Citation

Anderson JH. Engl. Lit. Renaiss. 2009; 39(1): 74-96.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1475-6757.2009.01040.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In the early cantos of The Faerie Queene, Book III, Britomart is the figure of a young woman vested in armor that forms and masks, expresses and veils, protects and contains her, and she is further invested in finding Artegall, himself a figure vested in various armors. By the beginning of Book IV, Britomart, the armed but nubile virgin, not only Venus-Virgo but also Venus within Mars, has become a complex cultural signifier implicated in cultural conceptions of gender. Her figure indicates that a binaristic conception of gender is inadequate: there are four terms in play or at least two in each of the major amatory players of the books featuring Britomart. Venus-Virgo does not sufficiently represent this doubled perception. Unless seen as a cultural inflection of the composite Venus-Mars, Venus-Virgo conceals the truly Martian, martial, masculine nature of Britomart's figure and elides the hard questions that her armor presents, those involving combinations of nubility and firm resistance, incorporation and active agency, the kinds of questions involving what the early modern period typically perceived as masculinity. My essay explores how a doubled perception of Britomart's gender develops through a process of figuration in allegorical narrative: Britomart is an evolving figure, and her armor conspicuously participates in—figures—the development of her integrity and its loss.