Why should gender be an issue in Book V of The Faerie Queen What is the
On reading “The Faerie Queen”, my initial reaction was that this poem was an extensively imperialistic work, founded within the politics and sexual politics of the day. ... Further investigation of the poem however, raised more questions on this text, particularly on the issue of gender and justice and I will attempt to discuss these issues as fully as possible concentrating on three main female characters. ... It can be argued both that his sentence is relatively lenient in comparison because his crime is against a woman and that the horrible death dished out to Munera is so severe due to her gender. ... ” Giving most ammunition to the dominant male/inferior female view of “The Faerie Queen” is in one simple line in canto 2: “Yet was admired much of fooles, women, and boys”. This one line that closes stanza 30 encompasses Spenser’s placing of women in the social order and was the main reason I read much of Book V with a very great bias concerning gender in the poem. On reaching cantos 4 onwards though, my opinions of the relationship between gender and justice began to change somewhat. In canto 4 we meet the Amazons and their Queen, Radigund who detests all men and has “vow’d to doe all the ill/Which she could doe to Knights”(stanza 30). ... First she doth them of warlike armes despoile, And cloth in womens weedes: And then with threat Doth them compel to worke, to earne their meat, To spin, to card, to sew, to wash, to wring; Ne doth she giue them other thing to eat, But bread and water, or like feeble thing, Them to disabale from reuenge aduenturing, For the first time in Book V, Spencer has written strong “warlike” women. The emergence of these characters divides the debate of sexual politics in “The Faerie Queen” further. ... Nevertheless there is another glaring example of the politics of “The Faerie Queen” at the end of the Radigund episode. ... There is also the matter of her “jealous thought”(canto 6, v 2) as she thinks on Artegall’s imprisonment. I think most readers would be in agreement that no male characters in “The Faerie Queen” would spend several stanzas worried that a “distressed Dame” was in fact “trustlesse and vntrew”. ... Although this changes in her defeat of Radigund, it is telling that no woman to this point ever truly escapes the stereotypical writing of the time, as I previously said, even the great Amazonian Queen who is said to detest all men falls helplessly in love.