Pity and the Tortured Reader in Book 4 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene

• In Event: Allegory and Affect in Spenser III

Abstract

This paper examines the role pity plays in the creation of virtue in Book 4 of The Faerie Queene. Following an Augustinian concept of pity that sees it as a force impelling us to help others, the poem gives this affect the power to create concord, healing the rifts between characters. When the narrator claims that he, too, feels pity for his characters, he marks the ability of pity to communicate beyond the story, encouraging the reader to recognize her own pity as something that should move her to virtue. Yet the narrator’s expressions of pity simultaneously call attention to the fact that he himself is creating the pain that inspires this pity—both the pain of his characters and, to the extent that we feel pity, our pain as well. The poem thus, I argue, raises serious questions about the ability of allegory to educate through evocation of affect.

Author

• Danielle A. St. Hilaire, Duquesne University