The Imagination in Distress: Amoret’s Brain and the Busyrane Factor in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 3

Spenser’s “Busyrane Episode” concluding Bk III of his Faerie Queene is arguably one of his most adventurous attempts at profiling the human mind in a state of obsession and indecision through all the restraining conventions of allegory. The magician’s house in which Amoret is held captive doubles as her own brain with its tri-cameral faculties laden with the imagery which is the production of her overheated imagination churning helplessly with the stress and anxiety of her situation as an escapee from the consummation of her own marriage. Simultaneously, the episode touches upon themes represented throughout the entire book on chastity. At the center of it all is the human imagination where the depictions and emotions of amorous and erotic desire are conceived and dwelt upon in mind states ranging from innocent excitement to lingering states of pathological melancholy. Spenser treats these images as static museums of emblematic depth as well as kinetic and ambulatory sequences resembling the patterns of consciousness itself. Thus, through the mechanisms of allegory he seeks to profile what it is like to experience, mentally, the many phases of distress and trauma provoked by mating, bonding, initiatory sexuality, insecurity, and eventual trust—in short, the psychological states which protect and negotiate our deeply embedded instincts concerning chastity, union, and procreation.