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Una's Line
by Catherine Nicholson

C. S. Lewis’s account of The Faerie Queene in The Allegory of Love (1936) begins with the declaration that “allegory is no afterthought in Spenser’s poem.” Although Lewis gives full credit to Ariosto for inspiring Spenser’s plotting, he insists that The Faerie Queene differs absolutely from its romance precursors in the profundity and abstraction of its spiritual themes: “When it is allegorical at all,” he writes, “it is radically and momentously allegorical” (299).[1] The force of the main clause makes it easy to overlook the destabilizing effect of the initial caveat, which Lewis does not pause to elaborate but which hints at the possibility that what Spenser termed his “continued Allegory”[2] is in fact intermittent: what, one wonders, might the poem be up to in the meantime, when it is not being radically and momentously allegorical? That question is at the heart of the book chapter from which the following brief essay is extracted, in which I access the lapsed middle of Spenser’s allegory in Book One of The Faerie Queene by way of a prolonged, now mostly disregarded, interval in the poem’s reception history, when allegory was indeed an afterthought, and readers were advised to cultivate a blithe disregard for its intrusions on the plot. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I show, the imagined ideal reader of Spenser’s poem—the reader to whom its qualities were supposed to appeal most intensely and successfully—was one naturally impervious to its moralizing pretensions: a child, usually but not always a boy, old enough to read independently but not so old as to have lost his taste for fantastical fictions, or to have developed an awareness of allegory.  

Today, when nearly all readers of The Faerie Queene first encounter the poem in a university classroom and the pages of a densely footnoted scholarly edition, it is hard to appreciate the influence actual and imagined child readers once had on the poem’s critical and popular reception. Far from requiring or fostering the hyper-literacy with which Spenser’s poetry is now associated, The Faerie Queene was characterized by both its admirers and its detractors as quintessential children’s fare: an almost too effective engine of readerly enchantment, a gateway to the more demanding (but also more rewarding) poetry of Milton, and a rich repository of adventures and images, ripe for anthologizing and adaptation. The sort of irresponsible, immersive pleasures Heather James and Leah Whittington have recently urged readers of The Spenser Review to consider indulging were second (or even first) nature to many of Spenser’s earlier critics. Although this approach to The Faerie Queene ignored or occluded much of what scholarly readers now consider essential to the poem and its literary historical significance—Spenser’s language, for instance, or his religious, political, and ethical commitments—it attended with useful closeness to parts of the poem that now get short shrift: its richly detailed fictive landscape, and the characters who populate it, without necessarily having much to do with its meaning.  In the full version of this argument, I suggest that the most important of these figures was Spenser’s Una, the heroine of Book One—not, however, in her allegorical role as the Truth and Unity of Christian faith, but in her narrative function, as the endearing protagonist of a series of adventures occupying the book’s middle cantos. I argue that Una, accompanied by her lion or—especially—surrounded by romping satyrs, represented the poem as a whole in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not because she signified an eternal truth but because she embodied a transitory fiction. As the most cherishable and the most vulnerable of Spenserian fictions, Una stood not only for The Faerie Queene, with all its minor virtues, but for the imagined or recollected idyll of childhood reading, a realm of infantile pleasures whose appeal was inextricable from the awareness that they would one day be outgrown.  

By fixing the poem’s moral allegory (especially its idealization of marital sexuality) as the horizon of readerly engagement, Lewis’s account of The Faerie Queene worked to delegitimate this earlier reception history, but Lewis himself was not immune to its influence. Lewis, of course, wrote books for children as well as literary criticism for adults, and in an essay published five years after The Allegory of Love, he argues that childish or child-like reading is not the antithesis of a mature appreciation for The Faerie Queene but its indispensable foundation: 

Beyond all doubt it is best to have made one’s first acquaintance with Spenser in a very large—and, preferably, illustrated—edition of The Faerie Queene, on a wet day, between the ages of twelve and sixteen; and if, even at that age, certain of the names aroused unidentified memories of some still earlier, some almost prehistoric, commerce with a selection of “Stories from Spenser,” heard before we could read, so much the better. (40)[3]

Why “so much the better”?  Such vague, preliterate, and almost prelinguistic impressions as Lewis’s imaginary child reader retains, more sound than sense, might seem remote from and even alien to the allegorical sensitivity Lewis’s criticism sought to foster. Surprisingly, however, Lewis suggests that the reverse is true: allegorical awareness approximates the faded recollections of childhood. The reader whose first encounter with the poem was in infancy will return to it with the uncanny feeling of having “met all these knights and ladies, all these monsters and enchanters, somewhere before,” he explains. “What corresponds to this in the experience of the mature reader is the consciousness of Spenser’s moral allegory”—not, that is, the clear-sighted apprehension of its meaning, but “the sense of some dim significance in the background” (43). By this account, appreciation of the poem’s moral meaning is not the end or antithesis of childish reading, but a relic or simulacrum of it: an afterthought in an entirely different sense. 

A remnant or residue may, indeed, be all that survives of childhood reading in adulthood. Lewis is precise about what his imaginary child reader of “Stories from Spenser” is likely to recall later on: not the allegory or even the plot, but the mere sound of “certain of the names.” Just what meaning might echo in the music of a Spenserian name is a question Nathaniel and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne confronted in March of 1844, when they announced the birth of their first child, a little girl named Una. The choice of name was anything but accidental: “Many months before she was born,” Sophia reports in her journal, “we anticipated a daughter, & named her Una.”[4] The name perfectly expressed the idealizing expectations of the baby’s parents, to whom she appeared—in Nathaniel’s words—“the symbol of the one true union in the world, and of our love in Paradise” (37).[5] Others, however, were more skeptical: “Nearly everyone has had something to say about it,” Hawthorne wrote irritably to his sister Louisa (CE 16:20). Among those who expressed doubts was an old and trusted friend: George Hillard, Hawthorne’s former landlord and the editor of the first American edition of Spenser’s poems, published in Boston in 1839. Hillard congratulated Hawthorne on the baby’s arrival, but “as to the name of Una,” he confessed, “I hardly know what to say”:

The great objection to names of that class is that they are too imaginative. They are rather to be kept and hallowed in the holy crypts of the mind, than to be brought into the garish light of common day. If your little girl could pass her life playing on a green lawn, with a snow white lamb, with a blue ribbon round its neck, all things would be in a “concatenation accordingly”; but imagine Sophia saying, “Una, my love, I am ashamed to see you with so dirty a face,” or “Una, my dear, you should not sit down to dinner without your apron.” Think of all this, before you finally decide. (276)[6]

Such reservations are striking, given how emphatically Hillard champions Una in the preface to his edition of The Faerie Queene, not as an allegorical abstraction but as the object of readers’ “warm flesh-and-blood interest.” “It is Una—the trembling, tearful woman—for whom our hearts are moved with pity, and not forsaken Truth,” he writes. “We may fairly doff the allegory aside, and let it pass” (liii).[7] As his letter to Hawthorne suggests, however, in practice Hillard found Una’s allegorical significance harder to dismiss—and impossible to assimilate to the experiences of a living, breathing, accident-prone child.

In his reply to Hillard, Hawthorne insists, rather defensively, that he had thought of all this:

Perhaps the first impression may not be altogether agreeable, for the name has never before been warmed with human life, and therefore may not seem appropriate to real flesh and blood. But for us, our child has already given it a natural warmth; and when she has worn it through her lifetime, and perhaps transmitted it to descendants of her own, this beautiful name will have become naturalized on earth;—whereby we shall have done a good deed in first bringing it out of the realm of Faery. (CE 16:22)

Hawthorne himself was a child reader of The Faerie Queene (according to family lore, it was the first book he purchased with his own money as a boy), and in this defense of Una’s name, “naturalized on earth” by association with a succession of real little girls, whose sensual, sensuous forms override its moral significance, we can see one version of what such reading is and ought to be. Allegorical understanding has little to do with it. After all, Hawthorne continues, “I like the name, not so much for any associations with Spenser’s heroine, as for its simple self—it is as simple as a name can be—as simple as a breath—it is merely inhaling a breath into one’s heart, and emitting it again, and the name is spoken” (CE 16:20).

A pleasure as simple—and as involuntary—as breathing: this is what child readers from the seventeenth century onward claimed to find in Spenser’s poem, and it is what numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics, including Hillard, urged them to find in it, “doff[ing] the allegory aside.”  But the figure of Una Hawthorne—an embodied reading of The Faerie Queene if ever one existed—does not necessarily equate the future of Spenser’s poetry with an escape from its allegory. On the contrary, the records Nathaniel and Sophia kept of their daughter’s childhood show just how tenaciously allegorical intendment clings to a pair of Spenserian syllables, however thoroughly domesticated. Little Una, Sophia vowed in her diary, “will be rightly named—a most delicate spirit, impatient of wrong & ugliness—demanding beauty of all things and persons—& like the ‘heavenly Una’ of Spenser.” As if conscious that this might be a bit much, she adds, “At the same she will know the Real” (148). In fact, the impulse to narrate the child’s daily existence through Spenser’s allegorical fiction proved irresistible. When two-month-old Una received a Newfoundland puppy from her godfather, the dog was promptly christened “Leo”: “so the lady Una already has her Lion,” Sophia noted with satisfaction, “to guard her from all peril, & to crouch at her feet & kiss her lily white hand… . Her little soul shines brighter and brighter out of her eyes” (149). At seven months, little Una was “a book baby—an ideal child” (150), and as she grew (and was joined by a younger brother, Julian, and a baby sister, Rose), Sophia made sure she knew the book that had given her her name. “I read from Spenser to the children, in the morning, of St. George and Una, Una and the Lion, and Prince Arthur,” she wrote to her mother. “They made an exquisite picture with the hobby-horse,” she adds, Julian astride the horse and Una, like her namesake, “at his side” (122).[8] 

Nathaniel Hawthorne was somewhat less prone to idealize his children, especially Una—of her going to bed one evening after a bout of particular naughtiness, he writes, “she … departs with the blessedness and kindliness of a euthanasia” (CE 8:409)—but he too was attached to the allegory of her name, far more so than he was willing to let on to George Hillard. In the diary he kept of Una’s childhood, he labors to reconcile her imaginary nature with her material existence. “She has a scratch on her face … and her cheeks are somewhat swollen with cold,” he notes of her, dressed in Sunday finery one morning in 1848, “so that my description, or rather affirmation, of the grace of her little phiz, must be taken as referring to her general appearance, rather than to the passing moment” (CE 8:400). His tone is humorous, but such vicissitudes evidently troubled him: “Her beauty,” he reports, “is the most flitting, transitory, uncertain and unaccountable affair,” and so was her mood, having “no settled level” (CE 8: 421). She didn’t merely smudge her face or forget her apron, as Hillard predicted she might; she threw burrs in her little brother’s hair and romped through the house half-naked, “prostrating herself on all fours, and thrusting up her little bum as a spectacle to men and angels” (CE 8:417).  “There is,” Hawthorne confesses, “something that almost frightens me about the child—I know not whether elfish or angelic … , a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I live” (CE 8:430-1). Even the doting Sophia could be taken aback by the child’s crude vigor. In one of the final entries of the family journal, she describes Una pretending to be a country boy to amuse her little brother:

The voice, & manner & phrases & pronunciation were of the most uncivilized, barbarous clodhopper … Where was the grace, the softness, the order of my little Una? Utterly gone—No changeling could have been a greater change. What an Elfish element there is in her— What a tract of untameable wilderness, whither she rushes to dens and morasses, to air herself as it were. I never knew such a combination of the highest refinement & the rudest boorishness—one lies at the door of the other—When she was a little infant, in one position as she lay asleep, she reminded us of Pan … & in another the most sweet, angelical, etherial—spiritual aspect beamed forth—. (166)

She was, in short, a child: a vigorously embodied being with a tract of untamable wilderness at her core and an allegorical screen for the projection of adult longings and fantasies. Rude and refined, Pan-like and angelical, stubbornly material and irresistibly ethereal, she was satyr and Una both.

Such uncanny girl-children recur throughout Hawthorne’s fiction, most famously in the guise of little Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. Pearl, F. O. Matthiessen claimed, is “the purest type of Spenserian characterization, which starts with abstract qualities and hunts for their proper embodiment” (278).[9] A “living hieroglyphic” of her parents’ sin and the outward sign of “the oneness of their being,” she is also a relic of the romance tradition, described with disapproval by the pious Mr. Wilson as “one of those naughty elfs or fairies, whom we thought to have left behind us … in merry old England” (140, 76).[10] But Pearl is also a child reader, of the letter “A” on her mother’s breast, and her responses to that brief text illuminate and complicate the familiar trajectory of childhood reading, from delight to understanding. The letter, Hawthorne writes, “was the first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware” and evokes her first infant smile (67); as the child grows older, however, she torments her mother with questions about it: “What does the letter mean, mother? … what does the scarlet letter mean?” (123-4) Pearl’s fixation on the letter culminates with the encounter between Hester and Dimmesdale in the forest, during which Pearl goes off to play and the letter is (briefly) cast away. As Sacvan Bercovitch has argued, it is the determining force of meaning itself Hester rejects in throwing the letter to the ground and plotting her escape with Dimmesdale back to Europe, and it is meaning to which she submits in putting the letter back on. But, he points out, meaning doesn’t simply vanish from a discarded signifier. The temporarily abandoned A has a meaning of its own:

Never does the A more vibrantly represent the imperatives of whim, free will, defiance, and abandonment, and never does it more sternly recall us to the fact that its office has not yet been done. It stands for the paradox of autonomy preserved, precariously yet decisively, and all the more decisively for its precariousness within the bounds of culture. (144)[11]

What Bercovitch calls “the paradox of autonomy preserved” is, in effect, the structure of Una’s existence in the middle cantos of Book One: a compound of “whim, free will, defiance, and abandonment”—of what Spenser terms “accident”—contained precariously within an allegorical intendment whose office has not yet been done.

Bercovitch, of course, does not need Spenser in order to make this point, but it is possible Hawthorne did. Hawthorne describes the idyllic encounter in the woods between Hester and Dimmesdale as “a mystery of joy,” sanctioned by “the sympathy of nature—that wild heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illuminated by higher truth” (138): these are Spenser’s woods, not the allegorical woods of Error, but the tract of untamable wildness in which Una is permitted to catch her breath among the satyrs. To sharpen the association, Pearl returns from her romp in the woods, looking like “a nymph child, or an infant-dryad, or whatever else was in closest sympathy with the antique wood” (139)—“It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left in our dear old England, had decked her out to meet us,” her mother exclaims (140)—but the resemblance is misleading: the child demands that her mother restore the letter to her breast, resubmitting herself to its signifying power. In the end, Dimmesdale dies, and Hester leaves New England only to return; this brief interval is all they are given of life together. Even so, Hester thinks to herself, “she had drawn an hour’s free breath!” (143)

The scene inverts a more familiar pattern in Hawthorne’s fiction, in which children provide a respite from the punitive necessity of meaning. “I delight to let my mind go hand in hand with the mind of a sinless child,” says the narrator of “Little Annie’s Ramble” to his young companion. “So come Annie; but if I moralize as we go, do not listen to me; only look about you and be merry!” (172).[12] Such cheerful imperviousness to moral instruction has long been the privilege of the child reader and so, too, is the capacity to “revive the … moral nature” of adulthood, as the narrator says Little Annie has done for him, with “free and simple thoughts,” “native feeling,” “airy mirth, for little cause or none” (182). The sketch concludes with an injunction to “spend an hour or two with children” and then “return into the crowd … to struggle onward” (182): the aimless, causeless existence of children, accident untouched by intendment, remains the object of a temporary fancy, not an enduring commitment. But as Hawthorne’s more subtle and darkly shaded depiction of Pearl suggests, it isn’t only adults—parents or schoolmasters or the authors of didactic story books—who insist on conscripting childhood into a textual regime; children cling just as fiercely—more fiercely, even—to the texts they imprint themselves upon.

Childish reading is reading one grows out of, in all senses of the phrase, but childish reading is also reading that refuses to let go, reading that clings to what it ought to outgrow. During his stay in George Hillard’s home, while he was courting Sophia Peabody, Hawthorne wrote a letter to her in which he describes taking The Faerie Queene to bed with him in the afternoon; he fell asleep with the book in his hand (CE 15:XX). Such contact—at once intimate and evasive—seems to have been Hawthorne’s preferred way of negotiating the poem’s stubborn grasp on his imagination. Napping is also, it is worth remembering, how Una accommodates herself to an existence at a temporary remove from allegory, in the middle cantos of Book One. Exhausted by her solitary wanderings, at the start of canto three she takes off her veil, lays it to one side, and falls asleep:

One day nigh wearie of the yrkesome way,
From her vnhastie beast she did alight,
And on the grasse her daintie limbes did lay
In secret shadow, far from all mens sight:
From her fayre head her fillet she vndight,
And laid her stole aside. Her angels face
As the great eye of heauen shyned bright,
And made a sunshine in the shadie place;
Did neuer mortall eye behold such heauenly grace. (I.iii.4)

It is a scene that recurred to Hawthorne’s mind while writing his letter to George Hillard after the birth of little Una. Writing stories, he complains, is “the most unprofitable business in the world,” and fatherhood has forced him to take such mundane considerations seriously: perhaps he will have to “write for bread,” a humiliating prospect. “If I alone were concerned, I had rather starve,” he declares, “but in that case, poor little Una would have to take refuge in the alms-house—which, here in Concord, is a most gloomy mansion. Her ‘angel face’ would hardly make a sunshine there” (CE 16:23). The contrast with Spenser’s Una is implicit, and embittered: allegorical abstractions don’t need bread, and they don’t inhabit alms-houses. But the remarkable thing about the middle cantos of the Legend of Holiness is that Una is required to confront the needy realities of her fallen existence—for a time, at least—and that Spenser asks us to regard that confrontation as an enhancement, not a privation, of her function as Truth. Hawthorne inherits allegorical romance from Spenser, but he inherits a kind of realism, too—the awareness that donkeys are not as fast as horses; that wandering is weary, irksome work; and that if satyrs did exist, and if they knelt to an allegorical embodiment of a transcendental truth, their knees would bend backwards, in the direction of childhood. 

Catherine Nicholson
Yale University



[1] C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, Clarendon, 1936.

[2] Edmund Spenser, “A Letter of the Authors” (1590), The Faerie Queene, edited by A. C. Hamilton, Longman, 2007, p. 714.

[3] C. S. Lewis, “Edmund Spenser,” Fifteen Poets, Oxford UP, 1941.

[4] Sophia’s journal entries during her marriage to Nathaniel can be found in Patricia Dunlavy Valenti, “Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s American Notebooks,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1996, pp. 115-85, and this quote, from an entry made on April 7, 1844, is on p. 147.

[5] Letter to Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, May 27, 1844, in The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 16, edited by Thomas L. Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson, Ohio State UP, 1985. [Hereafter cited as CE.] A good deal has been written about the Hawthornes’ Transcendentalist-inflected visions of marriage, family life, childhood, and their eldest daughter, and although most of these accounts mention Spenser only in passing, they give a vivid sense of how simultaneously romantic and allegorical those visions tended to be: in addition to Patricia Dunlavy Valenti’s introduction to “Sophia Peabody Hawthorne’s American Notebooks,” see her Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: A Life, 2 vols., U of Missouri P, 2004-2015, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture, U of Chicago P, 2005, pp. 52-60, and T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle Class Family, U of California Press, 1995.

[6] Hillard’s letter is quoted in its entirety in Julian Hawthorne’s biography of his parents, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, Boston, 1893.

[7] George S. Hillard, “Preface,” The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Boston, 1839. According to Gary Scharnhorst, Hawthorne is the likely author of an approving review of this edition published anonymously in the Boston Post in November, 1839, “Hawthorne and The Poetical Works of Spenser: A Lost Review,” American Literature, vol. 61, no. 4, December 1989, pp. 668-74.

[8] The letter, written in 1850-51, is recorded in Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s Memories of Hawthorne, Boston, 1897.

[9] As such, Matthiessen regarded her “worth dissecting,” but also “worth murdering, most modern readers of fiction would hold, since the tedious reiteration of what she stands for betrays Hawthorne at his most barren,” American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, Oxford UP, 1941, p. 278. The tendency to lament Spenser’s influence is pervasive in twentieth-century criticism of Hawthorne’s fiction.

[10] Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, edited by Seymour Gross, Sculley Bradley, Richard Croom Beatty, and E. Hudson Long, W. W. Norton, 1988.

[11] Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of the Scarlet Letter, Johns Hopkins UP, 1991. 

[12] Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales, Boston, 1837.

Comments

  • Carlsbad Pro Tree Service 3 months, 2 weeks ago

    I argue that Una, accompanied by her lion or—especially—surrounded by romping satyrs, represented the poem as a whole in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not because she signified an eternal truth but because she embodied a transitory fiction.

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46.2.6

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Catherine Nicholson, "Una's Line," Spenser Review 46.2.6 (Fall 2016). Accessed March 29th, 2024.
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