The ethical landscape of Edmund Spenser: Colonial ecology in the 'Faerie Queene'

This dissertation argues that to understand the full ethical vision of the Faerie Queene one must understand the poet's sense of the relationship between civilization and nature: Spenser's "colonial ecology." Contrary to Andrew Hadfield's assertion that Ireland "determines the conditions of representation," I argue that the representation of Ireland is determined by the same ethical reasoning that governs all of the representative work of the poem. The introduction addresses the ethical implications of recent literary theory as applied to Spenser's oeuvre, demonstrating the impossibility of ignoring Spenser's Irish involvement in a reading of even the most morally rarefied portions of the Faerie Queene. In response to the moral shock of Spenser's guilt, I argue for an ethical criticism based not on political dogma but on the recognition of individual responsibility for the Other---Logstrup's "ethical demand"---and insist that the details of this responsibility have been historically determined by our involvement with the land of the Other. Chapter One is then a sustained examination of the intersection of land and ideology in early-modern Ireland. I read several key episodes---Redcrosses' battle for Eden, Ate's garden, and Calidore's pastoral---in light of colonial discourse on agriculture. The New-English colonists brought with them to Munster a moral understanding of land-use shaped both by a specific reading of Genesis and by the emerging economic individualism that was resulting in wide-spread enclosure in England. The pastoral of Book Six is then best understood in the context of seizure and improvement in the Munster colony, a context which reveals how the poem resonates with a colonial ecological understanding even when the Irish conquest is not an overt topic. Chapter Two traces the anxiety this ecological view-point generates about wilderness. Augustinian theodicy clearly influences Spenser's depiction of the poem's villains, and the poet applies this concept of evil as nothingness to the wilderness that surrounds him in Ireland and crowds the borders of his narrative. The Spenserian resemblance between evil and wilderness can be read throughout the poem, and through the juxtaposition of Duessa's unveiling in Book One with the wild places and characters throughout the epic, the lacuna at the heart of Spenserian evil is shown to lurk also beneath Spenser's depiction of the wild. Chapter Three moves the discussion of Spenser's anti-froward ethic into the context of ideological conflict between the Queen and the colonists. Spenser's critique of the Queen's resistance to full-blown conquest is shown to work through a resonance with his critique of Petrarchan sexual ethics, a resonance which depends upon Protestant ideals of marriage. This chapter culminates in a re-reading of the series of metaphors involving the land as woman which closes Book Five, revealing the full critical force behind the knot of assumptions about gender, land, and conquest which drives the narrative.