Presenter: Alison Goodwin
Mentors: Jessie Nance and Corbett Upton, English
Oral Presentation
Majors: English and Political Science
Under Elizabethan rule, Edmund Spenser wrote literature that both praised the queen and reflected the colonization of the New World (he himself took part in the colonization of Ireland in the 1580s and onward). Initially published in 1590, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene constructs unexplored, fantastical, and often dangerous lands. As a sprawling moral allegory, The Faerie Queene: Book Two depicts the overcoming of intemperance and idleness, particularly through the vehicle of nature. Scholars Amy Tigner and Arlene Okerlund have explored the function of nature and horticulture in early Renaissance writings. As Tigner detailed the constructedness of horticulture, Okerlund complicated this botanical purpose and additionally has argued that Spenser’s audience consumes both the art of the Bower and the art of Spenser’s language. Viewing Spenser’s poem through an ecocritical lens, I follow this scholarly tradition by reading representation of gardens and of the Bower of Bliss as commentaries on the distinct separation between the corruption of man and the authenticity of natural landscapes. While these scholars agree that the ecocritical approach illuminates the Bower’s dangerous veneer, I additionally argue that, by including a colonial perspective, my analysis carries with it an English fear of idleness and lack of labor that percolates from Spenser’s experience with colonialization. In The Faerie Queene: Book Two, the pristine essence of the natural, uninhibited land serves as both aesthetically pleasing as well as wild and tempting. Spenser juxtaposes pristine nature with constructed landscapes to distinguish the purity of the land from the danger of man-made contamination and idleness. Thus he illustrates English anxieties of idleness that stem from a built environment and stresses the necessity of utility over empty aesthetics in colonial expansion.