As they say on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, it’s all about taking it to
another level.
RE Mammon—in what sense can Guyon be called aristocratic? I’m thinking
of 2.7.33, for instance. Does Guyon, or Red Crosse, become noble through
action, or is nobility defined only as a blood title and a landed estate? As
Huntington argues (another plug for his book), these two competing
definitions cause a lot of problems. Another question: when Mammon
shows Guyon the big furnace things in 2.7.38, in line 6, does “good” mean
Good or does it mean commodity? And what sort of labor are the
“deformed” “feends” doing in 35? “Wealth” also seems to be a word whose
meaning is not entirely clear, at least not to me. I hesitate to call this
“commercialism,” since I’m not sure what mode of production is operating
here—are they producing capital or just evil (not the same thing). Can the
feends qualify as a proletariat? I won’t even attempt to figure out what all
this has to do with Ambition...
cw
---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2004 19:13:34 +0000
>From: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: article review
>To: [log in to unmask]
>
>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
Christopher Warley
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Oakland University
248-370-2256
|