The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity

Chapter 4 Boy Toys and Liquid Joys:Pleasure and Power in the Bower of Bliss

c h a p t e r 4 Boy Toys and Liquid Joys: Pleasure and Power in the Bower of Bliss E arly in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the Redcrosse Knight, just having departed the House of Pride, rests by a fountain “Disarmed all of yron-coted Plate” (1.7.2). The duplicitous Duessa will soondiscoverhiminthisvulnerablestate,aswillthegiantOrgoglio,who defeats Redcrosse largely as a result of his separation from Una. Though his companion dwarf warns him away from the House of Pride, with its parading vices and rotting foundations, Redcrosse’s moral and psychic states justify his defeat at the hands of the giant, who finds him “Pourd out in loosnesse on the grassy grownd” (1.7.7). Spenser, however, takes the extra time to explain Redcrosse’s lassitude. The fountain from which he drinks bubbles up from a mythic substrate, for in these waters dwells a nymph suffering from the curse of Phoebe. Having wearied during a hunt and rested, she was fixed to the spot: “her waters wexed dull and slow/And all that drinke thereof, do faint and feeble grow” (1.7.5). After Redcrosse drinks his “chearefull bloud in fayntnes chill did melt” (1.7.6). It would be easy to read this upwelling mythographic moment as a concretization and a condemnation of Redcrosse’s moral situation. However, the fountain remains, as either a narrative or allegorical detail , superfluous. Superfluity is precisely its point, in as much as these episodes are concerned with the excess and scarcity of flows of pleasure and energy. That is, the fountain adumbrates the larger network of watery signifiers at the heart of the Legend of Temperance. Before Redcrosse drinks of the fountain, he sits by its waters, and Hee feedes vpon the cooling shade, and bayes His sweatie forehead in the breathing wynd, 130 The Legend of Temperance Which through the trembling leaues full gently playes Wherein the chearefull birds of sundry kynd Doe chaunt sweet musick, to delight his mynd (1.7.3) The site of the fountain becomes a locus ameonus prefiguring the Bower of Bliss, the destruction of which is the apparent moral telos of the book. Redcrosse at the fountain becomes the site of an exchange of fluids at once erotic and poetic. At the moment of his greatest moral lapse, his greatest susceptibility to dangerous pleasures, Redcrosse is also most receptive to aesthetic experience. As wind passes through the branches of trees and the throats of birds making song, water passes through Redcrosse’s body, making his body like a poetic instrument. Redcrosse’s experience of liquidity requires him to set aside the signifiers of heroic masculinity that confirm the labor of his quest and convert the energies of his body to violent force; his enervation exposes this appropriation and his abandoned armor serves to concretize the process. As he disarms and experiences this morally questionable liquidity, Redcrosse experiences his body as sensuous and sensible flesh. This chapter examines the pleasurable liquidity that confounds Redcrosse in the Legend of Holiness and that appears with increasing prominence in the Legend of Temperance, which is that part of The Faerie Queene most explicitly concerned with the validity of aesthetic and sexual enjoyment and which features extraordinary figures of excessive pleasure. While James Carscallen has pointed out the way “water tempering wine” constitutes one of a number of emblems of appropriate temperance, we encounter more frequently characters who embody the sensual and censurable qualities of water: the uxorious Cymochles whose heroism is diminished by his lust, the loose Phaedria who ferries knights among the wandering isles, and the enchantress Acrasia who seduces men and appears quite vividly in the poem soaked in the sweat of her sordid play. “Wanton toys” and “lascivious boys” lurk behind almost every bush against a backdrop of “liquid joys” and a host of tempting nymphs and sirens. Given Guyon’s quest, the defeat of the irrationally intemperate Acrasia, it is easy to dismiss these liquid figures as obvious villains in the reductive moral landscape of allegorical romance . Yet the Legend of Temperance lingers over a series of disarmed, pleasured male bodies, forcing the reader to ask why Spenser explores Boy Toys and Liquid Joys 131 masculine pleasure so expansively in a work of apparently unwavering moral purpose and what governs the relationship between the pleasures of poetry (and the pleasured male body) and...