Monstrous Regiment: Spenser's Ireland and Spenser's Queen

In Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland Irenius, an authority on Irish affairs whose knowledge is based on his experience, describes for his interlocutor, Eudoxus, the origins of the Irish people and the effects of those origins on their peculiar customs. He is arguing the relationship of the Irish to the Gauls:

Allsoe the Gaules vsed to drinke theire enemyes blodd and to painte themselues therewith. So allsoe they write that the owlde Irishe weare wonte And so haue I sene some of the Irishe doe but not theire enemyes but friendes blodd as namelye at the execucion of A notable Traitour at Limericke Called murrogh Obrien I sawe an olde woman which was his foster mother take vp his heade whilste he was quartered and sucked vp all the blodd rvnninge theareout Sayinge that the earthe was not worthie to drinke it and thearewith allso steped her face, and breste and torne heare Cryinge and shrikinge out moste terrible. (lines 1933-42) ¹

In six of the manuscripts a blank that follows this horrifying narrative signifies panic and exhaustion before Eudoxus responds (112n1942). It is as if a flood of irrepressible associations has swept Irenius's imagination from the course of his measured humanist discourse on historical origins toward origins of another kind. Blood and milk, maternity and the body, violence and passion, and the apparently indestructible and overwhelming power of female survival summon one another up under the sign of the foster mother, a figure whom Irenius associates elsewhere in the View with the dangers of miscegenation (2101-33).

Confusion underlies the outrage of Irenius here and elsewhere in the View. From the point of view of a colonialist, the effeminacy of a subject people would have been an acceptable and even predictable confirmation of their inferiority. But Ireland and the Irish as Irenius represents them to Eudoxus offer a challenge that is all but intolerable in terms of the binary categories that are grounded on gender and that subtend and organize human language and therefore understanding. Lacan describes the movement of the human being toward maturity as a process of development from inarticulate infantile privacy in association with the mother into the social order of language, the father, and the law:

Even when in fact it is represented by a single person, the paternal function concentrates in itself both imaginary and real relations, always more or less inadequate to the symbolic relation that essentially constitutes it.

It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law. (67)

In the light of Lacan's association of the masculine with all that we think of and know as civilization, Cixous comments on the dichotomy Man/Woman:

Always the same metaphor: we follow it, it carries us, beneath all its figures, wherever discourse is organized. If we read or speak, the same thread or double braid is leading us throughout literature, philosophy, criticism, centuries of representation and reflection.

Thought has always worked through opposition,

Speaking/Writing
Parole/Écriture
High/Low

Through dual, hierarchical oppositions. Superior/Inferior. Myths, legends, books. Philosophical systems. Everywhere (where) ordering intervenes, where a law organizes what is thinkable by oppositions (dual, irreconcilable; or sublatable, dialectical). And all these pairs of oppositions are couples. Does that mean anything? Is the fact that Logocentrism subjects thought--all concepts, codes and values--to a binary system, related to "the" couple, man/woman?

Nature/History
Nature/Art
Nature/Mind
Passion/Action

Theory of culture, theory of society, symbolic systems in general--art, religion, family, language--it is all developed while bringing the same schemes to light. (63-64)

More than merely foreign, Ireland and its inhabitants defy categorization in the most basic terms. Its women are viragos whose sloth and lust make...