Poetic Parthenogenesis and Spenser's Idea of Creation in The Faerie Queene

Abstract

Recent scholarship has been interested in the early modern period as an age of self-actualization for the writer. Even in a moment in which criticism has distanced itself from old humanism, Renaissance man reappears in the works of such critics as Stephen Greenblatt, who describes how writers demonstrate new forms of subjectivity and employ sophisticated models of self-representation in which they seem to think themselves into being. While such accounts question humanist belief in individual autonomy, they also risk reenacting old stories in new critical histories. 1 However, this story of self-actualization is not limited to literary studies. Descriptions of what authors such as Spenser do to "make themselves" men have a curious affiliation with accounts of how a different kind of creation was thought to function--biological reproduction. In work that has been almost as influential as Greenblatt's, Thomas Laqueur argues that natural philosophers likewise understood man's thoughts to be a powerful means of self-production. As the rational part of physical creation, male "conception" was essentially an "idea" that was realized in material form through the female. Both literally and physically, men thought progeny into being. 2