Flowers and Boars: Surmounting Sexual Binarism in Spenser’s Garden of Adonis

Abstract

Recent experiences teaching Spenser’s Book III inform my skepticism regarding binaristic assumptions about sex and gender in the Garden of Adonis. The Garden Mount is ambiguously, or doubly, sexed. This doubleness is not that of the hermaphrodite or the androgyne, of visual, humanized forms belonging to the fixity of statues and to the landscape of quest beyond the Garden gates. The Garden is preeminently symbolic and mythic, rather than realistically anatomical or human in the quotidian sense, and it further resists full or consistent visualization for good reason. Like other features of the Garden, the flowers of poetic metamorphosis, of death and life and mutability and perpetuity, that grow in the Garden signal its earthly rather than heavenly nature. At the same time, however, the distance of the Garden from everyday life is vital to its regenerative vision. The coincidence of art with nature participates in the Garden’s depiction of conjunctive generations that at once contain and surmount doubleness and difference. The punning senses of contain and generations (physical, cultural, and historical) begin to capture the simultaneities and complexities of this mythic place. The boar encaved beneath its Mount is at once a bisexual figure and a culminating emblem of containment in every sense of this fertile word. An attribute at once of Venus and Adonis, the boar conclusively depicts their ambisexuality.