Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and Books IV of the Faerie Queene.

A recent article in the Arts section of Canada's national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, proudly and patriotically announced that Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan was once again de rigueur. To some extent, though McLuhan goes unmentioned within its pages, Lauren Silberman's recent work on Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene bears this out to be true. Informing Silberman's argument is a conviction that the medium of The Faerie Queene is also its message. Silberman argues that the poetic mode of each book is different because the mode itself is a large part of the intellectual "essay" each book conducts. Book III, she argues, "focuses on the chase as a discursive structure that determines how Eros is understood" (71). Book IV, on the other hand, undermines the apparent certainty derived from these structures and offers instead a model accepting of contingency as revealed through a more fluid narrative subject and practice. For Silberman, Spenser's self-conscious deployment of the discourses of gender function as an allegorical consideration of systems of knowing. Though I found myself less convinced by this extension of the readings toward epistemology in general, Silberman's considerations of the gender play in the text are engaging, original, and well worth the attention they demand.

Silberman's fourth chapter, "Book IV: Retrospection and the Undoing of Book III," and her final chapter, "The Marriage of Thames and Medway and the Union of Florimell and Marinell: Plenitude and Closure," are the strongest sections of the text, and, in my estimation, make a significant contribution to the scholarship concerning closure in the two middle books. In these chapters one finds a clarity of argument and an economy of expression that are not always as tightly maintained elsewhere in the text. Silberman argues that Spenser places under scrutiny the traditional gendering of the worldly and sensual as female by deploying a strategy of gender difference - the use of female hero. Britomart becomes, for Silberman, the center around which Spenser can, to an extent never before credited him, construct a critique of Elizabethan social (including textual) practices that is decidedly feminist. Silberman suggests that the "second 'second look' directed by Book IV at the Masque of Cupid," in which we find out that it was used as a wedding entertainment and facilitated the abduction of Amoret by Busirane, enacts Spenser's critique of the Petrarchan fictions and the "reality of socially authorized rape" (74) that those fictions belie. Silberman's assertion is that the desire to exist within these certainty-granting fictions is represented by Spenser through Scudamour's desire for narrative control and closure in Book IV. In the search for textual and sexual certainty, Scudamour effaces the emotional complexity allowed for in Book III (and the 1590 ending) by inscribing it within his own limited and limiting narrative desire. Scudamour's closure, with its hermaphroditic counterpart written over, reads as loss, and Silberman argues that this is what Spenser represents as the "consequences of a particular theoretical orientation" (160, n 1).

In the final chapter of Transforming Desire, sharing the shadows backstage with McLuhan is Helene Cixous. Though Silberman only mentions her (disparagingly) in a footnote, there is much of Cixous here in the privileging of play, improvisation, and plenitude. The wedding of the Thames and Medway suggests for Silberman a plenitude that is without referentiality, beyond counting and one-to-one correspondences, and it is through this celebration that she sees Spenser questioning the very nature of poetic referentiality. Here, Silberman argues, "instead of being given the meaning of narrative, we see meaning as narrative, as an unfolding rather than as an encapsulation of a greater plenitude" (138). This statement describes also the final effect of Transforming Desire. Silberman comes to the great plenitude that is The Faerie Queene, and, rather than trying to encapsulate it, she is sensitive to its allusiveness as she unfolds its richness.

DAVID KINAHAN University of Western Ontario