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7 Una’s Trinitarian dimension To the question of whether Una ‘needs’ the dwarf there can be no single, no decontextualized, answer. That the dwarf was an accessory to Una in the rescue of Red Cross cannot, however, be denied (although we cannot know what, in the absence of the dwarf, might or might not have happened). We may, therefore, infer from the story of the dwarf the usefulness to the invisible Church of what rightly oriented earthly institutions (including, we may assume, the Church in Spenser’s England) have to offer. But the dwarf is far from
6 Una’s adiaphoric dwarf Una’s dwarf is usually glossed as a natural faculty such as ‘common sense’, prudence, or reason – a faculty, as Ronald Horton has put it, ‘subservient to revealed religion and faith’.1 But while the dwarf is certainly Una’s servant, the standard glosses are (to put it mildly) insufficient to account for the ways in which he is particularized throughout Book I of the Faerie Queene. My own quite radical reinterpretation takes as its starting point the dwarf ’s burden, Una’s bag of ‘needments’ (I.i.6.4).2 These ‘needments’ invite
2 Una redeemed Una transformed Chronically fallible until shortly before she leaves Archimago’s house at I.ii.7, Una never puts a foot wrong thereafter. Her conversion is projected by her seemingly miraculous survival against all odds and by her agency in saving (or, as in I.viii.Arg.1, ‘redeeming’) the very knight who had abandoned her.1 And yet Una’s transformation (which represents, as I shall argue, her redemption) has received no attention from critics to date.2 This may in part be because it has been obscured by the pervasive misunderstanding and
accounts of West Indian and black British literary and intellectual histories of the first half of the twentieth century is mention of Una Marson, a black Jamaican woman whose experiences and achievements provided a link to all these major movements and figures. It is perhaps not surprising that Marson’s identity as an intellectual is not straightforward. As an educated, middle-class daughter of a Baptist
1 The fallibility of Una In drawing attention to the fallibility of Una I find myself at odds with the majority of critics to date. Reading emblematically, commentators have identified her as ‘truth’; reading literally, and responding to the story as a romance, they consider her an ideal heroine.1 Douglas Brook-Davies’ extensive and generally useful entry on Una in the Spenser Encyclopedia contains not the slightest hint that she stands for anything that is less than admirable or that her behaviour is at any point less than exemplary.2 On the other hand, there
8 The multiplication of Una Una’s transformation into the City of God (the invisible Church, the community of the redeemed, the body of Christ), although hidden from the reader, would appear to have taken place at the very instant of her desertion by Red Cross and the dwarf.1 From this point on, until the rapprochement initiated by the dwarf in canto vii, Una is isolated – either literally (as when she is ‘far from all peoples preace, as in exile’, I.iii.3.3) or metaphorically (as when she is persecuted, abducted, or maliciously deceived). Thrown into relief by
3 Una as the City of God The essential argument of this chapter is that from I.ii.7 Una represents the true Church as conceived by Saint Augustine in his De Civitate Dei (The City of God). As the City of God, she is distinguishable from any visible institution, past or present. While (as far as I have been able to discover) Augustine did not himself describe this ‘City’ as ‘invisible’, this adjective (traditionally applied in accordance with Augustine’s conception) usefully pre-empts the confusion that may arise from the adjective ‘true’ – which is applicable
). Aparicio , J. R. ( 2012 ), Rumores, residuos y Estado en la ‘mejor esquina de Sudamérica’. Una cartografía de lo ‘humanitario’ en Colombia ( Bogotá : Ediciones Uniandes ). Aparicio , J. R. ( 2017 ), ‘ Affective Capitalism, Humanitarianism and Extractivism in Colombia: Old and New Borders for Future Times ’, Cultural Studies , 31 : 2–3 , 331 – 52 , doi: 10.1080/09502386.2017.1303431 . Arango , M. ( 2021 ), ‘ Procesos de acompañamiento psicosocial en el marco del conflicto armado: una revisión crítica de la literatura ’, Revista
consulted. Works Cited Abellán García , A. , Aceituno Nieto , P. , Fernández Morales , I. and Ramiro Fariñas , D. ( 2020 ), ‘ Una estimación de la población que
retarding force against Irish social and economic progress. 11 T. W. Freeman, Ireland: A General and Regional Geography (4th edn, London, 1969), p. 416. 12 DE, vol. 4, 6 July 1923. 13 Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (Stanford, 1976), p. 480. 14 Lecture by Padraig Ó Máille TD to the Gaelic Society’s meeting at Trinity College Dublin. Cited in Connacht Tribune, 8 Mar. 1924. 15 Ó Tuathaigh, ‘The land question, politics and Irish society, 1922–1960’, p. 168. 16 Úna Newell, ‘Awakening the West? Galway 1916–1918’, MA thesis