Christopher Warley's post unexpectedly moves the discussion of class (or, as some historians would prefer, status group) struggle to a whole 'nother level. I have nothing of my own to contribute at this time, but I'd welcome further contributions to this string.
Some attention to the obvious and the less obvious in the Cave of Mammon episode would seem in order. There are some suggestive prefigurations of Spenser's mature attitude toward wealth and status in his Latin verse letter to Harvey.
The last chapter in Elizabeth Fowler's book, "Literary Character," deals with Spenser's perspective(s) on politics in interesting ways: not a self-sufficient discussion of the themes that Warley highlights, but maybe seminal.
Cheers, Jon Quitslund (Geo. Washington U.)
> My university doesn’t seem to have the journal, so I can’t read it though
> I’d
> like too. In your representation, it sounds like a classic, if aggressively
> old-fashioned, depiction of what Ellen Meiksins Wood calls “the bourgeois
> paradigm.� However, the vocabulary might be different, but I’m not sure
> that the argument (having not read it, again) is actually all that different
> from arguments about Spenser as Poet’s poet, or emphases on his
> “inwardness.� The class dimension of these arguments is rarely made
> explicit—and is usually very, very suppressed (repressed?)—but they’re all
> imagining a bourgeois Spenser (Rambuss puts this better than me in his
> article in Spenser and the Subject of Biography). Montrose, for instance,
> posits a bourgeoisie as the marginal alternative to Elizabethan absolutism;
> his argument is less strident and more subtle, but it’s not qualitatively
> different than a Spenser in a bourgeois class-for-itself. In both The
> Pristine Culture of Capitalism and The Origin of Capitalism (fun and
> enviably clear texts), Wood argues that bourgeois-aristocratic is a false
> opposition, basing herself mostly on the work of Robert Brenner.
> I’d guess that Spenser’s depiction of class is characteristically
> subtle.
> He does not want to be, nor does he have a vocabulary to describe, a
> bourgeoisie (or a middle class, or a middling sort, etc); instead, he tends to
> articulate class antagonism, and occasionally class struggle, in the
> vocabulary of “nobles� and “queens.� But this focus on nobility
> doesn’t
> mean he’s only, as Marx put it, England’s ass-kissing poet—there’s a lot
> of
> quiet social distinctions and less than quiet antagonism going on
> everywhere (FQ 3.11.46 seems to me a very, very tricky stanza to read). A
> similar argument is now routinely made in terms of gender—Spenser’s
> idolization of Elizabeth cuts any number of ways—but for some reason an
> analogous class argument has not gotten much play.
>
>
> cw
> ---- Original message ----
> >Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2004 17:37:53 -0700
> >From: Jean Goodrich <[log in to unmask]>
> >Subject: article review
> >To: [log in to unmask]
> >
> >Hiya, Spenserians.
> >
> >A quick question, I hope. Is anyone familiar with Pauline Kogan's article,
> >"Class Struggle in the Superstructure in Spenser's Faerie Queene," in
> >Literature and Ideology, 1970? Have there been any reviews?
> >
> >Kogan represents Spenser as being a part of a self-aware bourgeois
> class,
> >actively working toward what sounds to me like a too-monolithic,
> coherent
> >agenda to promote middle class values. There are other things that
> trigger
> >warning bells for me in this article: the representation of Sir Philip Sidney
> >and the Sidney family as bourgeoisie (along with other "bourgeois men of
> >prominence" including the earl of Leicester -- now, if you're an *earl* can
> >you really be bourgeois?), an unqualified assertion that Spenser was
> connected
> >to the Spencers of Althorpe, the idea that allegory as a genre has "class
> >associations" and makes a "suitable medium of ideological propaganda,"
> and the
> >portrayal of Giordano Bruno as a visionary asserting a "bourgeois
> cosmology."
> >
> >Oh, and then there's the concluding sentence of the article: "The recent
> >revival of his [Spenser's] poetry is part of the efforts of the monopoly
> >capitalists to mobilize all their cultural despotism in self-defence." Ahem.
> >
> >Opinions, please?
> >
> >Thanks, as always.
> >Jean Goodrich
> >English Department
> >University of Arizona
> Christopher Warley
> Assistant Professor
> Department of English
> Oakland University
> 248-370-2256
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