Review of The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity by Joseph Campana. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. 296. $55.00 cloth

Crocker, Holly A

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CriticismVolume 58 | Issue 2 Article 102016Virtus Without Telos: The Ethics of Vulnerability inEarly Modern EnglandHolly A. CrockerUniversity of South Carolina, hcrocker@mailbox.sc.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticismRecommended CitationCrocker, Holly A. (2016) "Virtus Without Telos: The Ethics of Vulnerability in Early Modern England," Criticism: Vol. 58 : Iss. 2 ,Article 10.Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol58/iss2/10 347Criticism Spring 2016, Vol. 58, No. 2, pp. 347–354. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.58.2.0347© 2017 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309The Pain of reformation posits masculinity as an ethical condition, not just a social role, in Edmund Spenser’s 1590 Faerie Queene. This shift in inquiry highlights heroic masculinity’s propensity for vio-lence and domination, and suggests the tensions inherent to a poem that purports “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline,” as the “Letter of the Authors” famously avers. Rather than a didactic project that depends on creating an invulner-able masculine subject from the imposition of codified discipline, the 1590 Faerie Queene emerges as poem concerned with vulner-ability, including a fundamental openness to bodily experience. In Joseph Campana’s deft analysis, vulnerability becomes “the source of a new understanding of mascu-linity and ethics, which might be united in the term virtue” (8). This book does not just attend to vulner-ability as the underside of violence in Spenser’s expansive narrative. Instead, Campana argues that “the 1590 Faerie Queene is in fact an allegory of vulnerability, one that disarms and reforms masculinity as a project of ethics” (204). Violence becomes subject to critique, and the programmatic habitus of tra-ditional virtue is superseded by a reformed model of masculinity attuned to pain and suffering as well as pleasure and joy.Sensation, not governance, organizes this new masculinity. VirTuS WITHOUT TElOS, OR THE ETHICS OF VULNERABILITY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLANDHolly A. CrockerThe Pain of reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity by Joseph Campana. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. 296. $55.00 cloth.348 HOLLY A. CROCKERto create a new model of virtue responsive to the Reformation’s manifold harms. Rather than predicating ethical life on prescrip-tive norms or moralistic rules, vir-tue, as Campana analyzes it across Spenser’s 1590 narrative, emerges from shared relations of affect, energy, and sensation. Rethinking Spenser’s ethical project makes a profound difference to the ways we might read the Legends of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity.In charting Redcrosse Knight’s difficulties in book 1, Campana acknowledges the appeal of a dematerializing moral regime that asserts control over pain, violence, and suffering. Yet, even if we rec-ognize the defensive reassurance that the fantasy of rational control over insensate matter might hold, a series of unsettling encounters in the Legend of Holiness works to undermine this model of mascu-line virtue. Chapter 1, “Reading Bleeding Trees: The Poetics of Other People’s Pain,” focuses on the Redcrosse Knight’s inability to respond to the suffering of others, and questions “how we witness and respond to violence” even when that violence is supposedly sanctioned as part of the purifying process of ethi-cal reform (73). Campana connects the episode in which Redcrosse Knight encounters a bleeding tree with the iconoclastic violence of England’s early decades of reli-gious Reformation, and argues that the Knight of Holiness’s inability While Campana acknowledges that a powerful Protestant ethos runs through Spenser’s poem, he connects this militant form of self-mastery to the trauma of violence suffered in the wake of England’s break with Rome. The violence of the Reformation suggests that an impervious moral identity is only a meager defense against, and therefore an insufficient solution to, the experience of pain wrought by decades of religious upheaval. Spenser instead elaborates what Campana calls a “sympathetic soci-ality” (168 passim), which might mend the harms of a community rent by generations of suffering. An ethics founded on an acknowl-edgment of shared vulnerability reforms the heroic masculine sub-ject and provides new grounds for ethical action that acknowledges the bodily experiences of all those involved.As exemplars of this refor-mation, the knights of the 1590 Faerie Queene are caught in a bind between inviolable heroism and vulnerable compassion. Campana identifies this aporia as character-istic of sixteenth-century poetry, so that Spenser’s effort to create an aesthetics that expresses the flesh’s sensitivities as a new foundation for ethical action is rendered through the struggles of the Knights of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity. To reformulate mascu-linity as an ethical condition—one that re-members classical virtus—is  ON THE PAiN OF rEFOrMATiON 349iconoclasm lavish so much energy on allegorical creatures that excite and sometimes overwhelm the senses? Moralizing self-cultivation fails to defend against the revul-sions of Error or the horrors of the dragon. Malevolent figures including Duessa, Archimago, and Orgoglio, moreover, present poetry’s elemental materiality, its potential to evoke physical presence even in a religious milieu where Christ’s body has receded into the folds of textual representation. As Campana eloquently argues, “Lurking behind terrible demons and evil specters of the Legend of Holiness is a fundamental mate-riality in which Spenser locates a vitality that animates subjective, sensuous experience and the poetry that colors and conveys that experi-ence” (78). This is not dead, mecha-nized matter, though Campana elaborates differences between monster and machine to address the lively material presence that is banished by a routinized ordering of wayward or monstrous bod-ies. Mechanization reduces mat-ter’s generative vitality to its barest technical functions. When the Redcrosse Knight stumbles, or is overcome with monstrosity’s gen-erative materiality, Spenser investi-gates what it might mean to found an ethical masculinity that pre-serves the many fragilities of physi-cality. In other words, “Redcrosse’s virtue is not his struggle against the flesh, but his struggle to be flesh to bear  compassionate witness to the imprisoned Fradubio’s pain presents the problem of “suffer-ing matter” (19) after Christ’s pas-sion was culturally displaced in the Protestant imaginary.When Fradubio’s pain is made tangible through the bleeding flesh of the tree, it unsettles a tra-ditional model of heroic virtue by capturing “the shock of masculin-ity faced with a materiality that is neither docile nor silent” (57). If the House of Holiness incorpo-rates the Redcrosse Knight into Protestant theology with its pro-grammatic discipline, that body, Campana’s analysis demonstrates, is stripped of all flesh. Instead, the body becomes “emblematic” in a way that bares the losses that a martial Christianity imposes on the subjects it fashions. Cut off from sympathy and suffer-ing, Redcrosse Knight defeats the dragon and uncovers the “virtu-ous violence” (72) that iconoclas-tic righteousness seeks to justify. Spenser pursues the underside of this zealous discipline in chap-ter 2, “Spenser’s Dark Materials: Representation in the Shadow of Christ.” In so doing, Campana offers a powerful explanation for one of the poem’s enduring enig-mas: the poem’s dazzling visuality, including book 1’s ocular fascina-tion with a series of powerfully rendered monsters.How can an ethical poetics aligned with martial Christian 350 HOLLY A. CROCKERa vulnerability to change, and a capacity for motion” (114).The body’s economy, its flows of vitality that run to overflow or depletion, is the source of Guyon’s struggle in book 2 of the 1590 Faerie Queene. Guyon’s witness to Amavia’s death, along with his experience in the cave of Mammon, demonstrate the dangers of extreme deprivation. Whereas the dying Amavia should affirm affect’s power to connect bodies through shared experiences of intensity, the unfeeling response of Guyon and the Palmer critiques the impulse to deny oneself a sympathetic soci-ality in the interests of construct-ing a moral exemplum with crisp narrative contours. A different form of ethical impoverishment is at work in the much-studied cave of Mammon episode: after Guyon denies himself all forms of sustenance for three days, he very famously collapses after he leaves the cave. Though he seeks to prac-tice a martial form of Temperance that disciplines the body’s affec-tive intensities, his response to his experience affirms affect’s ability to overflow the strict boundaries one might seek to set for it: in other words, the very act of extreme deprivation becomes an occasion for affect’s acute excitation. In both instances, inattention to the body’s economy of energy—particularly the way its expenditure and accu-mulation of vitality might affect its ethical capacities—produces and not an empty allegorical body” (104).Campana’s investigation of the Legend of Temperance continues to consider poetry’s materiality by contemplating the intensities of the body enfleshed. Instead of treating temperance as simple privation, part 2 elaborates an alternative con-ception that focuses on the body’s energies and affects. By so doing, Campana argues that Spenser offers “a thorough critique of an ideology of temperance embodied by Guyon and the Palmer, who model the moderation of affect and the expropriation of energy by which heroic subjects are alienated from their own bodies and dedi-cated, quite violently, to the cause of virtue” (131). Chapter 3, “On Not Defending Poetry: Spenser, Suffering, and the Energy of Affect,” connects the body’s vitality to a poetics that resists moral clar-ity in favor of ethical resonance. A focus on the body’s energy—its enervation and its excess—allows Spenser to avoid the poetic ges-ture, practiced so famously by Philip Sidney, that defends poetry by associating it with the clarify-ing ethical force required to culti-vate a heroic subject. As Campana suggests, “For [Spenser], the value of poetry derives neither from its moral and mimetic properties nor from its ability to reflect or refer to social experience but, rather, from its capacity to convey the vitality of bodies endowed with pain, affect,  ON THE PAiN OF rEFOrMATiON 351Guyon’s destruction of the Bower of Bliss divides him from pleasures that might be ethically enriching. Such violent energies are at odds with the poem’s purpose, which, Campana powerfully argues, “is to defeat varieties of alienation that render pleasure or pain a form of stupefaction, which disables the body’s vulnerability to the experi-ential and ethical dimensions avail-able in common corporeality” (158).Part 3 of Campana’s excellent study pursues “common corpore-ality” in book 3 of the 1590 Faerie Queene by addressing Spenser’s endeavor to develop a “sympa-thetic sociality” in the Legend of Chastity. This productive empha-sis on shared vulnerability emerges mainly through the friendships of female characters. And, while Campana continues to argue for the reformation of the heroic masculine subject, his analysis of Britomart’s emergence as the exemplar of an ethical vulnerability shows that Spenser’s reworking of virtus is more comprehensive than his project “to fashion a gentleman” might explicitly allow. Chapter 5, “Vulnerable Subjects: Amoret’s Agony, Britomart’s Battle for Chastity,” traces the Knight of Chastity’s transformation from unfeeling to sympathetic witness of others’ suffering. By realizing that those in pain need sympa-thy more than rescue, Britomart gains an access to corporeal experi-ence that ultimately reformulates an immoderate and therefore  intemperate physical response.Chapter 4, “Boy Toys and Liquid Joys: Pleasure and Power in the Bower of Bliss,” turns to the pleasures of bodily intensity that Temperance might traditionally have been imagined to squelch. In continuing the previous chapter’s focus on the body’s economy, how-ever, Campana argues the “plea-surable liquidity … that appears with increasing prominence in the Legend of Temperance” is cen-tral to Spenser’s reformulation of heroic masculinity as disarmed, vulnerable, and open to the vicis-situdes of corporeal experience (130). Similar to his treatment of monsters in part 1, Campana asks why Spenser spends so much poetic energy on masculine pleasure if book 2 of the 1590 Faerie Queene is unflinching in its pursuit of a totalizing moral program of mod-erating discipline. Here we see that pleasure “renders the masculine heroic body vulnerable to experi-ence” (137). As a consequence, all those pleasured male bodies in the Legend of Temperance—which are frequently treated as abject or marginal—are central to an eth-ics that includes all varieties of lived corporeality. If temperance does not amount to denial, then we should question the ready asso-ciation of figures such as Mordant with effeminate powerlessness. These “boy toys” might clarify the dangers of bodily enervation, but 352 HOLLY A. CROCKERis lively, vulnerability may also be recognized as a source of strength. This strength emerges from col-laboration and from a recognition that bodies are always mutually enriching or damaging. In assess-ing the recalibration of gender that the Garden of Adonis achieves, Campana concludes his discussion of book 3 by returning to the form of suffering that launches his analy-sis of Spenser’s Legend of Holiness early on:Born from a bleeding tree, Adonis embodies, too, a vision of matter endowed with life. If suffering, the quickening experience of pain, served as a reminder of all that was suppressed in the machine of the Protestant allegorizing of the flesh, Spenser’s damaged divini-ties, especially Adonis, intro-duce that vulnerability into the texture of allegory by dis-arming this disembodying hierarchical violence. (223)By figuring heroic masculinity as implicitly vulnerable, Spenser rei-magines virtue as corporeal and collaborative.Campana’s argument is tightly drawn, so much so that he uses his conclusion to imagine other ave-nues of inquiry. In looking forward to Spenser’s return to The Faerie Queene in its later instantiations, Campana focuses on the potential heroic masculinity. When she seeks to be (rather than to possess) her beloved, vulnerability comes to define her experience in ways that open her to others. She might ignore Florimell’s pain early in her quest, but later she becomes the paragon of a vulnerable masculin-ity whose heroism is predicated on mutuality. Britomart’s relation-ship with Amoret becomes “a bond based on affection and sympathy” (200), which remakes both part-ners through their collaborative renegotiation of the roles of rescuer and lady that populate traditional romance narratives. Their bond disarms Britomart, and makes way for the kinds of “compassion-ate companionship” that Spenser imagines elsewhere in book 3 (203).In chapter 6, “Damaged Gods: Adonis and the Pain of Allegory,” Campana addresses how Spenser imagines another important bond between women, but here the col-laboration between Venus and Diana produces vulnerable mascu-linity as the most idealized figure of the “new man” in late-sixteenth-century England. By replacing the martial Mars with the vulnerable Adonis, Spenser revises traditional gender hierarchies in a fashion that expands both masculinity and femininity. Masculinity is no longer sullied by an association between vulnerability and effeminacy; likewise, femininity is no longer tainted by a connection between materiality and passivity. If flesh  ON THE PAiN OF rEFOrMATiON 353accepted positions—about  religion, violence, and gender—and shifts the grounds of understanding. Some readers might be unper-suaded that Spenser means to cri-tique his knights for assuming a militant Protestant masculin-ity. Nonetheless, the Knights of Holiness and Temperance are cus-tomarily viewed as failures, at least in the early stages of each quest. Britomart’s success as a virtuous exemplar, too, is simply another variation on a long-accepted char-acteristic of the 1590 Faerie Queene. What Campana’s study achieves, I would suggest, is virtus without telos: when vulnerability becomes central to rethinking ethical rela-tions, virtue is always in process, since the body’s affects and ener-gies, pleasures and pains, never reach a point of stasis until the point of death. There is no achiev-ing virtue as a finished product; even Britomart’s quest relies on the contingencies of corporeality. With this reworking of virtue as a continual struggle rooted in the body’s sensory capacities, Campana recasts the 1590 Faerie Queene as a series of episodes in a much larger and longer ethical quest. By so doing, Campana affirms Spenser’s moral seriousness and formal inventiveness; he does so, importantly, by opening space for an ambitious rethinking of virtue and gender in the ongoing wake of England’s religious Reformation. This book is relevant, then, not just of shame as the impulse unifying the Legends of Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. In so doing, Campana observes shame’s duality: “Spenser wielded rather effectively the forces of shame in the interest of maintaining a sense of order, but he also keenly observed shame as a form of social vulnerability (231, original emphasis). The extended legends that comprise the 1596 Faerie Queene make the ethical vul-nerability their protagonists come to experience manifestly social. As a consequence, the networks of collaboration become more exten-sive, and shame gives private vul-nerability a socially recognizable iteration. A focus on shame has an explicit politics that Campana links to Spenser’s relationship to Ireland. Because “Shame names the social pain of thwarted attachment,” it gives shape to those affects, ener-gies, and affiliations that arise “from the failure to sustain an eth-ics of vulnerability” (236). When social attachments fail, when they become suffused with aggression and violence, shame continues to express the vulnerability that might lead to a reparative reassessment of communal connections. While tracing future lines of argument, Campana affirms the innova-tion and importance of his present project.The Pain of reformation is a thrilling book. It is firmly founded upon established arguments in Spenser studies, but it takes those 354 HOLLY A. CROCKERHolly A. Crocker, who is professor of English at the university of South Carolina, writes on gender, affect, and ethics in premod-ern England. She is currently completing a book entitled “The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare.”to Spenserians, but to all scholars interested in investigating the dif-ference that vulnerability might make to poetry’s influence over lived corporeal experience in early modern England.

Virtus Without Telos: The Ethics of Vulnerability in Early Modern England

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Virtus Without Telos: The Ethics of Vulnerability in Early Modern England

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