Right on, Harry, except for "whar he did with Una." I read that as wet dream. Problem is who or what is Poured in loosenesse ...." tpr
----- Original Message -----
From: Katherine Eggert <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Monday, June 28, 2004 1:43 am
Subject: Re: Redcrosse and Duessa at the Fountain
> Re: Redcrosse and Duessa at the FountainEven if we could read the
> physiognomics of what Redcrosse is doing with Duessa (or having
> done to him, or doing and then blaming her for having done),
> wouldn't we be more surprised if we found he *were* participating
> in a "a regular [heterosexual, actively male] sexual act"?
> Arguably, the FQ contains no such sexual acts. Unless you count
> the satyrs and Hellenore -- and that is bestiality.
>
> Katherine Eggert
> Associate Professor of English
> Chair, Department of English
>
> Department of English
> University of Colorado
> 226 UCB
> Boulder, CO 80309-0226
> tel and Voicemail (303) 492-7382
> fax (303) 492-8904
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Harry Berger, Jr.
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Sunday, June 27, 2004 9:28 AM
> Subject: Re: Redcrosse and Duessa at the Fountain
>
>
> -->
> All in all, would it be better not to try to uncover specific
> physical activity in the words, but to read them in an Alper-ish
> kind of way as a generalized depiction of moral, spiritual, and
> physical dissolution?
>
>
> Sure. Always pull back. But not until the last minute.
>
>
> A heavily alliterated case of acedie/accidia. And the verse is
> really enjoying its punitive moment clobbering and hissing at the
> poor devil, giving him what-for. But at the same time it's finding
> excuses for him, blaming the failure of his manly forces on the
> nymph's waters, blaming his looseness on "his looser make." As he
> so much as says much later to Una's dad, "It wasn't my fault." So
> I'd worry less about what, precisely, they were doing (that gets
> into Othello territory) and more about who's being held
> responsible for it. "Dissolution" is a metaphor encouraged by the
> passage. But it's the wrong metaphor. It accedes to the
> displacement from moral to physical debility.
>
>
> The depiction is not all that generalized. Isn't the chief
> meaning effect produced by the way this passage begins with a
> repetition and echo of Sansloy resting "foreby a fountaine" 10 or
> 11 stanzas earlier? Which reminds us that what he's been doing
> with Duessa is part of what he did and is still doing to Una.
>
>
> Happy Sabbath
>
>
>
>
> Valued members of the list,
>
> This is about a page long, so if you don't like lengthy
> postings, delete now.
>
> Can one tell what, if anything, is going on physically with
> Redcrosse and Duessa in stanza 6 and 7 of canto vii?
>
> The water so chills Redcrosse that it seems unlikely he would
> be able to participate in a regular sexual act.
>
> After drinking from the fountain,
>
> His chaunged powres at first them selues not felt,
> Till crudled cold his corage gan assayle,
> And chearful blood in fayntnes chill did melt,
> Which like a feuer fit through all his body swelt.
>
> Vital heat in the form of vital spirits sent from the heart
> (the seat of "corage") effects all bodily acts. Erection, observes
> Helkiah Crooke (_Microcosmographia_, 247-48), results from "heate,
> spirites and winde, which fill and distend these hollow bodies [in
> the penis].
>
> Yet goodly court he make still to his Dame,
> Pourd out in loosenesse on the grassy ground,
> Both carelesse of his health, and of is fame:
>
> "[G]oodly court" does not, of course, necessarily indicate a
> sexual advance, and "Pourd" and "looseness" definitely do not
> indicate a sexual act. If an early modern reference is needed,
> Crooke describes the way seed "comes indeed leaping forth, and yet
> is continued one part of it with another as a company of Antickes
> holding hand in hand, do vault vpon a stage." And, with regard to
> "loosenesse," Crooke says "in the auoyding of seed the legges and
> the armes are contracted and the whole body suffereth a kinde of
> convulsion" (287).
>
> Pouring and looseness are, however, evocative of Gonorrhea or
> "running of the reyns." Crooke says the emission of seed in
> gonorrhea "neither hath any imagination going before nor pleasure
> accompanying it, neither is it driven out by the strength of
> Nature, but falleth away by reasone of the waterishnes or acrimony
> of the seed, the weaknes of the vessels, their convulsion and the
> inflammation of the neighbour parts: finally, which bringeth vpon
> the Patient an extenuation and consumption of the whole body." (287)
>
> Surely it would be a stretch to understand Redcrosse to have
> contracted a venereal disease, even though he is "carelesse of his
> health, and of his fame" in the company of the whore of Babylon.
>
> All in all, would it be better not to try to uncover specific
> physical activity in the words, but to read them in an Alper-ish
> kind of way as a generalized depiction of moral, spiritual, and
> physical dissolution?
>
> In any event, I hope you have found the medical lore
> interesting, even at times amusing.
>
> Jim Broaddus
>
>
> emeritus, Indiana State University
> Route 3 Box 1037
> Brodhead, KY 40409
> 606-758-8073
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
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