Milton uses the same figure in Comus, when the Elder Brother talks in
the lordly way of twelve-year olds explaining to their juniors about
Chastity being imaged Athena's snaky-headed Gorgon shield "Wherewith she
freezed her foes to congealed stone." But that's funny (I think), where
this is astonishing. I think that Spenser can get away with the
comparison because of the chastity/Gorgon shield association, but he
uses it to suggest attraction and fear in almost equal measure. "
Medusa's mazeful head" mixes amazement with the idea of a maze. The
lines seem to stress that you can get lost in the maze and it isn't
entirely clear whether that's just what you feel comfortable doing. One
of the sonnets (XXXVII) doesn't use the word maze but gives you the idea
in the golden tresses that bind--possibly too much. Bill Oram
>>> [log in to unmask] 02/21/04 05:55PM >>>
Yes, Medusa. To me this is a comparison rich with contradiction,
ambivalence, and other wonderful stuff. I assume for Spenser too. It
is
the case, though, that (as I'm sure David knows) the Medusa was
sometimes
used in the Renaissance as an indicator of chastity--so blazingly
lovely
and powerful that people got "astonied." There's an older essay on
this
somewhere that I think the Norton edition of Spenser may cite. Ronsard
at
one point, as I recall, calls one of his ladies a "Gorgon," and there
is
no record that she punched him out for doing so. Freud, of course, had
a
very different take on the Medusa but what he said is not suitable for
a
family e-list. I gather from the few men I've dared ask about this
that
they personally do not freeze into stone at the sight of one of those
things. Whatever the use of Medusa as a signifier of chastity/virtue,
though, she *was* a monster with snakes and this bit in Spenser is, I
think, a fine example of his tapping in to the emotional complexities
of
love and marriage. Viper thoughts indeed! (Yes, as Joe Loewenstein has
shown). Anne (Prescott).
> --But the problem with "anticipated-but-deferred wholeness"
> (_differance_) is that it is inconsistent with Spenser's aesthetic
> Neoplatonism.--
>
> Yes, that's the problem. But it isn't just our problem, it was
Spenser's,
> too, and he has an amazing facility for allowing such problems to
play
> unresolved in his verse. Whatever beliefs Spenser held, he seems to
have
> held them differently, or with a difference, when writing. For a
poet who
> manages at times to sound defensive, he wrote remarkably undefended
> poetry,
> so permeable to contradiction that when (since you spoke of the
> Epithalamion) he gives us a portrait of his bride, he compares her
effect
> on
> the beholder to Medusa's.
>
>
> _____
>
> David Lee Miller
>
> Department of English 543 Boonesboro Ave
> University of Kentucky Lexington, KY 40508
> Lexington, KY 40506-0027 (859) 252-3680
> (859) 257-6965
> FAX 323-1072
>
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