Marriage, closure, and constructing the feminine in Spenser's world.

摘要

Each chapter of this study explores the idea of "subjectivity" in relation to narrative closure and a construction of the feminine. The chapters examine cruxes that share a critical heritage emphasizing the author's achievement of "harmony." My reexamination of the "harmony" foregrounds a fracturing, which occurs within the trope of "Marriage," the cornerstone of Spenser's metaphysics of continuity. I contend that the crucial moments of closure are attempts to harmonize via a metaphor of union--marriage--but that the union figured is instinct with tensions most evident in an ambivalence, indeed in a "polyvalence," surrounding and permeating representations of powerful female figures. In developing this idea, I explore two of Spenser's major works: the so-called "wedding volume," including the Amoretti and the Epithalamion, and The Faerie Queene. I treat the "wedding volume" as a "whole" made up of two "parts." The first "part"--the Amoretti sonnet sequence--has commonly been seen to achieve a type of harmony. Chapter 1 examines closely the loss that actually problematizes the sequence's "achievement." The ambiguous "Anacreontics" magnify the problematic closure of the sequence. Chapter 2 discusses the Epithalamion's peculiar "cutting off" as it repeats this problem of a harmonic closure permeated by fragmenting anxieties surrounding union with the feminine (or Spenser's construction of it).;The next three chapters address the crucial moments of closure in The Faerie Queene, moments that have generally been viewed as magnificently harmonic and transcendent. Chapter 3 addresses Duessa's disruption of the wedding closing Book 1; chapter 4 deals with the displaced 1590 closing of "Part One" of The Faerie Queene; and chapter 5 examines the "unperfect" Mutabilitie Cantos closing the entire project. If we read the union of contraries in Spenser's metaphysics as a kind of "marriage," each of these chapters involves a marriage drama underwritten by the subject's profound ambivalence toward the principle of the feminine that he has constructed and on which his harmonizing--with its attendant implications for the subject in history--depends.