Explaining the relationship between his lines and rectangles and the real world, Piet Mondrian said, “We need not look past the natural, but we should in a sense look through it.”[1] To look through nature is to see the proportions on which Mondrian’s work is based, and if they can be perceived through it, they are in some sense the frame on which nature is built, but in another sense artificial constructions the eye is able to perceive in nature, like the dots that illusorily appear at the intersections of some of Mondrian’s grids. The old idea of painting as a mirror is inverted, since the painting does not mirror the seen side of nature but the opposite side, the hidden side. Mondrian’s metaphor thus bears a relationship to the “faire mirrhour” in The Faerie Queene in which Elizabeth might see herself, her kingdom, and her “great auncestry” (2.proem 4.7–9).[2] Spenser explains, though, that he must cover the mirror “in couert vele, and wrap in shadowes light” (5.2): a metaphor for the ways in which his allegory both does and does not represent reality. “Shadowes light” works two ways—shadows’ light or light shadows—which suggests in itself the difficulty the allegory presents; the reader can look through the veil at the mirror, but is still never quite sure what it shows. But thinking of the poem in mimetic terms complicates the mirror further. The world of The Faerie Queene, with its great forests, broad oceans, and high castles, would seem to be located in the veil, for the mirror itself contains Elizabeth, her court, and her lineage as they are, not as the poem refigures them. Nature as described in the poem can be seen through—but only with difficulty, and only by the right eyes.
The differing approaches of Spenser critics could be divided between those whose goal is to delineate the figures in the mirror and those who describe the art with which the veil is constructed. On the one hand, there is some feeling that the allegorized account of history is what really matters, but critics have also felt that Spenser seems, as the poem goes on, to become more interested in his own elaborate construction than in his original historical points, or to put it another way, in nonallegorical ways of representing history.[3] Spenser suggests that the dichotomy cannot be so simple. The description of the veiled mirror implies two different sets of eyes: Elizabeth’s, which can see the Queen’s own face in the mirror, and those “feeble eyes” which must be protected by the veil, “[w]hich else could not endure those beames bright.” The veil functions differently to different viewers, depending on their own inherent qualities, not necessarily on their approach. At the same time, it asks viewers to acknowledge someone else’s perspective. If the poem is not a window but a mirror showing someone else’s face, then to read it is to imagine seeing through someone else’s eyes.
The metaphor of the veil, then, does not explain Spenser’s art, but the experience of the reader. It gives the reader a kind of permission to look through as well as at the narratives and images of The Faerie Queene. The differing perspective implies both a particular way of thinking about reading and a distinct account of mimesis. In Sidney’s definition, poetry is mimetic in a fairly simple way: “a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth (to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture).”[4] If mimesis is a speaking picture, then Spenser’s veiled mirror is one step removed from mimesis. It is a reminder that the role of the reader in that representing is neither passive nor static and that the task of the writer in relation to history is not, in fact, representation. Spenser’s veil is the intervening layer in the awkward relationship between fiction and mimesis, which both depend on and undermine each other. Luiz Costa Lima, in his attempt to “revivify the concept of mimesis,” has argued that the evaluation of mimesis must address not what is represented but the image that is ultimately created: “it is proper to fictional discourse, be it aesthetic or other, that it be perceived as an articulation of images, that it be thematized by the imagination.”[5] Even when the fiction serves, in some way or other, to represent history, it still must be understood first in relation to the imagination in which it appears rather than the history that it putatively figures.[6] Following on Costa Lima’s metaphor suggested by the word “revivify,” we can say that looking at mimesis from the perspective of the imagination is necessary for the mimetic representation to have life. Without it we get history as “the chronological ordering of facts and results,” which will never, Costa Lima says with Claude Lévi-Strauss in the background, be “intellectually sufficient.”[7] Spenser, I believe, uses the mechanics of looking at something deceptive to shift the emphasis of mimesis from what is represented to the perceived image. For the person looking at the mirror, after all, the veil and the mirror are part of a single assemblage; the viewer imagines what the mirror would look like without the veil, but that possibility is never more than a kind of fantasy. To think about mimesis through a veil is to think about the process by which the represented image enters the mind of the reader.
When an image is specifically represented as deceptive, the inherent distortions of mimesis are echoed by another layer of distortion within the descriptions, thematizing the mechanics of imagination already inherent in the poem. The episode of the Bower of Bliss, also in book 2, is particularly crucial for understanding Spenser’s process of literary representation because of its chief theme: the relationship between nature and artifice. The bower is an artificial landscape: an assemblage of inorganic materials designed to resemble organic ones. To describe in a poem what something looks like if it looks like something other than what it is becomes for Spenser a way to question the nature of mimetic description and by extension the relationship between allegorical fiction and history. Description in this episode is not a “figuring forth” of the world; it is an image of distortion that reflects back on what it figures and suggests the distortedness of the original. As he does with the veiled mirror, Spenser depicts multiple points of view of the bower at once, as we will see, and that multiplicity of perspective demonstrates a kind of mimesis that is itself divided—representing different things to different people. To some extent, the episode merely reinforces something generally true of poetry—that its representative capacity is mediated by figuration. But beyond that mediation, Spenser uses this moment to establish an extreme of the poetics of representation, marking the capability and the limit of art.
In the final part of the last canto of book 2, Guyon, with the Palmer’s assistance, enters the Bower—a place whose sensuality Spenser describes with rare abandon—in order to take its proprietor, Acrasia, into captivity and destroy the bower and its surrounding gardens. Critics have been alternately disturbed and intrigued by the richness of Spenser’s images of the bower, finding the episode’s descriptive passages to be quintessential examples of both his singular poetic ability and the moral complexity of the poem’s allegory. But the vividness of description is always qualified by Spenser’s frequent reminders that none of it is real. These reminders have sometimes been downplayed by critics whose goal is to assign the bower itself a distinctive and consistent moral status within the poem.[8] Assuming that the bower can have only one final meaning, however, makes it difficult to account for our reaction to it as readers, particularly since the consciousness reflected by the narrative voice of the canto seems not to be aligned with either the Palmer’s stark single-mindedness or Guyon’s temporary and violently corrected temptation. Responding to this problem, but still assuming that the Palmer’s morality is the right one, David Mikics concludes from the indulgence of description that the canto represents a “drastic separation of poetry and morality.”[9] By “poetry,” Mikics means the same energy of description I will be examining here; the representation of the bower cannot be reconciled with a strict understanding of Spenserian ethics. But the independent voice that emerges in description is more than just that of an idly powerful genius allowing himself the exercise of his lyrical powers, temporarily, before he allows Guyon to destroy his creation.
Spenser in fact carefully represents and even defends this independent point of view, particularly by means of an odd aspect of his description of the bower and its surrounding gardens which seems to have escaped critical attention. Spenser consistently implies a hypothetical viewer within the garden whose perspective is entirely distinct from the inhabitants, Guyon, and the Palmer. At first this viewer is merely “One”:
One would have thought, (so cunningly, the rude,
And scorned parts were mingled with the fine,)
That nature had for wantonesse ensude
Art, and that Art at nature did repine; (2.12.59.1–4)
Spenser includes this “One,” this perspective that is clearly not warned (like Guyon) nor unyielding (like the Palmer) but sensitive to—and interested in—the full complexity of the mingling of the “parts” in the bower. There is not merely a “separation of poetry and morality”; there is a separation of perspective itself from morality. The moral disruption Mikics locates in the poetry has to be placed back into the bower. This separated perspective is found throughout the episode; in the ekphrasis of the ivory gates, Spenser uses the second person pronoun to describe this view: “Ye might have seen the frothy billowes fry.” In describing the golden ivy that surrounds the fountain in the bower, he asks us to imagine an unadvised person mistaking the metal plant for real. Spenser is clearly quite interested in this person who is taken in by the illusory landscape of the bower; even if the deception is temporary, his reference to a distinct viewer suggests that the image of the bower as landscape has some staying power. The variability of perspective means that the act of seeing—the discovery of the bower as a place—is given emphasis over judgment and destruction.
Merely to see the bower as landscape is already to suggest the question of the variability of perspective. The word itself originates from painting and has for most of its history referred to a specifically visual way of addressing the surrounding environment. This history has given it a problematic status in geography and environmental studies now, since the word has often excluded what is hidden or deceptive in the environment, including what its occupants may do to it unaware and what it might mean to those other than themselves.[10] Writing of the difficulty of accessing what contemporary geographers call “existential insideness”—the intimate knowledge of one’s location—one geographer points out that, although “it would seem that the ultimate goal of humanistic geography would be to fathom the experience of the existential insider, the landscape idea implies an outsider’s point of view.”[11] Similarly, landscape tends to be defined by conventions associated with the inside perspective of a particular culture within a particular place, which makes others difficult to account for as landscape; Robert Mugerauer, in a history of the American landscape, says that in the colonial period, “it did not qualify as landscape according to the reigning conventions of the cultivated natural, which were associated with previous periods of civilization.”[12] This discrepancy between the inside and outside perspectives of the surroundings means that the landscape as a unified whole only exists for the outsider. But the artificial landscape complicates the geographical model, since it means that the landscape is always constructed; the difference between insider and outsider lies in the appearance of the means of construction. To view the bower as landscape is to be between inside and outside—between the occupants’ naive self-abandonment to the bower’s seductions and the Palmer’s destructive resistance.
Renaissance writers noted—even admired—the inherent artificiality of landscape, as revealed in the great obsession of the period with gardens. Rebecca Bushnell, in the last chapter of her book on Renaissance garden writing, notes that objections were raised to garden writers who write about imaginary rather than real gardens, but also that such writers reflect a particular Renaissance drive to reinvent nature. Gardening, it seems, invites the kind of imagination that depends on describing nature while distorting it, a process that can be troubling but that makes deep sense to “a culture that dreamed that the pleasures of the imagination could exceed the mundane attractions of the given world.”[13] The Faerie Queene has a more complex view of the imagined garden; it acknowledges the desire to create landscape beyond the capabilities of nature but presents the artificiality that results as dangerous. Spenser makes a connection between the imaginativeness Bushnell finds built into the conception of landscape and that of poetry but needs to acknowledge the moral disruption that occurs as a result.
Seeing the bower as landscape is in keeping with Costa Lima’s sense that mimetic description is always a process of discovery: a finding rather than a revealing. The pleasure of discovery, a pleasure that lies at the heart of mimesis, can take precedence over the status of what is discovered. Erich Auerbach points out that when Rabelais takes up the theme of exploring the new world only to find in it a version of the old, as when Alcofrybas finds a man planting cabbages in Pantagruel’s mouth, he emphasizes not the similarities and differences between the two worlds but the subjective experience of discovery: “what surprises him most is that things are not somehow strange and different, but just like things in the world he knows.”[14] Rabelais continually provides multiple categories of experience, such as the experiences of Alcofrybas and Pantagruel, going on at the same time and in the same place but on two incompatible scales; the alternation “serves Rabelais for perspectivistic effects of contrast, which upset the reader’s balance in an insidiously humorous way; he is perpetually flung back and forth between provincially piquant and homely forms of existence.” In this sense Rabelais solves one of the problems discussed by modern geographers, because he is able to synthesize the inside and outside points of view (to the extent that Pantagruel tries to imagine Alcofrybas’s life inside his mouth—“And what did you live on? What did you drink? . . . but where did you shit?”[15] ). The point of it all for Auerbach “lies in the joy of discovery—pregnant with all possibilities, ready to try every experiment, whether in the realm of reality or super-reality—which was characteristic of his time, the first half of the century of the Renaissance.”[16] In other words, the significance of the cabbages in Pantagruel’s mouth is not the correspondence between the two worlds but the inevitability, in moving from one to another, of making the comparison. The strangeness and the familiarity of the explored world speak to the same imaginative process.
This relationship between new and familiar is fundamental to Rabelais’s way of creating meaning; as Terence Cave says, there are persistent instances of wonders presented as “the discovery of something wholly new or of an antiquity or relic.”[17] The twin possibilities point to the complexity of the discovery and the separation of the act of discovery, which creates its own meaning, from its object. For Cave, such a combination of old and new is emblematic of the balance Rabelais strikes between inscribed and open-ended meaning; his allusive “quirks and vicissitudes . . . compose the text as an amalgam of Christian doctrine, humanist learning, popular legend and lore, and an insatiable appetite for language.”[18] In order for the mimesis of the new to function, discovery must be mediated by recognition, and that mediation holds as true when the meaning of the discovery is assessed. To place the new solely in the context of moral teachings would be to cancel out its newness, and thus the imagination of the discoverer must exist always somewhat outside of moral definition.
In the case of the bower, the process of exploring it (and, for the reader, of imagining it), must be similarly separate from the process of assessing it. Spenser has Guyon enter the Bower of Bliss and, like Alcofrybas, find a familiar landscape in the unlikeliest context. In this case it is Spenser’s unnamed viewer, not the explorer, who notices the similarities, because Guyon’s role here is not imaginative. Recent criticism, following the lead of Stephen Greenblatt, has emphasized Guyon’s similarity with the conquerors alluded to in the discussion of the New World in book 2’s proem, but even if we do choose to see him in that light, his function does not define the process of imagining the bower.[19] The bower’s familiarity, of course is a different kind of familiarity from that in Rabelais, questioned and undermined always by the place’s deceptiveness and dangerousness. The heightened sense of risk is further created through the confusion of perspectives in the bower. Unlike Rabelais, whose Alcofrybas is a naive version of himself (Alcofrybas Nasier is an anagram of his name), or Chaucer, who uses his own name for the naif of The Canterbury Tales, Spenser separates himself from his viewer in order to provide a perspective on which the interplay between artificial and natural can have its full effect.
The old reading that Spenser endorses the destruction of the bower with few qualms has been associated, perhaps unfairly, with C. S. Lewis.[20] More recently, it has often been suggested that there is some irony to Guyon’s fury; as Syrithe Pugh puts it, “Spenser intends the Stoical idea of temperance embodied by Guyon and the Palmer to be seen as inadequate.”[21] In order to avoid having to accept or reject that idea of temperance, some readers prefer Stephen Greenblatt’s formulation of the destruction of the bower as a necessary component of colonization, in which any apparent ambivalence about the destruction is explained by the general anxieties in the period about the increasingly bold English imperialism.[22] But Greenblatt’s view is effectively limited by his insistence that the political allegory of the poem is the chief reality it represents (in other words, looking only for the figure in the mirror rather than the veil); that insistence presupposes that poetic elements that work against the political allegory cannot exist. Susanne Wofford responds to Greenblatt by pointing out that “the sliding and denying that goes on between the political and moral readings when they are forced to meet” means that the political aspects of the poem complicate rather than endorse its status as allegory.[23] One problem many of these readings have is that they tend to understand Guyon and the Palmer as representing the same idea, as Pugh says explicitly, as if Guyon’s always rather reluctant renunciation of temptation were equivalent to the Palmer’s steady disapproval and his violent resistance no different from the Palmer’s seeming invulnerability.
The perceived moral equivalence between Guyon and the Palmer is parallel to that seen between Acrasia and the bower, but I think neither is really there. By looking at the way the bower is perceived and described, we see distinctions that affect both. Acrasia’s sexuality is blatant, simple, and obvious: though she wears a veil, it “hid no whit her alabaster skin” (2.12.77.4), the opposite of the distorting veil from the proem. The bower’s sensuality, on the other hand, is always tempered and complicated by the relationship between natural and artificial. A deceptive landscape is not the same as a deceptive person; a seductive surroundings uses different means of seduction. Even if Acrasia is ultimately responsible for these constructions, their effects—as Spenser emphasizes through his presentations of multiple perspectives—are not determined by her responsibility. As we will see below, the bower’s landscape provides support for the bower’s temptations while still maintaining separation from them. One valuable result of a focus on description is a separation of the bower from Acrasia, and, similarly, a separation of all of the perspectives that view it: Guyon’s, the Palmer’s, the hypothetical naive viewer’s, and the reader’s. The act that matters most to Spenser is perceiving the garden through the filter of this illusory definitiveness of the landscape.
The bower seems to consist fundamentally of a collection of natural and artificial aspects that can never fully be separated from each other. There are three descriptive foci in particular that, I think, embody the persistence of landscape in the bower beyond art’s co-opting—the part of the bower that resists mimetic representation: land, water, and shade. All participate in the visual beauty of the bower, but they maintain some distance from the bower’s logic of deception. What they have in common is that they alter the perceptibility of the aspects of the bower most relevant to its moral status. They require that we look at the bower’s seductiveness and artificiality through the morally neutral and the real. They present a kind of allegory that functions as a war on two fronts: on the one hand, allegory interprets the real—it is the veiled mirror. On the other, the real—the mimetic—represents the allegorical, as precisely described water must stand in for allegorized sexuality. Land, water, and shade add an extra layer to the veiled mirror, creating an allegorical structure in which the real is read through the bower’s unreality and the bower’s unreality is read through its relationship to the real. What happens when that extra layer becomes the focus is that the episode of the bower ceases to be about temptation or destruction and becomes instead a story of perception and thus, as the poetic means of perception, of description.
The simplest way to think of the problem of perspective as Spenser presents it is through the act of looking for nature in the bower. Rather than providing a perspective in which the artificiality of the bower is always evident, Spenser establishes the role of nature in the bower’s gardens early on. Principally, it is there to be overshadowed and overcome by art but still seems to be necessary in order for the artificiality to work; in fact, nature lies at the core of art’s imitations of nature, as in the first description of the interior of the bower:
Thus being entred, they behold around
A large and spacious plaine, on every side
Strowed with plesauns, whose faire grassy ground
Mantled with greene, and goodly beautifide
With all the ornaments of Floraes pride,
Wherewith her mother Art, as halfe in scorne
Of niggard Nature, like a pompous bride
Did decke her, and too lavishly adorne,
When forth from virgin bowre she comes in th’early morne. (12.50)
“Strowed with pleasauns” is clear—those pleasures are excessive, and the temperate person resists them. Similarly, Spenser leaves no doubt about the moral status of Art, whose pomposity leads it to place upon nature a kind of decoration that is both hubristic and false. But what is left in this picture for “niggard Nature”? Nature is the antecedent of “her” in the penultimate line—she is made up “like a pompous bride” by art. The argument is not, however, that an otherwise perfect bride is spoiled by the application of art: nature becomes “pompous” itself, implicated in art’s deceptions, and their relationship is an intimate one. The “virgin bowre” nature emerges as does not reflect its essence, which is more like Milton’s nature, “Pollute with sinfull blame.”[24] Indeed, nature and art are surprisingly difficult to separate here. Are the “large and spacious plaine” and the “faire grassy ground” supposed to be extricated, in the mind of the observer, from the ornaments strewn over them? This seems impossible to do—even the word “bowre” is invoked in an ambiguous context, and indeed, the suggestion of a possible natural bower makes us wonder whether it is merely the Bower of Bliss’s artificiality or deceptiveness that is objectionable. Since this “virgin bowre” is connected to the flowery deflowered one Guyon discovers through the presence of nature, the two are not quite presented as contraries but as states of being capable of overlap.
Nature is covered up but fundamental, as if one could brush away “the ornaments of Floraes pride” and find the humble green original underneath. The simile of the ornamented bride asks us to look for nature in the bower—it suggests that nature is never absent, and so cannot be even in the midst of an artificial environment. Nature also marks the limitations of the artificiality, the deceptiveness, and thus also the seductiveness of the bower. From the first, the bower is described inclusively—as a landscape that, like the landscapes of Vergil’s Eclogues or of the Shepherdes Calender, looks inward toward its inhabitants, described in terms of their needs rather than its organic realities. Whether that inclusiveness is itself artificial is difficult to say. In the descriptions of the interior of the bower, inclusiveness applies to both ornamentation and geography, as if avoiding the simile we have just been given of the natural bride decked by art:
The painted flowres, the trees upshooting hye,
The dales for shade, the hilles for breathing space,
The trembling groves, the Christall running by;
And that, which all faire works doth most aggrace,
The art, which all that wrought, appeared in no place. 12.58.4–9
The descriptions are of a natural landscape, but, Spenser assures us, that is the point; the kind of deceptive art with which the bower is built is invisible. By describing the art of the bower as if it were nature—“The trembling groves” in particular signal the impression of life—he describes that kind of art more accurately. Once again, mimesis’s dependence on trope blurs the basic contraries of the canto, introducing the absent natural landscape into the artificial one. As the geographers and Rebecca Bushnell would remind us, however, landscape as perceived is always somewhat artificial anyway, so perhaps it makes sense that, conversely, an artificial landscape would still be somewhat natural. The description is not static and final but provides the setting for the rest of the canto, and Spenser’s willingness to enter descriptively into the bower’s deception renders uncertain the relationship between character and setting for everything that follows. It is the condition of the bower that it is not possible from within to distinguish between artificial and natural landscape—not for Guyon and not for the reader. The surroundings are themselves subsumed into the visual logic of the bower, and so when we are within it, we cannot know exactly where we are. “The art, which all that wrought, appeared in no place” is thus only partially true; the art appears in the description, but the described place is of a different kind than the place as a surroundings (again, the geographical distinction between the insider’s and outsider’s landscape).
Because the art of the bower both stands in for and exemplifies the art of the poem, the bower mediates all of the perspectives in the poem: Guyon’s, the unnamed viewer’s, and the reader’s. To that end, Spenser emphasizes the persistence, regardless of who looks at it or what happens in it, of the relationship between art and nature. Even in the midst of the bower’s destruction, its status as setting is preserved, and is naturalness remains as an aspect of its artificiality. At the very moment that the bower seems to be reduced solely to an allegorical function, the description of what is destroyed pulls that function in a different direction:
Their groves he feld, their gardins did deface,
Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse,
Their banket houses burne, their buildings race,
And of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place. (12.83.6–9)
The distinction between nature and art that Spenser insists on and explores throughout the canto is here vanished. Groves and gardens, arbors and cabinets are presented as if belonging to one category, which they do: they have in common that they are fair, that they are suspect, and that they are destroyed. The final rhyme of “race”—raze—and “place” is significant; it is as place, not merely as thing, that the bower is made foul. Thus its destruction is not a replacement of a deceptive and artificial surroundings with a natural and organic one—it is simply the destruction of the surroundings. The distinction between art and nature is no longer germane. Its absence means that the opening descriptions of the bower and this final glimpse of it rely on two different kinds of mimesis: one in which the materials with which the bower is constructed are present to the imagination and another in which they are irrelevant. Description in this canto does not represent the Bower of Bliss, as if it were a unified whole in Spenser’s mind that could be translated to the reader. Description is the process of looking at the bower, with the understanding that it looks different from within or from without, from a sympathetic or destructive perspective.
Spenser tells us that Guyon “of the fairest late, now made the fowlest place”; what kind of environment, then, is this foul place that remains when he has left? It is certainly not reformed. Acrasia’s poison is permanent, as becomes evident when the men whom the Palmer has restored from their bestial forms condemn him for the service. Guyon’s response is generalized:
See the mind of beastly man,
That hath so soone forgot the excellence
Of his creation, when he life began,
That now he chooseth, with vile difference,
To be a beast, and lacke intelligence. (12.87.1–5)
These beastly men have lost the ability to tell the difference between natural and artificial. Guyon and the Palmer leave them that way; by capturing Acrasia and destroying the bower, they feel they have fulfilled their obligations. From their point of view, they have merely confirmed the baseness of what they leave behind; the Palmer, indeed, avoids Guyon’s model of forgetfulness and thus avoids any suggestion that the men could be reeducated. Responding to a former hog, “Grille by name” (12.86.7), the Palmer ends the canto with a note of merciless renunciation:
The donghill kind
Delights in filth and foule incontinence:
Let Grill be Grill, and haue his hoggish mind,
But let us hence depart, whilest wether serves and wind. (12.87.6–9)
Guyon’s forgetful men are become “The donghill kind”; Acrasia’s victims are reduced to a caste.
Since the bower is gone, what they have left is indeed “filth,” and the “foule incontinence” the Palmer cites matches up with the “foul place” to which Guyon has reduced the bower. Thus a resolution to the destruction is specifically cut off, and with it, as Susanne Wofford has argued, any moral allegory that can make sense of this: “Letting ‘Grill be Grill’ rather than anything else—a figure of ‘sloth,’ say, or a ‘kynd’ of any other sort—in this context is a radically anti-allegorical step.”[25] Wofford’s assertion suggests that we should divide the various modes at work in the canto into allegorical and nonallegorical ones, but if we choose not to, what we get is a model of allegory in which some things represent allegorically and other things represent in some other way. Grill is Grill—his presence in the text is mere presence.
The simplicity of representation suggested by the Palmer’s statement about Grill also applies—even before the destruction—to those aspects of the bower that are not artificial but fundamental and permanent, aspects whose existence Spenser asserts by imagining the bower as nature decked by art. The most basic of these is land. When Guyon earlier meets Excess, he responds excessively himself, and Spenser records the effects. Excess squeezes wine into a golden cup:
So she to Guyon offred it to tast;
Who taking it out of her tender hond,
The cup to ground did violently cast,
That all in peeces it was broken fond,
And with the liquor stained all the lond: (12.57.1–5)
Land functions in two ways simultaneously. It records and reveals excess—“stained” suggests a permanent mark. But it does so neutrally, and indeed we would be hard pressed to say whether it records Excess’s excess or Guyon’s. The staining of the land is neither’s sole responsibility but the result of the collision between them. That neutrality of recording is the root of the difficulty in describing what is left after the bower is destroyed, for the “waste” left over is similarly neither the essence of the deceptive bower nor its moral correction but the effect of their conflict. If the land is part of the garden, then there is no problem; this is simply the destruction of the garden in miniature, and it is natural that the garden would suffer from the confrontation between Temperance and Excess. But if the “fair grassy ground” is the virgin bride, whom the garden’s deceptive art has ornamented against its will, then Guyon has turned what was an unnecessary ornament into a stain. The land, the “fowlest place” Guyon leaves, is what remains when Guyon has turned an essentially transient deformation of nature into a permanent one. As Grill’s hoggishness is completed rather than reversed by the destruction of the bower, the creation of Acrasia’s approving landscape cannot be undone but only finalized. By doing so Guyon simultaneously damages the bower and completes the transformation of the landscape to which the bower’s artificiality tends. The wine stain on the land figures that same kind of completion.
The bower’s descriptive deceptiveness extends beyond what the narrative requires. Everything in the bower deceives, even when temptation is not immediately present. We might be inclined to conclude from this generalized duplicitousness that the bower becomes for Spenser a kind of intellectual experiment—once he conceives of the idea of a deceptive artificiality taking over the surroundings, he wants to see how far it can go. The viewer in the garden, however, prevents us from taking up that reading. The references to this viewer do not come in moments of sexual temptation; it is not that Spenser wants us, like Guyon, to experience being tempted and resisting. On the contrary, the viewer’s participation matters most when the stakes of the bower’s deceptiveness are lowest. In the ekphrasis of the gates, for example, the deceptiveness makes itself transparent. Ekphrasis is, of course, a fundamentally uncertain form, as Murray Krieger argues—a form in which the distinction between description of art and description of nature is muddied and a new poetic category created that belongs to both and to neither.[26] Enforcing the importance of vision in the bower, Spenser imagines someone he calls you—an observer within, though, and therefore not the reader—looking at the gates:
Ye might have seene the frothy billowes fry
Under the ship, as thorough them she went,
That seemd the waves were into yvory,
Or yvory into the waves were sent; (12.45.1–4)
It makes no difference to the observer whether the water has turned into ivory or the ivory has turned into water. When the observer looks at the gates, he is not inclined to believe that the waves are real waves, because they are in the gates; he knows they are artificial, so he is not deceived.
The bower’s power of seeming extends well beyond deception. Seeming, on the contrary, is fundamental to the place; it overflows with its own potential to appear to be something it is not. This nondeceptive seeming is why it does not matter whether the ivory is false water or the water is false ivory—neither is really the case if no one is deceived. This second-person viewer seems to stand in for the perspective more interested in the complexity of the construction—both that of the garden and that of the poem—than its moral status. The waves, then, are here in order to signify the extent to which art can take the place of nature. Indeed, water turns out to have something of an intermediary role in the conflict of art with nature, since later on in the canto Spenser stresses the ways in which (like description) it simultaneously shows and alters what is within it. That function only increases the weight these waves have in affecting the way we look at the bower—it is not unreasonable to conclude that Spenser places his addressee in front of the gates because their waves are no less real than any other waves in the Faerie Queene.
Krieger’s thesis is that ekphrasis functions to cloud the distinction between the artificial sign and the natural sign. He focuses on the Platonic objection to mimesis’s dangerous illusoriness, pointing out that such danger can “spread out beyond dramatic representation to include the descriptive power of language to paint images for the mind, though not, of course, for the eyes.”[27] The trope of ekphrasis is Krieger’s emblem (and emblem is another figure the book explores in depth) for that power and its dangerousness. The source of the “ekphrastic impulse” is “the semiotic desire for the natural sign, the desire, that is, to have the world captured in the word.”[28] But essential to that impulse is that the relationship between word and world must remain oblique. Ekphrasis is essentially the trope of seeming—it stands in for the ability of poetry to “represent what is unrepresentable.”[29] In the context of the bower, that ability is all the more important. The description of the bower must seek a mimesis of the deceptive: a way of translating into language a visual world in which representation is essentially irrelevant. Spenser’s placement of this ekphrasis, which is explicitly tricky—the waves look as if they are moving even though they are recognizable as ivory—and which is tempered by the presence of the figure who is not the reader, who can see the gate as it is and not as it is described, makes it function as the entrance to the bower in an interpretive as well as literal sense. We must look at the bower through the mimesis of the unreal that this opening ekphrasis suggests.
If what is being described is always something that looks like something else, then is the precise description of that thing a way to represent it more clearly or to create distance by a kind of diversion from the imagined object toward the real one? Spenser treats the question of the bower’s nature as one of perspective. The ivy that covers the fountain (as I mentioned earlier) is described as ivy because a casual observer—whose naive perspective is equivalent to the second-person viewer looking at the gates—would not know the difference:
For the rich mettall was so coulored,
That wight, who did not well avis’d it view,
Would surely deme it to be yvie trew: (12.61.3–5)
To describe this false plant as ivy is to emphasize its dangerousness, and to describe it as metal is a way of disarming it: rendering it into something that (though still beautiful, even if this passage does, unlike some, imply that “yvie trew” is better aesthetically than the metal kind) is less influential. The very words “rich mettall” mean that the “wight” looking at it is not the reader, who has just been “well avis’d” by the poet that it is not what, to someone else, it appears to be. It is a complex distinction that seems to solve the problem of mimesis by separating the perspective of its naturalness from that of its artificiality.
That solution, however, is immediately undermined by the ivy’s interaction with water:
Low his lascivious armes adown did creepe,
That themselves dipping in the silver dew,
Their fleecy flowres they tenderly did steepe,
Which drops of Christall seemd for wantones to weepe. (12.61.5–9)
The word “seemd” leads us to ask: “seemd” to whom? The word suggests that defining the dripping as weeping is a matter of perspective. Complicating that problem of perspective is the relationship between water and flower. The water dripping from the flowers is something distinct from the ivy that has become implicated in the ivy’s complex fraud—but only partially. It enhances the ivy’s visual deception, but it is not itself deceptive; it might (as water can) enhance the seductiveness of the image, but the ivy, not the water, is “lascivious” and tender. The tears come from that in-between position—the water both participates in and acknowledges the wantonness. The subject of “seemd,” on the other hand, is the “fleecy flowres” rather than the water. It is as if, even though Spenser has just said that the ivy is not ivy, it reverts to natural landscape in this moment—as if the point of view of the “wight . . . not well avis’d” takes over. The ivy does not need reference to its truth or falsity in order to function as natural. But since the lascivious occupants and the upright invaders are both too caught up in their extremity to recognize that the ivy crosses the line between them, the person to whom the ivy seems to weep must be Spenser’s imaginary viewer: the same person to whom the waves in the gates seem to move and to whom the fake ivy looks real. The perspective of the unadvised “wight” reveals the fictive creation of this ivy that is both metal and organic at once, and thus emphasizes how distinctly literary is the version of place presented. The power of the word “seemd” overcomes both the reality and the deception and becomes the real point—seeming is not a subspecies of deception here nor of eroticism, but is itself the essential mode of the bower.
We can draw a connection between the water in the ivory waves, whose mimetic function is made indeterminate by ekphrasis, and a similar uncertainty concerning the water in the fountain. The extent to which the water is implicated in the uses to which it is put is complicated by its shifting nature. When the ivy dips itself into the water and steeps its flowers so that they with “drops of Christall seemd for wantones to weepe,” the water cannot be separated from the weeping. The dripping flowers anticipate the dripping hair of the bathing and wrestling women:
their yellow heare
Christalline humour dropped down apace.
Whom such when Guyon saw, he drew him neare, (12.65.5–7)
The dripping is attractive, but it draws Guyon to the women, not directly to the wetness of their hair. Even though the wetness here is sexy, describing the water as “Christalline” suggests that it is to be interpreted as crystal: as something to be looked through, not at. The distinction is enforced by comparing water to something else looked through rather than at: a veil:
their snowy limbes, as through a vele,
So through the Christall waves appeared plaine: (12.64.6–7)
Spenser had already mentioned that the pool is shallow enough“That through the waves one might the bottom see” (62.7), so anything within it is going to be quite visible. And yet not, since once these “wanton Maidens” notice Guyon, they use the water’s lack of transparency to their advantage; the bolder of the two “her two lilly paps aloft displayd,” while “The rest hid underneath, him more desirous made” (66.6, 9). In contrast to Acrasia’s useless clothing, “That hid no whit her alabaster skin” (77.5), the water makes the woman’s body more attractive by hiding it. “As through a vele” continues the conceit of “Christalline”; by being looked through, the water is both there and not there. Recalling the veiled mirror from the proem, it seems also to suggest a poetic problem: the poem seeks two simultaneous perspectives.
The other woman hides even more, and thus draws out a greater imaginativeness, by covering herself with both hair and water:
So hid in lockes and waves from lookers theft,
Nought but her lovely face she for his looking left. (12.67.8–9)
Of course, whether the water is hiding or revealing, it is in the service of the bower in that sexual temptation depends on both functions. But even when it is opaque, water is still to be looked through rather than at; it is the nymph’s unseen parts under the water that give the water any erotic energy it may possess. Whatever we think of the ethics of Guyon’s gaze—an ethics Spenser takes up with his reference to the “lookers theft”—that gaze is not direct.[30] It is mediated by this prismatic water, which ensures that the Palmer, or a moralizing reader, can be no more certain than Guyon of what exactly Guyon is looking at. The problem of the “lookers theft” is solved by disrupting the looking itself.
Description itself in these passages has a function similar to that of water—and indeed to the persistent natural landscape as a whole—since it too hides and reveals at once. By describing the artifacts of the bower as if they were natural objects, Spenser simultaneously reveals what they look like and hides what they are (though, perhaps, revealing a hiddenness or duplicitousnesss which is even more essential to them than what they look like). Both the description of the bower and the water work to reveal by hiding. We might say the same thing about Spenser’s descriptive tropes here; they are not, as critics sometimes describe them, seductive, but they allow seduction to pass through them.[31]
One of the hallmarks of the pastoral tradition (a tradition a number of recent critics have found to be alive within The Faerie Queene) is the sympathy of the landscape for its inhabitants, and there is a general tendency to put pastoral singers in the shade of echoing or silent trees.[32] In the opening line of the first of Vergil’s Eclogues, Tityrus is described as “lying in the shade of the beech tree” (“patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi”), and Corydon in the second is in the shade of an oak (though that does not prevent him from complaining about the sun).[33] The summer sun is the enemy of the singing shepherd, as Spenser acknowledges in The Shepherdes Calender, in “August.” Preparing for a singing match, Willye says:
But for the Sunnebeame so sore doth us beate,
Were not better, to shunne the scortching heate?[34]
The line about the sunbeam is highly irregular metrically (both syllables of “Sunnebeame” seem to be stressed, so that the line is heavily anchored at that point), creating a pun on “sore doth us beate”—the sun beats a sore meter. It as if versification can only take place smoothly in the shade, its natural Vergilian habitat. Shade stands in partially for the friendly environment—equally friendly to the shepherds and their song.[35]
In the bower, shade creates an environment friendly toward the poet and his goals but more immediately toward the oversexed inhabitants. The bathers, for example, are protected by a shade that is almost personified in its complicity with their pleasure:
And all the margent round about was set,
With shady Laurell trees, thence to defend
The sunny beames, which on the billowes bet,
And those which therein bathed, mote offend. (12.63.1–4)
Shade here is an intercessor between the sun and the bower, but from whose point of view? It is a distinctly pastoral moment—the relationship between sun and shade is a pastoral motif—and in pastoral, shade is something that is provided to shepherds, or withheld from them, as part of the rules of the pastoral world. In the second Eclogue, those rules hinge on the shepherd’s perspective; hence the joke of Corydon’s complaining about the sun under shade—his lovelorn state prevents him from recognizing that nature is on his side and makes him assume that, because he is miserable, it cannot be. Here, the significance of the shade lies in its not being part of the bower’s deceptive ornamentation.
Shade’s participation in the sexual allegory of the place is necessarily partial. Like water, it simultaneously hides and makes sexier what lies within it; in this case, it is not Guyon’s gaze that is deflected but the sun itself, though both can stand in for the reader.[36] The shade is necessarily complicit in what it shades and thus involves the sun as well (there is no shade, after all, without sun). The function of the laurel trees is “to defend / The sunny beames” (“defend” here meaning ward off) and that assertion is the central problem shade creates and addresses. It is only within the trope, after all, that the trees do what they do; they are personified as complicit with the people and actions whom they are protecting from the sun, whether they are so in any real moral sense or not. Shade’s literary provenance, which is reinforced here by the literary associations of laurel, functions as part of that general dependence on trope. The nod to pastoral that Spenser’s shade enacts prevents morality and poetry from being separated, because the moral complicity that defines the bower and that draws the viewer and the reader into the bower’s moral function is itself mediated by means of description. Shade represents at once the unity of the bower—the environment’s sympathy with its erotic function—and the disunity, since it creates something external through which the bower is viewed. If the sun is a gazer standing in for the reader, then shade stands in for something that alters but also encourages the reader’s experience of the bower’s sexiness. That desirability seems to hinge on a descriptive deflection, a visual refraction of both the desiring and the interpretive eye.
As the canto comes to its end and we enter Acrasia’s bower, the significance of trope is sharply clarified. Shade is the crucial aspect of the description. Near where Acrasia lies in her wanton ecstasies with her latest lover, a singer serenades her. He does not sing alone; he is accompanied by some version of nature, just as nature through shade protects the swimmers at the fountain:
The joyous birdes shrouded in chearefull shade,
Their notes unto the voyce attempred sweet;
Th’Angelicall soft trembling voyces made
To th’instruments divine respondence meet:
The silver sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmure of the waters fall:
The waters fall with difference discreet,
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call:
The gentle warbling wind low answered to all. (12.71)
The birds follow the singer’s lead in counterpoint—in contrapuntal terms, they are the comes to his dux—and repeat his melody after he is done, “As in approvance of his pleasing words” (12.76.3). And also “as in approvance,” the stanza reflects the canonic repetition of the sounds it describes with its own set of ordered repetitions. The repeated words all describe things that themselves are part of the canon: “voyce,” “instruments,” “meet,” “waters fall,” and “wind.” The repetition of “meet,” the verb describing the canon, effectively extinguishes a rhyme, and the middle of the stanza takes on a static feel. Introducing and governing this mass of tropes is the transferred epithet that has the birds “shrouded in chearefull shade,” the trope that carefully involves the shade in the music it (like the shade in pastoral) seems to allow. “Chearefull” should sound insipid but still pleasant in its way, as the overly simple rhymes in this stanza do not destroy the power of the harmonic metaphor; the transferred epithet provides a reading that allows the whole passage to function. Shade (like water, which participates here) is the great mediator; we hear the birds through it, and it interprets them. Form—in this case, repetition—is the parallel site of mediation, and looking through it we find a kind of song that involves us much more than it otherwise would because it involves the poetic voice itself so heavily. Thus the sun, which is blocked by the shade but enables the shade, becomes parallel to the reader whose gaze is refracted by trope.
All of these complex moral mediations add up to a poetic voice that is darker and more ambiguous than we might expect. The ambiguity of the descriptions suggests a corresponding ambivalence of the narrative voice, so that one product of the indescribability of the bower is an acknowledgment of the impossibility of a final moral definition of its nature and functions. Shade is about perception, not shielding, and if that were not already clear, it becomes so in the stanza following the birdsong one:
There, whence that Musick seemed heard to bee,
Was the faire Witch her selfe now solacing,
With a new Lover, whom through sorceree
And witchcraft, she from farre did thither bring:
There she had him now layd a slombering,
In secret shade, after long wanton joyes:
Whilst round about them pleasauntly did sing
Many faire Ladies, and lascivious boyes,
That ever mixt their song with light licentious toyes. (12.72)
The description of the bower shows the function of the surrounding garden, which is the same recreated larger. It is not enough for Acrasia to seduce and corrupt these men; she must surround the seduction with approval, and indeed with layers upon layers of approval radiating out from this erotic center. One of those layers is the “secret shade,” another transferred epithet. The trope makes the shade itself complicit in the secret wantonness it covers, but there is another trope here as well. There is, after all, nothing particularly secret about what goes on within this “secret shade”; on the contrary, one has the sense of hundreds of these “faire Ladies, and lascivious boyes” looking upon it musically. Nor is this Spenser’s first use of the word to mean something that should be secret but is not; when “The secret signes of kindled lust appeare” on Guyon’s face, the Palmer instantly notices them and rebukes him (12.68.6). Opacity in this canto seems to figure not invisibility but, paradoxically, the object of a kind of focus. So, though the irony of “secret shade” mediates and interprets the relationship it describes between the lovers and the shade, it also reveals the stark complicity of that relationship. Spenser’s description of shade is approving in a way that allows for repudiation, just as the shade itself manages to cover the lovers in a way that reveals them, just as the water in the fountain covers the nymphs in a way that reveals them.
Shade within the bower is simultaneously artificial and not—the trees that produce it are part of the carefully constructed bower, but the shade is not itself of them. It is an emblem of the complicity of trope in what it describes and of the complicity of artificiality in seduction. But in both cases, it provides a provisional moral definition by partially separating itself from what it covers. This ambiguity of artificiality has a long history, including a biblical analogue. In Jonah 4, shade both stands in for and is caused by the larger divine morality that, to counteract his fierce egotism, must always remain outside of Jonah’s moral self-construction. Shade is God’s reminder that Jonah’s morality must be God’s, not the other way around. The Geneva Bible has it:
So Ionah went out of the citie and sate on the East side of the citie, and there made him a boothe, and sate vnder it in the shadowe til he might se what shulde be done in the citie.
And the Lord God prepared a gourde, & made it to come vp ouer Ionah, that it might be a shadowe ouer his head and deliuer him from his grief. So Ionah was exceding glad of the gourde.
But God prepared a worme when the morning rose the next daie, and it smote the gourde, that it withered.
And when the sunne did arise, God prepared also a seruent East winde: and the sunne bet vpon the head of Ionah, that he fainted, and wished in his heart to dye, and said, It is better for me to dye, then to liue.
And God said vnto Ionah, Doest thou wel to be angrie for the gourde? And he said, I do wel to be angry unto the death.
Then said the Lord, Thou hast had pitie on the gourde for the which thou hast not laboured, nether madest it growe, which came vp in a night, and perished in a night,
And shulde not I spare Nineueh that great citie, wherein are six score thousand persones, that can not discerne betwene their right hand, & their left hand, and also muche cattel? (Jonah 4.5–11)[37]
The Geneva editors provide a marginal note: the gourd “was a further meanes to couer him from the heat of the sunne, as he remained in his boothe.” Jonah’s booth is clearly fairly shoddy and provides little or no real relief from the sun, but the gourd can “deliuer him from his grief”; the power its shade possesses against the sun translates easily into an emotional power. That the gourd shames his own efforts, however, does not prevent Jonah’s anger at its removal, and therein, of course, lies God’s moral message: no one can take the place of God.
But Jonah’s predicament speaks also to the relationship between man and nature; man’s constructions imitate and envy nature’s. What Jonah is attempting to do is to rely upon his own moral construction over God’s; though he has created his ethical model as an imitation of one that exists already within God’s natural universe, his ability to do so leads him to believe that the two are essentially the same, just as he is as angry at God for destroying the gourd as he would be if God had destroyed his own underwhelming booth. The problem is not just hubris; from Jonah’s point of view there is an interpretive difficulty, because the shade of the booth and the shade of the gourd are indeed the same shade, even if the source and degree are different. Shade possesses the capacity to obscure the observable difference between organicism and artificiality while demonstrating the importance of the difference in genesis. Jonah does not perceive the persistence of the natural within the artificial environment; because his booth is artificial, he assumes that the shade of the gourd counts as being of his hands.
The reader of canto 12 is in danger of making the same error as Jonah, and to show the danger, Guyon himself makes that very mistake: he thinks that shade has an owner and a moral meaning it cannot have. Because the bower is arranged “as in approuance” around Acrasia, he destroys the whole thing, reading that appearance of approval (a simile is only a simile) as if it were the real thing. The approval is not complete; the natural landscape, which does not approve, exists in liminal fragments around the bower, and its presence provides a space in which the destruction cannot be judged strictly in terms of the reader’s judgment of Acrasia. For Jonah, the shade reveals the sun—he is not as desperate before the gourd grows as he is after it is taken away, because he has been made more aware of shade’s necessity through its removal. We can understand the laurel shade’s defense against the sun in the same terms; it draws the sun into the bower (making it morally complicit), but it also draws the reader out of the bower, toward the sun. As a photographer judges the brightness of the day through the depth and crispness of shadow, shade is a means both of deception and of the way out of deception. The approving trees gathered around Acrasia shield her but also reveal her with more clarity, and indeed, unlike his earlier stumble at the fountain, here Guyon does not pause.
The bower’s power of seeming both conditions and depends on the parallel power of description itself. Like the ivory waves in the gates, which look as if they are in motion but do not deceive, trope can present an image without claiming it is real. In coming to terms with this power of seeming, I have argued that the ambivalence of Spenser’s descriptions of water and shade suggest that something of the natural landscape lingers in the garden surrounding the bower—that Spenser’s solution to the impossibility of representation is to represent something that clearly is not there. The landscape of the bower is a transparent creation; we know it is false, but that knowledge merely changes the kind of representation it is capable of. Landscape in the bower resists mimesis.
If the land, as one of those things that is within the bower without being part of it, is essentially parallel to water and shade, then the stain it bears is equivalent to the loss of shade when the laurel trees are cut down and the loss of the crystallizing effect of water when the fountain is destroyed. All three refract and condition the visual image of the bower as it is presented to the neutral observer. As comparatives for what similarly refracts the image of the bower for the reader, all three are emblems of trope. The poem itself, then, is stained too, as is the reader’s imagination in which these visual entities take shape, just as the viewer in the bower has been destroyed along with the landscape itself. Our response should not be, however, to try to rescue nature from what art has done to it; on the contrary, the blurred distinction between art and nature really is final, and the persistence of natural descriptions throughout the canto indicate that we can never separate the nature Spenser’s descriptions create from the “niggard Nature” that underlies the bower itself. We must, instead, recognize that the descriptive power of poetry outlives the closing off wrought by the allegory as morally understood, and thus by the Palmer. Representation (the relationship between description and the thing described) is limited by the bower’s seeming, and thus interpretation (the relationship between description and meaning) must be as well. To look at the artificial through the natural, even as the natural is underlying the artificial, is to get caught in a cycle with no escape. The effect of the cycle is to cut off the finality of any conclusion that this is artificial, deceptive, and seductive while that is natural, transparent, and virtuous, however those variables would be filled in. What counts is not the rejection of the artificial but the vision to be gained from imagining what it might look like.
1. Mondrian, Natural Reality and Abstract Reality: An Essay in Trialogue Form, trans. Martin S. James (New York: George Braziller, 1995), 31.
2. All quotations of The Faerie Queene are drawn from The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933), vol. 2. I have introduced “u,” “v,” and “j” according to modern practice.
3. For an account and pointed critique of the various readings suggesting that allegory matters more at the beginning of the poem than at the end, see Kenneth Borris, Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 145ff.
4. Sidney, Defence, 25.
5. Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary, 47.
6. This emphasis on the reader’s experience has long been at the heart of definitions of poetry; Sidney argues that poetry “excelleth history, not only in furnishing the mind with knowledge, but in setting it forward to that which deserveth to be called and accounted good,” a setting forth Sidney calls moving, which “is of a higher degree than teaching” (Defence, 38–39). The idea is comparable to that of Horace: “non satis est pulchra esse poemata; dulcia sunto, / et quocumque volent animum auditoris agunto” (“it is not enough for poems to be exquisite; they must be sweet, and lead the heart of a listener to what they intend”; Ars poetica, 99–100; my translation). But Horace, presumably, is describing the rhetorical power of poetry, whereas Costa Lima asks us to imagine the representative capacity of the text as itself taking place within the reader’s mind.
7. Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary, 90.
8. One argument of this type is that the bower as a whole is an emblem of fruitless sexuality and a parody of Eden replaced by the later Garden of Adonis; for a defense of this position, see Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Other similar arguments are cited below.
9. Mikics, The Limits of Moralizing: Pathos and Subjectivity in Spenser and Milton (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1994), 85. For Mikics, the chief problem of canto 12 is that of the ambiguity of Spenser’s ethical characterizations.
10. For a useful account of the use of the word “landscape” within geography, see Richard Muir, “Geography and the History of Landscape: Half a Century of Development as Recorded in The Geographical Journal,” Geographical Journal 164 (1998), 148–54.
11. Steven C. Bourassa, The Aesthetics of Landscape (London: Belhaven, 1991), 3.
12. Mugerauer, Interpreting Environments: Tradition, Deconstruction, Hermeneutics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 61.
13. Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 176.
14. Auerbach, Mimesis, 267.
15. Pantagruel, in The Complete Works of François Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 241.
16. Auerbach, Mimesis, 272, 284.
17. Cave’s emphasis; Cave, “Reading Rabelais: Variations on the Rock of Virtue,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 79.
18. Cave, “Reading Rabelais,” 89.
19. Greenblatt argues: “The Bower of Bliss must be destroyed not because its gratifications are unreal but because they threaten ‘civility’—civilization,” which he identifies with the colonialist attempt to civilize the New World and not only resist but destroy “the disordered and licentious life” practiced by its inhabitants. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 173, 182.
20. Lewis’s goal in his reading of the episode is to defend Spenser from those who consider the bower’s pleasures to be too enthusiastically described; he contends that such enthusiasm is deeply ironic and that the bower “is a picture, one of the most powerful ever painted, of the whole sexual nature in disease.” Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 332.
21. Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 113.
22. In fact, to some extent the trend has been to expand the historical reach of this reading. In a recent book placing Spenser’s view of Ireland in a colonial context, Richard McCabe argues: “The mingling of topographical references to Ireland and the New World throughout book two serves to remind us that the action is ‘set’ exclusively in neither but in a conflation of both, in the common ‘land’ of colonial opportunity” (McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 122). McCabe’s use of what are sometimes jocularly called “scare quotes” indicate anxiety about asserting that this colonial context actually functions as the setting of the book, because to do so would be to say that the bower, for example, not only can be imagined in a colonial context but must be. Greenblatt would probably go that far.
23. Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 296.
24. Milton, “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” line 41.
25. Wofford, The Choice of Achilles, 305.
26. Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
27. Ibid., 67.
28. Ibid., 11.
29. Ibid., 2.
30. Guyon’s explicitly erotic gaze, which seems to incite rather than undercut the intemperate, destructive passion with which he overcomes it, has occupied a central role in debates about what reality the poem is representing; in a critique of Greenblatt’s reading of the episode, Louis Montrose writes, “To write as a male reader, identifying unself-consciously with Guyon’s position, with Guyon’s gaze, leads to a misrecognition of the gender-specific character of the self-fashioning process figured in Guyon’s violent repression of his own sexual arousal.” Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 329.
31. Another way to put this is that the tropes have enough distance from the wickedness they represent to be recoverable, a view not all readers of the poem share. Richard McCabe argues that the mode of description in the episode needs to be rejected: “The imagery of metamorphosis which lends such dynamism to the verse encapsulates the very force that the heroes must resist, and their resistance generates a persistent tension between the moral and aesthetic orders. It is not just the Bowre of Blisse that Guyon must reject, but the poetics that sustain it. He must become deaf to Spenserian verse in order to become a Spenserian hero” (McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment, 140–41). This reading implies a simple and final resolution for an episode that consistently eschews univocality; in my view, the multiplicity of perspective Spenser provides is designed to forestall precisely this sort of settled interpretation.
32. For the importance of the pastoral genre to The Faerie Queene, see, for example, David R. Shore, Spenser and the Poetics of Pastoral: A Study of the World of Colin Clout (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985). The pastoral mode frequently relates to writing in Spenser but can also be emblematic of reading and indeed of criticism; such a relationship is the basis of Richard Chamberlain’s Radical Spenser.
33. “tantum inter densas, umbrosa cacumina / fagos adsidue veniebat. Ibi haec incondita solus / montibus et siluis studio iactabat inani ” (Vergil, Eclogues 2:3–4) (“Into such dense beeches, their pointed shadows, he would continually go. There alone, in inane zeal, he would hurl his disordered words to the mountains and woods ”). But most of the complaint he utters is about the sun; he apostrophizes his beloved Alexis: “tua dum vestigia lustro / sole sub ardenti” (12–13) (“while I trace your footprints under the burning sun”). Vergil, Eclogues, ed. Robert Coleman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); my translations.
34. “August,” 47–48.
35. As Jane Tylus points out, it has a similar but perhaps even broader role in Vergilian georgic, in which shade is the shelter of patronage and of artistic mystery into which poetry can retreat from the rigors of science; when Vergil in Georgics 2 asks to be shielded “ingenti ramorum . . . umbra” (“under the shadow of the broad branches”), he refers either to “the Muses or preferably (and less dangerously) [to] the unnamed patron who will shield him”; Spenser, Tylus argues, uses shade similarly in “October” in the Calender. Tylus, Writing Vulnerability and the Late Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 122–23.
36. Thus the sexual allegory is another part of Spenser’s relationship with his classical models, as Syrithe Pugh observes: “The lake is landscaped to evoke Ovid’s tale of Daphne (the laurel), encouraging the viewer to fantasize about being the rapacious Apollo (the sun) contemplating an offence against the bathers” (Pugh, Spenser and Ovid, 105).
37. The Bible and Holy Scriptures (Geneva: Rouland Hall, 1560); reproduced as The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).