An Iconographic Study of Despair in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
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This study is an attempt to explore despair in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in relation to the traditions of melancholy. In the development of melancholy, three traditions are conflated: medical, humoral, and Saturnalian. Thus, melancholy is viewed as an illness, a temperament, or poetic imagination. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, these diverse and complex traditions in melancholy are pictorially represented by such iconographers as Cesare Ripa and Albrecht Dűrer. More significantly, Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, explores love and religious melancholy. Religious despair, which is almost equivalent to religious melancholy, is caused by religious entities ranging from the devil and priests to ignorance and pride. The cures of melancholy are three-fold, that is, faith, hope, and repentance. Both Spenser and Bunyan are indebted to iconographic and philosophical traditions of melancholy and despair for the theme and structure of their works. The despair episode in canto 9, book 1, The Faerie Queene is modelled on Stoicism and christian theology. By brilliantly employing his rhetoric and logic, Despair overpowers Redcrosse, but the knight overcomes his danger with the help of Una. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress depends on episodic motifs for its structure. While Bunyan borrows iconographic traditions of melancholy in creating the atmosphere of the story, he also invents new motifs such as the key of promise, Mrs. Diffidence, and Doubting Castle. By incorporating his personal emotion, doctrinal exegesis, and pictorial allegories in the episode, he makes his story ring in the mind of readers. Spenser’s and Bunyan’s allegories remain provocative and useful to modern readers who live in the same age of despair as people of Reformation England did.
Abstract
This study is an attempt to explore despair in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in relation to the traditions of melancholy. In the development of melancholy, three traditions are conflated: medical, humoral, and Saturnalian. Thus, melancholy is viewed as an illness, a temperament, or poetic imagination. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, these diverse and complex traditions in melancholy are pictorially represented by such iconographers as Cesare Ripa and Albrecht Dűrer. More significantly, Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, explores love and religious melancholy. Religious despair, which is almost equivalent to religious melancholy, is caused by religious entities ranging from the devil and priests to ignorance and pride. The cures of melancholy are three-fold, that is, faith, hope, and repentance. Both Spenser and Bunyan are indebted to iconographic and philosophical traditions of melancholy and despair for the theme and structure of their works. The despair episode in canto 9, book 1, The Faerie Queene is modelled on Stoicism and christian theology. By brilliantly employing his rhetoric and logic, Despair overpowers Redcrosse, but the knight overcomes his danger with the help of Una. Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress depends on episodic motifs for its structure. While Bunyan borrows iconographic traditions of melancholy in creating the atmosphere of the story, he also invents new motifs such as the key of promise, Mrs. Diffidence, and Doubting Castle. By incorporating his personal emotion, doctrinal exegesis, and pictorial allegories in the episode, he makes his story ring in the mind of readers. Spenser’s and Bunyan’s allegories remain provocative and useful to modern readers who live in the same age of despair as people of Reformation England did.
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