Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene

This chapter synthesizes a number of critical accounts of Elizabethan humanist culture to construct a dynamic interplay among three different models of reading: reading as if seeing, opposed by the text’s iconoclasm; reading as if hearing, based on traces of orality in the rhetoric; and reading as if reading, a.k.a. “perusing.” The chapter focuses on the episode of Phaon/Phedon, Furor, and Occasion in Book 2 to demonstrate its thesis that the text of Book 2 resists an allegorical program based on the ideological values of Temperance.

On Texts and Countertexts

The publication of Resisting Allegory offers us another chance to take stock of Harry Berger’s body of work. Harry Berger, Jr., has published original and enduringly influential essays on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marvell, Milton, Plato, Alberti, Virgil, Dante, Da Vinci, Pico della Mirandola, Vermeer, Beowulf, Erasmus, More, Theocritus, the concept of cultural change, the theory of periodization, and the poetry of Robert Frost. The third stage in Berger’s career-long engagement with Spenser was a series of seven essays published between 1991 and 2005 that revisit Books 1–3 of The Faerie Queene. Three essays on Book 1 have been revised and incorporated into the first chapter of Resisting Allegory, which now offers a full-dress reading of the Legend of Holinesse. Four more essays, two each on Books 2 and 3 of the poem, are reprinted here.

Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser’s Gardens of Adonis

This chapter approaches the Garden of Adonis and surrounding passages in Book 3 by way of the misogynistic career of Orpheus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The argument identifies a citational and anthological interlace of traditional discourses—among them the Petrarchan, the Ovidian, the Neoplatonic, the chivalric, the courtly, the goliardic, and the pastoral—all represented as ideological strategies for defending or legitimating male dominance and desire, and for justifying the instrumental functions of woman in the patriarchal mode of reproduction. Close attention to the text shows that its own “citational” strategies create “internal distance” upon these ideological defenses, making them an object of criticism.

Resisting Translation: Britomart in Book 3 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

This chapter examines the manifestation of the “castration principle” in the legend of Britomart. Its power is explicitly invested not only in the allegorical and magical violence of antipoetic scapegoats—the witch, Proteus, and Busirane—but also in the apparently benign patrons of patriarchal order and continuity. Britomart's violent awakening to love, her induction into the heterosexual regime of the translatio imperii, is presided over by Merlin, an agent whose motives and career are shown to be dominated by gynephobia and the fantasy of castration.

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.

Wring Out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001

This chapter focuses on the Bower of Bliss episode in Book 2, arguing that we should read it primarily as a “textual place.” Doing so enables us to deconstruct the witch Acrasia and her ally Phaedria as projections of misogyny and repressed masculine desire subject to the logic of the “castration principle.”