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- Author: Kathryn Walls x
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This is the first book-length study devoted to Una, the beleaguered but ultimately triumphant heroine of Book One of The Faerie Queene. Challenging the standard identification of Spenser’s Una with the post-Reformation Church in England, it argues that she stands, rather, for the community of the redeemed, the invisible Church, whose membership is known by God alone. Una’s story (its Tudor resonances notwithstanding) thus embraces that of the Synagogue before the Incarnation as well as that of the Church in the time of Christ and thereafter. Una’s trajectory also allegorizes the redemptive process that populates the City. Initially fallible, she undergoes a transformation that is explained by the appearance of the kingly lion as Christ in canto iii. Indeed, she becomes Christ-like herself. The tragically alienated figure of Abessa in canto iii represents, it is argued, Synagoga. The disarmingly feckless satyrs in canto vi are the Gentiles of the Apostolic era, and the unreliable yet indispensable dwarf is the embodiment of the adiaphora that define national (i. e., visible), Churches. The import of Spenser’s problematic marriage metaphor is clarified in the light of the Bible and medieval allegories. These individual interpretations contribute to a coherent account of what is shown to be, on Spenser’s part, a consistent treatment of his heroine.
C. S. Lewis has, influentially, characterized the lion of FQ I.III as “a type of the natural, the ingenuous, the untaught.” But Lewis’s was an almost literal reading. The lion allegorizes, in accordance with tradition, for Christ Incarnate. Spenser here and elsewhere implies that it is the confusion of the allegorical with the Incarnational that characterizes, and even defines, idolatry.
Una’s fallibility in canto I has been underestimated thanks to the received interpretation of Una’s injunction to Red Cross at I.i.19.2 as a laudable invocation of “saving faith.” But Una is merely (and, in terms of Protestant doctrine, dubiously) urging Red Cross to have faith in himself. Una is implicated in all the mistakes made by Red Cross.
At an unspecified point during the night before she leaves Archimago’s house in canto ii, Una changes. Spenser’s reticence on the question of how the change took place intimates that it was the product of election, described by Calvin as God’s “secret adoption.” As Calvin notes, God chooses his children not “in themselues” but “in his Christ,” and it is in accordance with Calvin’s doctrine that Spenser goes on to incorporate his allegory of the Incarnation in canto iii. In using the lion to represent Christ, Spenser follows Biblical and medieval traditions. The meaning of the lion’s appearance is conveyed in part by the intense emotion with which the scene is suffused.
Henceforth Una represents Augustine’s City of God. As such, she stands for a Church that is distinct from the “visible” earthly institutions that co-exist with it. She is not (as most commentators have thought) the Church of England. Correctly interpreted, the Kirkrapine episode underlines Spenser’s preoccupation with the invisibility of the Church. The physical elusiveness of the House of Holiness also tends to distinguish the Church proper from church buildings and forms generally.
In cantos ii-iii Spenser allegorizes the history of the heavenly City’s relationship with the visible institutions that have failed to accommodate it: Abessa’s flight represents the rejection of the gospel by the Synagogue; Una’s miserable night in the house of Corceca represents the fate of the redeemed in a superstitious pre-Reformation Church. Joined by Archimago, and attacked by Sans Loy, Una represents the abiding predicament of the redeemed. The allegory of Christ’s life (and death) on earth incorporates a quasi-prophetic allegory of the history of the Church under Henry VIII: the lion’s slaughter of Kirkrapine, for instance, alludes both to Christ’s expulsion of the money-changers from the Temple and to the dissolution of the monasteries.
Una’s time with the satyrs represents the Church’s mission to the gentiles as described in the book of Acts. The satyrs’ idolatry of Una and her ass echoes (i) that of the gentiles in their attempt to worship Peter (as described in Acts 10), and (ii) the response of the people of Lystra and Melita to Paul (Acts 14, Acts 28). But the world of the satyrs is insistently mythological. As such, it is more representative of the gentile imagination than it is of the first-century Graeco-Roman world. Spenser implies that, although (as the mythographers emphasized) this mythology was fictional, it nevertheless contains poetic truth, even to the extent of foreshadowing—as Boccaccio allowed—Christian revelation. ust as the gospel history represented in canto iii resonates with Tudor history, so also does the subsequent history represented by canto vi. Spenser’s satyrs are suggestive of late medieval Catholics who, in the eyes of the Reformers, had reverted to paganism. Satyrane may represent those Catholic humanists who found in the forest of pagan mythology a fountain of Christian truth.
Through the dwarf Spenser treats the relationship between the invisible Church and the institutional Church in England. The “needments” he carries represent the “ornaments” imposed by the contentious 1559 “Ornaments Rubric,” together with the ceremonies that these material objects epitomized. Such forms (anathema to the dissenters) had been strongly defended by Henry’s apologist Thomas Starkey as adiaphora (or “things indifferent”). These, according to Starkey and the Elizabethan hierarchy in general, were in fact indispensable. The dwarf’s commitment to ceremonial takes a superstitious Catholic turn in canto vi, but his revival of Una in canto vi intimates that the forms of worship embraced by the Church as a national (visible) institution support the Church as the (invisible) community of the redeemed.
Thanks to the Incarnation, Una participates in the nature of God. It is in accordance with this that she has a strongly Trinitarian aspect. Her identification with the Trinity is made most obvious through the House of Holiness, which is inhabited by three quasi-divine matrons and an overlapping, generally younger, triad. Una is also identified with the Trinity through her affiliation with the medieval figure of Sapience, as treated in the Horologia Sapientiae of Henry Suso. Una’s three animals suggest Christ as God Incarnate, reflecting the interdependence of the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ—which are proclaimed, respectively, in the first and second of the Thirty-Nine Articles.
Once the independent trajectories of Una and Red Cross have coincided, Una is reflected in her companions. Arthur, too, epitomizes and signifies the invisible Church. As such, he becomes instrumental in the salvation of Red Cross. “Called to election” in canto viii, Red Cross (whose prior and formal baptism is intimated by the cross he has borne from the beginning) experiences the spiritual baptism of repentance in the House of Holiness, and also during his fight with the dragon. That Red Cross has become, as it were, another Una is implied by their quasi-marriage in canto xii, in a ceremony suggestive of the Sacrament of Communion.