English Language and Literature ETDs

Publication Date

5-7-1974

Abstract

No one who reads The Faerie Queene and its immediate sources in Boiardo, Ariosto, Trissino, and Tasso can fail to be impressed by the frequency with which Homer's Circe episode is imitated and alluded to, and by the variety and fullness with which these imitations are treated. A Circean enchantment experienced, survived, and even surpassed by a martial hero forms a recognizable plot convention of the Renaissance genre known as romance-epic. A crux of many epics, especially descendants of the Odyssey and the first half of the Aeneid with a large admixture of romantic interest, is the choice forced on the hero between pursuing the course of duty and thus fulfilling his destiny, or succumbing to the blandishments of some fascinating woman. The necessity for choice usually arises during an episode in which the hero is captured by an enchantress like Circe or Calypso or is compromised by a powerful woman like Dido. He becomes a love captive, foregoing his capacity to operate heroically in his proper sphere, the world of action, in order to satisfy the demands of the enchantress in hers, the world of sensation. The mark of a great hero is eventual reasoned rejection of voluptuous captivity and resumption of the active role. This is the heroic choice of life. It is not always a simple matter, nor is its import necessarily unequivocal in moral terms. It can be a useful initiation, a salutary humiliation, a purgation, or even a punishment-- as in the cases of Aeneas, Red Crosse, Odysseus, and Launcelot. It has positive parallels in the pastoral retreat for the sake of contemplation and re-integration, and in the more uncompromising religious retreat culminating in a vision of the New Jerusalem. In lamenting the past folly of his affair with Dalila, Milton's Samson very accurately characterizes this plot situation:

... foul effeminacy held me yok't

Her bondslave; O indignity, O blot

To Honor and Religion! servile mind

Rewarded well with servile punishment!

The base degree to which I now um fall'n,

These rags, this grinding, is not yet so base

As was my former servitude, ignoble,

Unmanly, ignominious, infamous,

True slavery, and that blindness worse than this,

That saw not how degenerately I serv'd.

The Chorus characterizes Dalila as the type of femme fatale who "by her charms/ Draws him awry enslav'd/ With dotage, and his sense deprav'd/ To folly and shameful deeds which ruin ends." No doubt the accuracy of Milton's formulation is due to the status of the literary situation of ignoble captivity in the seventeenth century: it had become so widespread and protean as to be in practice a conventional plot pattern. As an accepted device which was often the key to a story's meaning, it gained the force of an archetype. Varieties of ignoble captivity are found not only in the obvious sources of Spenser's Acrasia episode (Faerie Queene II.xi-xii)--Ariosto's Alcina and Rogero (Orlando Furioso VI-VIII) and Tasso's Armida and Rinaldo (Jerusalem Delivered XIV-XVI)--but also in the less direct sources in medieval and Renaissance chivalric and pastoral romance, in the lifelong relationship of Malory's Launcelot and Guinevere in Le Morte Darthur and in the complicated imbroglios of Pyrocles and Musidorus with Philoclea and Pamela in Sidney's Arcadia. If this plot convention is defined with latitude, several other partial analogues are evident in The Faerie Queene: Radigund and Artegall in Book V, Duessa and Red Crosse in I, Pastorella and Calidore in VI. Other important analogues are Antony and Cleopatra in Shakespeare and in Dryden's All for Love, Samson and Dalila in Samson Agonistes, and Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost.

Degree Name

English

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

English

First Committee Member (Chair)

Franklin Miller Dickey

Second Committee Member

Edith Buchanan

Third Committee Member

Joseph Benedict Zavadil

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

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