6 - Narrating the personification of personification in The Faerie Queene

Summary

The Anima sequence in Piers Plowman exemplifies yet another generative code in the poetics of personification. So far, we have left attenuated the stakes for the diegetic representatation of personification's semiotic structure. Prudentius and Langland supply narrative scenes of defacement or embodiment literalized – a poetic maneuver that gains more meticulous care and density in The Faerie Queene. Spenser's vast poem contains a conventional variety of tropological character types ranging from iconographically simple personification characters (the train of Sins who appear in the House of Pride, i.iv.18–36, or the Faculties of the mind appearing in the Masque of Cupid, III.xii. 3–26) to mysterious or superhuman characters named by nonce-words. Although many personifications appear and act according to little more than perfunctory proairetic direction, the central personification characters in The Faerie Queene experience focalization in a narrative moment of embodiment or disembodiment, facement or defacement. This chapter argues (using material predominantly from Books I and II) that the governing poetic code for Spenserian personification is the narrativization of the trope as it comes into or goes out of existence. Such pervasive personification of personification finds its nub in several crucial sites.

In some cases, these crucial sites have a mixture of personifications (even ones not named in English) and possible non-personifications. The three sages of the House of Temperance presented in ii. ix have been variously interpreted as personified powers or faculties of the human mind, that is, as psychic aspects or facets of human consciousness (Berger 79).