In Resisting Allegory: Interpretive Delirium in Spenser's “Faerie Queene,” Harry Berger, Jr., author of fifteen previous books and ninety-six articles in professional journals, is introduced by David Lee Miller as “the leading Spenser critic of our time” (x)—a tribute not only to the learning and brilliance of his publications but also to the personal magnetism that electrifies colleagues and has attracted generations of students to his subjects. The book collects seven of Berger's previously published essays on the 1590 Faerie Queene.
In “Introduction: On Texts and Countertexts,” Berger sets up his thesis. As traditionally understood, The Faerie Queene expresses “the religious and social ideals of the Reformed state” (10) and serves “the Queen's colonialist discourse” (10) to uphold Tudor ideology. In Berger's reading, however, these messages are “offered to the reader as a target of textual critique” (10). The chapters that follow illustrate readings that detach the text from its apparent meaning.
In chapter 1, “Displacing Autophobia in The Faerie Queene, Book I: Ethics, Gender, and Oppositional Reading in the Spenserian Text,” Berger introduces language and concepts of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Seen in this light, “Christian discourse is . . . an Ideological Cultural Apparatus” (23) to produce self-alienation. Spenser translates this project into “a chivalric fairy tale” (23), but “the text of The Faerie Queene represents itself as reading its allegorical narrative subversively and disobediently” (40–41). In the final Canto, when Duessa accuses Redcrosse of abandonment in terms that apply to his treatment of Una, Una's father accepts Una's counteraccusation. Redcrosse's failure is “swept under the rug” (98) and the process “is rendered conspicuous” (98), inviting readers to see the poem as critical of salvation, forgiveness, and Christian heroism. Likewise, the dragon fight in Canto 11 critiques chivalric romance and its cooperation with Christian narcissism.
Berger's second chapter uses John Webster's distinction between “Oral Form” and “Written Craft” (111; 263n10) to discuss Book 2. Spenser's poem is “a textual critique” that “targets the moralist/storyteller/rhetorician” (111) who identifies with the fictive audience and shares the male-dominant, Protestant, Tudor cultural values of the period. The Phedon and Maleger episodes show how Book 2 criticizes rather than celebrates “the ideology of temperance and heroism that it represents” (131).
Berger begins his third chapter, “Wring Out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001,” by identifying three critical conversations most affecting Spenserians over the titular fifty years: those centered on “orality and literacy”; “feminism, gender, and the role of the reader”; and “internal distance and oppositional reading” (144). He applies insights from all three conversations to key episodes in Book 2, including the House of Temperance and the Bower of Bliss. Book 2 exposes Temperance as the cause of “the self's instability” (157), and targets rather than participates in the cultural tendency to blame women, “internally distanc[ing] itself from the sexist ideology and rhetoric” of Spenser's culture (152). The poem's reluctance to hold the enchantress Acrasia's victims accountable for their transformation is made conspicuous by those victims’ resistance to being restored to temperate manhood.
Chapter 4, “Resisting Translation: Britomart in Book 3 of Spenser's Faerie Queene,” examines the gynophobic discourses at work in the legend of Britomart (174). Early episodes showcase the narrator's fear of female sexuality and discomfiture at Britomart's autonomy—but the logic and wisdom of the allegorical narrator is undercut by his being a suspiciously traditional, suspiciously entertaining “textual impersonator” (186) given to an “ebullient and self-delighting spirit of citational parody” (186). His tone cautions readers against submitting to his guidance.
The focus of Berger's last chapter, “Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser's Gardens of Adonis,” is the sixth canto of Book 3. Its argument, following Maureen Quilligan in particular, is that its “erotico-matriarchal idyll of fulfilled Venerean desire” (212) “rectif[ies] the injustices of the dominant discourses” (212) of male supremacy, Protestantism, and Tudor politics—with the caveat that the myths Spenser cites in this canto are all “created by males” (222). As women gain power, men get more anxious, resistant, and malicious. While Canto 6 endangers the male viewpoint, the subsequent Cantos threaten female characters. The distance collapses between Busirane, the witch who sends a hyena to chase Florimel, and the poet, creator of tormenters and tormented alike. Florimel and false Florimel equally project and reflect male desires. They, Una, Duessa, and the false Una created by Archimago to deceive Redcrosse are all idols. Allegorical distinctions break down, suggesting to Berger that “even revised versions of the traditional approach to religious allegory in Book 1 should be reconsidered” (243). Thus is the 1590 Faerie Queene reduced to a typographical arrangement on which Berger can play his brilliant games.
Spenserians cherish Berger's generous engagement with other critics and the light-hearted wording of his bold claims. Accepting those claims, however, means affirming that the historical Spenser invested his livelihood in the English colonial project but attacked it in his poetry; that he dedicated an elaborate poetic takedown to his queen, personally presented it to her, and accepted a pension in recompense; that he repudiated the Christian theology and chivalric ethic his poem transparently teaches and celebrates; that he was several hundred years in advance of his literary peers in objecting to the “gynophobia” of literary tradition; and that his readers for the first several generations, including experienced readers like Milton, missed the point of The Faerie Queene—as their successors continued to do for the subsequent 275 years.
Many of Berger's colleagues do not affirm these things, and Berger himself is open about his interpretations’ detachability from the historical Spenser (10). Miller writes that “the American Spenser Berger has constructed . . . will demand that future interpreters . . . come to terms with its arguments” (ix). But given that “the American Spenser Berger has constructed” is detached from the Edmund Spenser who lived in London and Ireland and died in 1599, readers susceptible to the claims of history may decline the argument while still experiencing delight and gratitude. Spenserians continue to learn from Berger's early career close readings of Spenser's text; we take delight in hearing Berger's voice and watching him play in the text he has constructed subsequently.
