The Choice of Achilles by Wofford Susanne Lindgren

Author:Wofford, Susanne Lindgren
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780804780803
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

Here Spenser represents his own plot line as created by two women (much as the plot of the second half of the Odyssey is worked out by Odysseus and Athena); specifically, they generate the plot of knightly disguise, and hence find a role for Britomart in the chivalric fiction. Throughout Book III she is associated particularly with this chivalric fiction, which is often explicitly set at odds with a competing allegorical narrative of which she remains unaware and of which she eventually becomes, as we have seen, not the creator but the undoer who “reverses” the figures. Thus the “fate” that Merlin is privileged to see is set as the closure of the chivalric fiction—he makes it clear that Britomart will be able to continue as a knight until she must bear children (III, iii, 28)—which otherwise is characterized not by closure but by wandering and by many turns away from the course. “Fate,” then, is one name for the fully authorized explanation that becomes associated with the allegorical (and, at the level of allegory, political) claims to assign meaning to the chivalric fiction.

The gap between this revealed “fate” and Britomart’s wandering search can thus be interpreted as a representation of the value of “hope” and of the closural function of vision. Neither hope nor vision, however, is exempted here from the qualification and ironizing that Spenser elsewhere directs at them. Most disturbing, perhaps, Merlin is himself (like the Sibyl in Aeneid VI) possessed by the “spirite” (III, iii, 21) or “powres” (st. 19) that command him, which in the conclusion of his “fit” come to be labeled, in an analogue to Phedon’s enthrallment, a “fury.” Here is the final stanza of Merlin’s prophecy:

But yet the end is not. There Merlin stayd,

As ouercomen of the spirites power

Or other ghastly spectacle dismayd,

That secretly he saw, yet note discoure:

Which suddein fit, and halfe extatick stoure

When the two fearefull women saw, they grew

Greatly confused in behauioure;

At last the fury past, to former hew

Hee turnd againe, and chearfull looks (as earst) did shew.

(III, iii, 50)

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