Putting Justice to Question: The Exercise of Power and Rationality in Spenser’s Muiopotmos

Abstract

Spenser’s deeply ambiguous and ambivalent treatments of justice have long courted critical controversy. More often than not, critics have focused on the social and political contexts informing Spenser’s frustratingly inconsistent handling of justice, explaining these inconsistencies as a byproduct of the poet’s overly ambitious political enterprise. This paper analyzes the anomalous status of justice in Spenser by moving away from these social and political readings to pay renewed attention to the epistemological complexity and symbolic intensity of Spenser’s treatment of the operation of judicial power in his early poem Muiopotmos, or The Fate of the Butterfly. In a poem often regarded as a witty if relatively insignificant insect fable, Spenser in fact rigorously and self-consciously explores the exercise of judicial power, and furthermore deploys Ovidian metamorphosis to add a political dimension to and further complicate the poem’s treatment of institutional justice. In Muiopotmos, the volatile bodies of Astery and Arachne are transformed through the exercise of power by public authority. On the surface, Venus and Pallas, the two agents of divinely enacted justice, appear as counterpoints to each other, the first embodying the arbitrary or irrational exercise of political power and the latter the strategically judicious political exercise of justice. Spenser, however, blurs the seeming differences between the two stories of punitive metamorphoses by having Astery, the butterfly, mutate from a token of injustice to one of justice by which Pallas unmakes Arachne. With their symbolic and epistemological mutability, Spenser uses the metamorphic bodies as heuristic devices to analyze and problematize the operation of judicial power.