Allegorical Fanaticism

Chapter 1 turns to Spenser’s use of allegory to represent the ambiguous fanatical transformation of person into divine instrument. If allegory in The Faerie Queene works by analysis, parsing complex motives and essences into their discrete parts, fanaticism proposes an undifferentiated divine violence that threatens to obliterate allegory’s distinctions. Reading The Faerie Queene as an engagement with fanaticism demonstrates that the poem is fundamentally uneasy with divinely inspired action. If, in Book I, The Faerie Queene momentarily achieves an allegorical representation of Redcrosse as an “organ” of divine might, the poem grows progressively more worried about its capacity to distinguish between true instruments of the divine and false prophets like the Anabaptist Giant of Book V. Representations of fanaticism in the poem suggest that allegory in its purest form, void of all difference, may itself be a form of fanaticism, the emptying out of a character so that it might incarnate divine will.