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15. Androcentrism and Acrasian Fantasies in the Bower of Bliss Harry Berger’s ‘‘Wring out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001’’ will be a major critical statement on the Bower of Bliss for years to come, and serious work on the Bower needs to engage its generously annotated, tightly argued analysis of the structural discourse that constitutes this site.1 In ‘‘Squeezing the Text’’ (is the trope laundry or lemon juice?), Berger exposes the workings of misogyny as a target, and emphatically not a given, of the Bower. He reads the Spenserian narrative as an instance of ‘‘specular tautology ,’’ or self-reflection, which he also understands as an inversion of cause and effect such that the effect is misrecognized as its own cause (86).2 In this misrecognition lies the ‘‘unconscious of the system.’’3 Thus the wicked witch Acrasia is falsely projected, regarded, and bound as the ‘‘objectification of male hysteria.’’ She ‘‘is male’’ because she is ‘‘placed in the position of dominance’’ within her Garden, and because she is ‘‘the product of male fantasy’’ (88). Presumably, Acrasia differs in these respects from Venus in the Garden of Adonis, but that site is at least nominally Adonis’, and in light of his possession, we may have to look still further at differences and similarities between Bower and Garden.4 Because of the importance both of the Bower and of Berger’s essay to any reading of The Faerie Queene, I want to raise some questions about these in accord with Berger’s own critical approach to others’ readings. Having forthrightly argued the insufficiency of a recent historicist interpretation, Berger observes that ‘‘critique works best when it reflects the critic’s obligation to what has been critiqued—when it produces a change of mind and an idea the critic hadn’t had before and thus, in serving as the prologue to appropriation, increases the target’s generosity, that is, its power to generate alternative readings.’’5 I intend what follows in the spirit and substance of conversation with Berger’s writings that has meant much to me over many years. Where my questions existed before, his essay on the Bower has made them more urgent, and where they have not, it has provoked them. 224 Androcentrism and Acrasian Fantasies in the Bower of Bliss 225 In a whimsical, tempting touch at the end of the Bower essay, Berger wonders ‘‘what would have happened to Acrasia had the Palmer ‘with his vertuous staffe her strooke’’’ (109). Immediately, I think to myself, ‘‘The Palmer would have been astonished by her not vanishing away.’’ A rereading of Berger’s final paragraph has indicated that my answer should have been ‘‘her replacement by Grill and, more radically, by the Guyon-Palmer composite.’’ But for now I cling to my initial obtuseness. Without it, I am left wondering what remains of female representation in the Bower and whether a female reader like me has not, as an accidental effect, been excluded from its artistic potency. While I am not leading a chorus of ‘‘Let’s hear it for Acrasia,’’ and I am not disputing Berger’s insistence that the Bower is tautologically misogynist, I am still not sure that this insistence in itself is enough. Where misogyny is brilliantly exposed and rejected, I am worried that androcentrism might still be alive and well, and, indeed, reinstated . Traditionally, androcentrism, also deeply cultural and insidiously so, swallows up the female in a telos of restoration to the male androgyne, the divine anthropos, the one, which, when gendered (and when isn’t it?), is always already male: Adam’s rib goes right back where it belongs.6 Enlightened , persuaded, and provoked by Berger’s reading, I wonder whether there is any female in the Bower and the rich artistic tradition it represents if ‘‘Acrasia is male,’’ along with her agents and everything else that she apparently creates.7 Where are the traces? A while back, I shared a playful version of my present questions with Berger by asking, ‘‘What have you done to that poor seductress?’’ I will return to this second question about the relation of discourse and character later, only noting at present that for me it becomes a question about form and its significance. Both Berger’s recent essay on the Garden of Adonis and his recent Bower essay render the myth of Venus’ birth as ‘‘an alienated figure of the masculine role in procreation[,] . . . as a projection, an...

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