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Reading the bower: Critical responses to Edmund Spenser's Bower of Bliss in the 1980's
Abstract
The Bower of Bliss episode in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene has provoked widely varied interpretations in the 1980's. Though critical controversy is not new to the passage, in the past decade that disagreement has been enunciated in detailed studies for the first time. Some critics have described the Bower episode as a moral allegory that recommends temperance to its readers. Others celebrate its erotic pleasures and portray Guyon's violent destruction of the Bower as evidence that he and the poem's author are "cold" and sexually repressed. This puzzling disparity has led me to examine criticism on the Bower of Bliss published in the past ten years. My purpose has been to study these readings to examine how they reach their conclusions and to evaluate the reasons for their disagreements. I analyze Spenser's critics using a pattern of interpretation developed by The Faerie Queene itself. The action of the poem constantly parallels the critical enterprise as Spenser's characters are forced to evaluate appearances, solve puzzles, and avoid deceits in the quest to understand reality and to act virtuously. Characters and readers alike must put people and events in proper context to respond to them appropriately. In this sense Spenser builds an allegory of interpretation at the same time that he explores the particular virtue each knight portrays. Using this Spenserian model as a way of approaching both Spenser's poem and his critics' arguments, I find that criticism sometimes reflects its particular assumptions and procedures more than the poem it treats. Aspects of the poem that oppose critical readings are sometimes revalued, restated, or ignored. Hence, critics succeed and err in responding to the poem's images and actions, much as Spenser's characters do. The valuable contributions of historical, psychological, Marxist, and feminist criticism are undercut when method obscures the poem. I find that attention to the details and contexts of The Faerie Queene resolves many of the critical controversies these approaches have spawned.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
Milliken, Robert Charles, "Reading the bower: Critical responses to Edmund Spenser's Bower of Bliss in the 1980's" (1990). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9108233.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9108233