A Training in “feminitee”: Edmund Spenser, Mary Tighe, and Reading as a Lover

Much ink has been spilt in asserting what it is we do when we read; our proper proximity, pace, and disposition to texts all seem to be recently up for grabs, as they have been so often, and one might wonder what more could be said about this strange task of reading. How close should we be to our texts? How quickly should we move through them? What kinds of evidence should we seek within them for historical or contemporary unwellness or disease? These are not new questions. If, as Jane Gallop asserts, “We became a discipline … when we stopped being amateur historians and became instead painstakingly close readers,” we might say that we continue as a discipline by returning repeatedly to the question of what it is we do when we do the thing we call reading.¹ Close reading has long provided a method, a teachable set of assumptions about how to encounter a text with care and with attention. It is a short and quick hop, perhaps, from the ubiquity of close reading to a more recent emphasis on “slow reading,” offered up lately by Marjorie Garber but around, notably enough, at least since Reuben Brower’s undergraduate course taught his graduate assistant Paul de Man to slow down.² As a counter to the risks inherent in slow or close reading, Franco Moretti’s distant reading promises to counter the potentially slothful and myopic insularity of the slow and close with the scientific promise that one can know more and know faster if one can only come to read at scale. As Moretti propounds, “you invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter.”³ Jonathan Culler, after first offering up distant reading as a potential antonym for the methodological imperative of the close, suggests that the act implied by Moretti’s method, however, “is scarcely reading at all.”⁴

If there is to be closeness, what shall be the nature of that closeness? In opposition to the “symptomatic” critical reading that has permeated the realm of professional readers at least since Fredric Jameson—and indeed, quite well before, for what is psychoanalytic reading, for example, or the basis of hermeneutics, if not symptomatic?—Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus offer the antidote of “surface reading,” or as Marcus specifies in Between Women, “just reading”—that is, reading defined as “only” reading and that is, somehow, more ethical, more just than the reading that seeks to expose symptomology.⁵ If we accept that we are professional readers, we accept, it seems, that we are literary critics, and yet we seem rather far from agreeing upon what it is we do when we read critically; we could turn, for example, to Michael Warner’s question: “Is critical reading really reading at all?” Or, “Is it an ideological description applied to people who are properly socialized into a political culture?”⁶ Is critical reading merely another form of social repetition, masking itself as novelty?

We have been trained to read closely, critically, slowly, with attention.⁷ We have been trained in the “demystified” reading of scholarship that J. Hillis Miller opposes to the “innocent” reading of unscholarly pleasure.⁸ We have been trained to be deep, deliberate, rigorous, and methodical. We have been trained to withstand the texts we read, for, as John Guillory asserts, “close reading involves, as we all know, resistance to the seductions of the literary work itself.”⁹

I offer this perhaps too quick and far away summation of recent implied metaphors of reading in order to turn to two texts that stage as part of their primary drama the potential results of the act of reading. For the first of these texts, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, reading—rather markedly since Stephen Greenblatt’s having pointed it out¹⁰—aims at the lofty goal of self-construction; the goal of the text as Spenser outlines it is “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline.”¹¹ To read is to locate in...