The Garden of Adonis and the Garden of Forms

THE GARDEN OF ADONIS AND THE GARDEN OF FORMS JUDITH C. RAMSAY Customarily, modern critics discuss the Garden of Adonis in terms of Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene; but considering Spenser's willingness to publish the first three books of his poem as a separate unit, we may assume that the narrative, the allegory, and the philosophy of each of those three books are sufficiently self-contained to stand alone. And this means that the Garden of Adonis episode would stand in relation to the original concluding situation of Book III as the House of Holinesse stands to the final situation of Book I, or the Castle of Alma to the destruction of Acrasia's Bower. If Book III demonstrates the education of Britomart, the love-lorn girl with little practical knowledge of the pitfalls of love, it ,,·ould then follow that her successful rescue of Amoret is not merely a delay in her quest for Artegall, but a visible sign that she has perfected the virtue of which she is the champion-just as the slaying of the dragon is the sign of St. George's perfection, and the destruction of the Bower of Bliss the sign of Guyon's perfection. That she is not from the beginning perfect in her self-control is indicated by the two wounds she receives. Just as St. George must be perfect in his virtue before he is worthy of Una's hand, so Britomart must be perfect in her virtue before she is worthy of Artegall's. The images of the Heavenly City and the Castle of Alma are obviously connected to the heroes' quests. These unique experiences are earned by the good intentions of Red Cross and Guyon, even though there is considerable backsliding, and the experiences strengthen them for the remainder of their trials. But what was Spenser to do when he wanted to explain to us the central experience of Britomart's quest, an experience which is essentially instinctive not revelationaI, as is the Heavenly City, nor educative, as is the Castle of Alma? His solution was to describe the generative impulse in the metaphor of the abundance of nature. (The City and the Castle inevitably suggest human architecture and man's control of his environment, but the emphaSis in III, vi is on the absence of such human control: "Ne needs there Volume xxxv, Number 2, January, 1966 THE CARDENS 189 Gardiner ... ," "A gloomy grove of mirtle trees / Whose shady boughes sharpe steele did neuer lop.") At the same time he has modified the symbol of fruitful nature by setting it between the images of twin sisters whose sum total refers to Britomart. We can then expect canto vi to perform a double function: to generalize creation as a divine action which is also performed by all God's creatures at their own level, and to indicate how Britomart and her particular virtue are related to this action at the social level. Between 1932 and 1942 the traditional sources for the Gardens of Adonis episode of The Faerie Queene were thoroughly discussed by Josephine Waters Bennett and Brents Stirling. From 1942 to 1961 the Gardens lay fallow until Harry Berger, Jr. used the episode as an example of a style [which] seems the natural outcome of an intellectual climate in which the visible forms of the real are no longer felt as external or given, but are created and stabilized through the experience of the individual soul and the creative effort of the individual imagination.l Where Mrs. Bennett and Dr. Stirling were concerned with the origins and inspiration of the passage without being able to fit it into the larger context of the poem as a whole, Dr. Berger could take its structure and significance for granted. More recently Thomas P. Roche, Jr., in his interpretation of the Gardens, places the emphasis on their relevance to Belphoebe, Amoret and Britomart? None of the four writers mentioned above has successfully demonstrated the way in which the Gardens of Adonis canto is integrated with the rest of The Faerie Queene. It is my intention to demonstrate the unity of F.Q., III, vi; to point out...