Transporting Florimell: The Place of Simile in Book III of The Faerie Queene

This article explores the places of Florimell and the place of simile in The Faerie Queene, with particular focus on the third book “Of Chastity.” Whereas the main narrative critically presents chaste/chased Florimell’s indiscriminate flight from all men, a series of epic similes, with extended narratives about alternate places, locate the logic of her motivation to flee and enlarge our understanding of Florimell and of chastity. Although simile and metaphor recently have been characterized as figures that contain the transformations they perform, The Faerie Queene suggests that the narrative transformations within an epic simile are not always cordoned off by the figure’s formal structure and can stake a place in the poem at large.