Sexual Generation and the “two-bodied” shapes of creatures in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Abstract

This article follows an aspect of Spenser’s structure of the The Faerie Queene, namely that of duality, to discuss how the notion of the body is treated. This representation gives way to doubleness, if not to say problematic expression of bipolarity, someties as both male and female figures, in the process of “sexual” regeneration or creation. The article, thus, mostly highlights the role of Britomart, the heroine of Book III, and Artegall, hero of Book V, as the one is presented in an armour, brandishing a “phallic” lance, and the other is introduced in a woman’s attire. In both of them, therefore, one finds the principle of the duality of bodily representation, or as Pico della Mirandola has it, that the male and female representation can be seen as “two powers in the same substance.”