There is one further possibililty regarding the phallic character of
Orgoglio in relation to the defeat of Redcrosse. I have not mentioned it,
out of fear that it will seem merely -- i.e., wholly -- bizarre, and yet
there's a certain obligation to follow a matter to its conclusion, merely to
see where things lead, that is, if we believe that knowledge is its own end.

If, as suggested in earlier posts, the body of Redcrosse is always part of
the allegory in Book I whenever that body is focused on,* and if the
martyrdom of Redcrosse is, so to speak, distributed across the spectrum of
his sufferings in Book I, then it seems pertinant, when considering the
undone Redcrosse in the Orgoglio episode, that an erection is a possible
effect of a hanging. For Redcrosse in Orgoglio's dungeon -- keeping in mind
that dungeon has been glossed as limbo -- AnFQ quotes Norton's trans. of
Calvin's Institutes IV.ii.12 on the tyranny of the Romish Antichrist who has
afflicted the Church and "corrupted and in maner killed [it] with euill &
damnable doctrines, as with poisoned drinkes: such [churches] wherein
Christe lieth half buried...that therein rather appereth the face of Babylon
then of the holy citie of God." Such seems to be the situation regarding
Redcrosse, Duessa, and Orgoglio. Leo Sternberg, in his The Sexuality of
Christ in Renaissance Art, 2nd edn. rev. and expnd. (Chicago and London:
 University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 299, reproduces (fig. 283) the
image of "Allegory of the Crucifixion," by Wolf Huber, ca. 1550 (internal
caption reads: "Be it known unto you all, and to all the people of Israel,
that by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified,
whom God hath raised from the dead, even by him this man stands here before
you whole. This is the corner-stone that was rejected by you the builders,
which is made the head of the corner; and there is no salvation in any
other. Acts iiii.". In this picture the crucified Jesus is shown with a
billowing loincloth and he is apparently erect; the painting includes the
Bishop-Donor, the Temple, and (in evidence) a limp, draped brazen serpent (a
Temple relic in the days of Hezekiah) raised up as the scriptural antetype.
 Paintings by Hans Schaufelein and Lucas Cranach are also offered as
examples of the same pictorial motif.

* Spenser's first legend assumes that our identity and our person are
founded on an individually generated body, and that only a resurrection of
this body is capable of fulfilling the measure of who we are. Spenser would
hardly have put it this way, but this is the implication of making his
standard-bearer a victorious Christian martyr. No doubt Redcrosse is a
noble soul with a great potential for human sensibility, but he is presented
as a character who repeatedly and mainly comes into his own through
corporeality and sensations and the orientation of his person on his
physical life and death. The fiction makes his identity inseparable from
his life in the body, both when he is sown a physical body with Fradubio and
his own georgic original, and when he is raised a spiritual body with his
savior on Easter morning. The forty stanzas of the dragon fight are the
forty hours Jesus Christ was in the tomb.

     Redcrosse stands for faith and holiness, but his holiness is symbolized
by his wholeness, and his faith is correlated with his physical condition
and his health. The vicissitudes of his faith and the strength of his
virtue are somaticized. A moribund faith is represented by a cadverous
body, a lively faith by a robust body, and a wavering or troubled faith by a
weakened or debilitated body. Redcrosse's history includes a medical one:
 trouble sleeping in Archimago's cell, a physical attack with Sansfoy,
nervous shock at the condition of Fradubio, trauma with Sansjoy and
convalescence at the House of Pride, fatigue and prostration in the company
of Duessa, near total degeneration and incapacitation in the prison of
Orgoglio, a strong recovery with the intervention of Arthur, a disappointing
relapse with Despair, physic at the holy hospital, extensive therapy and
rehabilitation under the house doctor, and finally exhaustive exertions
followed by total recuperations in the three round fight with the dragon,
when I guess we're talking Rocky Balboa.

Redcrosse's rocky medical history suggests that the condition of his body is
a virtual criterion for that of his faith. Of course a healthy body need
not reflect a healthy faith, for we are not talking about a religion of a
perfect body, as in the Stallone movies, but a perfected spirit. To a
nutritionist, the anorectic atop the mount of Contemplation wouldn't look
much better than the starveling in the bottom of Orgoglio's castle: "Each
bone might through his body well be red, / And euery sinew seene through his
long fast: / For naught he car'd his carcas long vnfed; / His mind was full
of spiritual repast, / And pyn'd his flesh, to keepe his body low and chast"
(x.48). Redcrosse is similarly inured, under a comparable ascetic regimen,
at the House of Holiness, a health club for getting in shape for heaven. By
means of his namesake's last scenes on earth, the house doctor brings the
charity case to perfect health by a kind of spiritual surgery.

In favor of spiritual acts of mercy to others, such as advising a fellow
sinner like Redcrosse, Contemplation neglects any corporal act of mercy
towards his own body. But the effect is the opposite of Idleness's
exemption from labor and exercise, which was suppossedly "For contemplation
sake" (I.iv.20). Idleness lacks the energy to stay awake or hold his head
erect, and his draggy limbs shake with fever. Sin and illness both being
vicious and mortal, the sins are disfigured by disease: fever, narcolepsy,
pathological obesity, gastro-enteritic reflux disorder, dropsy, siphyllis,
gout, foaming at the mouth, spleen, frenzy, palsey, and apoplexy. Lucifera
herself may present no symptoms, but her dwelling proves both a lazar house
and a charnel house.

Redcrosse's own body is at its worst in Orgoglio's dungeon, where the
knight's thighs can scarcely "vphold his pined corse" to bear him up to a
light that his eyes cannot endure anyway. His physique is like the body of
Lazarus, in bands and stench, while Arthur is like the late-arriving friend
of the entombed and lamented brother. The Prince stands in place of "the
resurrection and the life" that his arrival anticipates and to which Martha
subscribes: the expectation that the buried man "shall rise again in the
resurrection at the last day" (Jn. 11:24). --Hence Spenser's imagery for
the last judgment and the blasting of the "last trump" when the dead will,
as a result of Christ's victory, be raised incorruptible (1 Cor. 15:52).
 The knight's mortified body is momentarily that of Jesus in typical
deposition scenes, where the faithful, like Arthur, find the means to uprear
the savior's defeated corpus when, like Redcrosse, it "lay at deathes dore"
(x.27). The apocalyptic imagery is placed mid-course, in a position like
the unbinding of Lazarus in the Gospel, which anticipates the resurrection
of the holy one whose flesh God will not suffer to see corruption (Acts
2:27, 31). The magic potion Arthur gives Redcrosse after he has "delivered
him from the bondage of corruption" (Rom. 8:21) is an earnest upon the
restorative water and medicinal tree of life that will heal the corpus in
the dragon-fight.

It is under Charity's regimen at the House of Holiness that Redcrosse
reviews the seven corporal acts of mercy, a scripture-based, non-miraculous
maintenance program undertaken for the sake God's corporal image in others
and one's own spiritual health, at the expense of one's economic or physical
health. The program also presents a biography of the body, "From point to
point, as is before exprest" (xii.15), as the narrator recapitulates when
Redcrosse relates his story to Adam. (And thus the program may also be read
as a somaticized history of Redcrosse: housing the homeless versus the
dubious hospitality of Archimago, feeding the hungry and thirsty versus the
restoratives the misformed and parched Fradubio lacks from the stock of
grace; clothing the naked versus the gaudy peacocks of Pride; ransoming the
captive versus the suffering the captivity of Orgoglio; comforting the sick
versus the interventions of Despair; burying the dead and adorning the body
for meeting its maker versus the depredations of the dragon; and taking up
the cause of the widow and the orphan versus exposing Duessa and leaving Una
to mourn, when the knight returns to the cause of the Fairy Queen.) --
Jim N.


On Tue, 5 Jun 2007 13:29:11 -0400
  "James C. Nohrnberg" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From Ken Gross:
> Yes, poor St. George in the latter part of his legend becomes a martyr.
> But then there's the other bit Spenser doesn't use, George's shackling the
> still living dragon, and saying that he will only finally kill it if the
> king and his subjects convert to Christianity.
>
> Respondeo:
> Re the dragon of Book I as remaining a threat: I suppose Spenser's Adam
>and Eve in the Eden of FQ I.xi-xii have already converted to Xtianity, and
>that the shackled dragon has been converted (in another sense) too: to the
>shackled Archimago at the end of Book I (xii.35-36), and analogously to the
>beasts tamed and led about in bonds in Book III by Satyrane (vii.36) and
>near the end of Book VI by Calidore (xii.35-37). But the defunct dragon of
>Book I itself still poses a threat, in the eyes of the fearfull populace of
>I.xii.9-11: because "in his wombe might lurke some hidden nest / Of many
>Dragonets, his fruitfull seed; / Another said, that in his eyes did rest /
>Yet sparckling fire ... Another said, he saw him moue his eyes indeed."
>Spenser is reminding us of the etymology of dragon, Latin darconem from
> Greek drakon serpent but conjecturally from derkomai see, via the stem
>drak- . See the Cupid-idol with the blinded but only wounded dragon of
>III.xi.48 (--"shot through either eye"--) that Britomart found so
>fascinating: "That wondrous sight faire Britomart amazed, / Ne seeing
>could her wonder satisfie, / But euermore and more vpon it gazed, / The
>whiles the passing brightness her fraile sences dazed" [st. 49]. It is an
>image of her own potentially impaired and Dianaesque vigilence in the
>guarding of a virgin. -- Jim N.
>
>> [log in to unmask]
> James Nohrnberg
> Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
> Univ. of Virginia
> P.O Box 400121
> Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121

[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121