Spenser’s Neoplatonic Geography of the Passions: Mapping Allegory in the “Legend of Temperance,” Faerie Queene, Book II

Abstract

PENSER'S USE OF of emblematic architecture to express mental and moral states throughout The Faerie Queene could hardly be more obvious, yet ironically, much recent criticism has obscured, ignored, or simply denied the existence of geographical paths connecting its symbolic houses and castles. Christopher Burlinson sweepingly rejects all semiotic readings of space in the poem, including any that attach moral meaning to physical paths or structures, while Jon A. Quitslund questions whether anything like finished cosmos ... is mapped for us in the poet's articulate design. Quitslund does note of a mannerist design in which spatial parts relate to one another if not to a larger whole, but for Burlinson, all in-between spaces exist in the poem only insofar as they are needed to describe an approach to one of these locations. . . . This being so, any sense that the poem consists of a single, integrated 'landscape' becomes difficult to maintain; Spenser clearly declines to depict a spatial continuum. Thus while he admits that the poem creates a mosaic-like arrangement ... of elements constructed (as in Angus Fletcher's seminal analysis of allegory) by fundamental oppositions such as 'saluage forests' and 'court,' he denies that these dichotomies graph a continuous or coherently imagined spatial world.1 Commenting specifically on Book II, Joanne Woolway Grenfall emphatically agrees: its terrain is uncharted and unchartable in terms of graphs or tables, even though contemporary Protestants increasingly used of the Holy Land as visual aids to guide them through the unfamiliar lands of Old Testament narrative. Grenfall concedes that these maps had a theological as well as a more national/political significance well understood by Spenser, but argues that his choice of a typological rather than a fully allegorical mode prohibits in The Faerie Queene.2 Typology thus has the same nugatory function for Grenfall as mosaic arrangements have for Burlinson: neither somehow permits geographical continuities, even though both types and mosaics possess spatial dimensions. 'These assessments are at least partially true: the of The Faerie Queene includes both types, which link disjunctive temporal events, and mosaics, which juxtapose disjunctive figures. In that respect, it obviously lacks the interlocking grids or routes of modern city maps. Yet even today, the term geography need not refer to point-by-point mapping, which is not what we actually find in Spenser's poem. Webster's Unabridged Encyclopedic Dictionary defines more globally as the systematic differentiation of the earth's surface, as shown in the character, arrangement, and interrelations ... of such as climate, elevation, soil, vegetation, population, land use according to their relative size and position. Spenser's Proem to the final book of The Faerie Queene shows that he understands his poetic topography in a similar sense. Remarking that the variegated waies of his poem have sometimes made for tedious trauell, he still finds them so exceeding spacious and wyde,/And sprinckled with such sweet variety,/Of all that pleasant is to eare or eye, that his dulled spright is moved to begin anew (VI.pr. I).4 Yet as C. S. Lewis, Isabel MacCaffrey, and Wayne Erickson all agree, these waies are more diagrammatic than naturalistic. Synthesizing the approaches of the former two critics, Erickson describes the universe of The Faerie Queene as including botha horizontal dimension of spatial and temporal and a vertical dimension of topographical and cosmological geography. The horizontal-the earthly setting in the fallen world-intersects the vertical-an ontological spectrum extending from heaven to hell-on the plain in Faeryland where much of the action of the poem occurs. In general, vertical shifts in the setting-up a mountain, down into a valley or cave, up or down into a building-reflect changes in the ontological status of the event portrayed. …