AMORET'S BLOOD an essay on gazing on female torture. I

Amoret's pov

Hello, fellow ghost reader!

Welcome back to my substack!

Following my Christmas post, Cyborg Toad, I’ve decided to post some more of my proper essays that I wrote during my degrees (in blatant spite of the fact that it is probably my worst performing post to date). This is in part because I’m unlikely to ever do my PhD now considering the state of funding for the humanities and I would like my academic work to see the light of day outside of my Google Drive. And it’s also because I hate Januaries. They are when I feel at my most morose and reclusive, and aside from the fact that I have less time to write this lil newsletter than usual due to several impending realities which require me to stop dilly-dallying and actually get my shit sorted right this minute, I also want to retreat a lil bit from the necessities of online society without forgetting about Ghost Reader altogether. As such I’m publishing this essay in four parts over this coming month to keep it consistent, and so you guys aren’t deprived of literary analysis for overlong.

This is an essay I wrote for a module I took on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (I published another TFQ piece on the language of the opening stanzas which you can read here), and actually I think it’s probably one of the best I ever submitted. It’s an exploration into the presence and significance of blood in Book III Canto xii of TFQ, where the female knight, Britomart, ventures into the house of Busirane - a wicked magician who has kidnapped Amoret and is attempting to torture her into loving him by cutting out her beating heart in some dark ritual - in order to rescue Amoret and return her to her witless true love Scudamore.

When analysing this scene critics have largely reached a kind of stalemate between those who read Amoret’s torture as an inevitable, perhaps even necessary, process through which her unchecked female desires are both evidenced and purged in readiness to facilitate her marriage to Scudamore (essentially, she is complicit to some degree), and those who view it as an allegorical rape. Both hold weight within the text, but as yet such conflicting fundamentals about the reading of this scene have failed to reach any kind of harmony — up until this point, most readers generally ascribe to one point of view or the other without much attempt to engage with those textual facets which might support the other. Fair enough I guess, they do seem diametrically opposed, but I was set this essay by one of my more contrarian professors with whom I had developed a particularly combative relationship and I’ve always likes to make a game of hegalian dialectics, so I thought it would be amusing to attempt a reconciliation between these two warring sides. As I say, both readings have their supporting evidence whether we like it or not, but Spenser was not a writer to be careless of meaning and I figure there must be some reason for staging such a conflict in the first place. What resulted was an essay which is intended to deconstruct the four primary view points of the scene (rather than just focusing on Amoret, as most scholarship has tended to do). I demonstrate that the point of contact between these conflicting narratives is the very presence of her blood as a significant and loaded substance, in order to argue that there is no consensus between the characters as to what Amoret’s torture signifies, and therefore that there can similarly be no meaningful attempt by the reader to state that her torture means anything definitive — we cannot read this scene without accounting for the fact that it is directly influenced by the gaze of the constantly-changing individual on her blood. Rather than asking what Amoret’s torture means, we are better asking why she bleeds.

The essay is structured in four parts (one for each point of view), so this is the first of four posts where I will post periodically over January.

I hope you like it (cuz for the next month it’s probably all you’re gonna get)!

A ghost reader 👻

tw: this essay includes references to sexual violence and torture

---

Amoret’s Blood

The moment when Amoret’s living heart is exposed within her mutilated chest - at first removed entirely, and then prodded and worked upon in the futile attempt to physically move its intangible existence - is an unusual spectacle of gore, noteworthy for being one of the few instances of civilian violence (as opposed to the chivalric violence of knights), let alone for the sheer complexity of metaphorical possibility. When we first see her in the House of Busirane, Amoret is being led by the Masque of Cupid, ‘Her brest all naked, as net iuory’ ‘Entrenched deepe’ with a bloody, ‘wide wound’, at the centre of which lies ‘her trembling hart’ which is then ‘drawne forth, and in a siluer basin layd, / Quite through transfixed with a deadly dart’. She is taken into an inner room of the house, wherein, when Britomart manages to gain access to it the following night, she finds Amoret bound and tied to a pillar, her bloody wound exposed to Busirane who is attempting without success to remove her ‘stedfast heart’ with ‘A thousand charmes’ (III.xii.19-31). It is a scene which is pornographic in its violence, yet despite being arguably one of the most gory scenes of body horror in the entire work, very little critical work has prioritised its study. Instead, scholarship of this scene has ¹concerned itself with the allegorical implications of her torture. Is Busirane the projection of her fears of impending marriage?² Or even just a mere counterpart with whom she may act out her insatiable sexual desire? Or should we look at this in more sinister terms, as an allegorised rape³ to which Amoret has been abandoned by both her beloved, Scudamore, and adoptive mother, Venus?⁴ Theories abound as to why Amoret bleeds. Why then have we not considered starting with what Amoret bleeds, and the aesthetic significance of her body in order to answer that question?

Although Paul J. Alpers certainly had a point when he famously cautioned against reading the figures of Spenser’s Faerie Lond as ‘characters’ because they are ‘not conceived as the utterances of a speaker who has a dramatic identity and presence’,⁵ the literal and metaphorical allusions to physical (specifically sexual) interactions means we must at least consider them in terms of bodies. It is not the intention of this essay to suggest that the following aesthetic examination is a new frontier of Spenserian study, rather its aim is to experiment with how the process of departing from canonical modes of study can help us reinterpret its wider meaning in the context of allegory. After all, how odd it feels that it is this woman (whom we have only so far encountered in flashback and largely only in relation to the unusual circumstances of her conception rather than any other defining characteristic) who should have her blood spilled, as opposed to one with a more evident allegorical function. With this in mind, this essay will examine Amoret’s bloody, wounded and violated body using the principles of horror aesthetic in order to consider the significance of its corporeal presence in the House of Busirane, and attempt to decipher why Amorett bleeds.

I.

As we have mentioned, the depictions of Amoret’s torture are undeniably pornographic. As Busirane ties her to his ‘brasen pillar’, exposing her gaping orifice, throbbing heart at its centre, on which he precedes to work his magic (III.xii.30-31), it seems only by the finest of margins that we can even conceive of the interaction between the yonic and phallic imagery of this scene as metaphor. Moreover, it seems like a significant oversight to examine this scene without engaging with the aesthetic principles of ‘grotesque realism’ or ‘abjection’. Declaring that Amoret’s heart cannot be moved by Busirane’s clumsy attempts at ‘wooing’ obviously constructs it within its conventional symbolic connotations as a physical object whose allegorical presence is associated with love, passion, a person’s truest emotions, and the fragility of human mortality. However, the debasement of its place within ‘her bloud yet steeming fresh embeyd’ (III.xii.21.4), presented in the horrific orifice of her wound, perverts any one-dimensional reading of the heart as a purely metaphorical tool. Bakhtin’s depiction of the grotesque body as one which ‘retains only its excrescences [...] and orifices, only that which leads beyond the body’s limited space or into the body’s depths’ - its degradation constructing a new body in which the ‘outward and inward features are [...] merged into one’⁶ perfectly describe Amoret’s mutilated form, in which the wound is emphasised to the extent that it is the only corporeal entity described in any detail. The yonic connotations of the wound construct the heart as a purely physical reiteration of the clitoris, and transforms her body into one in which the thing that desires and the thing which pleasures that desire are made into a singular object, debased in its grotesque physicality, but raised by the ability of its double function to desire, and satisfy that desire, self sufficiently.

Acknowledging this, it is no wonder that Rooks believes that ‘Amoret is bound to suffer’ because ‘the only expression of love that [she] can conceive of [is] sexual pleasure’,⁷ but it is a surprising presentation of a woman who we associate with a lack of sexual identity. Amoret’s is a body which was not created through sexual intercourse - her virginal mother, Chrysogone, was impregnated by the rays of the sun (III.vi.7). In contrast, to the torture suffered by Amorett six cantos later, Chrysogone’s miraculous pregnancy is often thought about in terms of Bakhtin’s ‘closed, smooth and impenetrable’ (what we might call ‘un-grotesque’) body⁸ to such a degree it becomes almost caricaturic. Critics have long seen Chrysogone’s story as one which demonstrates an uneasiness about sexual processes - Susan C. Staub even suggests Chrysogone’s impregnation better resembles plant reproduction than human sexuality.⁹ Her asexual conception means that Amoret is denied a paternal bloodline, and even her maternal bloodline is troubled by the fact that we are offered almost no information about Chrysogone - she appears out of nowhere exclusively to bear Amoret and her sister, which she does in her sleep without pain, mess or comprehension she has done so (III.vi.26.7-9) - and then evaporates into the non-space of Faerie Lond, never to be heard from again, leaving Amoret to be raised by Venus who adopts her (III.vi.27.9). If ‘blood is the locus of identity’¹⁰ then the absence of parental bodies means Amoret lacks blood and what identity she has is always removed, in some way, from the experience of sexual desire and reproduction. Although Chih-hsin Lin identifies a learned experience of sexuality in her upbringing, gained from observing Venus, the goddess of love, and her sexual dynamics with Adonis,¹¹ we must acknowledge that this ‘education’ is gained at a distance and takes place outside of her own body. Later we will examine in depth the issues caused by her adoption, but for now it is simply enough to understand whatever knowledge of love and sexuality she has (the main facet of her identity - ‘Amoret’ coming from amor, ‘love’), comes to her entirely from external sources, ‘taught’ to her by a mother who does not share her blood, and experienced in the bodies of others. As such, it feels naive to agree with C. S. Lewis’ assertion that Amoret is ‘simply love - begotten by heaven [and] raised to its natural perfection in the Garden’.¹² Amoret’s history defines her as abject desire - that is, desire which exists liminally between the space of its performance, experience and climax, and the boundaries of her own body.

Returning to the scene of her torture, we can see how Julia Kreisteva’s theory of abjection manifests in Amoret’s mutilated body.¹³ Her grotesque form, in which internal and external are merged to create a space which is neither in or out, functions as both desire and the mode of pleasuring that desire, ‘throw[ing] off’ conventional experiences of desire ‘into defamiliarized manifestations’ sustaining ‘fear and desire because they both threaten to reengulf [sic] us and promise to return us to our primal origins’.¹⁴ This is not necessarily to support Thomas P. Roche’s claim that her torture imagines a projection of Amoret’s fears.¹⁵ Although she embodies abject desire, the nature of its experience necessitates that it take place outside of her own body. Amoret might be internalising this sense of abjection herself - indeed, we are told she feels ‘consuming paine’ (III.xii.21.9) - but the reason she is the one experiencing it (as opposed to any other damsel) is because only she is able to present desire as a sublime confrontation with the self, in terms of the other who gazes on her. As such, we might understand her purpose as an active recreation of the ‘primordial’ abject experience of the ‘moment of birth, at which we are both inside and outside of the mother and thus both alive and not yet in existence (in that sense dead)’,¹⁶ and which Amoret is denied by the text through the experience of her absent mother, Chrysogone. In this way, we conceive of Amoret as one psychologically trapped in the moment of her birth with which she must confronts us by embodying both the vagina as the space of both the moment of sexual conception, and the entrance to the womb, in a desperate attempt to move between non-existence (death) and life. Ultimately, it is the female knight, Britomart, acting as the mother-figure, who is able to free her from the constructed womb, seal her bleeding wound, and bring her forth into Faerie Lond as, what Kristeva conceived of as, a ‘coherent and independent identity’.¹⁷

To be continued 10th January…

For more Faerie Queene analysis in the meantime, read my essay on space and language in the opening stanzas here :)

1. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. The Kindly Flame: A Study of the Third and Fourth Books of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 117.

2. John Rooks, Love’s Courtly Ethic in The Faerie Queene: From Garden to Wilderness (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), pp. 77-8.

3. Susan Frye, ‘Of Chastity and Violence: Elizabeth I and Edmund Spenser in the House of Busirane’ Signs, 20.1 (1994), 49-78 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/3174927> [accessed 23 November 2023].

4. Sheila T. Cavanagh, Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 102 and 98.

5. Paul J. Alpers, Poetry of ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 95. De Gruyter ebook.

6. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helen Iswolsky (Bloomington, IND: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 317-8.

7. Rooks, Love’s Courtly Ethic in The Faerie Queene: From Garden to Wilderness, p. 77-8.

8. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 318.

9. Susan C. Staub, ‘While She Was Sleeping: Spenser’s ‘goodly story’ of Chrysogone’, in Maternity and Romance Narratives in Early Modern England ed. by Karen Bamford and Naomi J. Miller (Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), pp. 13-31 (pp. 13). Kortext ebook. See also, Joanne Craig, ‘‘All Flesh Doth Frailtie Breed’: Mothers and Children in The Faerie Queene’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 42.1 (2000), 16-32; David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 ‘Faerie Queene’ (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988).

10. Andrew Hadfield, ‘In the Blood: Spenser, Race, and Identity’ <https://doi.org/10.1086/711935>

11. Chih-hsin Lin, ‘Amoret’s Sacred Suffering: The Protestant Modification of Courtly Love in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene’ Studies in Philology, 106.3 (2009), 354-377 (pp. 358-359) <https://www.jstor.org/stable/25656020> [accessed 28 November].

12. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 344.

13. Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, trans. by Leon Rudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

14. Jerrold Hogle contextualises Kristeva’s theories within Gothic literary convention; Jerrold E. Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), n.p. ProQuest ebook.

15. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. The Kindly Flame, pp. 117.

16. Jerrold E. Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, n.p.

17. Jerrold E. Hogle, The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, n.p.