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This essay examines The Faerie Queene's use of erotic subjection as a political metaphor for theorizing the relation between conquest and consent. In the Radigund episode of Book V, Spenser explores the gender dynamics of this trope, as the subjected body is male and the monarch, female. These scenes act as a powerful counter-narrative to the poem's earlier representations of erotic subjection by showing that external obedience cannot be equated with consent. Radigund forces Artegall to wear women's clothing and to do women's work, but this submission constitutes nothing more than slavery. The narrative blends political domination with sexual conquest to demonstrate that compliance is not loyalty and violence cannot elicit love.
Marriage and erotic subjection loom large in the political imagination of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. These acts appear repeatedly as characters pledge oaths to a beloved or are taken captive by a sexual aggressor. These allegorical scenes of desire and violence enter into sixteenth-century debates about tyranny and kingship by examining questions of consent and hierarchy. Perhaps the most striking juxtaposition of these relations occurs in Canto xi of Book IV. In Proteus's house, Spenser depicts the marriage of the rivers Thames and Medway, a symbolic union of the English nation that establishes the country's political power in the subjects rather than the monarch. Within the structural foundation of Proteus's house, however, a more disturbing narrative haunts the wedding. For more than sixteen cantos, Florimell has been confined to Proteus's subterranean dungeon. An archetypal example of erotic subjection, her subdued body is completely under the sea god's control, yet her body is not the primary object of the violence. Instead, Proteus holds her in order to elicit her assent by mastering her will. Elizabeth Fowler argues that "when Spenser chooses marriage and the epithalamion for his description of the English constitution, opposing it to Proteus's tyranny, he chooses a particularly sexual consent as constitutive of the polity."1 Scenes of seduction and coercion therefore explore the political middle ground between the Medway's free consent and Florimell's imprisonment.
Throughout The Faerie Queene, perpetrators of erotic subjection pursue sexual consent rather than overcome their victims through force alone. Busirane, for instance, imprisons and tortures Amoret in order to elicit her consent. He desires her...