Page "Archimago" Paragraph 30

Such textual mischief leads me to conclude that the effect of book 1's political rhetoric is wrongly described as the " defense of reformed Christianity against idolatry.

" On the contrary, it is the critique of that defense.

The text parodies the tendency of antipapist iconoclasm to slander woman by making her an idolatrous embodiment — an embodiment not only of the Catholic idolatry it criticizes but also of the reformed faith's own iconoclastic aspiration to invisible truth.

In this new iconography the mechanisms that assure the transmission of faith make common cause with the mechanisms that assure the transmission of property: if religious truth is idolized as a beautiful and chaste virgin, or as a married and prolific daughter, or as a godly " matron grave and hore ," it enters into the discursive arena of sexual and patriarchal politics, where it is defined by the interests of fathers, heroes, and husbands ( 1. 10. 3 ).

Book 1 rewrites apocalyptic rhetoric — and here I borrow Donald Cheney's wonderful concept — as a eucalyptic rhetoric ; eucalyptic ( well hidden ) in that it makes a show of pretending to veil its sexual basis even as it exposes the structure of displacements by which the hero's weakness and fear of self, his autophobia, are evasively translated into gynephobic fantasies.

These fantasies are assimilated into the reformed iconography from well-marked Ovidian and Petrarchan sites — assimilated and sublimated but by no means disabled.