Wow! Such a rich conversation, and it has taken me a while to try to digest it all.
Following Susanne's suggestion that we might read "Timias searching Amoret's wounds in multiple ways--as a moment that is laid out as simultaneously care/concern/healing and also a spark of passion," Timias's unsuccessful battle with the foresters in book 3 suggests that he is capable of being overcome by lust. Also, Spenser described Timias's hair after he was defeated by the foresters: "His locks, like faded leaves fallen to the ground / Knotted with bloud, in bouches rudely ran" (3.5.29.5-6). I never before recognized that Spenser was such a hairstylist: When Timias is in a mess, his hair is a mess! Can we read Timias's messy hair as a return to a previous lustful state? Timias may have had a conversion experience after meeting Belphobe, but unfortunately for him, the 39 articles had stated that concupiscence remains after conversion/baptism. And perhaps the squire did protest too much moments after meeting Belphobe with his "dye rather dye," especially as we see the effect of his love being so profoundly experienced in his body (book 3, canto 48).
That being said, I am still interested in the ways classical and early modern "ethnographic" texts (Heather's comment allows us to read Ovid as an ethnographic writer) and their sometimes use of humoral theory (as John mentioned in his first post) now make hairiness such a fascinating site for thinking about race and somatic difference. I would like to link Tiffany's wonderful question, "can affect so alter even seemingly stable somatic markers so that Timias might be, depending on his grooming rituals (and on his affective state), 'erotic elegy, exilic, dainty courtier, or Goth (self-described barbarian)'?" with John's equally wonderful comment, "one reason allegory makes us recognize acutely the problems in the representation of race is that reading a body's markers as signs of essential racial identity is an allegorical practice." Rembering Kim and Yulia's observations that Spenser tends to racialize lust and lustful characters, I find Katherine's comment, that Timias may be self-Gothicizing, even more compelling. To what extent does he become hairy because he feels like those hairy people, whoever they are? Does Timias say to himself: Darn it, here I am lusting again, time for me to mess up my hair and look like a figure of lust, like a barbarian, because you know those barbarians. Does something about the allegory demand that Timias become like a barbarian?
Timias's transformation, however, is less permanent than Grill's or Malbecco's. Timias will eventually get cleaned up (and presumably get his hair done), and thus no longer be a figure of lust, or a goth, or a barbarian.
After all of that, I don't think I've said much that that is new, only stitched together some of the provocative comments in this thread.
Dennis
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