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Close Reading Of A Stanza From The Dragon Fight In Canto 11 in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene The first episode of The Faerie Queene comes to a temporary halt when the monster Error wraps the Redcrosse Knight in her coils "That hand or foot to store he store in value. " The image - an emblem of the mind immobilized by uncertainty and doubt - brilliantly embodies the issues of the subsequent book. But this onset of furious helplessness is not limited to Redcrosse's adventures. It appears repeatedly in The Faerie Queene -- for instance, in book 3 when three forsters (foresters) ambush Arthur's Squire Times while he is fording a river. One throws a "dart" that pierces his mail without wounding him: That stroke the hardy Squire did sore displease, But more that him he could not come to smite; For by no means the high back he could see, But labour'd long in that deep ford with value disease. (3. 5. 19. 6 - 9) When Prince Arthur fights with Maleger -one of the longest combats of Spenser's poem - the frustration modulates toward terror. Maleger -- supported by his minions Impotence and Impatience -- shoots arrows at Arthur, who rides after him but finds that "labour lost it was, to queene approach him name" (2. 11. 25. 9).
When he tries to exhaust Maleger's store of arrows, he finds that Impotence continues to gather them up for her master; the allegory suggests that Arthur's awareness of his own impotence further weakens him. Attempting to bind Impotence, he finds himself overthrown by Impatience: he's caught between knowledge of his weakness and his angry wish to be otherwise. Rescued by his Squire, Arthur manages to engage his enemy directly, only to find him unsellable. He smites him with his iron mace, rejoicing to see "all his labour brought to happy end" (2. 11. 35. 2), but finds that end deferred when Maleger rises again. "Halfe in a maze with horror hideous / And halfe in rage, to be deluded thus, " Arthur strikes him again with the same result (2. 11. 38. 4 - 5). His wonder free exceeded reasons reach, That he began to doubt his dazzled sight, And oft of error did himself approach: Flesh without blood, a person without straight, Wounds without hurt, a bodie without might, That could doe have, yet could not harmed bee, That could not die, yet seem'd a mortal wight, That was most strong in most infirmity; Like did he neuer heare, like did he neuer see. (2. 11. 40) Maleger is a walking riddle, but, unlike such incidents in, say, the Queene del Sante Graal, there is no hermit handy with an allegorical solution. Arthur will kill him again only to have him arise again, leaving the frustrated victor to think "his labour lost and travel value" before he finally thinks to crush him and throw the body in the standing lake (2. 11. 44. 2).
Endurance is essential in Arthur's battle with Maleger who, as James Nohrnberg argues convincingly, embodies an attack of crippling melancholy, a felt inner weakness and worthlessness comparable to the Despaire of book 1. It is a characteristically Spenserian insight to say that what drives the senses to assault the castle of Alma is an underlying despair, not the other way around: first comes the sense of hopelessness, then the willingness to yield to concupiscence. Maleger resembles Antaeus, whose mother was the earth, because he is an aspect of the flesh itself, one (like Despaire) that will not die in this world. One can only fight this weakness by suffering patiently, enduring pain and claiming nothing for oneself from this life. Arthur bears Maleger to a "standing, " or stagnant lake, an infernal opposite to the well of grace that saves Redcrosse from the dragon (2. 11. 46. 6): Him thereinto he threw without remorse, Ne said, till hope of life did him forsake; So end of that Caries days, and his owne paine's did make. (2. 11. 46. 7 - 9) Like returns to like. The reflexively blurred pronouns of the passage suggest that what Arthur does to Maleger he does to himself: to crush Maleger, Arthur needs to deny his own hopes for this life.
In many episodes, Spenser sets Britomart's capacity for growth and for directed movement. Her battles are decisive: the magic spear dispatches her enemies at once. When Scudamour remains on the turf outside Busirane's house, Britomart charges unscathed through the flames of its moat. Yet, once arrived, she slows and stops.
The description of Busirane's establishment stresses her wandering admiration and suggests her danger. She is "amazed" and "amazement" here involves its usual Spenserian pun (3. 11. 49. 6). Her fascination with the house and her dismay when it vanishes contrasts with her normal impetuous, commonsense activity (3. 11. 49. 6 - 9, 3. 11. 53. 1 - 4, 3. 12. 29. 1 - 2, 3. 12. 42. 5). She is arrested by the sight because Busirane's view of love corresponds partly to her own when she first finds herself in love with Artegall, a connection intensified by the reference to her "basic eye" (3. 11. 50. 1). Busirane lives in Britomart's imagination as well as in Amoret's.
Critics are right to see in Busirane an image of a male poet, busily consigning women to an imprisoning fantasy, so long as they allow Spenser's characteristic multiplicity of reference. While he embodies an imprisoning literary tradition, he also embodies that tradition as it is internalized in the imaginations of his female readers -- in women like Britomart or Amoret. Busirane insists that love consists mostly of pain and frustration, and leads necessarily to disaster. ("Yet" the narrator apostrophizes Apollo, mourning for Daphne, "was thy love her death, and her death was thy smart" [ 3. 11. 36. 91. ) His vision is tyranny because it insists that love is always the same instead, as the narrator says, of acting differently on different minds (3. 5. 1 - 2). His house figures an imagination dominated by one way of seeing -- so that love seems necessarily to end in despair. The masque form in which Amoret is embedded suggests that, just as the masquer's move forward in preordained sequence, all love affairs will follow the same disastrous pattern.
Taken as sole truth, such a vision freezes the soul in fear, separating it from its own loving feeling, as has happened to Amoret, whose heart has been removed from her breast. It is necessary for Britomart to master that fear in herself as she masters the enchanter, but she can't kill it any more than Redcrosse can kill Despaire. Instead, for Amoret to be healed, Busirane must undo his charm. She must revise her conception of love if she is to pass beyond the paralysis created by his half-truth.
In the second half of the epic, then, the angry helplessness associated with the paralysis motif gains new meaning as Spenser focuses on external limits to human action. Although the motif only rarely takes the form of an extended battle, there are analogous moments of frustration. In book 6, Arthur can strip Turbine of his armor but cannot shame a man naturally shameless. He can break the leg of the giant Disdain but cannot rescue Mirabella, whose life depends on the social conventions Disdain embodies. The sudden, unexpected outbreaks of violence in the book -- from lawless knights, or from the tribes of Cannibals and Brigands, all of which shadow the Irish Spenser was describing in the View -- leave their hapless victims dead, wounded, or imprisoned until the reassuring romance plot enables a Calepine or a Calidore "with huge resistless e might" to scatter them like a flock of doves or a swarm of flies (6. 11. 43. 2, 6. 8. 49. 9, 6. 11. 48). These endings recall the fantasy victory of Talus over Malengin.
Bibliography: Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 1977), 1. 1. 18. 8. Hereafter, all references to The Faerie Queene are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by book, canto, stanza, and line numbers.
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