Looking back over the first three books of The Faerie Queene, Spenser's narrator perceives a disturbing pattern of female torture. He challenges the artist behind the design:

In condemning Cupid's sadism, the narrator attests to women's innate vulnerability and subjection. Love's ‘cruell dart’ has only ‘add[ed] anguish to the bitter wound, / With which their lives thou lanchedst long afore’, a wound that is synonymous not merely with women's lovesickness but with their sex. But just as the fictional authorship of Cupid stands in for that of Spenser, so the victimization described seems more like a fantasy than the ‘reality’ of the poem. Passive suffering at the dart of Cupid may reflect the fates of Florimel and Amoret, but Britomart is empowered by love, taking up the sword to pursue her own erotic fulfilment.