| My purpose in the dissertation is to ask "the double question of the reading of sexual difference and of the intervention of sexual difference in the very act of reading" of Sidney's Arcadia, and Spenser's The Faerie Queene.;The Arcadia is a tale of Youth and Audacity, of young men who try to make their 'mark' by competing against each other on and off the battlefield. While the New Arcadia appears to uphold authoritative hierarchies, Sidney subverts those orders through the improprieties of characters who in their quests for individual autonomy displace the Name of the Father. The names they take, the clothes they wear, the roles they play are all travesties that undermine proper signification. In contrast, from the very beginning of The Faerie Queene, Spenser reappropriates poetic language to its 'proper' place where it protects the Name of the Father, the symbolic system that upholds his Law. ftn;I establish an analogy, based on Freudian and Lacanian paradigms, between sexual and textual ideals. For Sidney, these two ideals come together in his Defense of Poesy: a defense of both the poetic text and the male poet who expresses himself in the feminine garb of Poesy. To attain that ideal, Sidney attempts to imitate the Father and appropriate the (m)other to legitimate his text. The revised New Arcadia signals a daring experiment in narration: a transference from one narrator to another, which brings Sidney to an impasse in Book III. While Sidney tries to assume the phallic position himself, effacing his presence in imitation of the Father, Spenser responds to the problem of creative autonomy by conceding to the restraints imposed by external models of authority and exploiting the Freedom of his more personal stance to intervene directly in his narrative. |
