Spenser's Poetics: The Poem's Two Bodies

Abstract

Spenser's Faerie Queene is constituted by the fiction of a single transcendental body that is at once spiritual, politic, and aesthetic. The poem's allegorical structure reflects an implicit doctrine of “the poem's two bodies.” Its poetics is an aesthetic theology based on the motifs Kantorowicz discerned in Tudor “political theology”: perfect wholeness, secular perpetuity, and a doctrine of “assimilation.” Analysis of the negative moment in the dialectic of this theology shows allegory to be a strategy for summoning the poem's ideal body into representation as a sublimated negative image of its natural, or written, body. Spenser's image for this ideal body, the veiled hermaphrodite, confounds not only sexual difference but also the difference between metaphor and catachresis, or between mimetic and iconoclastic decorums. No purely mimetic critical reading can do justice to this structure, which demands that a reader “overgo” the text in the production of a historical or political “truth.”

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