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