In reading Spenser, I have been keeping the Bechdel Test in mind: that is, whether the work features two women discussing something other than a man or a boy. Our reading for Monday comes close, yet does not quite pass the test. Venus stumbles upon Diana and her nymphs in the woods while searching for her lost son, Cupid. Venus asks for their help in finding Cupid; Diana responds rather cattily that Cupid has aided Venus in her evil tricks, so she’s now getting what she bargained for. Venus persists, saying: “Faire sister, ill beseems it to upbrayd/ A dolefull heart with so disdainfull pride;/ The like that mine, may be your paine another tide” (3.6.21.187-189). So, the two are discussing a boy, therefore the conversation does not square with the Bechdel qualification. But there is something interesting here about entreating a common sisterhood: Venus addresses Diana as her sister, and presses that this–implicitly motherly–pain may inflict Diana another time. I’m interested in further exploring how women characters in the poem interact with one another.

I have also been thinking about the note that Woolf considered Spenser an early feminist. Not only does Spenser explicitly promote chastity and demonize female sexuality, he uses female adjectives to describe ill-willed creatures in the poem. In the first canto of Book I, Error is described as “Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide/ But th’ other halfe did womans shape retain,/ Most lothsom, filthie, foule, and full of vile disdaine.” (1.1.14.124-126). Duessa, in the next canto, is “a cruell witch” and “a false sorceresse,/ That many errant knights hath brought to wretchedness” (1.2.33.289;34.305-6). These descriptions could be read as providing women with more agency than we have seen in other contemporary poetry. However, it seems that Spenser could be merely adding a third archetype to the ones allowed for women: virgin, whore, and monster.