Irreconcilable Differences: Gender and the Failures of Heterosexual Love in The Faerie Queene, Books III and IV

While many readers of The Faerie Queene have traced a shift from private to public virtues in the middle books of the poem, this article argues that the projects of Books III and IV run aground on the poem’s inability to make private, erotic happiness compatible with the social order it is supposed to produce. The primary tension in Books III and IV of the poem grows out of the attempt to ground public virtues in the private experience of erotic love. More specifically, the difficulty Spenser faces throughout the central books of the poem derives from his attempt to reconcile heterosexual love in a patriarchal context—that is, intimate relationships between a dominant and a subordinate party—with stable social relations. Both Books III and IV attempt to generate a form of love that is egalitarian as a way to end interpersonal violence, but in both books the project fails to the extent that The Faerie Queene cannot imagine a world in which women are full subjects rather than objects of the social order they help to generate.