‘Good to Think [With]’: Spenser’s Animals Against Materiality

This essay is concerned with Spenser’s animal figures—in The Faerie Queene and Amoretti 67—and the kinds of thinking they afford, with attention to emblematic, natural historical and scriptural detail. In it, I interrogate a critical propensity (especially compelling in Spenser studies) to distrust figuration, particularly allegory and anthropomorphism, in the context of literary animals. Rather than equating the ‘literal’ to the material or immediate and reducing figuration to anthropocentricism, I argue instead that we might read Spenser’s animals against materiality, that is, both in touch with and resistant to the creatures they invoke or name. Taking as case studies Gryll, the transformation of Malbecco, and Spenser’s trembling deer, I show how the fluctuations between vehicle and tenor, mimetic and conceptual, within a range of animal figures kindle unexpected and contradictory interpretive possibilities for each, more critical and speculative than usually imagined. I suggest in conclusion—by way of the murder of protean Malengin—that literalism, greeted at times as a caring countermove to the hostilities of allegory, is an inadequate interpretive response, scarcely distinguishable from dogmatic forms of abstraction.