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

Abstract

Recent feminist criticism of Spenser's Faerie Queene has increasingly focused attention on construction of gendered subjectivities throughout epic romance, and especially within Book 3, book of chastity. The dif ficulties of constructing or representing a heterosexual relation based on rec iprocity (the Spenserian version of Lawrence Stone's companionate mar riage) has been of critical concern ever since publication of C.S. Lewis's Allegory of Love. In contrast to 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 barren dead-ends of Petrarchism and idolatry.1 Other critics have represented sexuality as a battle between sexes: dynastic marriage which Britomart's narrative aims at requires overcoming of a sexual dif ference which, in a variety of ways throughout epic, is posited as funda mentally antagonistic.2 Recently, however, Spenser criticism has been increasingly influenced by discourses such as feminism, queer theory, post structuralism, and psychoanalysis, majority of whose practitioners refuse an essentialism which characterizes sexual difference and sexuality as invari able, natural, or unwavering. But despite sophistication of 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 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 chaste ideal always remain heterosexual.3 Lauren Silberman argues that Malecasta episode—a potentially lesbian encounter—foregrounds 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

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