Disknowledge by Eggert Katherine;

Author:Eggert, Katherine;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2015-11-01T16:00:00+00:00

And fram’d of liquid ayre her tender partes

So liuely and so like in all mens sight,

That weaker sence it could haue rauisht quight.

(1.1.45)

The “liquid air” he uses to fashion this artificial woman corresponds to the elemental qualities of alchemical mercury, that feminine component of the alchemical trial, which, as Maier’s Atalanta fugiens puts it, is the “water of the Air . . . [that] dissolves body into spirit, and makes a living thing of a dead thing, and conducts a marriage between man and woman.”76 In particular, the stanza dwells upon how Archimago uses this liquid air to form the false Una’s “tender partes.” While most of the real Una’s parts are no doubt “tender,” Spenser plays on what A. C. Hamilton calls the “folk etymology” for “woman” (Latin mulier) as molis air, or “softened air,” to imply that Archimago requires alchemical means specifically to concoct the false Una’s most womanly parts, her genitalia (1.1.45n). In this way, Archimago “mollifies,” softens and blurs, the false Una’s sexual equipment just as Helkiah Crooke “mollifies” the language of his descriptions of the human female reproductive organs. And as with both Crooke’s descriptions and the anatomy books’ decorously draped female nudes, it is the “mollified” woman who proves more attractive than the authentic one. Even Archimago himself is beguiled “with so goodly sight” of his creation: sight, that is, not of the fleshy parts of an actual woman but of the liquid air of an alchemical one (1.1.45).77 In other words, even the man who knows the difference—or, I should say, especially the man who knows the difference, Archimago—prefers looking imperfectly at an alchemical woman to looking plainly at a real one.

The poem also suggests, however, that when avoiding the sight of the feminine is signaled by alchemy, we can discern, as in William Harvey’s account of generation, the choice of a particular kind of knowledge and a particular kind of fictionalizing. While we do not hear what ultimately happens to the false, alchemical Una, the similar replacement of a beautiful woman with her alchemical double becomes a significant story arc of books 3, 4, and 5. When the oafish son of a witch falls for Florimell (“flower honey”), the poem’s sweetest woman, he is so racked with lovesickness that his mother undertakes “a wondrous worke to frame” (3.8.5), the alchemical production of a false Florimell:

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