ABSTRACT
In Book VI of The Faerie Queene Spenser fashions a variety of emotionally expressive men from different social ranks and backgrounds, ranging from chivalric knights, courtiers, shepherds, and poets to wild, primitive men. A number become courteous by balancing the masculine and feminine dimensions of themselves. In the Legend of Courtesy an androgynous psyche is often an ideal state of mind for gentlemen and shepherds alike.38 Men in Book VI tend not only to express intense affect but also to occupy private spaces-glades, hermitages, or intimate circles of dancing ladies on Mount Acidale. Male displays of emotion in the Legend of Courtesy are often strengthening rather than weakening, and the timely retreats (or intrusions) of men into secluded enclosures are frequently healing or educative instead of emasculating.39 Their masculinity remains unthreatened as long as they
38 The topic of androgyny in Spenser’s works has generated considerable critical discussion. In The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 28 and 215-81, David Lee Miller contends that masculinity reinforces itself through definition against the female other and through assimilation of androgynous or feminine challenges. In Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 49-70, Silberman focuses on the Hermaphrodite as an image of ideal romantic love. In Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 200-3 and 210-11, Elizabeth J. Bellamy also discusses androgyny in relation to Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene. Lockerd examines androgynous identities in terms of Jungian theory throughout The Faerie Queene in The Sacred Marriage.
