I was lecturing the other day about Spenser’s Faerie Queene. For those who do not know: this is one of the greatest poems in the English language, an enormously long and complex epic romance published in two instalments in the 1590s. In it, knights representing virtues go on adventures in which they prove that they truly embody those virtues. I read out a very favourite bit, where the ‘Red Cross Knight’, who quests for Holiness, meets a figure named Speranza, who represents Hope:

Her younger sister, that Speranza ,
Was clad in blue, that her well;
Not all so cheerful seemed she ,
As was her sister; whether dread did dwell,
Or anguish in her hart, is hard to tell:
Upon her arm a silver anchor lay,
Whereon she leaned , :
And ever up to heaven, she did pray,
Her steadfast eyes were bent, other way. (Book 1, Canto 10)

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The details here have allegorical significance: blue is the traditional colour of hope, so of course it suited her; the anchor is a common symbol, recognising how hope keeps you steady. Her lack of cheer is more noticeable, perhaps, because you might think that Hope would be a bit lighter of heart. But Spenser’s point, tuned in to the religious thinking of his time, is that religious hope is a serious thing. The detail that catches my attention, however, and links back to my previous post about ‘theory of mind’, is the idea that her downcast face could have been due to ‘dread’ or ‘anguish’, but it was ‘hard to tell’.
      Given that each detail tends to mean something, the fact that a key interpretative skill, mind-reading, is evoked but then denied, is striking. Perhaps it is the narrative voice, or Red Cross himself, that proves fallible here; or perhaps Speranza, an allegorical representation of an abstract quality, not a person with a mind, has a special degree of unreadability. The failure to understand what is going on inside her makes us think harder about why Speranza should seem troubled. Inscrutability itself may be meaningful. The dread-anguish pair is, in any case, not a straightforward contrast: unfortunately they are quite compatible. So at this moment in The Faerie Queene simple skills in construing emotions are not going to clear things up.
      Literature does a great deal with theory of mind, but it can also do things with its limitations.