Psychic Deadness in Allegory: Spenser’s House of Mammon and Attacks on Linking

Abstract

Mammon’s piles of ore, ingots, coin, and other chunks of precious metal may stand as an emblem of one problem that allegory can pose to readers. Pursuing this problem through the House of Mammon episode in The Faerie Queene II, I will suggest links among the problem of thinking allegorically, greed, and death, and argue that the whole episode — the epic descent of the book’s hero Guyon to an underworld — amounts to an attack on readerly thinking; Spenser represents and critiques the discourse of punitive moral-exemplum allegory (of the kind found in Dante or Boccaccio or Comes) as such an attack on the mobility of interpretive thought. This is so contrary to our usual assumptions about allegorical fictions inviting interpretations that I want to start by calling to mind a very different allegorical fiction about greed and a mound of gold, that in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale.¹ Three young ‘riotours,’ hearing of a dangerous murderer, a ‘privee theef’ (675) called Death, swear to find and slay this dangerous fellow. On the way they meet an old man whose time for death has not yet come, though he is ready for it; he directs the young men to Death’s place, in a grove under a tree.

And in his lap a masse of coyne he told, And turned vpsidowne, to feede his eye And couetous desire with his huge threasury. And round about him lay on euery side Great heapes of gold, that neuer could be spent: Of which some were rude owre, not purifide Of Mulcibers deuouring element; Some others were new driuen, and distent Into great Ingoes, and to wedges square; Some in round plates withouten moniment; But most were stampt …

(The Faerie Queene 2.7.4–5)