Spenser's Amoretti
Questions

CONSIDER the two sonnets by the Renaissance poet, Edmund Spenser, that appear in the right-hand frame of your browser window (from the sonnet sequence, Amoretti). Ask yourself what gender issues are at work here. Can you pinpoint any of the concepts discussed under terms or across the various modules on individual theorists? Some of the questions you might consider when analyzing a work by way of theories of gender and sex include the following:

• How is gender represented/ constructed in this text?
• What are the text's assumptions regarding gender?
• What are the images of women/ men in the text (especially images of women in texts by men)?
• How and why is woman identified as "Other" (merely the negative object) to man, who is then seen as the defining and dominating "Subject"?
• What are the covert ways in which power is manipulated in the text so as to establish and perpetuate the dominance of men and subordination of women?
• What are the female points of view, concerns, and values presented in the text? And if absent, how so and why?

Here are a few more questions modified from Eve Sedgwick's own web-based "Heuristics for Reading Nineteenth-Century Fiction" (remember that these were designed for the nineteenth-century novel but can easily be reworked for most any literary text):

• Do the images of women and men in the text seem to function as stereotypes, warnings, models, exceptions?
• In what systems of evaluation do they seem to be embedded? In your thinking about gender, remember to include characters who may not be invested in the novel's heterosexual plots. Remember that class, gender, sexuality, nationality, race can each be used to offer allegorical representation of arguments about the others. And vice versa.
• What are the thematics associated with women/men; with characters of different ages, classes, nationalities, regions, races? Look for distinctive places, distinctive words, distinctive images, objects, grammars. What are their implications? Do they change? Are they differentiated along more than one of these axes?
• What gender and sexual values are implied in the focus and coverage of the work? What/who is included, excluded?
• What audience is implied for the work?
• What reader expectations and assumptions about each of these dimensions seem to be embodied in it? What possibilities of different reading relations does the work suggest for differently positioned readers? Is it an easy or a hard book to read "against the grain"? How does it invite, repel, coopt, amplify, or otherwise deal with obliquely positioned readings?
• What expectations about gender and sexuality/ about age/ about class/ about nation, race, region are already embodied in the work's genre(s) or subgenre(s)? What is the relation of the work to its genre(s)/subgenre(s), and to the expectations so entailed?
• What is the usefulness of the text for analyzing and describing gender and sexual/ class/ national/ racial, etc. ideology? What are the relations of this text to the ideologies sketched?
• What relationships between/among women are presented? Between/among men? What are the bases of these relationships? What are their dynamics and rules of circulation? Are they differentiated along other axes (class, age, etc.?) How do they support, and how are they in tension with, any heterosexual presumptions that may be structuring the novel?
• Where is one to look for the historical specificity of the treatment of gender and sexuality in the work?
• What models of same-sex and other-sex attachment and desire are in play? What is their history?
• Does the novel present an implicit or explicit definition of "the sexual"? How and what? What seems to be at stake in the answer to this question? To what is "the sexual" opposed, definitionally? How stable are the oppositions? How, and how fully, is "the sexual" defined in terms of gender? In terms of procreation or its absence? In terms of class? In terms of age or generation? In terms of nationality? Of race?
• Does it make sense to talk about homophobia as having a distinct function in the text? Think about this in relation to histories of homophobia, as well as in relation to histories of same-sex desire.
• How does the term "family" play out in this text? What families are in evidence? What counts as a family-- and to whom? When several characters reside together, what links them? Blood relations (and if so, what)? Legal relations? Economic relations? How many different kinds of household can you find; how are they organized, and how related to each other? To what is "family" opposed, definitionally? How stable are the oppositions? How, how fully, and how stably is "family" defined in terms of gender and sexuality?
• What are the novel's explicit or implicit claims to present ahistorical truths of gender and/or sexuality? How do they function?
• What relations between narrator and characters are generated? Between reader and characters? Between narrator and reader? What sexual and gender dimensions characterize these relations? Do they change?
• What are the sex/ gender/ power implications of the novel's stylistic and formal choices?
• It's always worth trying to look at a given novel as—not just an example of a single genre—but a kind of anthology of generic choices, often in dialogue or even at war with one another. Think about how the terms "novel," "romance," "history," for example, might intertwine and intersect as generic markers for a given text. It's also worth putting such descriptions back into the historical context, eg. with the "rise of the novel": What is consolidated, what subsumed, what marginalized, with the "rise of the novel"? How may such narratives also be treated (in the novels themselves) as allegories of other relations (e.g. of gender, sexuality, class)?
• What images of the human body are presented? How concrete or abstract are they? To what senses do they appeal? What are their presumptions? How much and what kinds of narrative energy are attached to them? How are these bodies--as bodies--gendered, sexed, classed, and raced?
  

Proper Citation of this Page:

Felluga, Dino. "Applications of Marxism: Spenser's Amoretti: Questions." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory.[date of last update, which you can find on the home page]. Purdue U. [date you accessed the site]. <http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/marxism/applications//marxapplicationspenser.html>.