Conclusion: Taxonomy II and future directions in personification theory

Summary

According to chapter 6, Spenser's Error in The Faerie Queene signals “the deconstruction of textual presence.” That is, the peculiar narrative scene of the figural character's unmaking posits that even “unmade,” she still exists as a palimpsest, as a present absence or absent presence. This paradoxical state of affairs tacitly designates the condition of all personification characters. The Faerie Queene presents a reminiscent absent-but-present personification at the end of the poem. Arriving at the rear of the procession of hours, months, and seasons in the “Mutabilitie Cantos,” Death appears well outside of his traditional iconographic agency (see Macey 45–47), seeming to defy description:

And after all came Life, and lastly Death;

Death with most grim and griesly visage seene,

Yet is he nought but parting of the breath;

Ne ought to see, but like a shade to weene,

Unbodied, unsoul'd, unheard, unseene …

(vii.46)

The rhetorical question about the parting of breath ambiguously marks Death not just as his real signified (“death” – the moment of human expiration) but also as the authentic phenomenal character of his status as a textual signifier: the illusory character “Death” is no more than a jet of air laryngeally formed. (Shakespeare plays with an identical analysis of Honor in 1 Henry 4 when Falstaff declares that the formidable personification is no more than “a word” or “air”; v.i. 133.) More intriguing, though, is the personification's virtual invisibility and intangibility, his phenomenal status as an absent presence or present absence.