Into the Wilderness: The Fleeing Figure in Early Modern Heroic Poetry

Abstract

All the major epic poems from the Renaissance include a marginalized character who tries to escape from the action. The fleeing figure appears in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and his Paradise Regained. Each iteration of the fleeing figure trope gets a little closer to attaining freedom from their oppressive social contexts until the limitations of the epic/romance polarity are finally dismissed in Milton’s brief epic. This study identifies the fleeing figure trope in early modern epic romance poetry as a site of resistance against imperial discourse and explores how its development eventually undermines the epic genre. The retreat of marginalized, chivalric romance characters from their epic narrative contexts can be understood as a rejection of consumptive narratives that are hostile to the individual subject. This research draws upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and David Quint’s theories of epic continuity and the tension between epic and romance (Epic and Empire, 1983) to identify and trace the generic mediation of imperial epic and chivalric romance through early modern heroic poetry. As each successive poem moves further away from polarizing gender constructs, the evolving feminist critique of heroic narratives that movement represents leads to the absolute rejection of imperial discourse. This research traces the mediation between imperial narratives and individual autonomy through the maturation of heroic poetry as it outgrows the limitations of simplified gender assumptions.