Walls, Kathryn. God’s Only Daughter: Spenser’s Una as the Invisible Church. Manchester, New York: Manchester UP, 2013. xiii + 238 pp. ISBN: 978-0719090370. $90.00 cloth.
“Is she selfe truth & errs?” Spenser’s Una haunts Donne’s lines about the true church, Christ’s bride, prompting him to ask whether she “Dwells … with us,” or whether “we” (“we” men, presumably) must “like adventuring knights / first travaile … to seeke & then make love?” Despite Donne’s witty hints about the puzzle Una presents, to date Kathryn Walls is the only scholar to dedicate a book-length study to her. Walls argues systematically that Una does err, at Book I’s beginning; that her redemption is indicated in I.ii.7; that she thereafter represents “the community of the redeemed” (58); and that Una’s adventures illuminate various aspects (theological, sacramental, historical, etc.) of that community. Una, Walls insists, is not to be identified with any earthly church—including the Elizabethan Church—but rather with the invisible church, made up of the elect, Augustine’s “City of God” as reformers interpreted it.
The book’s guiding lights are those of late sixteenth-century English Protestantism: St. Paul, Augustine, Calvin. An unambiguously Reformed Spenser emerges from Walls’s account. Walls argues that Spenser offers a consistent allegory; she interprets his poem primarily through close attention not so much to its intricate verbal texture as to the religious ideas and contexts that, she argues, it evokes. Walls seeks broad consonances between Spenser’s poem and other sources, aligning poem with context through verbs such as “recalls” (Una’s “journey recalls Israel’s periods of exile in Egypt and Babylon and its forty years of wandering in the wilderness,” and “recalls the subsequent experiences of the prophets and … John the Baptist,” 84) or “anticipates” (thus The Popish Kingdom “anticipate[s] Spenser’s description of the reception of Una and her ass by the fauns and satyrs,” 120). The contexts Walls deploys are religious, and religion here operates independently of politics, nationhood, gender, etc. While the choice is understandable given the book’s focus, it produces some narrow interpretations. Yet the materials Walls details are worth the attention she gives them, and her readings, if not always fully convincing, reward careful engagement.
Those readings are many and detailed. Key to them is the argument that at the poem’s opening, Una needs redemption. Thus Una’s urging Redcrosse, in the midst of his struggle with Errour, to “Add faith unto [his] force” indicates her fallibility (23). Walls notes, astutely, that in the sixteenth century “to add faith [to something]” could mean that one believed in, trusted in, that something. To a sixteenth-century Protestant, trust in one’s own force would be woefully misplaced; Walls thus distinguishes Una’s advice from her later, entirely salutary intervention in the Cave of Despair.
Walls locates evidence of Una’s transformation in I.ii.7, in which Una awakens from her overnight sojourn in Archimago’s dwelling (I.ii.7). The stanza’s opening invokes Aurora rising from aged Tithonus’s bed; Walls claims that Una, too, experiences a new dawn. For some, the stanza will not support Walls’s conclusion; there is little in its verbal details to suggest the call of the elect. In fairness, Walls admits that “Spenser’s story gives us no indication of how [Una] came to experience her calling” (42). But she insists that this is to be expected: “reticence is appropriate on this issue.” In cases where Spenser is truly reticent, perhaps we might best let him remain so. Arguing from reticence is a tricky business. Still, Walls’s later suggestion that Una’s true nature emerges here, soon after her false double’s appearance, fits with what many have found to be Book I’s epistemology: we learn to know the sheep by the goats, as it were.
Walls’s readings of Una propose allegories of the invisible church in its many dimensions. Because for Walls Una is, from I.ii.7, no longer subject to error, her mistaking the disguised Archimago for Redcrosse does not indicate fallibility but rather the invisible church’s condition in the world, where the elect are necessarily mixed with hypocrites. Other episodes shadow the church’s history. Thus Walls reads the lion as the incarnation of Christ (the author of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe might have approved), turning to medieval and biblical sources (Christ as the “lion” of Judah) to argue the case. Abessa is the community of Jews at the time of Christ who rejected him as messiah; Catholic abuses at the home Abessa shares with Corceca are linked with the Judaizing of which Catholics were frequently accused. In keeping with Walls’s Reformed Spenser, Kirkrapine is no iconoclast but an idolator who thwarts the practices of charity. Una’s sojourn with the satyrs represents the church’s mission to the Gentiles (with hints of pre-Reformation idolatry).
Other readings locate Una in relation to Reformation-era concerns: because the dwarf carries Una’s “needments,” which Walls interprets as clothing or vestments, and later carries Redcrosse’s armor to Una, Walls suggests that he is concerned with religion’s externals, or with ceremonial adiaphora. Once Una rejoins Redcrosse, his story illustrates “the process by which the elect individual becomes a member of the invisible Church: his call to election, self-knowledge, faith in God, repentance, and spiritual rebirth” (186). Arthur is one of the redeemed destined to join the church; his and Una’s “parallel predicaments” “define both of them as the City of God in this world, as the building that, although its foundation stone has been laid, is still under construction” (181). Other chapters explore Una’s interactions with figures in the House of Holiness and with her three animals (lamb, ass, lion) as reflections on Trinitarian doctrine, and consider the sacramental overtones of Una’s betrothal to Redcrosse.
Walls posits for Spenser’s allegory a single-minded consistency. As a consequence, she champions some readings that will seem flat to those who find in Spenser’s allegory recursive, contradictory, and/or exploratory impulses. For instance, Arthur’s bejeweled armor is interpreted in the terms of Revelation and Isaiah; yet many have found in Spenser’s description of that armor tensions between chivalric vehicle and Christian tenor. Sansloy is identified as an “extreme Puritan” or an “Anabaptist” (the two positions are collapsed) who denies the need for law in the church. His status as one of three Saracen brothers does not inform the argument, a missed opportunity given recent work on connections between Islam and Catholicism in contemporary Protestant writing. Relatively little attention is paid to the Irish resonances many have heard in canto vi; references to the satyrs as a “nation” and “people” are situated almost exclusively in the context of Acts.
The book suffers at times from Walls’s tendency slightly to overstate her case. On page 149, we read that “In attributing a spiritual value to the external ministrations of the dwarf [after Una’s fainting in canto vii], Spenser must have had the indispensibility of adiaphora in the administration of the sacraments (as noted above) in mind.” The first part of the sentence does not necessarily (“must”) warrant the latter, even given Walls’s careful explication of magisterial Protestant thought about adiaphora. In the interest of argument Spenser’s figures are occasionally granted extra-poetic histories. Thus when Walls discusses pre-Reformation funeral rites, prayers for the dead, and sacramental last rites, she writes that “We can assume that Spenser’s dwarf would have been attached to these forms” (142); later, she takes as “given” that “Red Cross was christened many years before his adventures as they are described in Book I” (195). There are a few factual missteps; Lilian Winstanley is credited with first linking Duessa with Mary, Queen of Scots, but of course that honor belongs to Mary Stuart’s son, James VI and I (185).
Yet there remains much to value here. Chapter three’s discussion of Augustine’s “City of God” and its reception in the Reformation treats a complex subject with admirable clarity. Walls knows Calvin’s Institutes, the Bible, and traditions of biblical exegesis extremely well; those interested in Spenser’s biblicism or his relation to Reformed thought would do well to pore through her commentary and notes. There are many tantalizing moments where the book gestures at the implications of its readings for our understanding of Spenser’s allegorical practice. For instance, Walls writes that Una in her wanderings represents the “painful isolation” of “all regenerate Christians” in this world; “in her oneness, then—a oneness that may be conceived but never observed—Una exemplifies allegory at its greatest distance from imitable reality” (178). On the whole, the book achieves its stated goal: it persuasively demonstrates that reading Una alongside contemporary Protestant thought about the invisible church greatly enriches her role in the poem. Walls’s tightly-focused book establishes that Una’s travails deserve as much careful attention as those of the knight(s) who seeks her.
Susannah Brietz Monta
University of Notre Dame
44.3.64
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