Observing Privacies: the Passions and Tact in "The Faerie Queene" (Spenser).

William Hazlitt noticed that Spenser "pries into mysteries," and that he "has an eye to the consequences" of describing beautiful objects and pleasures. These comments suggest my subject: that one of Spenser's thematic and structural concerns in The Faerie Queene is how we may look at mysteries, privacies, and beauties, and what kinds of pleasure we tap in so looking. The poem develops the themes of privacy and tact in several ways: it presents characters in whom the deeply hidden and intimate force of eros begins to emerge as a natural and heavenly mystery; it examines the phenomena of shame and humiliation as characters struggle with private desires and impulses made public; the poet constructs private places and examines the ways that sanctuaries from the public world can nourish and protect. Spenser creates episodes showing the violation of privacy or intimacy, and the ways that invader and invaded respond to the breach of tact. He presents characters embarrassed or abashed: Serena naked, Artegall rescued by Britomart, Britomart discovering the force of eros in her life. Chapter 1, on Book 1, proposes that its hero needs to become aware of the powerful "privitees" or mysteries of both heavenly and natural realms--grace and the natural passions--through his shocked discoveries of grace and of the strength of erotic drives. Chapter 2, about Book 2, discusses the hero's struggles wth eros and ire, and the author's struggle with the place of the passions in human life. Book 2 also develops issues of the act of vision, and to distinguish between the ability (in both characters and readers) to see with imaginative vision or with voyeurism. Chapter 3 explores the linked themes of embarrassment and shame in the middle books, processes that result when deeply private and hidden aspects of the mind come to light. Chapter 4 examines the poem's images of private enclosure, and their relationship to the public world. Chapter 5 shows how Book 5 complicates the intertwined issues of privacy and the passions in the context of public, political heroism. The final chapter treats Book 6 as the culmination of the poem by showing how it interweaves all the above themes; the chapter also examines the way that the poet becomes explicit about the need for tact on the part of the artist who represents, and the reader who observes.PhDBritish and Irish literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/159586/1/8324223.pd