David Radcliffe, in his Edmund Spenser: A Reception History (1996),
records the opinion of J. H. Reynolds that Spenser "says more of the
persons of women than any other writer, and yet he never says too much.
He is always gratifying the senses -- but his gratifications serve to
purify, by their very refinement" (96). Reynolds was a correspondent of
Keats, and not stupid. But whatever can he have been thinking of?
Cf. A. C. Hamilton, The Structure of Allegory in The Faerie Queene
(1961), p. 199: "If Spenser's poem should reach a paperback edition
underneath the title will be a picture of Serena
her bellie white and clere,
Which like an Altar did it selfe vprere,
To offer sacrifice divine thereon,
the priest with his knife poised 'readie to launch her breast,
surrounded by leering savages waiting to devour her."
Remember that, Penguin, the next time you reprint Roche's edition...
Back to Reynolds, though: I'm not one of those readers who are troubled
by the stripping of Duessa. (The stripping, it seems to me, expresses
distaste for hypocrisy, not for women's bodies as such.) I wouldn't call
anything in Spenser "pornography," and I wish we would reserve the term
"voyeurism" for something really kinky. I have also read, marked, and
inwardly digested Theresa Krier's excellent Gazing on Secret Sights
(1990). I think I have read most of what has been written on Belphoebe's
blazon in book 2. Still I am puzzled by Reynolds: is it just wishful
thinking, or does Spenser really have ways of describing a woman's
"person" that refine our conceptions of her, that make her seem
"personal" as well as animal? If so, which descriptions are they? And is
Serena one of them? How about Acrasia? I feel quite lost.
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Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask]
English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet
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