A Similar Gesture Is Made In The Cocytus By Tantalus

By Author: Jackey
Total Articles: 54
Comment this article

A similar gesture is made in the Cocytus by Tantalus, whose outstretched hands are 'Accusing highest love'; the gesture's causation is not as simple as the desperate desire for food, for we find Spenser reading his classical precedent with the schoolboy habit of discovering the emotions within a narrative through its gestures, so that Tantalus is expressing both hunger (desire) and anger. Tantalus' partner in hell, Pilate, also reaches toward heaven his hands are 'on high extent' but instead of turning outwards in Gestus me (or any other gesture of devotion), his hands are engaged perpetually in the same washing motion that 'Deliuered up the Lord of Calvin Klein Jeans life to dye'. His hand-washing gesture is distinguished from Gestus II, 'the opening and lifting up of hands', which is a sign of the 'uprightness and integrity of the heart'. Pilate's arms are not raised in accusation like Amavia's and Tantalus', but his hypocrisy distils through his double gesture. The praise, devotion, or request for mercy that his outstretched arms declare cannot be achieved ...
... as long as his hands are busy claiming innocence, so that the afterlife of his hand-washing gesture reverses and interprets his earthly one: 'The whiles my handes I washt in purity, The whiles my soule was soyld with fowle iniquity'. Now, however, while his arms may reveal an act of 'purity' or devotion, his hands are 'soyld'. This explains why Spenser places Pilate in the rather strange position of extending his arms upwards while he washes them (out of the water).

Pilate's problem underscores the anti-dualist strain in The Faerie Queene that is evident during similar episodes when bodily gestures do not match intentions and feelings. The assumption that a gesture could reliably communicate meaning was always under threat from its misperception, and also through its feigning. Tarquin, who in The Rape of Lucrece is 'armed to beguile With outward honesty, but yet defiled With inward vice', demonstrates the danger of granting integrity to the gestures of the body. In The Faerie Queene, the ability of Archimago and Duessa to persuade and True Religion Jeans fool their victims depends largely on the degree to which their gestures can imitate the words and emotions of their cause. As the great histriones in the poem, their hands are continually wringing and trembling a gesture Bulwer insists is 'scenical and belongs more to the theatre than the forum' to the detriment of their sympathisers. Their punishment, however, is prefigured in Tantalus and Pilate, forever engaged in and tormented by a double gesture imitating (in Pilate's case especially) the cause of their hypocrisy. In contrast, though the Palmer also appears with 'trembling hand' when checking Guyon's pulse at II.viii.9.6, Spenser is clear that his emotion of fear is real and not feigned, and this, in turn, reminds us of a rhetorical context that provides for the legitimate expression of the passions.

The Palmer, in fact, has a special interest in training Guyon's body, as he attempts, for instance, to lead Guyon 'euer with slow pace', unlike Phaedria, for whom 'Both slow and swift a like do serve my tourne'. And, as discussed above, the instruction offered Guyon's steps is extended to include his hands, a training which would seem to suggest a pun on 'Palmer'. This connection is made perhaps less tenuous when one considers that the Palmer is yoked with a wrestler in particular, for yet another Plutarchan etymology finds that wrestling (pale) derived not only from the root words for holding and drawing close, but also from 'palaiste, "palm," for it is principally with this part of the hand that wrestler's operate'. A pun on 'palm' and 'Palmer' certainly availed itself to Shakespeare,89 and in The Faerie Queene its possibility is insinuated by Spenser's consistent focus on hands and touch as integral to understanding temperance an application that occasionally presents itself as an education of a wrestler's hands. Not unexpectedly, then, this particular form of actio turns out to be a feature of Book II rather than Book I, as evinced not only through Guyon's enjoinment of his body to a verbal interpretation (as with Amavia), but also through each Book's house of sojourn.