“What art thou man, (if man at all thou art)”: Spenser with Sylvia Wynter

Abstract

This essay reaches toward thinking Spenser with Sylvia Wynter in two stages. In the first stage, I read Spenser’s use of the terms “inhumanitie” and “humanity” in The Faerie Queene in relation to Briana, Crudor, and the “salvage man.” Spenser’s use of these terms, I suggest, enacts and illustrates Wynter’s theory of the overrepresentation of Man as the human. In the second stage, thinking alongside Wynter’s emancipatory thrust toward, in David Scott’s terms, the “re-enchantment of humanism,” I reconsider what it might mean to be deposited on the edges of the poem’s allegorical scheme. If figures like the “bear-baby” and Gryll can be thought of as human but not on Man’s terms, they not only reveal the limits of Man’s imaginary but also demand an alternative poetry of the human.