“Like to Amoret”: Spenser with Julia Kristeva

Abstract

In placing Spenser and Kristeva in companionship with one another, this article proposes to demonstrate a shared understanding of subjectivity in their work. The development of the subject through Spenserian exemplarity works quite similarly to the way that Kristeva describes momentary assertions of identity producing subjectivity through unstable mimetic representation. Spenser instructs us to read the sprawling stories and revisions of Florimell, Britomart, and perhaps especially Amoret as though what has been done to one has been done to the others, producing a situation in which these characters might be read productively through the lens of Kristeva’s semiotic: “heterogeneous to meaning but always in sight of it.” In particular, approaching Amoret with Kristeva’s theory in hand reveals a figure positioned to suggest another way of proceeding onward through the complex social world of the text.