Amoret's Sacred Suffering: The Protestant Modification of Courtly Love in Spenser's The Faerie Queene

More than sixty years ago, C. S. Lewis ascribed Amoret's suffering to the conventions of courtly love, presenting her as "simply love—begotten by heaven, raised to its natural perfection in the Garden and to its civil and spiritual perfections in the Temple, wrongly separated from marriage by the ideals of courtly gallantry, and at last restored to it by Chastity—as Spenser conceives chastity." ¹ More than thirty years ago, when Earle B. Fowler studied "the influence of the general laws as well as of particular codes of love upon Spenser," he found that in terms of "the resultant physical or 'pathological' symptoms" of love, "Spenser has been definitely influenced by courtly ideals." ² He argued that Spenser describes "the conventional recognition of love as a disease which attacks both mind and body" on the basis that Spenser includes Infirmity and Death in the Masque of Cupid. ³ Yet, critics continue to ask how the convention of a suffering courtly lover helps the reader understand Amoret's role in The Faerie Queene, especially in the House of Busyrane. Is married chastity always a passive victim in a courtly culture? Why? Is Amoret an innocent victim or a courtly lover herself who is doomed to suffer? Although critics mostly agree that Amoret suffers because she lives in a courtly culture, they want to explore further how and why she feels pain in such a culture.

Many critics blame Amoret herself for her suffering. John Rooks, for example, claims that "Having been wounded by Cupid, having fallen in love, Amoret is bound to suffer" because "the only expression of love that Busirane is prepared to acknowledge, or that Amoret can conceive of, is sexual pleasure." ⁴ William C. Johnson even argues that "Busyrane is a result and cause of Amoret's own fears." He argues that Amoret has to suffer because she has to learn to "free [herself] … from the spell … of false love or infatuation, replacing romantic (idealized, unreal) love and passion with temperate affection, mutual respect, and married sexuality." ⁵ This kind of argument, however, would mean that Amoret, at least temporarily, forgets the training she has "in true feminitee" ⁶ and the lessons she receives on "the lore of loue, and goodly womanhead" (3.6.51). This would mean that allegorically in this episode, she plays a conventional courtly lady. What's more, if Amoret has to suffer because she has accepted Busyrane's definition of love, does she suffer in the Cave of Lust because she enjoys illicit sensual desire like Lust? These critics forget that before going to the fairy court with Scudamour, Amoret is already "th'ensample of true loue alone, / And Lodestarre of all chaste affectione, / To all fair Ladies" (3.6.52): they believe that Amoret needs to go through "an awkward and even dangerous period of coming to know Scudamour's masculinity, and her own." ⁷ They are in effect arguing that Amoret is still learning to be chaste, that she does not stand for married chastity after all, at least not in Spenser's unfinished story.

Other critics believe that Amoret should not be blamed for her entanglement with the courtly culture and for her suffering. They examine various characters or traditions to find the source of Amoret's suffering. Sheila T. Cavanagh, for example, blames Scudamour for Amoret's suffering. She believes that "Scudamour's rhetoric … presents Amoret as a trophy rather than an object of love" and that he "remains culpable for transgressions which seem congruent with the enchanter's crimes." She even blames Venus for her "laughing complicity in the kidnapping of her adopted daughter and faithful virgin follower." ⁸ Lauren Silberman, for another example, blames a society that denies sexuality. She argues that "Amoret suffers spoliation because desire is misnamed" and "disfigured by a system of signs that repudiates bodily integrity." ⁹ However, Spenser never blames Scudamour for Amoret's suffering, as Cavanagh readily admits: "the narrator works to elicit the audience's sympathy for Scudamour, while vigorously denouncing the magician...