Art and Objectivity in the House of Busirane

Abstract

This essay analyzes a sequence of descriptions of art objects near the end of the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene. In the first room of the House of Busirane, Britomart encounters a tapestry that, as the romance’s longest ekphrasis, provides an immersive experience of art. The second room, however, treats art differently: No longer animated by the viewer’s imaginative involvement, these objects appear to be mere objects, antiquarian refuse from a dead past. I argue that this progression from immersion to detachment parallels a larger historical development in the period toward epistemological objectivity. By embodying imaginative forms in antiquarian objects, Spenser distances his readers from what he perceives as the imagination’s dangers. But he is ambivalent about the resulting detachment, as an analysis of his final metaphor of the Roman hermaphrodite statue shows. In the end, his highly imaginative poetry depends on the very same interfusion of subject and object that his poetry also seeks to reject.1