Campana, Joseph. The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. x + 286 pp. ISBN 978-0823239108. $55 cloth.
The Pain of Reformation begins with a premise familiar from Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars and Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory: that the Reformation in England damaged more than rood screens and statues of saints. It robbed the English of psychic comfort. Joseph Campana argues that, in discarding affective piety and its rooting of the believer’s faith in the wounded, suffering body of Christ, Protestantism also discarded the means by which people could conceive of masculine heroism as something other than martial valor. The Faerie Queene, Campana asserts, steps into the breach, seeking to redress that loss by valorizing “varieties of experience that can only be encountered when the masculinity enshrined by heroic poetry, which stands in for other ideological uses of force, can be disarmed and reconstituted through radical experiences of pain and pleasure” (27). That valorization works on the levels of both theme and genre. Romance, with its “chaotic world of … contingency, indirection, and irreality” (30), proves the ideal vehicle for a reconstituted masculinity. In Campana’s provocative and attractive reading, The Faerie Queene invites us to envision masculine virtue not as the outcome of resisting temptation and moderating desire, but rather as the process of feeling pain—not only one’s own pain, but also the pain of others. Spenser’s poem, in other words, transmutes Christ’s passion into knightly passion. And from that passion comes compassion, which in turn gives rise to an ethically constituted community of shared affect.
Fordham University Press has done the range of Campana’s scholarship a disservice by very thinly indexing the names of the scholars with whom he is in conversation, even many whose work he discusses at length in his text. Nevertheless, Campana’s text and endnotes demonstrate his careful reading of much of the best Spenser criticism of the last three decades, along with his judicious use of earlier critics. The Pain of Reformation is in extended dialogue with two landmark studies in particular, David Lee Miller’s The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (1988) and Gordon Teskey’s Allegory and Violence (1996). With Miller, Campana shares the conviction that Spenser’s great topic is the integrity of the body. With Teskey, Campana shares both the sense that allegory’s quest for perfect abstraction leaves in its wake a horrifying mess of ruined futures and bodies in pain, and the sense that this mess lays bare the moral and ethical implications of allegory’s quest for unified form at the expense of physical matter. However, Campana disputes Miller’s central contention that the 1590 Faerie Queene aims toward a whole, perfected body as its (endlessly deferred) ideal, and he differs from Teskey in implying that matter—in the form of the body in pain, exposed as basic stuff of humanity—is the allegorical aim of the poem. Whatever the “Letter of the Authors” appended to the 1590 Faerie Queene may attest, Campana contends, the poem shapes vulnerability, not Magnificence, as the virtue that contains all the rest.
The generalized “Spenser” in The Pain of Reformation’s subtitle is not quite accurate in describing the book’s scope. Campana’s central object of study, like Miller’s, is quite specific: The Faerie Queene in its 1590 incarnation. After an introduction, Campana’s six chapters comprise two each on Books One, Two, and Three of the 1590 poem. Furthermore, Campana’s discussion largely centers upon key episodes, rather than trying to give an encyclopedic account. Happily, this decision clears room for the long, meditative, and often revelatory close readings that are one of the chief strengths of this book. Campana’s choice of focus over coverage also, however, affects his argument in one important respect, as I discuss at the end of this review.
Appropriately enough, Campana’s opening argument that the Reformation left Britons starved for affect is played out most explicitly in the paired chapters on the Legend of Holiness. The first of these two chapters begins with Redcrosse’s horror at the blood and the voice that issue when he plucks a bough from a tree that turns out to be Fradubio. Campana reads this episode, rather than the encounter with Errour, as the initiating moment of Redcrosse’s moral education. Moreover, it is an education that fails. Ultimately purged of pain and of bodily empathy in the House of Contemplation, Redcrosse’s final foe, typecast as the enemy of Protestant truth, is one for whom he can feel no sympathy—a terrible consequence of the iconoclastic Protestant impulse to righteous violence. The next chapter then posits how poetry in The Faerie Queene compensates for Protestantism’s eradication from the sacraments of the material presence of Christ, the Word made flesh. When that relationship between word and flesh comes to the fore in Book One, Campana suggests, we are asked to question characters’ attempts to rise above sensuality, no matter how much those attempts look like instances of moral triumph. Campana finds among Book One’s villains unlikely avatars of the lost Christic body: from Error, whose children eat her flesh as Roman Catholic believers consume Christ in the Eucharist, to the dragon, whose airborne, bleeding mass is “the shadow of the abjected body of Christ” (99). That these villains are also associated with writing—Errour vomiting books, the dragon borne on “the pennes that did his pineons bynd” (1.11.10)—suggests to Campana not an ambivalence toward the poetic project, but rather an affiliation between poetry and physical substance that is discarded at one’s peril.
Subsequent chapters make far less of the capital-R Reformation, focusing instead upon how The Faerie Queene values a re-formation of the masculine self that depends upon inhabiting rather than transcending the pain and pleasures of the flesh. In the first of two chapters on the Legend of Temperance, Campana argues that Spenser, quite in defiance of Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, allies his poetry with energeia rather than enargeia, vitality rather than visuality. For Spenser, unlike for Sidney, poetry needs no referent to “a narrow band of moral affects associated with the clarity of visual form” (108), and hence needs no defense. Thus, “the true concern [of Book Two] is not with rectitude or with abstinence but with economy, or the regulation of energy” (117). Energy contained is poetry demoted; energy used is poetry deployed in the service of affect. In extraordinary readings of two signal episodes—Guyon’s struggle to “objectify and neutralize” the suffering he sees in Amavia and in Mordant’s corpse (121), and the angel’s “hover[ing] over Guyon as an embodiment of the sympathy one piece of flesh may feel for another” (126)—Campana brings to the surface the way that Book Two, despite Guyon’s and the Palmer’s best efforts, subscribes to a poetics of pathos rather than ethos. From suffering, then, to pleasure: the subsequent chapter argues that Book Two’s two knights of “suspended instruments,” Cymochles and Verdant, experience “a sexual vitality that emerges only as masculinity is disarmed” (144). That vitality, which in Book Two is equally available heteroerotically (Verdant and Acrasia), homoerotically (the two nymphs in the Bower of Bliss’s fountain), or autoerotically (Phaedria’s mirthful self-locomotion), is aligned with poetry’s “capacity to resist the anaesthetization of affective and corporeal experience” that is the hallmark of the newly alienated labor of early modern proto-capitalism (158).
Campana’s description of Book Two as allying aesthetic energy with queer sexuality begins to put some pressure, however, on the gender identity of the self that is being re-formed through the poem’s valorization of physical vulnerability. Is it masculine? Feminine? Neither? Both? The first of two chapters on the Legend of Chastity comes up with some unexpected and controversial answers to this question. In a chapter on the “vulnerable subjects” of Book Three—Florimell, Amoret, Britomart—Campana continues to assert, despite the sex of the Legend of Chastity’s main characters, that the identity in question is a masculine one. Hence, he argues, the crises of feared or imminent sexual assault upon these women actually point toward a crisis in masculinity, which “oscillates in a dangerous and disingenuous binary, casting masculine subjects either as rapists or as victims” (165). Book Three’s paradigm for “masculinity in search of a shape,” says Campana, is Proteus, whose very form alternates between rapist and supplicant (166). I must confess that I have great difficulty feeling sorry for Proteus, poster child though he may be for masculine subjectivity in crisis. But Campana posits that Book Three’s most complex female characters, Amoret and Britomart, are actually solutions to the Protean problem. Amoret because she embodies “a will to identify with suffering” that rewrites the stereotypical gendered violence of Petrarchan lyric (168), and Britomart because, taking Scudamour’s place as Amoret’s rescuer, she offers a new model for masculine virtue that Campana comes to call “female masculinity” (183).
Campana’s use in this chapter of recent theorizations of masochism as empowering allows him to develop compelling, if not entirely new, readings of Amoret’s transfixion by Busirane as something other than a rape and/or an erasure of female autonomy. His reading of Britomart’s “exemplary masculinity” (198), however, risks erasing the feminine entirely, in a way that neutralizes rather than accounts for the challenges that feminine will poses for The Faerie Queene as narrative and as heuristic text. The subsequent chapter goes some way, however, toward identifying the space the Legend of Chastity creates for feminine will. Here, Adonis emerges as Campana’s ultimate exemplar of a new, vulnerable, generative masculine virtue; but he can be so only because of the precedent set by what Campana calls the “queer pairing” of Venus and Diana in Book Three’s rewriting of Ovid’s Actaeon story. When Venus catches sight of a naked Diana, the virginal goddess’s response is ultimately not to curse the goddess of fleshly desire, but to aid in her search for Cupid. Their subsequent discovery of the twin babies Belphoebe and Amoret, argues Campana, constitutes “a new gendered paradigm for creation” that grants femininity the generative role of both form and matter—the same blended role then occupied by Adonis, who is both “Father of all formes” (3.6.47) and a figure of material vulnerability. Adonis’s mysterious allegory is the heart of the 1590 Faerie Queene: he is the new Christ, a Father to be admired and emulated not in spite of, but because of his suffering.
Campana’s Spenser is thus, in a certain sense, a didactic one. Perhaps in common with most Spenser critics to this very day, Campana has no intention of reading the Letter to Raleigh’s stated purpose “to fashion a gentleman or noble person” as standing in ironic relation to the poem itself. The assumption that we should take the Letter straight has two consequences. First, while Campana’s stress is upon the gentle in “gentleman,” he never doubts that Spenser in 1590 means his poem as a tool and an exemplum for personal reformation. For personal masculine reformation, that is. The female reader may, perhaps, locate herself briefly in Book Three’s encounter between Venus and Diana, but she is not the one for whom The Faerie Queene sets a program for change, “noble person” though she may be when she picks up the poem. The second consequence of assuming the poem truly and unironically intends to “fashion a gentleman” into a vulnerable masculine body is that Campana must, in the end, imply that those episodes that do not lead to a positive valuation of masculine vulnerability are nothing but negative examples. Thus, the concluding chapter of The Pain of Reformation very briefly posits that “the legends of Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy [in the 1596 extension of the poem] transform the 1590 Faerie Queene into a poem concerned with shame, rage, and waste that derive from the failure to sustain an ethics of vulnerability” (236). Things fall apart in 1596, but that does not mean that the ideal center of vulnerable masculinity does not hold. It is only increasingly difficult to reach.
Identifying a singular ethical purpose for The Faerie Queene is a gutsy move. It is also an old-fashioned move, even if it is brought up to date by Campana’s argument that Spenser founds his poem’s ethics upon a vision of the body that queers early modern Protestant England’s quest for martial masculine identity. I cannot help wondering, though, how Campana would counter Harry Berger, Jr.’s argument that, whenever we isolate a discourse in The Faerie Queene, we must understand that discourse as represented: that is, not a point of view so much as a depiction of what it is like to have that point of view.[1] We find the poem’s purpose, such as it is, not by choosing one discourse as the poem’s moral or ethical touchstone but by tracing the results of many discourses’ collisions, interplay, and inconsistencies. While Berger has in mind primarily the kinds of moralistic opinions expressed by The Faerie Queene’s narrator or the kinds of dogmatic early modern ideologies that emerge, for example, in Guyon’s antipathy to aesthetic pleasure in the Bower of Bliss, Berger’s point applies equally to any thread of the poem’s complex of discourses.
Instead of identifying a singular Spenserian ethics, then, we might wish to consider what it means that the poem tacks toward one vision of plausible masculinity, then another, then another. For example, we might wish to register the effect of its being equally desirable to be the miraculously healed and newly invulnerable Redcrosse Knight who “tak[es] aduantage” of a dragon’s “open iaw” (1.11.53), and to be the miraculously revived and perpetually vulnerable Adonis, father of all forms, who lies in a Garden so centered upon receptive non-violence that even Cupid has laid aside his darts. Because Campana does not attend to the instances in the poem in which invulnerable male heroism seems to work out pretty well, however, the effect of The Faerie Queene’s oscillation in this regard remains unexplored. Such is the way, however, of a book that seeks to challenge orthodoxies: it necessarily dwells upon the evidence that makes its case. The Pain of Reformation, an important book in its own right, is also important in the way that it paves the way for future scholars to extend and challenge its argument.
Katherine Eggert
University of Colorado, Boulder
[1] Harry Berger, Jr., “Narrative as Rhetoric in The Faerie Queene,” in Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 173-217.
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Thus, “the true concern [of Book Two] is not with rectitude or with abstinence but with economy, or the regulation of energy”
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