Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book 1: Ethics, Gender, and Oppositional Reading in the Spenserian Text
An extended reading of The Faerie Queene, Book 1 to argue for the text’s resistance to Elizabethan ideologies of gender that inform the allegory. This chapter engages a range of modern criticism to argue against privileging context over text. The readings focus on in particular on Archimago as embodying a “castration principle” informed by the complex interplay of autophobia, gynephobia, misautia, and misogyny.