Boy Toys and Liquid Joys: Pleasure and Power in the Bower of Bliss

ç 2009 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2009/10603-0004$10.00 Early in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590), the Redcrosse Knight, just having departed the House of Pride, rests by a fountain “Disarmed all of yron-coted Plate” (1.7.2).1 The duplicitous Duessa will soon discover him in this vulnerable state, as will the giant Orgoglio, who defeats Redcrosse largely as a result of his separation from Una. Although his companion dwarf has warned him away from the House of Pride, with its parading vices and rotting foundations, Redcrosse’s moral and psychic states justify his defeat at the hands of the giant, who finds him “Pourd out in loosnesse on the grassy grownd” (1.7.7). Spenser, however, takes extra time to explain Redcrosse’s lassitude. The fountain from which he drinks bubbles up from a mythic substrate. In these waters dwells a nymph suffering from Phoebe’s curse who, having wearied during a hunt and rested, was fixed to the spot: “her waters wexed dull and slow / And all that drinke thereof, do faint and feeble grow” (1.7.5). After Redcrosse drinks, his “chearefull bloud in fayntnes chill did melt” (1.7.6). It would be easy to read this upwelling mythographic moment as a concretization and a condemnation of Redcrosse’s moral situation. However, the fountain remains, as either a narrative or allegorical detail, superfluous. Superfluity is precisely its point, inasmuch as these episodes are concerned with the excess and scarcity of flows of pleasure and energy. That is, the fountain adumbrates a larger network of watery signifiers at the heart of the Legend of Temperance. Before Redcrosse drinks of the fountain, he sits by its waters, and