The Faerie Queene

Spenser used the older characters to represent medieval Catholicism trying to regain control in England, so Archimago’s dual identity as the old hermit serves that metaphorical purpose in addition to encouraging Catholic persecution in the form of witch hunt propaganda. Here, Spenser introduces the uncanny into the story. Redcrosse and Una already crossed paths with a monster by this point, and Spenser has already explained the knight’s employment to the Queen of Faerie Land, so the setting itself has already been established as supernatural. Therefore, the fact that witches exist in this world is not necessarily uncanny, but a nice old man practicing witchcraft discreetly and deceiving innocent people- namely the embodiment of Protestant holiness and faith- is uncanny, especially because it is a situation that the audience can see themselves stumbling into. It is the homely becoming unhomely, such as Redcrosse being troubled with nightmares during very deep sleep, or “Una” not only trying to seduce Redcrosse before marriage but also laying with another man after he spurned her advances. Una 2.0 is a very interesting symbol because she represents both a denunciation of Catholic faith and a critique of the Protestant church’s response to that faith’s followers. Spenser explicitly compares a falsified “copy” of faith to that of the Catholic religion when he places Archimago’s sprights in bed together. However, Redcrosse abandoning true faith at the sight of its copy lying with another man is a critique of the Protestant church abandoning its values when “converting” (colonizing) other religious groups, specifically the Celts. Una does not just represent faith but also rationality, regulated emotions, and morality. Redcrosse is abandoning all of that which Una provides for him, (such as her warning him not to enter Errour’s den, which he ignored due to being “full of fire and greedy hardiment”), because he is confronted with the image and thought of “Una” betraying him with another (Spenser 420). Where is holiness going once he abandons true faith? To the Queen to fight in her wars, after slaying a dragon for her. 

Redcrosse ventures on and finds the other supernatural figure representing Catholicism, but “Faithless” is with her. Spenser has to dig the knife deeper with the metaphorical ‘fake faith’ characters being defenders of Catholicism; because Redcrosse kills the Catholic knight, Duessa now plots to kill him (Redcrosse) too. Holiness keeps running into so many adversaries because he consistently repudiates the religious Other- sometimes unprompted- and Spenser’s message is disapproval of these acts. Already, these three conflicts occured when he was either disagreeing with Una or when he was physically separated from her, symbolizing Spenser’s disapproval of the Church’s impulsively violent actions without regard for Protestant values. Soon, Redcrosse finds himself at the House of Pride, one of the most explicit examples of the uncanny advancing Spenser’s message. While the dungeon full of dead bodies was uncanny due to the reader’s confrontation with death on such a mass scale, it was more so because such a common human emotion as hubris is what caused their deaths. “The uncanny element we know from experience arises either when repressed childhood complexes are revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs that have been surmounted appear to be once again confirmed… we must not let our preference for tidy solutions and lucid presentation prevent us from acknowledging that in real life it is sometimes impossible to distinguish between the two species of the uncanny that we have posited” (Freud 155). Spenser continuously exclaims a fear of regression throughout the first book; the wandering woods and rain represent a reversion to pagan/Celtic religions in the face of adversity, Una tries to reform her worshippers to repurpose pagan belief systems, and Archimago and Duessa represent the constant looming threat of medieval catholicism regaining control. The past is constantly alluded to as something to either escape or repurpose, and when it appears in the form of the seven deadly sins performing a pageant of monstrosity in the castle courtyard, there is a sense of uncanny. Set in supernaturality, the monstrously personified biblical trans- and/or re-gressions still manage to create an even greater sense of unease.

This also lends itself to Cohen’s first thesis. Cohen surmised, “The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment- of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monster's body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny in-dependence.” (Cohen 4) The most interesting monsters from this processional to analyze from this spatio-temporal standpoint are sloth and wrath; if the poem was analyzed from the perspective of 21st-century society, sloth’s fever and wrath’s epilepsy would lose meaning. Even though it is now understood that idleness does not cause fevers, such as Idleness who “grew to grievous malady; / For in his lustlesse limbs through evill guise / A shaking fever raigned continually,” and unregulated temperament does not cause epilepsy, Elizabethan ignorance to these facts are necessary to completely analyze the monstrousness of Spenser’s characters (Spenser 442). This, of course, lends itself to Cohen’s second thesis as well. Although Redcrosse and the dwarf escape the House of Pride, they are not free of pride itself. Its “propensity to shift” causes it to become a continuous obstacle for holiness to face, the same way Despayre returns for the knight’s final battle: “And so the monster's body is both corporal and in-corporeal; its threat is its propensity to shift. Monsters must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations (social, cultural, and literary-historical) that generate them” (Cohen 5). It is not necessarily enough to word it in the way Cohen did, but to emphasize that is it because monsters are the nexus of various relations within the culture that creates them that they are both corporal and incorporeal, tangible and intangible. Take pride for example: the hubris within Redcrosse is very apparent and is a very important part of the plot of this tale, but pride is also personified by Lucifera, and it is implicitly personified in the mound of dead bodies in her dungeon. Even after Redcrosse escapes the castle and travels away, he winds up in the dungeon of Orgoglio, who is another symbol of hubris. The monster (pride) is constantly escaping and reimagining itself in this story.

Despayre was Redcrosse’s most riveting adversary, primarily because he is such a perfect example of how monsters are reflections/projections of the faults within the culture in which they live. The vast majority of the monsters within this story are human emotions or feelings while also pathologizing physical/mental health conditions, further supporting Cohen’s first thesis. Despayre is personified as such a powerful yet destructive emotion that it would have easily manipulated true holiness into destroying itself had it not been for faith. What makes it even more uncanny is the fact that he is not just talking to the knight, but also to the reader. He is asking Redcrosse the very same questions that Spenser raises for the audience: is Redcrosse really a hero? In that case, is the Church of England on the right side of history? Despayre was also the one enemy Redcrosse did not kill because God decreed that Despayre could not die until He deemed so. True faith had to pull Holiness out of the cave of despair, yet even after nearly killing himself at the will of despair, his hubris returns. In his final battle, both Redcrosse and his opponent, the automaton dragon, exemplify Cohen’s seventh thesis. Cohen states, “Monsters are our children. They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge-and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place” (Cohen 20). Because the most common imagery of dragons is reptilian, one coated in impenetrable metal armor is somewhat “futuristic” and implies interaction with human development. Contextually, it refers to the advent of using guns in warfare and colonization, but generally, it reflects Spenser’s concept of the future from an Elizabethan perspective.

When analyzed in conjunction with the understanding that Redcrosse represents the Church of England, Spenser is forewarning the destruction of the Church and Protestantism as a whole lest reevaluation takes place. It was extremely coincidental that Redcrosse fell into two miraculous bodies of water, further emphasizing how many second chances he receives, which in and of itself is miraculous as well. He relentlessly ventures to battle demons and monsters that have laid waste to countless other humans due to overwhelming hubris, yet he always escapes to fight another pointless battle. The audience almost forgets that they are working up to a climactic dragon battle because there were so many preliminary foes. This reflects the belligerency of British imperialism: what exactly are they doing this for? 

This was the first story involving a supernatural setting (such as Faerie Land and the Garden of Eden) that allowed both mortals and malicious spirits to share space. Supernaturality is presented as neither evil nor uncanny until it poses a threat to the main characters, as opposed to a story such as Sir Gaiwan and the Green Knight where the audience is uneasy as soon as Gaiwain leaves Camelot. Even the Queen herself, who represents the Queen of England, is a faerie. The most definitive example of this is when Redcrosse happens upon the talking tree; the scene itself is uncanny due to context, but the tree itself is not presented as uncanny. It is rather uncanny to imagine being forcibly transformed into trees or having limbs torn off you, mistaken for normal, inanimate tree branches, but not necessarily uncanny for Fradubio to be a tree in this sense. Despite Freud and Jentsch’s belief, it is not inherently uncanny for an inanimate object to be instilled with life, vice versa, or some amalgamation of both- like a talking tree. Even after Freud highlights the “excellent case” made by Jentsch that “doubt as to whether an apparently animate object really is alive and, conversely, whether a lifeless object might not perhaps be animate” creates an “especially strong and distinct sense of the uncanny,” he states that, “The imaginative writer may have invented a world that, while less fantastic than that of the fairy tale, differs from the real world in that it involves supernatural entities such as demons or spirits of the dead. Within the limits set by the presuppositions of this literary reality, such figures forfeit any uncanny quality that might otherwise attach to them.” (Freud 157) Once Fradubio explains what happened to him and his lover at the hands of the evil witch, the uncanniness is almost transferred from him to Fidessa as she faints, because the reader now knows the danger that Redcrosse is in. The uncanny effect does not work if some realistic sense of danger is not at least implied, so when the audience’s fear is changed from “why is this tree talking?” to “who and where is this witch?” to “is Fidessa who she really says she is,” the uncanny is effectively moved closer to Redcrosse. The closer this evil, supernatural power is to the main character, the more danger is sensed by the reader. 

So when Redcrosse goes to fight the dragon, its metal hide doubly stands out not only as anomalous to the surrounding environment and his previous enemies but also all previous encounters with dragons and other similar creatures. Although monsters are the harbingers of category crisis and unnatural amalgamations, they are normally still a) descendants of natural beings, b) previously natural beings that became monsters, or c) pieced together from the parts of various natural creatures. An automaton monster then, especially in the Elizabethan era, incites a sense of uncanny even more so than metal beasts or kaiju-like creatures do in the modern era. It would follow that for such a futuristic foe, evolved and reinvented from its natural, reptilian form, Redcrosse would have to evolve and reinvent himself to become an even more pious and pure Protestant knight. The juxtaposition of his dented armor with the dragon’s impenetrable hide emphasizes his need for reinvention; as mentioned earlier, the past is always framed as something that needs to be escaped or remade for the present. Fascinatingly, Spencer is trying to force the British imperial agenda into the past by doubly baptizing the knight. The dwarf was brought into the present by serving holiness and true faith, Una tried to reform her satyr worshippers and bring them into the present by teaching them the Protestant faith, and Redcrosse is symbolically renewed and brought further into the present by twice reaffirming his faith in the purest sources of holy water(s). This climactic battle is possibly representative of a final battle between contemporary Protestantism and Catholicism. After Holiness is reunited with true faith, reannointed, and brought out of the past into a reinitiated Christianity, then he can finally overcome a previously unstoppable foe in the form of militarized Catholicism. 

“Then God she praysd, and thankt her faithgull knight, / That had atchiev’d so great a conquest by his might” (Spenser 475). Oddly enough, Una does something that Redcrosse has not done after a single battle: she thanks God. Faith remembers her place- beside Holiness and under God- and reaffirms her gratitude for both of them. Redcrosse neither thanks God nor Una, even when she prevented him from killing himself; he is so overwhelmed with pride that he does not thank the God he supposedly is fighting for. If monsters really are God’s communication, then the existence of all these supernatural foes and their constant reappearance is clearly a consequence of Redcrosse’s pride. The witches plotting against Redcrosse and his lady, the countless monster battles, and the manifestation of deadly sins and similar vices are essentially “invited” due to his (notorious) pride. This is all a reflection of how Spenser attributes Catholic resistance to persecution, Protestant wars with other religions as well as Spain and Ireland, and the explicit exhibition of all seven deadly sins among the Elizabethan government (specifically imperial policies) to the foremost transgression committed by the British Imperial forces: pride. It can only be transformed by the timeless and crosscultural religious value: (holy) faith.