ESC: English Studies in Canada

INVIDIA AND THE ALLEGORY OF SPENSER'S "MUIOPOTMOS" RONALD B. BOND University of Calgary I n John Shawcross's recent judgment "Muiopotmos" is “ certainly an impor­ tant poem for a total study of Spenser.“ 1 Undoubtedly one reason for this recognition of the poem's importance is that it raises in a particularly provoca­ tive way issues which have constantly been at the core of understanding Spenser's art. Is Spenser here the sage and serious moralist? Is he the poet of mellifluous verse, the author of a delicious jeu d'espritl2 Is he, in fact, both? These, the well-worn questions which perplexed an older generation of critics, exemplify a persistent problem. To concentrate, as A.C. Hamilton constantly urges,3 on the literal meanings, on the non-allegorical textures of surface and statement, leads us in the case of this poem to admiration of such opulent passages as the catalogue of flowers (187-200) and to amusement both at the preposterously humorous dressing of Clarion in his mock-heroic “ furnitures" (56) and at the outbursts of woe and admonition which punctuate this delicate and nugatory story.4 Such concentration, taken to the extreme, led one older critic to the exaggerated claim that the poem's “ subject is a mere nothing: it tells no story that could not be told in full in a stanza, it presents no situation for the delicate rhetoric of the emotions: it is a mere running frieze of images and scenes, linked in fanciful continuity."5 Even though we no longer need worry, perhaps, about a statement so otiose and obtuse, the literal approach to "Muiopotmos" still enjoys some favour, as Franklin Court's recent article indicates. Court wants to extricate the poem from the coils of "mere allegory," and he proposes with tendentious obviousness that it be read as a dramatization of disillusionment.6 So much for this older, and generally discredited, view. There remains the Spenser who is to be read for his matter; there remains that version of “ Muiopotmos" which concentrates on its allegorical meaning. In this critical context Don Cameron Allen's article (now almost twenty years old), which identifies the butterfly as psyche, or the soul, and which makes the poem a miniature "paradise lost," still convinces most readers of Spenser.7John Shawcross , for instance, laments the exclusion of Allen's piece from A.C. Hamilton's Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser (1972); Judith Anderson, who has written a compelling phenomenological commentary on the differ­ En g lish Studies in Ca n a d a , ii, 2, Summer 1976 ences in the imagined external worlds presented in "Muiopotmos" and "The Nun's Priest's Tale," adopts as a given Allen's identification; even Franklin Court acknowledges Allen's as "by far the most persuasive argument for an allegorical reading" and in spite of his disavowal of such readings maintains that the garden is paradise and Aragnoll Satan.8 Clearly, then, Allen's view of the story as an allegory of the fall of man is the starting-point for modern allegorical interpretations of the poem: his morally oriented reading has displaced the attempts made early in the century to recognize historical identifications for the poem's figures. Moreover, his article has presented iconographical and concep­ tual backgrounds which show again that Spenser's sophisticated and, in this case, humorous handling of traditional material aims at making allegory and ornament quite compatible. At stake, however, in accepting Allen's conclusions holus-bolus is the nature of Spenser's debt to iconography. Particularly since Alpers's study of The Faerie Queene,9 no critic can ignore asking whether Spenser's imagery is "tied" to a specific iconographical matrix or whether it is freer and more eclectic than reference to a single iconographical context can suggest.10 To be precise, it seems to me that Allen's explication of the archetype in "Muiopotmos" has inhibited critics from asking these questions and that, in fact, the poem's meaning alludes to another conceptual and iconographical "background." Allen's interpretation is paradoxically reductive in that it enlarges the meaning of the poem to a point where more exact analysis has seemed...