from Book 1, Canto 9
Webtext: Representative Poetry Online
Audio: LibriVox via Audio Books on YouTube
Encountering the Text
Continuing the theme of madness and the project of expanding the idea of a canon of early modern disability texts, we selected the Trevisan/Despair episode in Book I of The Faerie Queene. This episode puts allegory to use in the project of articulating and expressing the usually-interior experiences of self doubt, self-loathing, depression, and suicidal ideation. But in the context of a religious epic, and in the midst of Redcrosse’s journey, what are we to make of this detour into madness?
- Just as we asked about Ophelia, what would it mean to read Trevisan’s experience through a lens of disability? How would this reading inform the shadowed allegory at work in the poem?
- Also as we asked about Ophelia, how is Trevisan’s visit to Despair (and his communication of the experience to RCK) potentially gendered?
- How are physical and mental/emotional disability in conversation or tension in this episode? How does Spenser’s description of what an embodied Despair would look like play into or undermine tropes of disability?
