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Spenser's Lexicon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Blanche H. Gelfant
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The Spenser of this essay is not the poet Edmund Spenser who wrote in mellifluous rhyme of chivalry and honor, but the wisecracking, hard-hitting, Boston-based private eye of Robert B. Parker's novels, a highly popular series in which murder produces mysteries, and ordinary words a disturbing, if common, mystification. Among these words — honor, courage, loyalty, friendship, and trust, a lexicon of moral values — one of the most mystified is honor, a cognate in the novels for coerciveness and violence. Though unremarked, this semantic slippage achieves rhetorical power as it persuades readers that virtue and violence are inseparable, and that violence and lawlessness — breaking and entering, burglary, assault, shooting to kill — are legitimate means to a moral end. Mystifications effected by an insinuating rhetoric differ from the bafflements conventional to private-eye fiction, such as the confusions created by characters who plant false clues within plots devised by mystery writers to puzzle and intrigue their readers. Typically, such crime plots end by revealing secrets concealed within a mystery's inherent darkness and within mystery novels as a literary genre. In the Spenser series, however, a melding of violence and honor produces mystifications that the narrator-hero deepens rather than dispels as he imbues familiar words with morally dubious meanings.

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Research Article
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Prospects , Volume 24 , October 1999 , pp. 1 - 32
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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