Two works I've found helpful on the subject of corporeality in Spenser
are Michael Schoenfeldt's book, "Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England:
Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton"
(Cambridge 1999) and Kenneth Borris' article, "Flesh, Spirit, and the
Glorified Body: Spenser's Anthropomorphic Houses of Pride, Holiness, and
Temperance" in "Spenser Studies" 15 (2001).
Jennifer Vaught
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
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From: Sidney-Spenser Discussion List [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of David Wilson-Okamura
Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2007 10:33 AM
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Subject: Spenser and the body
Our reading today comes from Wisdom 9:15:
"The corruptible body presses down the soul, and the earthly tabernacle
weighs down the mind that muses on many things."
May God add his blessing to this, his semi-canonical word.
A few weeks ago I spent a couple of hours resurrecting old files from an
obsolete word processor format. Somehow, I think scholarship would have
survived the loss of my college essays on Conrad, but you never can
tell! (While working, I had Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" playing in
the background on infinite repeat. Some people think that's a song about
Warren Beatty, but really she wrote it about me.) Among the papers that
I condemned to remembrance was one on Milton's poem "On Time," in which
I compared the young Milton's desire to leave the body behind (because
it weighs down the spirit) with the monism of Paradise Lost (in which
even angels eat and go to the bathroom). The last line of the essay was
a quotation from one of Milton's early biographers, to the effect that
Milton was "a spare man."
I am not as spare as the college freshman who wrote that essay, but I
was thinking about its substance last week at Kalamazoo, when I missed
our first Spenser session because of a King Kong headache. Instead of
hearing what, by all accounts, was an excellent paper on Spenser's
Latinity, I lay in my dorm bed cursing my earthly tabernacle. As a
religious person, I don't like to think of my body as "me." The real me
is spirit, and when the body dies the spirit will rise up and go on
living. But when the body is in pain, the spirit can't go on with its
normal business. At least mine can't. To someone who believes in spirit,
this is distressing, because it makes one question whether the spirit is
really separable.
Of course, as a Christian I am also obliged to believe that the body is
good: was created good on the sixth day, and was further ennobled c. 4
BC by the Incarnation. I know all that, and in an equable mood I can
believe it. But pain brings other verses -- counter-truths -- to
recollection: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" (Mt. 26:41,
Mk. 14:38). "Who will deliver me from this body of death" (Rom. 7:24)?
Where do we think Spenser fits into all of this? In FQ, he seems to
enjoin temperance and purity, but not asceticism. Sometimes, though, he
hints that the body is a source of sin. In the Garden of Adonis, he
speaks of our "sinfull mire" (3.6.32). In "Daphnaida" (which, we were
told last Thursday, is not really such a terrible poem as we think it
is), death is said to have "assoyld" the soul of Douglas Howard "from
sinfull fleshlinesse" (259). "Flesh" is said to be "sinfull" again in
HHL 97.
Is this contradiction, or just complexity? Cf. that other Irish poet,
who in one poem celebrates Love that "has pitched its mansion / In the
place of excrement," and in another poem feels sorry for the old soul
"fastened to a dying animal."
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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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