“Be Bold” or “Be Not Too Bold”: A Renaissance Dialectic of Jouissance in the House of Busirane

Abstract

This paper analyzes the silenced tropes of desire in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Ⅲ (1590) as a twisted allegory of feminist jouissance in the Renaissance era. Notably, it sheds new light on Britomart’s education in the House of Busirane, revealing how Britomart succeeds in subjectifying her fate based on the ethics of psychoanalysis. In the process, this paper refers to William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593) and Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598) as part of Britomart’s intertextual learning for the following three reasons. First, these two contemporary poetries formulate Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett’s ‘relativity of literature’ regarding the politics of erotic taboos in the Renaissance era. Second, their original myths derive from Cupid’s mischief and thus must have appeared in Busirane’s tapestries. Third, Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s narratives serve as a dialectic pair that corresponds to the aporic imperatives of Busirane’s castle: “Be bold” and “Be not too bold.” Thus, this paper investigates their rhetorics to delve into the Renaissance ethos of desire and locate Britomart’s growth within Spencer’s sociohistorical context. Such a line of discussion clarifies that Britomart is eventually reborn as an authentic subject of self-determined desire, not a passively chaste woman.