-maritally chaste woman who can be envisioned as the deserving purveyor of "apt and cheerfull conversation" after marriage. Although one anticipation of chastity is its promise of monogamy within marriage, I would contend that, oddly enough, Milton's concept of chastity does not necessarily lend itself to feminist critique as readily as the phenomenon [End Page 395] of Protestant marriage. ¹² One obstacle is the discontinuous gender coding that results from the enchanter Comus's own effeminate orientation. As the son of Bacchus and Circe, worshipper of Venus, and high priest of Hecate, Comus is more the embodiment of a kind of voluptuous femininity than a would-be rapist, thus eluding any first-wave feminist reading of Milton's masque as an oppressive male libido out of control. ¹³

But the masque's treatment of chastity does not particularly invite a so-termed third-wave feminist new historicist interpretation either--primarily because latency would not seem to be any sort of structuring principle for its remarkably thin narrative. After all, there can scarcely be any doubt that Comus presents itself as a manifest allegory of chastity itself: Comus alludes to the Lady's "sober certainty" (M, 263) and her "lean and sallow Abstinence" (M, 709); her Elder Brother praises her for her "true virginity" (M, 437), "chaste authority" (M, 450), and "saintly chastity" (M, 453); and the Lady herself invokes, at various times, the "holy dictate of spare Temperance" (M, 767), "thou unblemish't form of Chastity" (M, 215), and, most resonantly for a Spenserian reading of Milton, "the sage / And serious doctrine of Virginity" (M, 786-87). ¹⁴

All of which is to argue that whereas the precarious subjectivity of the Protestant wife must be subtly teased out and then exposed as contradictory and discontinuous, the chastity of Milton's Lady is its own highly continuous reification, its own manifest thing itself that seemingly disables a strictly feminist reading--defined, in this particular case, as a reading sensitive to moments of women's victimization in the text. If in Paradise Lost it is incumbent upon the reader to focus on the oppression of Eve beneath the surface of her supposedly mutual marriage to Adam, what, we may ask, is a feminist critique expected to do in Comus, where the Lady's chastity, as a form of feminine empowerment against the unruly sexual urges of the male, is always already foregrounded as a positive (and relatively unimperiled) virtue? ¹⁵ What I would like to suggest here is that any attempt at a feminist materialist reading of Milton's concept of chastity is destined to be far more overdetermined than a reading of the concept of the "companionate marriage," where male libido is the final determinate of marital mutuality. And it is because of this interpretive impasse that we can now begin to get a sense of why it is appropriate to refer to the Lady's chastity as a symptom.

But what is it a symptom of? A feminist reading of Comus could begin with the socio-political fact that Milton, like Spenser, wrote his [End Page 396] masque amidst the influence of a powerful cult of chastity at court. Maryann McGuire has demonstrated the pervasiveness of the Caroline chastity cult as shaped by Charles and the Catholic Henrietta Maria and their Neoplatonic celebrations of married chastity. ¹⁶ And as George Sensabaugh argued many years ago, even as the masque became a genre for royalist propaganda, Puritan moralists like Milton condemned the cult--and Comus, in particular, was written not to celebrate the Neoplatonic ostentatiousness of Henrietta Maria's cult of préciosité, but rather to fashion chastity as a mode of personal restraint and virtue. ¹⁷

But in this "old" historical reading, we should not limit ourselves to the simple cause-and-effect argument that Milton's emphasis on chastity is an outgrowth of his Puritan repugnance for Catholic ostentatiousness. We should instead push for the larger claim (as have Kendrick and Richard Halpern) that Milton's celebration of chastity as a mode of personal restraint (what Comus reifies as "the different pace / Of some chaste footing" [M, 145-46]) becomes a significant stage in the shaping of Early Modernity itself; in Foucaultian terms, we may say that we are witnessing the emergence of chastity as an episteme (and the subsequent disappearance of chastity's inherent femaleness). Let us focus for a moment on what is surely the central and distinctly overdetermined dramatic conundrum of Comus, the Lady's "immanacl'd" immobilization in the enchanter's chair. It is noteworthy that what the reader might imagine to be the Lady's greatest moment of physical danger ("in stony fetters fixt and motionless" [M, 819]) is, in reality, a kind of anticlimactic stand-off--a moment of suspense fading into mere stalemate. ¹⁸ The question then arises: how are we to interpret this moment of frozen stasis, this curious stand-off where the narrative stalls and must cede place to the dei ex machina agents of release (Thyrsis, the mysterious haemony, and Sabrina) in order to complete itself?

As I briefly summarized earlier in my essay, Kendrick makes an ambitious attempt to get to the heart of this interpretive difficulty when he perceptively characterizes the Lady's immobilization (her Stoic self-control) as an odd pressure point in the narrative, such that "the Lady's stasis [and her subsequent silence] is symptomatic of something, . . . an argumentative quirk, which can't be accounted for in terms of the masque's own discursive decorum." ¹⁹ Kendrick then argues for Comus as an inherently Foucaultian moment insofar as the Lady's immobile chastity, just as Foucault outlined in his History of Sexuality, comes to represent a new kind of "socio-political regime" [End Page 397] where sexuality not only defines the subject, but also, in Kendrick's deft paraphrase, threatens to become "the source of possible dysfunction." ²⁰ Thus the "regime" of chastity is one that invites monitoring and cultivating as a new focus for virtue itself. In such a Foucaultian (not to mention Miltonic) scheme, the femaleness of chastity becomes occluded within the larger epistemic framework of how virtue itself becomes constituted. In Comus, the Lady's chastity may be interpreted as a new and different deployment of sexuality such that chastity is absolutized beyond the feminine, modulating into a more abstract and ungendered virtue itself. As Kendrick suggests, the Lady's chastity "installs a neutral or paradigmatic dimension in femininity. . . . Thus there is a sense in which the Lady, in declaring her virginal power, is no longer feminine, but simply marks the limit of individual virtue." ²¹ One compelling reason for the Lady's historically troubling silence, then, is that she cannot articulate (she cannot "speak") the discursive space of chastity that constitutes her very being.

The limited space of my essay precludes delving into the complex matter of recent feminist accusations that Foucault's account of the constituting of the modern subject deprives feminism of any effective agency. ²² Suffice to say that a feminist reading of Comus could be justified, pace Kendrick, in urging a counter-move back to the text and demanding a shift of focus from the Lady's static (symptomatic) chastity to the circumstances of her rescue, and in particular to Sabrina, river nymph of the Welsh Severn, as her principle agent of release. In other words, a feminist reading could argue that it is not insignificant that the masque's narrative completes itself only when Sabrina liberates the Lady from the enchanter's chair--with this liberation serving as a distinctly feminine space in Comus. All of which may be to argue that, given Sabrina's origins in The Faerie Queene, what would enable a feminist reading of Comus is not, ironically enough, a focus on the sexual politics of Comus's and the Lady's stand-off, but rather a focus on literary history--on literary history, that is, as a kind of return of the repressed for Milton in particular and for socio-political critique in general. ²³ It is through literary history (as traced by Milton's ongoing and complex engagement with Spenser) that Sabrina as a distinctly feminine (and even maternal) agent of rescue is introduced into the narrative. ²⁴ And we discover soon enough that in any reading of Comus, it is essential to glance back to Book 2 of The Faerie Queene, which, as the legend of temperance, is also an extended meditation on the limit of individual virtue. After all, insofar as the Lady's rescue is first botched (when [End Page 398] her Brothers, reminiscent of Guyon's violence in the Bower of Bliss, smash the enchanter's cup but fail to confiscate his magic wand) and then successfully completed (when Sabrina sprinkles the liberating drops of water from her "fountain pure" [M, 912]), the circumstances of the Lady's rescue are deeply informed by the persistence of The Faerie Queene, Book 2, in Milton's text.

But the larger point here is not so much that Sabrina becomes the rescuing agent of a successful feminist reading of Comus. Rather, I would emphasize that it may be because of literary history itself that Milton's representation of chastity becomes even more symptomatic than it is in, say, Kendrick's (albeit impressive) Foucaultian reading of Comus. It is not insignificant that Milton describes both the "doctrine" of virginity and Spenser himself as "sage and serious;" and thus we should keep in mind that Milton's moments of Spenserian negotiation are strangely overdetermined--almost as if to remind us that any confrontation with the literary past will always serve as a kind of return of the repressed. We know that Spenser was consciously chosen as an ego-ideal for Milton because of the latter's oft-cited and by now thoroughly clichéd praise in his Areopagitica of "our sage and serious Poet Spencer;" but what about the possibility that Spenser's own treatment of "the sage / And serious doctrine of virginity" also served as the inadvertent site of a narrative unconscious for Milton? What about the possibility that despite Milton's conscious debts to Spenser, in Comus he never quite got Spenser right? We are well reminded that the Areopagitica and its deploring of a "fugitive and cloister'd virtue" serve as the occasion for one of the more notorious misreadings in literary history, when Milton refers to "our sage and serious Poet Spencer" as "describing true temperance under the person of Guyon, bring[ing] him in with his palmer through the Cave of Mammon . . . that he might see and know, and yet abstain." Milton's allusion to Spenser constitutes a kind of repression because what the author, of course, forgets in his brief plot summary of canto seven is that Guyon and his Palmer had been separated since the sixth canto where the Palmer is denied entrance to Phaedria's boat.

Given the notoriousness of the Areopagitica's misappropriation of Book 2, the absent presence of Spenser's Palmer has become a kind of synecdoche for a Miltonic forgetting of his precursor, such that it is even tempting to speculate about a Miltonic "anxiety of influence." ²⁵ But what prevents this speculation from merely recapitulating a sort of Bloomian allegory of an Oedipal competition within [End Page 399] literary history (where poets must repress in order to surpass) is that, in Comus, echoes of Spenser are so persisently manifest in the narrative, even as Milton does not quite get him right. Thus a second moment of Spenserian misremembrance occurs in what is, oddly enough, Milton's otherwise quite conscious appropriation of Spenser's Sabrina as the ultimate rescuer of the Lady. Fifty years ago, A. S. P. Woodhouse elegantly referred to Milton's appropriation of Sabrina as an act of "Spenserian myth-making;" but we should consider at this point just how much was excised from Spenser's text in order to produce Milton's mythic "Sabrina." ²⁶ In Spenser's account, Sabrina, chased by her angry stepmother Guendolene and transformed into a river nymph of the Severn, appears as scarcely more than an afterthought, little more than a rounding out of a parable not about chastity, but about the "vaine voluptuous disease" (2.10.17) of King Locrine's and Queen Estrild's adultery. Thus, even as Milton forgets the earlier separation of Guyon and the Palmer, he also represses the circumstances of Sabrina's illegitimate (unchaste?) birth and her mother Estrild's violent murder by the jealous Guendolene. ²⁷ If, for Spenser, Sabrina is scarcely more than an afterthought, a pathetically imperiled "sad virgin," "dead with feare" (2.10.19) of an enraged stepmother, Milton's Sabrina is a more sublimatory "Virgin pure" (M, 826), cleansed of the adulterous lust, rage, and violent jealousy dramatizing Spenser's version--not to mention the arbitrary agent of narrative closure for Milton's stalled narrative. If, for Spenser, Sabrina is a victimized and scarcely noticed by-product of her mother's adultery with Locrine, for Milton Sabrina becomes transformed into a kind of topos for virginity itself.

I wish to contend here that the odd persistence of Spenserian myth-making in Comus prompts a consideration of the psychodynamics of literary history itself. Sabrina is deployed by Milton as the narrative solution to the Lady's static (or even, symptomatic) chastity. But as a narrative solution, Sabrina herself is a kind of symptomatic, ineffable nodal point in the masque--a Spenserian repetition compulsion who is as overdetermined as she is arbitrary. It is odd moments such as Milton's creation of a sublimatory Sabrina that enable us to argue that literary history (like a kind of Lacanian unconscious) is not a repository of meaning as such (which is to say, our time is not well spent pondering the question: who is Spenser's or Milton's "Sabrina"?), but rather an ongoing process of signification whose effects are not always subject to authorial control. In the overdetermined space of negotiation between Spenser and Milton [End Page 400] (where Spenser's Sabrina transmutes into Milton's "Sabrina"), this nymph from the Severn, despite (because of?) her rescue of the Lady, constitutes a kind of unassimilated psychic residue that demands a reconsideration of literary history as (much like the Lady's Foucaultian chastity) itself a discursive practice. Fully as much as a socio-political reading of Comus, it is literary history (and what we might refer to as its at least semi-autonomy from the socio-political) that exposes the arbitrariness of Sabrina as a narrative solution to Milton's stalled portrayal of chastity. ²⁸ The Lady's chastity is saved by the chaste Sabrina--but in the interstices of a Miltonic remembrance and forgetting of Spenser (that is, in the narrative slot known as "Sabrina") lies the real truth of chastity as a symptom.

Let us for a moment return (retroactively) to the anticlimactic stand-off between Comus and the Lady, where the semi-autonomy of literary history also enigmatically exerts itself when the text tries to configure chastity. At one point the enchanter threatens the Lady:

...if I but wave this wand,
Your nerves are all chain'd up in Alabaster,
And you a statue; or as Daphne was,
Root-bound, that fled Apollo. (M, 659-62)

What is most remarkable about Comus's speech is that his threat to transform the Lady into a "root-bound," laurel-like Daphne also constitutes the Ovidian solution to Apollo's attempted assault on Daphne's chastity in the Metamorphoses: Comus's apotropaic threat to the Lady is that she will become, in effect, more chaste (more protected from assault) than she is now. ²⁹ In Comus's seeming parody of Ovid lies perhaps the most symptomatic moment in Milton's overdetermined masque. The Lady's chastity, both a plenitudinous self-sufficiency and a precarious vulnerability, cannot do anything--and her stasis is further mimed by the Ovidian threat that fails to threaten. In other words, the Lady's inability to do anything is mimed by Comus's inability to make Ovidian metamorphosis mean anything consequential for the narrative.

The point I wish to emphasize here is that, once again, it is a misremembrance of literary history that itself overdetermines an exclusively socio-political reading of the Lady's chastity. And we should particularly take note of what is at stake when the overdeterminations of literary history are distinctly Ovidian, rather than Spenserian. The absurd illogic of Comus's non-threat exposes the very concept of Ovidian metamorphosis as archaic and merely literary. ³⁰ That is to say, [End Page 401] Comus's threat is without consequences for the Lady not just because it is illogical, but also because Ovidian metamorphosis (as one solution throughout literary history to imperiled chastity) has lost its affective force in a Foucaultian world where sexuality (read, chastity) must be monitored as what Foucault would call "the source of possible dysfunction." It is not that rapists such as Apollo are not waiting for virgins in the woods. Rather, the point is that the chastity they would seek to violate is itself as reified within the Caroline socio-political order (reified, that is, as an act of bourgeois deportment) as an Ovidian laurel used to be in literary history.

This focus on the obsolescence of Ovid, and the parallel emergence of chastity as an episteme, gets us to the heart of the problematic intersection between Spenser and Milton. Echoing Kendrick, I have remarked several times that, in a Foucaultian scheme, a monitored chastity is always treated as "the source of possible dysfunction"; and it might be just as accurate to say that, in Comus, Ovidian metamorphosis (or the absence thereof) becomes "the source of possible dysfunction" for Milton's narrative. But the larger point to emphasize here is that if this is indeed so, it may be because Milton has forgotten the figure of Amoret, Spenser's own highly problematic ideologeme of chastity. Somewhere between the deterioration of the affective force of Ovidian metamorphosis into obsolete literary allusion and the rise of a bourgeois monitoring of sexuality lies the "perfect hole" (3.12.38) of Amoret as an ideologeme that cannot be thoroughly accommodated into the realm of literary representation.

All of which is to say that it is one thing to talk about the concept of "Spenser's Milton" when the text offers a readily identifiable borrowing, such as Sabrina. But I would also insist on the ongoing relevance of "Spenser's Milton" even (or especially) when Spenser does not appear in Milton's text. In such cases, we can still speak of "Spenser's Milton" (that is, we can still speak of "Amoret" in "the Lady") because of the retroactive repressions of literary history.

It is significant, I think, that our discussion of Amoret can begin where our discussion of the Lady left off--with how Ovid chooses to represent chastity. A recurring topos throughout The Faerie Queene is the preservation of chastity as an inviolate state. If much of Ovid's Metamorphoses constitutes an extended meditation on the precariousness of chastity and the possibility that it can be preserved only through liminal states of supernatural transformation, then Spenser's frequent incorporation of the Metamorphoses as a key sub-text for his poetry seems particularly motivated by Ovidian impulses to memorialize [End Page 402] (to fetishize?) chastity as a kind of "endlesse moniment" to a transcendent purity. ³¹ Spenser's "Aprill" eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender, for example, narrates the Ovidian tale of the river nymph Syrinx who, chased by Pan, is transformed to water reeds such that Pan's pre-orgasmic moans become converted to post-coital harmony. ³² And in Book 2, the Palmer narrates to Guyon the story of how Diana preserved the chastity of one of her nymphs, pursued by the lusty Dan Faunus (presumably the same Dan Faunus whose voyeurism is slated for sadistic punishment by Diana in the Mutabilitie Cantos), by transforming her "to a stone from stedfast virgins state" (2.2.8). Not just a fountain, the nymph is intended as nothing less than "for all chast Dames an endlesse moniment" (2.2.10).

But the transformation of the nymph's "stony feare" (2.2.8) into a "stony moniment" should give us pause to consider precisely what is entailed in these Spenserian permutations of an Ovidian chastity. For Ovid, chastity is distinctly epitaphic. It has no recognizable ontology of its own (unlike the Lady's chastity), but is rather seemingly always already metamorphosed into a tree or a reed or, in Spenser's more stolid transformation, a "stony moniment." Because, throughout so much of Book 3, chastity (as an extended pun on "chaste" and "chased") manifests itself as a fleeing from sexual penetration, Spenser examines, in his more Ovidian moments, the possibility that chastity can be represented only metonymically--through memorializing displacements that freeze-frame chastity's precariousness (its "stony feare") and transform it into something more representationally enduring.

Susanne Lindgren Wofford has perceptively argued that such moments of petrification as Diana's virginal fountain signal "a loss or failure from which the poet as allegorist has gained figurative power." ³³ Wofford's emphasis on the sublating impulses of allegory invites us to consider further the odd symbiosis between allegory and chastity in particular. As vividly demonstrated by Malbecco's compulsion to become "Gealousie" itself, allegory always restlessly seeks its figurative meaning: allegory seeks, in effect, its own kind of Ovidian metamorphosis of the literal. Thus literal chastity, the ongoing and "stedfast virgins state," must always be occluded--sacrificed, if you will--so that (male) allegory can be written.

What, then, of the daunting "ensample" of Elizabeth and her influence on the representation of chastity in The Faerie Queene? In his proem to Book 3, Spenser confidently proclaims, "what needs me fetch from Faery / Forreine ensamples [of chastity] to have exprest? [End Page 403] / Sith it is shrined in my Soueraines brest" (3.proem.1). As the absent center of The Faerie Queene, however, Elizabeth both invites and subverts any representation of chastity; and Spenser was well aware that his allegory could gain figurative power only through the loss of Elizabeth to his narrative--that is, through her metonymic proliferation in "Forreine ensamples" (Una, Florimell, Belphoebe). ³⁴ But if the "Forreine ensamples" of Spenser's allegory constitute one aesthetic solution to the representation of this royal "stedfast virgins state," they also repress the enigma of Elizabeth's chastity: it is so literal--so intractable--that it presents not just a representational problem (it simply would not do for her to become, for example, an Ovidian "stone"), but a social, political, and discursive problem as well. Because so much of Spenser's allegory in Book 3 seeks its figurative (or even, aesthetic) meaning in the social and political problem of Elizabeth's chastity, then chastity itself (as is certainly the case with Comus forty years later) is bound to become a highly refracted and discontinuous concept: it is the point at which Elizabeth becomes at once the poem's most profoundly informing presence and its political unconscious.

So, for example, instead of being presented with Elizabeth and the chastity that is "shrined in my Soueraines brest," the reader of The Faerie Queene must try to interpret the "Forreine ensample" of the enigmatic Amoret and the "knife accursed keene" that is "shrined" in her naked breast. All of Spenser's other avatars of chastity in Book 3 (Britomart, Belphoebe, Florimell) are deeply indebted to Spenser's literary antecedents (most notably to Virgil and Ariosto). But as far as I can tell, the hyper-spectated suffering of Amoret has no obvious literary antecedent. Initially conceived as an Ovidian imperiled virgin, but then denied (like Milton's Lady) the traditional Ovidian metamorphosis that could save her from her predator-magus Busyrane, Amoret is, in some sense, not really of literary history. She is rather a symptom, falling somewhere between the seams of literary history and the sexual politics of Elizabeth's official cult of chastity. Amoret's misery, in short, occurs because Elizabeth cannot be represented within the textual bounds of Spenser's epic.

In the ubiquitous but virtually incomprehensible iconography of the House of Busyrane, Ovidian discourse serves as the backdrop for Busyrane's torture of the chaste Amoret. We can first consider Busyrane's woven "Tapets" and their unrelenting depictions of the pagan libido (the "lusty-hed") of the gods, where the gods of pagan mythology are depicted in a lyrical and rhythmic series of bestial [End Page 404] transmutations: Jove ("Now like a Ram . . . / Now like a Bull," "snowy Swan," "soaring Eagles shape," "In Satyres shape," "like a Serpent"), Phoebus ("Now like a Lyon . . . / Now like a Stag, now like a faulcon flit"), Neptune as a "Steare," a "Dolphin," a "winged horse," and Saturn as "centaur" (3.11.28-44). What is worth noting here is the perversely deformative energy of these Ovidian metamorphoses: these otherwise nimble and athletic enactments of the promiscuity of the gods seem to depict the point at which Ovidian metamorphosis can generate nothing more than reductive tales of primitive physical compulsion. ³⁵ Perhaps even more to the point, the "Tapets" present a world of sexual violence in which Ovidian transformation (most ominously within Spenser's book of chastity) is an option only for the male gods, not their female victims.

The "Tapets"' denial to women of Ovidian metamorphosis as one of literary history's traditional solutions for sexual violation provides a cruel backdrop for Amoret's vulnerability. We might say that one reason why Amoret's chastity is symptomatic is because Ovidian metamorphosis does not intervene to save her--and instead of miraculous transformation, the virgin must suffer humiliation, pain, and sadistic torture in her stand-off with the "vile Enchaunter" Busyrane. In the dangerous world of Spenser's Book 3, it often seems that if a virgin is "chased," like Florimell, her chances of protecting her chastity from pursuers are good. But if she is merely "chaste" (that is, statically or symptomatically chaste--or "unchased"), then, like Amoret, she is slated for torture. Thus, more than simply "immanacl'd," like Milton's Lady, Amoret is "close embard" (3.11.16), with her hands "bounden fast . . . / And her small wast girt round with yron bands, / Vnto a brasen pillour, by the which she stands" (3.12.30). Her naked breast is punctured with "a wide wound . . . / That dyde in sanguine red her skin all snowy cleene" (3.12.20), and, most spectacularly, her heart has been carved out of her body, "drawne forth, and in siluer basin layd" (3.12.22), while Busyrane, "Figuring straunge characters of his art, / With liuing bloud he those characters wrote, / Dreadfully dropping from her dying hart" (3.12.31).

All of which brings us to the massive interpretive difficulties of this strange episode--difficulties which are at all times foregrounded in the text itself. Thus, from the moment she enters Busyrane's palace to rescue Amoret, Britomart encounters only a hermeneutic enigma: in response to the progressive warnings over the palace doors, "Be bold," "Be bold, be bold," and finally "Be not too bold" (3.11.54; italics Spenser's), Britomart "oft and oft [them] ouer-red, / [End Page 405] Yet could not find what sence it figured" (3.11.50); "That much she muz'd, yet could not construe it / By any ridling skill . . ."; she "wist not what it might intend" (3.11.54); upon viewing the figure of Ease, the leader of the Masque of Cupid, she "merueild at this strange intendiment." Much of the episode, then, seems framed by our "reading" of Britomart's "ouer-reading" of Busyrane's (Spenser's?) "strange intendiment."

Over the years it has become somewhat customary within Spenserian criticism to focus on Busyrane's predatory sadism as the central meaning of his stand-off with his captive Amoret. But despite the episode's obvious sadism (compounded by its masque-like emphasis on visual spectacle), the episode of Amoret and Busyrane raises more questions than it answers. Because of the peculiarly symptomatic nature of her chastity, Amoret cannot, like Diana's nymph in Book 2, become an Ovidian "stony moniment" to save herself from her pursuer--but why did Spenser avoid such an Ovidian solution in favor of presenting Amoret's ongoing "consuming paine"? Perhaps it is because he intended the spectacularly vivid emblems of her "wide wound" and its "bloud yet steeming fresh" (3.12.20) as illustrative "ensamples"--but of what? To repeat Paul Alpers's simple but pertinent question: "why is Amoret tortured by Busyrane?" ³⁶ For that matter, the question is first compellingly posed by Amoret's abject husband Scudamour to Britomart outside Busyrane's palace: "Why then is Busirane with wicked hand / Suffred, these seuen monethes day in secret den / My Lady and my loue so cruelly to pen?" (3.11.10). In Spenser's "Letter to Raleigh," that notorious explanatory document that never fully explains, Amoret is said to suffer "most grieuous torment, because she would not yield him the pleasure of her body." But when we consider that, later in Book 4, she is abducted and raped by the figure of Lust as an immediate and quite unsubtle allegory for the male genitalia (4.7.6), Busyrane seems less a rapist, or the male libido out of control, than a precursor of Milton's Comus, enigmatically committed (as a seducer who won't seduce) to preserving a magus-like distance from the object of his own sadism. Rather than seeking "the pleasure of her body," Busyrane seeks a ringside seat for the observance of the visual torments of her body--in the process, creating a kind of weird space of Lacanian intersubjectivity in which the enchanter seems content to watch the pained Amoret watching him watching her be chaste.

This intense but incomprehensible impasse, in which the reader and Britomart both search in vain for interpretive cues from within [End Page 406] the text, eventually forces us to cease "ouer-reading" and remember that the primary difference, of course, between Amoret and her chaste rescuer Britomart or Belphoebe or Florimell (or, for that matter, Milton's Lady) is that, as her husband Scudamour narrates in Book 4, she is distinctly married--which is perhaps the ultimate reason why she has been both abandoned by the transforming magic of Ovidian metamorphosis, and enmeshed in a stand-off with her captor. ³⁷ Instead of trying to pinpoint exactly what "sence" she "figures," we may more properly interpret the figure of "Amoret" as the representationally precarious space of married chastity, that scarcely emergent component of the still-evolving institution known as the bourgeois marriage--scarcely emergent, we may say, because it is strangely resistant to accommodation into literary representation (especially in an epic whose primary gendered reader, Elizabeth, is resistant to marriage itself). The possibility that Amoret's married chastity serves as a kind of political unconscious for Book 3 is complicated even further if we agree with critics, ranging from an earlier generation like Alpers, Alastair Fowler, A. C. Hamilton, A. Kent Hieatt, Thomas P. Roche, and Janet Spens to, more recently, Jonathan Goldberg, that Amoret's abduction by Busyrane from her nuptial celebration is a psychosexual consequence of her fear of intercourse with Scudamour. ³⁸ It is in this sense, then, that the episode of Amoret and Busyrane results in an even more dramatic (and certainly much more painful) impasse between virgin and "vile Enchanter" than the one we witness forty years later between the Lady and Comus. The sadistic and "ridling" iconography of Amoret's torture has seemingly become Spenser's only narrative solution for representing a virgin who cannot be transformed to a "stony moniment," but rather must be made eventually to suffer the terrors of sexual intercourse with her aggressive husband Scudamour if there is to be such a thing as chastity within marriage.

The crisis of representing Amoret's "married chastity" is perhaps most vividly portrayed in the oddly arbitrary moment when her rescuer Britomart forces the enchanter "his charmes backe to reuerse" (3.12.36), such that Amoret's "wide orifice" miraculously heals itself into a "perfect hole," as if "she were neuer hurt." Critics such as Berger and Kenneth Gross have rightly observed that Britomart's rescue is too complete and easy (we can think here also of Sabrina's rescue of Milton's Lady)--and, once again, as was the case with the Lady, we are left to wonder why representations of chastity persistently result in these anticlimactic (and symptomatic) stand-offs. ³⁹ [End Page 407]

At this point, we might pose the question: what is the truth of Amoret's "perfect hole" that the episode has failed to represent? ⁴⁰ I would suggest that Amoret's anasemic "perfect hole," neither fully a process of scarring nor of healing, may, in the end, serve as a vivid demonstration that the concept of married chastity is itself a kind of "perfect hole." The logical extension of married chastity is monogamy within marriage--but before the married couple can accede to a monogamous state, the chaste virgin must allow her hymen to be penetrated. There must, in other words, be a hymeneal "hole" that will potentially be "perfect"-ly monogamous. Amoret's "riuen bowels gor'd" (3.12.28), her painfully disemboweled heart, become then a kind of metonymic displacement for the hymen that must be penetrated. The painful hydraulics of Amoret's "fleshly bleeding" blood and its vivid stains "That dyde in sanguine red her skin all snowy cleene" (3.12.20) therefore mime the flow of hymeneal blood (itself a miming of menstrual blood) and its staining of the wedding sheets. "The hymen," writes Gayatri Spivak, "is the always folded . . . space in which the pen writes its dissemination." ⁴¹ And perhaps this is the final meaning to be derived from Busyrane's mysterious "cruel penning" of Amoret's blood.

In our final look at the House of Busyrane, let us turn to the "ridling" Masque of Cupid, whose reification of erotic impulses is ontologically different from the history of pagan libido as depicted by Busyrane's pseudo-Ovidian "Tapets." The "trim aray" of masquers, including the figures of Fancy, Desyre, Doubt, Daunger, Feare, Hope, Dissemblance, Suspect, Griefe, Fury, Displeasure, Pleasance, Despight, and (perhaps most significantly) Cruelty, is so self-consciously allegorical--so obviously the process by which allegory presents itself as allegory--that again, as is always the case with the overdetermined iconography of Busyrane's palace, we feel forced to interpret, even in the absence of any interpretive cues. ⁴² I would argue that this comprehensive gamut of courtly emotions is part "medieval" (that is, part self-consciously archaic and obsolete)--and part unconsciously, unknowingly constitutive of a moment within Early Modernism itself. The "trim aray" of masquers, signaling, as it does, the preoccupations of a subjectivity in love, may be interpreted as a discursive articulation of sexuality itself, serving as an elaborate (and characteristically Foucaultian) form of surveillance of the emotional life of subjects "in love." The masque, in other words, is an allegory of how sex is discursively produced--indeed, the point at which sex emerges as a "sexuality" that must be monitored and, [End Page 408] judging from the "wide orifice" of Amoret's surgically carved body, anatomized. ⁴³ As a meticulous scrutiny of the interiority of the sexual life of the subject, these literally dramatic figurations of the anxieties, triumphs, and defeats of love reconfigure the pagan "lusty-hed" of the gods into what we might term a newly emergent bourgeois libido--in the process rendering sexuality presentable as a discursive (and literally dramatic) production. In the transition from Busyrane's "Tapets" to the Masque of Cupid, sex as such no longer exists outside of its realization in discourses of sexuality--or, more specifically, in a nascent discourse of chastity that, amidst Amoret's pain, marks before our very eyes a transition from strictly literary (Ovidian) representations of imperiled chastity to the Foucaultian "thing" itself. In short, it is the point at which a psychosexual dread of male possession (Amoret's "thraldome and continuall feare" [3.11.16], as Scudamour himself describes it) must cede place to the (benign?) institution of "married chastity."

The interpretive difficulties of this episode point to the possibility that Spenser could find no literary solution available to represent married chastity. Within Amoret's anasemic "perfect hole"--a literary representation which fails to represent--lies perhaps the private space of interiority that, judging from Milton's Comus, some forty years later will more confidently constitute bourgeois marriage; Amoret's "perfect hole" is the overdetermined (and yet intensely individual) space of her resistance to "conjugal duty," the "companionate marriage," the proper and smooth functioning of "domestic life" itself--none of which can be achieved until she succumbs to sexual possession by her husband. Her "perfect hole" is both a literary trope for her healed wound and a discursive lack which, even less so than Milton's Lady, cannot yet "speak" the phenomenon of the "companionate marriage." In another forty years, as we have seen, the institution of bourgeois marriage will be ideally conceived by Milton as "apt and cheerful"--but in Busyrane's sadistic palace, Amoret's deferral of "companionate marriage" produces only a sadistically imposed "consuming paine" (3.12.21), rendered no less memorable just because her wound has been arbitrarily healed.

To conclude then, maybe now we know why Britomart experiences so many difficulties in interpreting the Masque of Cupid. Britomart's hermeneutic confusion is itself a compelling demonstration that one cannot interpret an emerging episteme within the configuring of sexuality itself. Conventionally, sexual terror is an Ovidian phenomenon and easily enough represented within literary history. But [End Page 409] sexual terror within the bounds of the "companionate marriage" is unimaginable for literary representation; it simply cannot exist. Perhaps it is in this sense, then, that it is more accurate to speak of Amoret's chastity not as symptomatic, but as dysfunctional. In the midst of the articulation of sexual discourse that constitutes the Masque of Cupid, it is as if Busyrane is trying to induce Amoret to confess her marital and sexual dysfunction, that is, her dread of intercourse and sexual possession by her own husband. Indeed, this may be the meaning behind Busyrane's enigmatic warning over the door: "Be not too bold." Do not be "so bold," in other words, as to assert the priority of individual psychosexual terrors over the larger forces of the "companionate marriage" in the making.

In the process of reconfiguring a literary continuum between Spenser and Milton, we can now more fully appreciate how overdetermined the concept of chastity is. In moving from Amoret to the Lady, we can see that the positing of "Milton's Spenser" lies somewhere on the discontinuous divide between chastity as both fundamentally imbued with a literary inheritance from Ovid, and an inherently materialist concept that fundamentally resists literary representation. Forty years later, Milton's aloof and self-sufficient Lady will not present the hermeneutic enigma that Spenser's terror-stricken Amoret does--but that is because Milton's Lady is both chastity as the materialist "thing" itself and the repressing inheritor of what Amoret could not speak in Busyrane's Palace. As the self-assured embodiment of virtue itself, the stolid Lady is Milton's repression of Amoret's distinctly feminine sexual terrors. And thus we can conclude that Amoret is both nowhere and everywhere in Milton's Lady. Even as Amoret's "consuming paine" has been sublimated into the "perfect hole" of the Lady's chaste self-sufficiency, so also does the symptom of chastity continue to haunt the space of "Spenser's Milton."

University of New Hampshire

Notes

1. All references to The Faerie Queene are taken from Edmund Spenser: "The Faerie Queene," ed. A. C. Hamilton (New York: Longmans, 1977), hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by book, canto, and line.

2. Thomas P. Roche, Jr.'s The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser's Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964) was among the first extended studies of Spenser to concentrate on the poet's borrowings from Ariosto and to posit a more deferred, "romance middle " for Books 3 and 4 of The Faerie Queene, as opposed to the more unified Books 1 and 2.

3. Stephanie Jed, Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989).

4. Maureen Quilligan, Milton's Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), 213.

5. At one extreme, a number of years ago Angus Fletcher wrote, "Although much has been made in literary histories of the link between Milton and Spenser, we need to insist on the relative unimportance of this link. Milton was not unduly perturbed, surely, by the example of 'The Faerie Queene'" (The Transcendental Masque: An Essay on Milton's "Comus" [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971], 142-43). But more recent studies have, in their different ways, attempted to re-forge this link. See, for example, Quilligan; John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983); and Gordon Teskey, "From Allegory to Dialectic: Imagining Error in Spenser and Milton, " PMLA (1986): 9-22, which views Milton's comparatively spare use of allegory in Paradise Lost as the key for understanding the differences between the two poets. On the almost automatic "coupling" of Spenser and Milton in the traditional literary canon, see Annabel Patterson, "Couples, Canons, and the Uncouth: Spenser-and-Milton in Educational Theory," Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 773-93. (All references to Milton's prose are from the Scolar Press Facsimile of Milton's 1644-45 prose, John Milton: Prose Works, 1641-1650, 3 vols. [Menston: Scolar Press, 1968], vol. 2. Since this edition does not provide page numbers further references to the Prose Works will be cited in the text by the title of the individual text.

6. Guillory, 135.

7. Kendrick, "Milton and Sexuality: A Symptomatic Reading," in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 43-73.

8. In the midst of new historicist reconfigurations of Early Modern studies, psychoanalysis, implicitly or explicitly, has often found itself marginalized. Stephen Greenblatt's essay "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture" (in Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986]), for example, constitutes the paradigmatic new historicist move whereby psychic experience disappears in the gaps of the subject's dispersal in the discursive formations of ideology. In this regard, Kendrick's essay is also a prime example of the new historicism's Foucaultian rejection of psychoanalysis. (For a sustained psychoanalytic critique of Greenblatt's essay, see the introductory chapter to my Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1992].) My essay is intended, among other things, to suggest ways in which psychoanalysis can be made relevant for socio-political critique.

9. See Nyquist in Re-Membering Milton, 99-127; see also Barbara K. Lewalski, "Milton on Women--Yet Once More," Milton Studies 6 (1974): 3-20; Joan Malory Webber, "The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise Lost," Milton Studies 14 (1980): 3-24; Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton's Eve (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983). For a valuable overview of the various evolutionary stages within feminist Milton criticism, see Janet E. Halley, "Female Autonomy in Milton's Sexual Politics," in Milton and the Idea of Woman, ed. Julia M. Walker (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988), esp. 230-35.

10. The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

11. As Richard Halpern argues, "For Puritanism, virginity before marriage is fine: virginity instead of marriage is less fine" ( "Puritanism and Maenadism in A Mask," in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986], 95). For more on the contradictory position of the bourgeois woman within marriage, see David Aers and Bob Hodge, "'Rational Burning': Milton on Sex and Marriage," Milton Studies 13 (1979): 3-33.

12. In this context, it is worth noting that Calvin, in his Institutes (2, 1254), interprets marriage as a type of virginity. For more on Comus's debt to Luther and Calvin, see Georgia Christopher, "The Virginity of Faith: Comus as a Reformation Conceit," ELH 43 (1976): 479-99.

13. Kathleen Wall argues for a "feminine" Comus, "the priest of various moon-deities," who derives many of his characteristics from his mother Circe ("A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle: The Armor of Logos," in Milton and the Idea of Woman, 54). See also Halpern, 90.

14. Years ago, Rosemond Tuve argued cogently, "Because [Comus] is allegorical, it does not expound, but presents" ( "Image, Form, and Theme in A Mask," in A Maske at Ludlow: Essays on Milton's "Comus," ed. John S. Diekhoff [Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1986], 160). (All references to Milton's poetry are taken from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes [New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957].) Hereafter cited parenthetically by page in the text and abbreviated M.

15. The potential irony of the Lady's unimperiled virginity is understood by Leah S. Marcus in her important new historicist study of the "local" political circumstances surrounding the initial performance of Comus, that is, the rape of Margery Evans in Herefordshire and the hearing of her appeal by John Egerton, first earl of Bridgewater ( "Justice for Margery Evans: A 'Local' Reading of Comus," in Milton and the Idea of Woman). For additional perspectives on the social, political, and topical contexts of Comus, see the special issue of Milton Quarterly, ed. Roy Flanagan, 21 (1987).

16. Milton's Puritan Masque (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1983), 131.

17. George Sensabaugh, "Platonic Love and the Puritan Rebellion," Studies in Philology 37 (1940): 457-81. More recently, see David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).

18. To provide a brief sampling of disappointment within the history of Milton criticism, McGuire has observed that the masque is "anticlimactic" (Milton's Puritan Masque, 63). D. C. Allen has complained of Milton's "unsuccessful attempt to establish a true intellectual conflict" in the debate between Comus and the Lady (The Harmonious Vision: Studies in Milton's Poetry [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1954], 68). A. S. P. Woodhouse observes that Comus's wand and cup never exert an "active compulsion" ( "The Argument in Milton's Comus," University of Toronto Quarterly 11 [1941], 82).

19. Kendrick, 50, 54.

20. Kendrick, 53.

21. Kendrick, 63.

22. See, for example, Nancy Hartsock, "Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?," in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. and with an introduction by Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 157-73; and Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body (New York: Routledge, 1991).

23. Spenser, of course, appropriates the story of Sabrina's illegitimate birth and murder from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regnum britanniae.

24. For more on the "maternal" Sabrina, see Tuve, 134, and Mary Loeffelholz, "Two Masques of Ceres and Proserpine: Comus and The Tempest," in Re-Membering Milton, 31-32.

25. It should be noted that Milton enacts a more successful "remembrance" of Spenser during the Brothers' attempted rescue of their sister from Comus's chair: their abrupt and violent smashing of the enchanter's cup (see Guillory, 89, and Quilligan, 221) echoes Guyon's violent entry into Acrasia's Bower and the moment when, confronting the Genius, he "ouerthrew his bowle disdainfully; / And broke his staffe, with which he charmed Semblants sly" (2.12.49).

26. Woodhouse, 77.

27. For more on Milton's retelling of Sabrina's death, see Fletcher, 240, and Loeffelholz, 32.

28. At this juncture I am playing off Louis Montrose's paradigmatic new historicist call for "substituting for the diachronic text of an autonomous literary history the synchronic text of a cultural system" ( "The Poetics and Politics of Culture," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser [New York: Routledge, 1989], 143).

29. As Loeffelholz remarks, "The inappropriateness of Comus's allusion lies in his using chastity's classical defense as a threat against the Lady's chastity" (33). (For a detailed overview of Milton's use of Ovid in Comus, see Richard DuRocher, Milton and Ovid [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985].)

30. Also commenting on the oddity of Comus's threat, Guillory cogently interprets the magus as a kind of synecdoche for "literary obsolescence" itself. As Guillory observes, "we are suddenly aware that his primitivism is also a kind of obsolescence" (80).

31. As Theresa M. Krier so eloquently writes, "Virginity in The Faerie Queene is more often conceived on an Ovidian model than on any other, as integrity of selfhood, intimacy with the natural world, and the fragile pleasure of bodily and psychic sensation allowed by invisibility to the social world" (Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorum of Vision [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990], 125).

32. Or, in David Lee Miller's description, "the breath of violent passion yields a harmonic chord" (The Poem's Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1988], 95).

33. Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in Epic (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992), 303.

34. For more on Elizabeth as a source of male poetic anxiety, see my Translations of Power; Pamela Joseph Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1992); Susan Frye, Elizabeth: The Competition for Representation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993); and Montrose, "A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture," in Rewriting the Renaissance.

35. My discussion of Busyrane's "Tapets" is indebted to Harry Berger's wonderfully suggestive account in his Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics, intro. Louis Montrose (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 175-78. As Berger observes, "The gods are assaulted by their desires as if it were a hostile force over which they have no control" (175).

36. Alpers, The Poetry of the "Faerie Queene" (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1967), 14.

37. In addition to Scudamour's and Alpers' question (why is Amoret tortured by Busyrane?) we can add another question posed cogently by Jonathan Goldberg: "what does [Amoret's] wound mean if Busyrane is recast, as he is at the opening of Book IV, as Amoret's abductor after marriage? Then the full ambiguity of being rendered 'perfect hole' comes into play" (Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1981], 78-80).

38. See Alpers; Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964); Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in the "Faerie Queene" (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961); Hieatt, "Scudamour's Practice of Maistry upon Amoret," PMLA 77 (1962); Roche, "The Challenge to Chastity: Britomart in the House of Busirane," PMLA 76 (1961): 189-98; Spens, Spenser's "Faerie Queene": An Interpretation (London: E. Arnold, 1934); Goldberg. More recently, Dorothy Stephens argues that Amoret's most positive relationship in the poem is her friendship with Britomart, a friendship with a decidedly erotic subtext. In his depiction of Amoret's and Britomart's friendship, claims Stephens, Spenser "allows women's alliances to trouble some of the poem's most resolutely trod paths, including those that lead toward matrimony" ( "Into Other Arms: Amoret's Evasion," ELH 58 [1991], 541). For some parallels between the sadism of Busyrane and Scudamour, see Sheila T. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in "The Faerie Queene" (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1994), 101-2.

39. Berger, 187. As Gross observes, "Britomart's quest for the disenchanting source of enchantment still unleashes no pure power of disenchantment nor concludes with any easy, unshaken recovery from magic" (Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985], 167).

40. For more on the hermeneutic ambiguities of Spenser's extended punning on "whole" and "hole," see Goldberg, 78-80.

41. Translator's Preface to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), lxvi.

42. Roche (78) and Berger (173) have both remarked on the "medievalism" of the Masque of Cupid. More recently, Lauren Silberman has observed that the Masque presents "a picture of extreme incoherence, systematic discontinuity, masquerading as continuous allegory" ("Singing Unsung Heroines: Androgynous Discourse in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene," in Rewriting the Renaissance, 265).

43. For the history of sexuality as an emergent discourse, see Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, tr. Robert Hurley, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Press Books, 1980).