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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