Planes, Plateaus, and The Faerie Queene: Spenser with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

Abstract

What might Spenser’s allegory be capable of if it were described as a rhizome rather than a tree? Taking its cue from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, this essay attempts a “rhizomatic” reading of The Faerie Queene. At first, the two works appear incompatible: binary, hierarchical signification, which is paramount to Spenser’s allegory and constitutes its vertical dimension, is anathema to Deleuze and Guattari’s leveling methodology. Yet in its horizontal dimension, its narrative, The Faerie Queene—not unlike A Thousand Plateaus—has a rhizomatic structure, which provokes a hermeneutic response and creates a network of connections between distant nodes. This essay reads the Cave of Mammon as a Spenserian “plateau,” or “hyper-allegorical space,” in which the planes of signification multiply, converge, and become flexible and interpermeable. Paradoxically, when the rhizome overtakes allegory, it becomes no less restrictive than the system it challenges, but Spenser also offers a glimpse of a possible escape from the allegorical machine.