Women's Friendship and the Refusal of Lesbian Desire in The Faerie Queene

Criticism, Wntr, 2000 by Tracey Sedinger

RECENT FEMINIST CRITICISM OF Spenser's Faerie Queene has increasingly focused attention on the construction of gendered subjectivities throughout the epic romance, and especially within Book 3, the book of chastity. The difficulties of constructing or representing a heterosexual relation based on reciprocity (the Spenserian version of Lawrence Stone's "companionate marriage") has been of critical concern ever since the publication of C.S. Lewis's Allegory of Love. In contrast to the social constructionist views fashionable today, Lewis posited an innate or naturalized heterosexuality, one which is, of course, embattled and in need of mediation by a discourse of love which escapes the barren dead-ends of Petrarchism and idolatry.(1) Other critics have represented sexuality as a battle between the sexes: the dynastic marriage which Britomart's narrative aims at requires the overcoming of a sexual difference which, in a variety of ways throughout the epic, is posited as fundamentally antagonistic.(2) Recently, however, Spenser criticism has been increasingly influenced by discourses such as feminism, queer theory, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis, the majority of whose practitioners refuse an essentialism which characterizes sexual difference and sexuality as invariable, natural, or "unwavering." But despite the sophistication of the various paradigms of gender construction which these critics cite, their efforts remain marked by a tendency to suture a specific sexuality onto a specific gender--in other words, to assume that the subjectivities constructed in The Faerie Queene, even in their moments of failure, are inevitably heterosexual. For example, Sheila Cavanagh's work on The Faerie Queene defines female sexuality as female heterosexuality--and slippages from the chaste ideal always remain heterosexual.(3) Lauren Silberman argues that the Malecasta episode--a potentially "lesbian" encounter--foregrounds the problem of gender identity and "the defamiliarization of heterosexual desire." But her brief reading of this episode, in which she convincingly argues that Ariosto's more explicit lesbianism is suppressed by Spenser, requires that she read Britomart's reaction to Malecasta's desire as "naive" and "ingenuous"--a reading which, as I will argue, neglects Britomart's complicit response to Malecasta's courtship.(4) Elizabeth Bellamy also notes how Book 3 is marked by its fears of unnatural sexual acts; despite her allusion to Glauce's fears of "endogamous and sodomitic sexuality" she notes Spenser's privileging of incest (via a series of concrete images and allusions) as that form of sexuality most inimical to Britomart's quest. But Bellamy once again imposes an understanding of sexuality in relation to sexual difference which elides an exploration proper of the dynamics of homoeroticism within the poem. For she sees androgyny (which she equates with Freud's bisexuality) as aphanisis, or the extinction of desire: sexual desire therefore becomes dependent upon sexual difference for its maintenance.(5)

Most feminist critics of Spenser have hitherto focused on incest or bestiality as the constitutive outside of the type of gendered sexuality which Book 3 tries to delineate. On the surface, it seems that too much or too little circulation of women is the primary threat to the maintenance of male sexual privilege. But this is to restrict feminist analysis to that which has been given in representation: the disposition of pre-constituted objects of exchange. It is not to query how those representations are generated or how they function. Queer theory has taught us that heterosexuality can no longer be treated as a given, and that the apparent absence of representations of non-reproductive sexualities is not a good indicator of their nonexistence. Given the success of this project, perhaps we should take another look at Spenser's exclusion, or perhaps even suppression, of female homoeroticism. For we miss something important about gender construction if we fail to ask why female homoeroticism is absent, since sexual desires and practices are integral to the construction and representation of gendered subjectivity.

Though The Faerie Queene might be evidence for what Valerie Traub has called the "insignificance" of lesbian desire in early modern England, many scholars have argued that "insignificance" does not means "nonexistence" (i.e., that lesbian pleasures or the representations thereof didn't exist), and have proffered increasingly ingenious readings which have disclosed sexual practices and desires that elude the parameters of reproductive heterosexuality. The project to map female homoeroticism in the early modern period has increasingly focused on female friendship as a privileged set of relations in which non-reproductive desires might be manifest.(6) But female friendship is a rare commodity within The Faerie Queene; as Dorothy Stephens has so astutely noted, "The Faerie Queene does not allow many such meetings between women to happen within its borders."(7) We might conclude that the lack of female friendship points to the absence of lesbian desire as well. But I would like to suggest that the lack of female friendship is an effect, rather than a cause, of the latter--that is, that Spenser suppresses friendship between women because of the possibility that such friendships might "devolve" into homoerotic attachments. This process is evident in Spenser's most sustained investigation of feminine subjectivity--the career of Britomart, which stretches across the three books of chastity, friendship, and justice. Within Britomart's narrative interpellation, friendship and its resulting identifications play an important role in the development of chastity. In order to give chaste desire a body within a poetics of the speaking picture, earlier in Britomart's career Spenser will run the risk of identification in order to produce a feminine subjectivity centered on the virtue of chastity. But when these identifications produce erotic possibilities which do not lead to dynastic marriage, Britomart's friendships become enmity, her identifications abjections, such that her career as the embodiment of chaste desire ends with her "hacking" and "hewing" Radigund's "dainty parts," a synecdoche for femininity itself.