Page 168 - Costellazioni 5

DANIEL T. LOCHMAN, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

itants of the castle of the jealous Malbecco are similarly struck “With
great amazement of so wondrous sight” (3. 9. 23. 2) when Britomart re-
moves her “heauy haberieon” and allows her “well plighted frock” to
fall along her “lanck syde / Downe to her foot, with carelesse modestee”
(3. 9. 21. 1, 6). Although the fictive viewers she accompanies, who in-
clude sophisticates in the art of courtly love, again register surprise and
fear, signaled by the narrator’s comparison of Britomart to a disarmed
Bellona, a goddess of war, their fear modulates to a mix of epistemic
emotions — to “delight / In their first error” — after they recognize her
“goodly personage and glorious hew” (3. 9. 23. 7-8, 6), her beauty now
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feeding the eros-crazed group’s “hongry vew” (3. 9. 23. 9). Memory of
this episode from Book 3, with its complex of noetic and emotional res-
onances, appears in Book 4, after Britomart and Amoret leave Busirane’s
demolished house and lodge and spend the night at an unnamed castle.
When Britomart again lets fall her “golden lockes,” the narrator notes
the “amazement” of a ending knights and ladies and their uncertain
efforts to understand the identity that she is forming during her quest
for Arthegall: “According to each wit,” they thought the beautiful
woman variously a magical illusion; as during her previous revelation,
a manifestation of the war goddess Bellona; or someone masked in the
“strange disguise” of a woman (4. 1. 13-14). In contrast to the viewers’
epistemic curiosity about her identity is the emotional relief expressed
by Britomart’s new friend and companion, Amoret, who, having been
“freed from feare” of Busirane by one she assumed to be a male knight
and a potential rival to her Scudamour, suffered from anxiety about the
anticipated sexual “service” she would, according to chivalric custom,
owe her rescuer (4. 1. 15. 6, 4 .1. 8. 5). Spenser mixes such varied focal-
ized perceptions of disarmed Britomart with readers’ ironic positioning
and observation of the fictive onlookers to form a complex, rich, and
memorable episode that contributes to a memorial network of noetic,
emotional, and kinetic responses to surprising recognitions.

35 The combined effects of surprised wonder, fear, satisfaction, and muted
desire coalesce with the gulling of Malbecco by lusty Paridell and Hellenore.
Their erotic table-talk gives rise to another form of revealed identity — Brit-
omart as visionary (3. 9. 44. 4).

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