Candidate 316773 English II Independent Study: Barthes’ Love Figures In Astrophil & Stella

Independent Study: Elizabethan & Jacobean Literature

Candidate 316773

Tutor Pamela Mason

Title Barthes’ Love Figures in Astrophil & Stella

MHRA Citation

2791 Words

1
Candidate 316773 English II Independent Study: Barthes’ Love Figures In Astrophil & Stella

March 2002

Barthes’ Love Figures In Astrophil & Stella

For many critics Astrophil And Stella and The Defence Of Poesie are two halves of one whole,
putting theory into practice on one hand and theorising practice on the other. Both reflect
Sidney’s contradictory support for the Aristolean ideal of poetic mimesis and the Platonic
ideal of poetry creating something beyond nature1. However, this essay contends that
Astrophil And Stella implies a different view (or at least a profound extension of the Platonic
one); that the main purpose of poetry lies in the act of utterance itself. In this Sidney
anticipates structuralist critics such as Roland Barthes, whose “love figures” lead to an
insightful reading of Sidney's poetry. This essay will first explain why Astrophil & Stella is
suited to Barthes' system, and then identify some of the enacted figures. Finally the limitations
of this approach will be considered.
Astrophil & Stella is suited to this type of reading because it fulfils much of Barthes’
definition of a love discourse2. Astrophil’s verse is “the site of someone speaking within
himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object) who does not speak” (1977, 3).
Like Barthes’ lover he “cannot stop his mind from racing, taking new measures and plotting
against himself” (1977, 4). Or as Astrophil puts it, “with a feeling skill I paint my hell” (2:
14). Like Barthes’ lover, Astrophil cannot be “reduced to a symptomal subject” (1977, 3).
Compare the raving madman of sonnets 20 and 31 to the confiding poet of sonnet 6. Astrophil
is not a coherent character, but a voice embodying different stances on love.
Barthes asserts that “the description of the lover’s discourse has been replaced by its
simulation” (1977, 3). Astrophil & Stella is such a simulation, dramatising a lover’s mental
processes, his discoursing “at thewhim of trivial, of aleatory circumstances” (1977, 4). The
reader follows the progression of Astrophil’s feeling in “real time”. In Sonnet 2 we endure and
understand his process of falling in love:

I saw and liked, I liked but loved not, I loved, but straight did not what Love decreed:
At length to Love’s decrees, I forc’d, agreed
(2:5-7)

Caesuras cause erratic bursts of tempo and rhythm that correspond to Astrophil's intellect
struggling against escalating emotions. As he loses control of his faculties and becomes a
“Muscovite” his verse becomes anaesthetized and entirely rhythmic. We become detached

2
Candidate 316773 English II Independent Study: Barthes’ Love Figures In Astrophil & Stella

from his viewpoint as we realise that, while he can articulate the severity of the situation, he
only appreciates it with gentle melancholy:

I call it praise to suffer Tyranny;

And now employ the remnant of my wit
To make myself beleeve, that all is well,
While with a feeling wit I paint my hell
(2:11-14)

Similarly, in Sonnet 47 Stella seemingly appears during Astrophil’s discourse and he declares
“but here she comes” (12), changing the course of his argument. These sonnets are primarily a
performance, sometimes addressed to Stella (“still I thinke of you” (AS 30, 14), sometimes at
“My friend, that oft saw through all” (69: 5), sometimes at personifications of prevailing
contemporary ideology (Virtue or Reason). Most of all, however, Astrophil discourses for his
own fulfilment, performing Barthes’ Loquela figure, the philosophy that “I am my own
theatre” (161).
Astrophil dramatises the importance of poetry and love, often replicating Barthes' love
figures. He performs atopos: “the loved being is recognised by the amorous subject as . . .
unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforseen originality” (1977, 34). Stella’s eyes are contrasted
with convention, syncopation adding to the sense of originality: “whereas black seems
Beauties contrary/She even in blacke doth make all beauties flow” (10-11). Stella transcends
the courtly values that Astrophil dismisses: “Only of you the flatterer never lieth” (First Song,
28). Astrophil instead performs the affirmation figure; he must “affirm love as value”, or in
his words “knowne worth” (2: 3). In Sonnet 18 Astrophil presents a list of conventional value
judgements, of “those goods, which heav’n to me hath lent” (4) which condemn him
according to Reason and Nature, but he uses the volte to shift his argument and prove that
love is most valuable of all: “I see and yet no greater sorrow take,/Then that I lose no more for
Stella’s sake” (13-14). Astrophil only relates to contemporary value systems by projecting his
experience onto them, performing the identification figure3. Virtue itself is personified, in
order that “thou thyself shall be in love” (AS 4, 14).
This love eventually eclipses Stella, as Astrophil performs the annulment figure – “to
love love”. A third subject is never introduced. Astrophil cannot conceive that Stella may love
another, because his verse prescribes a world in which he is at the centre, able only to affirm
his own existence. Instead of feeling jealous of the outside world, looking out, Astrophil feels
that the world will envy him, looking in: “Envie, put out thy eyes least thou do see/what

3
Candidate 316773 English II Independent Study: Barthes’ Love Figures In Astrophil & Stella

oceans of delight in me do flow” (3-4). Astrophil condemns the idea that “eyes are form’d to
serve/The inward light” (5: 1-2). Instead, when he gazes at Stella “thou straight lookst babies
in her eyes” (11: 10) – he sees his own reflection. Love consistently follows the Petrarchan
definition of an effect induced in the speaker by seeing a beautiful other. The union4 figure
never occurs; it may only have been added to our repetoire in Donne’s revolutionary
conception of love: “we shall/Be one, and one another’s all” (“Love’s Infiniteness”).
Nevertheless, Astrophil constantly refer to Stella’s body, drawing parallels and
differences to Barthes’ Body figure. In Sonnet 8 Astrophil declares that love “perched himself
in Stella’s joyful face” (8). This idea of the body as a container of that which motivates the
lover’s discourse is evoked in Barthes’ Proust quote:

“I am searching the other’s body, as if I wanted to see what was inside it, as if the
mechanical cause of my desire was in the adverse body (1991, 71).

Astrophil’s physicality sometimes takes in “the incomplete” parts of the body. In the First
song Stella is separated into lips, feet, breast and hand enforcing the impression that Astrophil
is “fetishizing a corpse” (1977, 71). However, this is done here for dramatic purpose,
obscuring her whole to enforce the repeated line “Only in you my song begins and endeth”.
Overall Astrophil’s examination of Stella’s body does not fit Barthes’ figure. Astrophil does
not merely regard her body as “the mechanical cause of [his] desire” (though this is an
element) but projects onto it desire itself, the nature of his love. Her eyes are no longer eyes
but “daintie lustre, mixt shades of light” (7: 4). The eyes are “windowes” (AS9, 9) through
which spiritual concerns can be identified.
Unlike Donne’s verse, there must always be spirituality beneath the physical
here. In Sonnet 9 Astrophil says Stella’s eyes “Of touch . . . are that without touch doth
touch” (12). The image is repeated almost exactly in the first song: “Who hath the hand which
without stroke subdueth” (21). These claims transcend Barthes’ contact5 figure. From this
wecan infer that the speaker is not interested in Stella the signified, an extra-textual human
being, so much as in Stella the signifier, whose connotations set various discourses in motion.
As Waller states “the poetry invites its reader to enter into such sensual appreciation of word,
sound and many kinds of suggestiveness” (1986, 73). Hence the eroticisation of Stella’s name,
the strongest example of the beauty of an object transferred to the beauty of a word. The name
- always italicized - is as important as her attributes: “Stella’s eyes” (7: 1), “Stella’s joyfull
face” (8: 8). In the expositionary sonnets five and six, Stella’s name is twice placed

4
Candidate 316773 English II Independent Study: Barthes’ Love Figures In Astrophil & Stella

emphatically in the concluding foot, in the motif: “I must/do Stella love”.

By first resisting and then rejecting Astrophil, Stella induces him to perform the why6
figure. She clearly reciprocates his desire to an extent, even kissing him in Sonnet 74,but does
not love him enough: “what I want is to occupy a site from which quantities are no longer
perceived, and from which all acounts are balanced” (Barthes 1990, 186-7). Astrophil
consequently argues against all value systems, claiming that he has been cast outside them by
Stella’s love; “Reason . . . Leave sense, & those which sense’s object be:/Deale thou with
powers of thought, leave love to will (10: 7-8). Besides, he reaffirms, love is the most
important thing: “Dig deepe with learning’s spade, now tell me this/Hath this world ought so
faire as Stella is?”. It can only be explained in writing by means of contradiction: “Reason,
thou kneel’dst, and offeredest straight to prove/By reason good, good reason be to love” (10:
13-14).
The strongest love figure in Astrophil & Stella is écrire/to write 7. This is established
in the opening line: “Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show”. Like the other
Renaissance sonnet sequences it reflects what Barthes terms the “romantic myth” of écrire: “I
shall produce an immortal work by writing my passion” (1977, 97). Astrophil hopes that in
future generations “perhaps some [might] find/Stella’s great powrs” (34: 13-14). Yet the true
importance of writing in the sequence is harder to grasp, implied rather than explicit. Stella is
first introduced in the context that “in Stella’s face I read/What love and Beautie be”(3: 12-
13). This is a Russian doll type metaphor: Astrophil reads what love and beauty are through
Stella, then we read what love and beauty are through his verse. Presuming that others may
read what love and beauty are through us, the process is never ending. The only way out lies
in rearranging the equation, to realise that “love and Beautie be” the process of reading
(discoursing), for love exists only in the utterance.
For Astrophil writing is synonymous with discoursing, with building love figures.
Sonnet 34 dramatises the struggle of writing: “Come let me write” (1). The speaker debates
what he is doing line by line with an unnamed other, concluding that the purpose of writing is
“To ease/A burthned hart” (1-2). Yet he rapidly qualifies this cathartic explanation by claiming
that people find something to“please” in the quality of the words themselves, and that they
identify with mutual experience: “Of cruell fights well pictured forth do please” (4).
Appreciating the importance of the discourse itself, the written artefact, is vital. The Astrophil
of the Second Song, uneducated in the ways of love, alludes to the lover’s discourse as a
learning process with the maxim: “Who will read [understand love] must first learne spelling”

5
Candidate 316773 English II Independent Study: Barthes’ Love Figures In Astrophil & Stella

(24).
Despite Astrophil’s lust for Stella the only sexual experience resulting in conception is
his annulment, his love of love itself. This results in the half-profound, half comic image of a
pregnant Astrophil at the beginning of the sequence:“great with child to speake, and helpless
in my throwes”. His verse is the great progeny derived by his love for Stella, the evolutionary
purpose of his love in language. Astrophil creates poetry in the same way that Milton would
later describe God creating the world: “sat’st brooding on the vast abyss/And mad’st it
pregnant” (Abrams 2000, 1818)8
In this context Astrophil’s attack on Petrarchan tradition can be seen as an attack on
the constraints of language itself. Barthes believes that the lover’s descriptive language
aspires to be:

precisely the utopia of language: an entirely original, paradisiac language, the language
of Adam – “natural, free of distortion or illusion, limpid mirror of our senses, a sensual
language: In the sensual language all minds converse together, they need no other
language, for this is the language of nature
(Barthes 1977, 99)

As mentioned earlier Astrophil’s discourse is introspective, so he excludes the idea that “all
minds converse together”. For him, instead, this utopian language must derive from the “fit
words” of his individual, anti-tradional expression. He echoes Barthes’ words, describing this
as “Invention, nature’s child” (1: 1). But for him the “distortions or illusions” impeding his
verse are traditional: “others’ feete still seem’d but strangers in my way” (1: 11) 9. He does not
realise that his problem lies not in poetic convention but language itself, as in Barthes’ view
the lover cannot write if he fully understands the nature of writing10. The close of Sonnet One
syntactically represents the inspiration and frustration of language. Using a typical English
concluding couplet to debase the argument, The consonant sounds of its first line: “Biting my
trewand pen, beating myself for spite” constrast with the resolution’s rich assonance -
“Foole/look” – and vowel sounds: “looke/heart/write” (1:14)
Correspondingly, Astrophil also articulates a great uncertainty about expressing his
love in verse. This corresponds to Barthes sign figure, the act of the lover attempting to prove
his love with no certain system of signs. The following part of the definition is especially apt:

A man who wants the truth is never answered save in strong, highly colored images,
which nonetheless turn ambiguous, indecisive, once he tries to transform them into
signs: as in any manticism, the consulting lover must make his own truth” (1977, 215)

6
Candidate 316773 English II Independent Study: Barthes’ Love Figures In Astrophil & Stella

Astrophil & Stella is full of “strong” or “highly colored” and ultimately ambiguous images.
As Astrophil puts it in a line of startlingly alliterative energy: “flow/Some fresh and fruitful
showers upon my sun-burned brain” (1: 7). He also makes “his own truth”, constantly
constructing obscure arguments such as “Vertue may best lodged in beauty be” (71: 2) or
expressing conventional opinion and countering it in the volte, such as in Sonnet 5.
Barthes “universal” love figures may constitute the most pleasurable aspect of
Astrophil & Stella for a modern reader, as it is in them we “recognise that we have been there;
we have wept with Astrophil and laughed with Stella ; we see conflicts and considerations of
love in our own experience” (Waller 1986, 74). However a faithful reading must also take into
account those elements that have nothing to do with our conception of love at all. Waller's
position that “such poetry seems to resist . . . the prudency of ideological analysis” (1986, 73)
is flawed. The sequence irrevocably reflects courtly powers struggles, Renaissance machismo
and new national pride. The sequence’s revolutionary aesthetics are most often a dramatic
effect. Attacking contemporary notions of “folk o'recharged with braine” (64: 4) contributes to
scholarly discussion over terms such as Vertue and Reason that were perpetually open for
debate anyway. The image of the lover at odds with society may simply be a romantic effect
in a society enamoured by the Cult Of The Virgin. The heart of Renaissance ideology is not
touched.
Barthes also stipulates that “the lover's discourse is no more than a dust of figures
stirring according to an unpredictable order” (1977, 197), but Astrophil & Stella connects
them as a near-narrative chronology. Carol Neely describes the best way of viewing this: “we
must look for structure where [the text] worked to incorporate it – at the beginning and
conclusion of the sequence and in an overall formal, narrative and thematic development
broad and loose enough to embrace digression, retreat and recapitulation” (1978, 363). This
not only adds crucial traces of love story to the sequence, but adds rich ambiguity. In Sonnet
70, for example, we cannot simply admire the quality of Astrophil’s “heav'nly joy”. That his
“pen the best it may/shall paint out joy” subtly evokes the Muscovite image of Sonnet 2,
where “with a feeling skill I paint my hell”. The possibility is raised that we have been duped,
that Astrophil's early delusions have come to dominate his verse in these happy portraits:
“And now employ the last remnant of my wit/To make myselfe believe that all is well” (12-
13).
Finally, Barthes’ love discourse is “a dramatic method which renounces examples and

7
Candidate 316773 English II Independent Study: Barthes’ Love Figures In Astrophil & Stella

rests on the single action of a primary language (no metalanguage)” (1977, 3) but Astrophil is
a character viewed through a metalanguage of Sidney’s, which encourages us to distinguish
ourselves from his point of view. In Sonnets 20 and 31 Sidney persuades us to laugh at
Astrophil’s ravings, when he again performs the identification figure attributing the universal
woe of unrequited love to the moon. Our response to the speaker is manipulated most
strongly, perhaps, in the Second Song, in which a particularly lascivious Astrophil debates
whether to take advantage of Stella when she is asleep and “disarmed”. This dramatises the
inferiority of renaissance machismo to “pure Love” to greater effect than any of the preceding
sonnets. Astrophil’s military/chivalric metaphor to disguise rape is particularly ugly: “Now
will I invade the fort:/ Cowards Love with loss rewardeth”. None of Barthes’ figures
correspond to this desire, as it represents not love but brute masculinity. The line also
contributes to Sidney continually condemning the Petrarchan oxymoron, as the idea of the
“rewarded hero” is built on immoral logic. It is one of the most subversive parts of the
sequence, unlocking one paradox of courtly life: Astrophil fails and is therefore made chaste
by Stella’s “Lowring beauty”, yet he was made lascivious in the first place because of Stella’s
chastity (a vice in men, a virtue in women). Moreover, this is the only instance in which the
reader is pushed to feel sympathy for Stella’s repeated “frankly niggard No”.

8
Candidate 316773 English II Independent Study: Barthes’ Love Figures In Astrophil & Stella

In conclusion, Astrophil & Stella finds a purpose for poetry that is divergent from its
rhetoric– poetry itself. This reading does not confirm the structuralist stance that such a
“readerly” text (one interested in the process of writing, see Abrams 1999, 302) should inspire
the reader to produce his/her own meaning however. Instead it produces what is effectively an
extension of the Socratic myth of love disoursing (see Barthes 1977, 97), that loving serves to
engender “a host of beautiful discourses”, but it is these discourses that construct love itself.
InAstophil & Stella love is the purpose of writing, and writing is the purpose of love.

Works Cited
Abrams, M.H. & Greenblatt, S. ed. 1999 The Norton Anthology of English Literature:
Seventh Edition: Volume 2 USA: Norton

Abrams, M.H. 1999 A Glossary Of Literary Terms: Seventh Edition Hardcourt Brace College:
Orlando

Barthes, Roland 1977 trans. Howard, Richard 1990 trans. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Penguin (Jonathan Cape 1979): England

Dubrow, Heather 1995 Echoes Of Desire: English Petrarchanism And Its Counterdiscourses
Cornell Univ. Press: New York

Hayward, John ed. 1950 John Donne: A Selection Of His Poetry Penguin: England

Kalstone, David 1970 Sidney’s Poetry: Contexts And Interpretations The Norton Library
(1965 Harvard Univ.Press): Toronto

Kerrigan, Willam and Braden, Gordon 1986 “Milton’s Coy Eve: Paradise Lost and
Renaissance Love Poetry” in ELH Vol.45, The John Hopkins Univ. Press: Baltimore

Neely, Carol Thomas 1978 “The Structure of English Renaissance Sonnet Sequences” in ELH
Vol.45, The John Hopkins Univ. Press: Baltimore

Roche, Thomas Jr 1989 Petrarch & The English Sonnet Sequence AMS: New York

Waller, Gary 1986 English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century Longman: New York

Watson, Elizabeth Porges ed. Sidney, Philip 1997 Defence of Poesie, Astrophil And Stella And
Other Writings Everyman: London

9
1

Notes
Aristotelean: "there is no Arte delivered to mankinde that hath not the workes of Nature for his
principle object"; "[the artist] seeth, setteth down what order Nature hath taken therein" (The Defence
Of Poesie, 87-88). Astrophil describes Stella as Nature's "chiefe work" (AS 7, 1) and poetry as
"copying what in her Nature writes" (????).
Platonic, conversely: "Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers Poets have done"
(The Defence Of Poesie, 88) and Astrophil poses the question "Hath this world ought so faire as Stella
is?" (21: 14).
2
“the lover’s discourse is today of an extreme solitude. This discourse is spoken, perhaps, by thousands
of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one; it is completely forsaken by the surrounding
languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority (science,
techniques,arts). Once a discourse is thus driven by its own momentum into the backwater of the
“unreal”, exiled from all gregarity, it has no recourse but to become the site, however exiguous, of an
affirmation (Barthes 1977, 1)
3
"The subject painfully identifies himself with some person (or character) who occupies the same
position as himself in the amorous structure" (Barthes 1977, 129).
4
“Dream of total union with the loved being” (Barthes 1977, 227)
5
“The figure refers to any interior discourse provoked by a furtive contact with the body (and more
precisely the skin) of the desired being” (Barthes 1977, 67)
6
“Even as the obsessive asks himself why he is not loved, the amorous subject lives in the belief that
the loved object does love him but does not tell him so” (Barthes 1977, 187)
7
“Enticements, arguments, and impasses generated by the desire to "express" amorous feeling in a
creation (particularly of writing)” (1977, 97)
8
Neely identifies this symbiosis of writing and breeding across renaissance sonnet sequences (1978,
365). Kelligan and Braden link Paradise Lost to Renaissance love poetry (1991).
9
In fact the Petrarchan conceits that Astrophil derides with comic alliteration as "running in rattling
rowes" (AS 55, 5-6) are perfect for expressing conceptslike love, that can only exist in the realm of
metaphor. Astrophil's problem is that he discourses in a context that places negative connotations on the
technique by tyinh it to the bad poetry of "daintie wits" (AS 3, 1) and the scholarly ideology that
hefeels his love transcends. In fact, as Heather Dubrow notes, Astrophil does use the techniques he
criticises (1995, 110). The Song One is held together by a frame of oxymorons that break with the
economical sonnet form using a barrage of repetition to convince Stella that she is the loved object:
"Who womankind at once both decke and stayneth . . . Whose grace is such, that when it chides doth
cherish? . . . Who makes a man live then glad when he dieth?"
10
To know that one dos not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never
cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing,
sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not – this is the beginning of writing.
(Barthes 1977, 100)