“Swarth” Phantastes: Race, Body and Soul in The Faerie Queene

Abstract

This essay probes the strange relationship of allegory and race in The Faerie Queene. It takes its rise from the description of Phantastes in Book II as “swarth”: the faculty of imagination is racialized; race is thereby introduced at the very point at which an allegory of the body—the House of Alma—opens onto an allegory of the powers of the soul. Placing a racialized figure here invites some strange questions about the ontology of race, as the poem constructs it. In fact it invites us to wonder whether what racializing discourse projects or produces is primarily a “fact” about the body at all. This essay connects the question of race to histories of the ontology of body and soul. It uses the figure of Phantastes to ask what The Faerie Queene can tell us about racializing discourse in the early modern period, exploring in one small instance what it means to bring Spenser’s poem into ongoing conversations about race.