From the Archive: Spenser (1999)
William Schraufnagel
English 125-8, Fayen
November 18, 1999
Long Spenser Paper
“I” Before “E”: Virtue and Vertu in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene
The Redcrosse Knight’s journey through the House of Holinesse culminates in a visit with Contemplation, a wizened old man who best knows the way to heaven. Upon his arrival, Redcrosse finds Contemplation to be spiritually strong, but physically weak: “That day and night said his devotion, / Ne other worldly busines did apply;... His mind was full of spirituall repast, / And pyned his flesh, to keepe his body low and chast” (I. x. 46. 6-7 and 48. 8-9). In this section of Book 1, Spenser depicts Contemplation in a reverent light, with great emphasis on humility, meekness, and introspection. However, as the next canto begins, Una directs the Redcrosse Knight in an ideologically opposite direction: “‘The sparke of noble courage now awake, / And strive your excellent selfe to excell; / That shall ye evermore renowmed make, / Above all knights on earth, that batteill undertake’” (I. xi. 2. 6-9). This emphasis on personal glory and might contradicts the humility that Redcrosse has taken such great pains to learn. Why does Una, who has just led him through the House of Holinesse and to see Contemplation, inflate his pride and fill him with visions of fame and glory?
Una brings Redcrosse to Contemplation hoping that he will show the knight the keys of heaven (I. x. 50). Contemplation takes the knight to the top of a great mountain to see the holy city of New Jerusalem, “Wherein eternall peace and happinesse doth dwell.” (I. x. 55). As Redcrosse stares amazed at the city, the old man prophesies that the knight will become a saint and win glory if he saves Una’s parents from the dragon that holds them captive. The knight resists, preferring to either continue to look upon New Jerusalem or travel there at once. Contemplation again reminds him of his obligation to Una and reveals to him: that Redcrosse comes from an ancient and illustrious line of heroic Saxon kings. This appeal to Redcrosse’s pride is soon followed in canto xi by Una’s call to battle. In this, Una seems to shed her previous tone of humility and obeisance in favor of a bolder, almost seductive, method of persuasion. She uses her sexual power to appeal to Redcrosse’s sense of manhood in hopes that he will defeat the dragon.
Both Contemplation and Una during this sequence prod the Redcrosse Knight towards a mentality of strength and pride. Having just gone through confession, repentance, and education by the female-dominated House of Holinesse, the knight has finally learned virtue. Therefore, Una and Contemplation are leading Redcrosse to a coalescence of masculine vertu and feminine virtue– physical strength fueled by the energy of holiness at its core. This combination is crucial in Redcrosse’s eventual defeat of the dragon. The union of the male and female ideals is the ultimate end of the Redcrosse Knight’s quest, and it finally manifests itself in his marriage to Una.
From the very first canto, the Redcrosse Knight acts in a horizontal progression– he darts from event to event on a very shallow level, without ever thinking or absorbing the implications of his actions. With his first step into Error’s Cave, Redcrosse boasts of vertu’s power: “‘Vertue gives her selfe light, through darknesse for to wade.’” (I. i. 12. 9). Here, vertu is strength in the absence of thought and spiritual guidance. Without the depth and maturity that Una can bring to him, Redcrosse is doomed to envelop himself in error: he leaves Una, he falls for Duessa’s deceits, he loses in battle to Orgolio. Only when Redcrosse comes to the House of Holinesse to learn virtue can he begin to develop a deeper understanding and the spiritual power that implicitly follows.
Una is just as reliant on Redcrosse as he is on her. On the simplest level, she needs him to defeat the dragon and rescue her family. If the Redcrosse Knight follows a horizontal trajectory throughout most of Book 1, Una follows a vertical one. She descends from Eden to earth as a conduit of light and truth, but she has no way of moving forward and accomplishing her goal without the strength of Redcrosse’s vertu. On a deeper level, Una is direction-less without him: “She wandred had from one to other Ynd, / Him for to seeke, ne ever would forsake,” (I. vi. 2. 7-8). He has the potential to fulfill her emotionally and sexually.
If the Redcrosse’s vertu and Una’s virtue are two halves of the whole that eventually comes to fruition, then the House of Pride and the House of Holinesse are their metaphorical (or edificial) correspondents, with the Palace in Eden as the resolution.
The House of Pride, to which Duessa brings the Redcrosse Knight, is a fragile building with an impressive facade: “without morter laid, / Whose wals were high, but nothing strong, nor thick,” (I. iv. 4. 2-3). As Lucifera’s light reflects inward onto herself off her throne and from her mirror, the House of Pride is a mirror of the Redcrosse Knight himself, showing him his weakness, if he will observe it. The weak foundation and “painted” facade (I. iv. 5. 9) indicate the House’s and the Redcrosse Knight’s susceptibility to false images, especially those “painted” by Archimago and Duessa in Canto ii. The phrase “vertue gives herself light,” from Redcrosse in Canto i resonates anew in light of Lucifera– vertu’s self-light is a self-inflating distortion: “Yet her bright blazing beautie did assay / To dim the brightnesse of her glorious throne, / As envying her selfe, that too exceeding shone.” (I. iv. 8. 7-9). Lucifera’s pageant of the seven deadly sins moves in a horizontal train that imitates the horizontal motion of the Redcrosse Knight’s vertu. While watching, Redcrosse dissociates himself from those in the parade because of pride, the very sin which they expose in him: “But that good knight would not no nigh repaire, / Him selfe estraunging from their joyaunce vaine, / Whose fellowship seemd far unfit for warlike swaine.” (I. iv. 37. 7-9). The knight soon becomes embroiled in a battle with a false knight, Sans Joy, over a false lady, Duessa. Upon victory, Redcrosse becomes an official member of the house: “Home is he brought, and laid in sumptuous bed:” (I. v. 17. 1). At this point, Redcrosse is filled with vertu without virtue in the form of wrath, ambition, and sensuous self-indulgence.
The House of Holinesse, in a similar but converse way, represents abundance of virtue and the absence of vertu. First of all, the dominant figures of the House are all women– Caelia and her three daughters Charissa, Speranza, and Fidelia. The male figures– Zele, Reverence, Patience, and the Bead-Men– all play submissive roles. Here, as opposed to the House of Pride, Redcrosse must purge himself of his masculine instincts. Instead of receiving pampering for his ambitions, the Redcrosse Knight must fast, pray, be whipped, pricked, and his blood bathed in salt water– not exactly the “sumptuous bed” from the House of Pride. The House of Holinesse breaks the Redcrosse Knight down to the point at which he absolutely rejects everything he has done up until this point: “And mortall life gan loath, as thing forlore, / Greeved with remembrance of his wicked wayes, / And prickt with anguish of his sinnes so sore,” (I. x. 21. 5-7). At the end of his stay, his vertu has become so diminished that Contemplation and Una must work hard to persuade him to meet the challenge which he has so avidly sought before.
The resolution of the extremes of Pride and Holinesse comes in Canto xii after the Redcrosse Knight has killed the dragon, and Una’s parents bring him to their palace. The feast that they hold is a metaphorical celebration of the union within Redcrosse between vertu and virtue, a union realized in the final two lines of Canto xi: “Then God she praysd, and thankt her faithfull knight, / That had atchieved so great a conquest by his might.” (I. xi. 55. 8-9). Una’s parents’ palace is a synthesis of the Houses of Pride and Holinesse, in that it celebrates earthly delights and heavenly virtues: “And all the floore was underneath their feet / Bespred with costly scarlot of great name, / On which they lowly sit, and fitting purpose frame.” (I. xii. 13. 8-9). All the guests enjoy a feast, and their appetites are “quenched” (I. xii. 15. 2), but they take nothing to the excess. The marriage of flesh and faith allegorically surrounds the actual marriage of Redcrosse and Una, and furthermore seems to be Spenser’s idealized situation.
Spenser’s marriage works on several levels above the purely literary. The most basic is the sexual theme of Una’s joining with the Redcrosse Knight. As Una’s father calls her forth to be joined with Redcrosse, she suddenly bursts with previously unseen sexual energy, similar to her unveiling in Canto ii: “So faire, and fresh, as freshest flowre in May... The blazing brightnesse of her beauties beame,” (I. xii. 22. 1 and 23. 1). After their marriage, Spenser gives a tongue-in-cheek insinuation: “Suffice it heare by signes to understand / The usuall joyes at knitting of loves band.” The alliteration of the former lines and the tasteful innuendo lighten the tone and appeal to the satisfaction of sexual fulfillment in Spenser’s readers.
On a political level, Spenser praises Queen Elizabeth through the marriage of Una and the Redcrosse Knight. The marriage symbolizes the union between the queen and all the men of England (i.e. the men who will fight in her army). At the end of Canto xii, Redcrosse reminds his father-in-law-to-be that he must do service to “that great Faerie Queene, / And her to serve six yeares in warlike wize, / Gainst that proud Paynim king,” (I. xii. 18. 6-8). This patriotic insertion most likely refers to King Phillip II of Spain, with whom the English were at war. On a theological level, Spenser glorifies the English Church in contrast to the Roman Catholic Church. The two bear doctrinal similarities, such as their emphasis on works as necessary for salvation, but Spenser criticizes the Catholic Church as being all works and no faith, or the Redcrosse Knight before his trip to the House of Holinesse.
In his letter to Raleigh, Spenser writes, “So much more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule.” Through the example of a fantastical journey of two lovers, Una and the Redcrosse Knight, Spenser fuses opposing ideals that lay at the foundation of our personal and societal values– action and respect, ambition and humility, confidence and wisdom, independence and faith, youth and age, earth and heaven. At the core of these couplings lies the most basic coupling of nature– the male-female conflict and resolution, a process held together and supported by the mortar and foundation of Spenser’s infallible, irreproducible verse.
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