Chastity embodied: Vision, knowledge, and the female figure in works by Spenser and Shakespeare

This dissertation examines the relation between episodes involving exposure to works of art, including images that make women objects of male erotic desire, and the romance narratives of captivity, education, and release that are associated with these episodes in Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. It proposes that in these episodes Spenser and Shakespeare explore the nature and potential of verbal and visual images. It argues that these poets, responding to contemporary iconoclasts who associated the dangerous power of images with erotic seduction, develop their own critique of erotic imagery in ways that both discredit the fears of iconoclasts and define a higher mode of poetic vision. The key to this higher vision is the female interventionist who, by freeing captive heroines, demonstrates an enlightened way of seeing and being seen that is emblematic of the way the pictorial images of efficacious poems reeducate their readers and spectators.;The Introduction explains how the ekphrastic portrait of Queen Elizabeth in the Proem to Book III illustrates the dual function of the female figure as both a gazing (and reading) subject and an instructive object. It also explores the different Renaissance "discourses"---the paragone, ekphrasis, Ovidian and Petrarchan erotic traditions, and the debate about women---that inform these explorations of verbal imagery. Chapter 1 links Spenser's objections to erotic images to iconoclastic fears and grounds them both in the erotic images of Ovidian and Petrarchan texts. Chapter 2 finds in the contrast between Redcrosse and Arthur in Book I a precedent for the objections raised against literal ways of gazing and for Britomart's enlightened role as image and spectator. Book III argues that the experience of observing Britornart's exposure to positive and negative images of love makes readers, like her, less vulnerable to the detrimental effects of verbal images. Chapter 4 observes similar interventions by Cymoent and Britomart in Marinell's and Artegall's lives. Chapter 5 explores Paulina's use of ekphrastic images of Hermione to reform Leontes' erotic imagination.