Eli Solt

“O but," quoth she, "great griefe will not be tould,
And can more easily be thought, then said."
"Right so"; quoth he, "but he, that never would,
Could never: will to might gives greatest aid."
"But grief," quoth she, "does great grow displaid,
If then it find not helpe, and breedes despaire."
"Despaire breedes not," quoth he, "where faith is staid."
"No faith so fast," quoth she, "but flesh does paire."
"Flesh may empaire," quoth he, "but reason can repaire.”
― Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

The ninth Canto of the first Book of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene follows the protagonist Red Cross into the Cave of Despair where he witnesses the aftermath of a knight’s suicide and is nearly convinced to kill himself by the highly skilled orator figure of Despair. Through an eloquent construction of various arguments which lead to a climax (or thesis), Despair presents a convincing case as to why it is perfectly reasonable and even just to kill oneself.

The character of Despair comes across as powerful, seductive, and terrifying largely because of his mastery of rhetoric. While the relationship to the text with readers a quarter-century ago compared to readers today may be different, the processes of identification and Spenser’s surrogate rhetorical strategies still possess a unique quality that is worth examining. The character’s function with a complex Christian allegorical framework of Spenser’s poem also holds significant weight and importance when exploring the narrative limitations of each character and the reasoning behind why Red Cross does fail when facing Despair. When analyzing through the lens of Aristotelian rhetoric, Despair’s argument follows a specific construction of arguments using the three artistic proofs (Ethos, Pathos, and Logos) and manipulates visual imagery and religious symbolism to reflect Spenser’s personal (and historical) understanding of both physical and spiritual death as a Christian.

***

To dissect Despair’s argument for suicide, it is important to understand his basic uses of Ethos, Pathos, and most importantly Logos when attempting to sway Red Cross. It is significant that Aristotelian rhetoric is a tool that, in its theoretical nature, is neutral. The tool denotes no intent other than to persuade yet, as Aristotle acknowledges, the people that wield rhetoric can be “virtuous or depraved” and it “can cause great benefits as well as great harms” (Rapp 4). In this instance, Despair is clearly a depraved figure using his means of persuasion for evil which, as Spenser constructs it, is also anti-Christian.

Despair’s argument may come off as powerful on first reading because it is not constructed in a way one would expect when discussing the topic of suicide. While emotional and Pathos arguments would appear to be the most persuasive, they are the least used in this Canto. Despair’s main use of Pathos comes in his argument that life is pain and suffering and that if Red Cross kills himself, he will be happier and free. However, this argument still follows a logical (logos) structure when deconstructed. Despair points to the bleeding Terwin and says, “He there does now enioy eternall rest” (Spenser ix.). Despair is concerned with stressing all the horrible things about living and how death will take them all away. He lists the worst aspects of life: “Feare, sicknesse, age, losse, labour, sorrow, strife, / Paine, hunger, cold, that makes the hart to quake” (Spenser ix.). This is an excellent use of asyndeton as Red Cross is reminded repeatedly, without pause, why living is a terrible existence.

It is essential for Despair that he constructs a stable credibility or Ethos in order to convince Red Cross who, after running into Trevisan, doesn’t believe that Despair has the power in his words that he claims he does. There is also a visual element that works against Despair because in physicality (while frightening) he is not someone like an authority figure of whom one would be easily swayed by. “That cursed man, low sitting on the ground / Musing full sadly in his sullein mind… / …And hid his face; through which his hollow eyne / Lookt deadly dull, and stared as astound” (Spenser ix.).

To compare the visual imagery that Spenser provides in the description of Despair, it is worth comparing to other interpretations and representations of demonic figures and death by others during this time period, specifically painters. Analyzing a wide enough number of painters during Renaissance and Baroque art to fully understand the representation would be impossible for the scale of this essay but I would like to analyze a couple pieces that Spenser may have encountered or seen before or during his writing of The Faerie Queene.

One of these is the “Allegory of Avarice” by Jacopo Ligozzi who was an Italian painter who created a series of deeply allegorical paintings in 1590 to represent all of the deadly sins. Avarice or greed is the most popular painting and displays a woman holding a bag of money as a ghastly skeleton stands behind her, holding a bag of money itself. The skeleton represents the sin of avarice but also death. This demonic or deathly figure is a common representation of the idea during this time and appears to be an image that Spenser draws heavily upon in this passage in relation to Despair’s hollow eyes.

Giovanni Canavesio’s “The Suicide of Judas” offers a less abstract but still extremely morbid representation of the devil. This painting shows the devil as a kind of monkey-like animal that rips a physical soul out of the hanged Judas’s abdomen. While the representation of the demonic figure is not comparable to Spenser’s Despair, the lifeless Judas could be viewed as a kind of inspiration of a soulless, decomposing body that Red Cross sees in the cave with Despair. Spenser’s description of the fallen knight lying in his own blood gives off the same horrific feeling that Canavesio’s painting evokes: the brutal physical pain and grotesqueness associated with a godless death. The connection to this specific painting is also important because both depict suicides. Their graphic and bloody visual representations are another reminder of a death without God and act just as strongly as a counterargument against Despair. However, it is one that Red Cross is blind to in the moment.

Returning to the idea of visual representations of death resembling skeletons, Despair’s skeletal features can also potentially be traced to the rising popularity of Vanitas still-life paintings at the latter end of the sixteenth century. Vanitas are “a 17th-century Dutch genre of still-life painting that incorporated symbols of mortality or mutability” (Oxford English Dictionary). The symbolism of mortality and death frequently were represented with a human skull sitting in a space like normal everyday objects, suggesting that death was a common part of life and could often be hiding in plain sight. It is likely that Spenser could have drawn inspiration from this common visual imagery when creating the figure of Despair who’s face seems to get close to resembling that of a skull: “His raw-bone cheekes through penurie and pine / Were shronke into his iawes, as he did neuer dine” (Spenser ix.). His ghastly appearance creates a different kind of ethos and credibility to his argument. His looks do not need to be appealing to Red Cross, they simply need to be frightening enough to put the knight in a place of discomfort and fear so that he forgets God’s everlasting mercy in the most dire moment. This seems to be a theme among many writers and painters in the late 1500s in their representations of demonic figures.

However, beyond the ethos argument, Despair’s main weapon in constructing his credibility is the validity of his arguments: their logic or Logos. Despair not only suggests to Red Cross that the brief pain of death is worth the bliss of eternal peace (“Is not short paine well borne, that brings long ease” (Spenser ix.)), but also that death itself is both lawful and just. Asserting law is a powerful logical argument because it is a socially (and religiously) agreed upon construct. It also undermines Red Cross’s belief that he knows (or at least is capable of defending) God’s law. Despair uses rhetorical questions of deep philosophical merit at the beginning of his “speech” in order to confuse Red Cross. Questions like “Is then vniust to each his due to giue” and “Or let him die, that loatheth liuing breath” are not questions that Red Cross should have an answer to but Despair presents them so quickly that they become almost disorienting. Despair also uses different forms of Aristotle’s defined “enthymemes” including a type of syllogism where the reader (and Red Cross) supplies the premise. Until the very end, Despair never literally tells Red Cross to kill himself but his framing of life and death make his suggestion easy to assume. The dead body of Terwin in the cave also functions as a visual enthymeme where it convinces us (not Red Cross) of Despair’s power and makes the reader wonder if it can possibly foreshadow Red Cross’s demise. Aristotle defines an enthymeme as a “body of proof” and here Spenser uses Terwin’s lifeless corpse as a literal body of proof of Despair’s persuasive power.

The function of the dead Terwin is important in understanding how Spenser uses visual imagery and symbolism to establish scenes and characters. Before Despair says anything, Red Cross takes note of the dead knight lying on the floor. The image created by Spenser writing “All wallowd in his owne yet luke-warme blood” (Spenser ix.) is both horrifying and functional; verifying Trevisan’s story and adding power to the already scary figure of Despair. Spenser also writes of the knife wound: “And made an open passage for the gushing flood” (Spenser ix.). This is one of his many uses of religious symbolism, connecting the wound to Noah’s Ark and the wrathful God of the Old Testament punishing Terwin for the sins he’s committed. Spenser sets the reader up with expectations of Despair via his visual descriptions before Red Cross even comes to the cave. Despair’s ominous power is reinforced when they see Trevisan with the rope still hanging around his neck.

Spenser’s visuals connect thematically to his own understanding and concern with the difference between the death of the body and the death of the soul. In many other episodes throughout The Faerie Queene, Spenser presents physical death as rather bland and without much emotion. Certainly, it is significant when a character gets their head sliced off, but Spenser appears to understand that bodily death is a natural and neutral part of life. It is simply the burden of man (and the burden of life) to eventually lose one’s body to death.

However, he appears much more concerned and terrified of the possibility of spiritual death and eternal damnation. The weight of this scene is much greater than other Spenser death scenes because if Red Cross goes through with killing himself, he has rejected God’s mercy and killed not only his physical body but his spiritual life as well. In the end, Una is the only one capable of bringing Red Cross away from these deaths by reminding him of God’s mercy: “In heauenly mercies hast thou not a part?” (Spenser ix.). The ease at which she brings him back to his senses perhaps suggests the power of God’s mercy (or the promise of it) over Despair.

It is also important to address the modes and strategies that Despair uses to so effectively sway the weak Christian figure of Red Cross. Ernest Sirluck’s essay “A Note on the Rhetoric of Spenser's ‘Despair’” breaks down the rhetorical strategy into one simple dichotomy: “[Despair’s rhetoric] consists of quite simply the suppression of one of a pair of essential terms (mercy) in the Christian equation of judgement, and the representation of the other (justice) as constituting the whole relation of God to human conduct” (Sirluck 1). By denying Red Cross the notion of mercy from God and presenting death as just, Despair takes away any valid argument that Red Cross could counter with.

Red Cross tries to argue by saying: “The terme of life is limited / Ne may a man prolong, nor shorten it / The souldier may not moue from watchfull sted / Nor leaue his stand, vntill his Captaine bed” (Spenser ix.). This argument is a common rebuttal written by Christian writers yet, it is not a good enough argument to beat Despair despite having its roots in Christian thinking. Sirluck suggests that it is “so incomplete as to be quite unavailing, since it emphasizes duty without supplying the term to balance justice and make the performance of duty possible for man” (Sirluck 2). Without the promised mercy, Red Cross cannot compete with Despair rhetorically. Furthermore, Katherine Koller suggests that a sixteenth century reader would have been familiar with how Despair could have been defeated in this situation. She writes that “They would have seen the trap set by Despair and how carelessly Red Cross failed to follow the directions for combating his attack” (Koller 7).

In this moment, there is a break in identification with Red Cross on the reader’s part. As the reader would have been familiar with “the old rigorous law” that suggests it is never too late for someone who has lived a life sin to turn to God and be saved, Red Cross comes across as idiotic for not remember this. As the reader stops identifying with Red Cross, they begin to see the truly horrifying effect that Despair is having on him since they are now distanced. This is part of why Despair’s speech is so powerful.

Finally, it is worth addressing the basic Christian allegory that is at the foundation of The Faerie Queene and how the characters of Red Cross and Una as well as this particular scene function within the allegory. Jamey E. Graham’s essay “Character in The Faerie Queene: Spenser’s Phenomenology of Morals,” sets up a contrast between literary characters within allegory and characters within romantic works as being fundamentally opposed to each other.

Graham sets up this contrast between literary characters within allegory and characters within romantic criticism as being fundamentally opposed to each other. Graham suggest that, “…an allegorical character…wills unfreely or obsessively, is restricted to a conceptual schema, and develops teleologically or not at all” (Graham 31).

In this interpretation, Spenser’s characters are narratively limited by their binds to their function within the larger Christian allegorical framework. Therefore, if Red Cross Knight stands for the virtue of holiness, then all of his actions must tie into that mode of representation. The passage in Despair’s cave however, acts as a counterpoint to this claim.

Graham continues, suggesting that, “The characters of Spenser’s Faerie Queene especially resist division into allegorical and nonallegorical forms, because of the uneven way the poem blends allegory into conventions of epic and romance” (Graham 31). Her dichotomy between the romantic and allegorical figure is then broken and characters like Red Cross are capable of transcending their own allegorical selves for the purpose of character development and arc. Red Cross then, need not constantly be representative of holiness but whose entire arc could act as an allegory for the discovery of holiness (a journey that is completed when he becomes Saint George). Graham takes the reading of this a step farther into a metaphysical territory, arguing that “…Red Cross is aware of living in an allegory and desirous to control his own meaning, and that the narrator’s perception of Red Cross as ‘right’ is swayed by the hero’s desire” (Graham 32). Within Graham’s interpretation, the scene in Despair’s cave must then be a moment where Red Cross slips up and whose overconfidence leads him to fall victim to the prepared Despair. 

Red Cross’s own awareness ties into the question of knowledge, particularly the knight’s knowledge of protestant theology prior to his encounter with Despair. His position within Spenser’s allegory also calls into question why he failed in Despair’s cave and how that functions within the broader framework as a whole. James W. Broaddus has an answer for this in his essay “Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight and the Order of Salvation.” Broaddus suggests that this part of the story is meant to represent a classic fall and redemption arc found in other Christian narratives. “…the future Saint George begins as one who is elect but unsaved, one who is, however, eventually and justified in the house of Holiness” (Broaddus 573). Red Cross cannot represent holiness at the beginning of the story because he has not gone through the trials of a Christian and has not fully accepted God’s faith. His lack of acceptance comes not from denial but of ignorance. He cannot be saved at the beginning because he still understands God through the lens of a pre-Reformation Catholic. Red Cross’s journey to becoming Saint George then, is not only about achieving his allegorical representation of holiness but it is also a journey from the confines of Catholicism to the freedom of Protestantism. Broaddus adds that there is a dramatic character shift from the point before Red Cross enters the cave and when he comes out:

            “Until [Red Cross’s encounter with Despair], there have been no indications that Redcrosse has come to any understanding of himself or of the consequences of his actions. […] Redcrosse knows the truth of Despayre’s accusations, and he thinks he knows that God will necessarily condemn him for his sins” (Broaddus 585).

Red Cross’s lack of understanding in himself acts as a double to his lack of understanding of a forgiving God. As he represents the virtue of holiness in the allegory, his lack of knowledge of self literally functions as a lack of knowledge of God’s holy power and forgiveness. When Despair talks about the torments of hell and casts horrible images into Red Cross’s head, they are so effective because Red Cross believes that that is that fate he deserves. His failure is then understandable as his lack of knowledge or “assurance” is ultimately what makes him so weak against Despair’s rhetoric but is intentional as it acts as his fall which will lead to his eventual redemption and true protestant beliefs.

The ninth canto in Book One of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene demonstrates one of the most powerful and shocking demonstrations of rhetoric by an Orator in all of literature. By employing simple uses of Aristotelian rhetorical theory, visual imagery, and identification shifts, Spenser creates a truly rich and devastating picture of Despair. Red Cross’s own limited place (and awareness of his place) within Spenser’s allegory contributes to his failure within the cave but is significant in his eventual redemption and transformation into Saint George. This message to sixteenth century readers is a dramatic warning against being ignorant of God’s love and mercy but also hints at redemption for those who initially lack the sufficient knowledge. While the arguments used by Despair were more common to sixteenth century readers who encountered elements of Christian theology in their everyday lives, the arguments are still moving to this day. As the reader identifies with Red Cross, they are meant to question their own foundations of faith. as well as fear and reinforce their defenses against the Devil.

Works Cited

“Allegory of Avarice.” Metmuseum.org, www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436888.

“A Moment of Life and Death.” SevenPonds Blog, 13 June 2015, blog.sevenponds.com/soulful-expressions/
a-moment-of-life-and-death

Broaddus, James W. “Spenser's Redcrosse Knight and the Order of Salvation.” Studies in Philology, vol. 108, no. 4, 2011, pp. 572–604. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23056053.

Didoi. “The Suicide of Judas.” Let Me See You Writhe, 15 Nov. 2013, didoisux.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/the-suicide-of-judas/.

Graham, Jamey E. “Character in The Faerie Queene: Spenser’s Phenomenology of Morals.” Modern Philology: Critical and Historical Studies in Literature, Medieval Through Contemporary, vol. 115, no. 1, Aug. 2017, pp. 31–52. EBSCOhost,             search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2017394735&site=ehost-live.

Koller, Kathrine. “Art, Rhetoric, and Holy Dying in the ‘Faerie Queene’ with Special Reference to the Despair Canto.” Studies in Philology, vol. 61, no. 2, 1964, pp. 128–139. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4173452.

“Ligozzi: from Pretty Plants to Moralistic Decay.” ArtTrav, 8 June 2014, www.arttrav.com/florence/ligozzi-pitti-exhibit-review/.

Rapp, Christof. “Aristotle's Rhetoric.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford University, 1 Feb. 2010, plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/.

Sirluck, Ernest. “A Note on the Rhetoric of Spenser's ‘Despair.’” Modern Philology, vol. 47, no. 1, 1949, pp. 8–11. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/435568.

Spenser, Edmund. “The Faerie Queene.” The Faerie Queene, Luminarium, 1995, www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/fqintro.html.

"vanitas, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2019,    www.oed.com/view/Entry/221393. Accessed 1 May 2019.

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