“Inwardly Dismayde”: Spenser with Gilles Deleuze

This article considers Spenserian allegory in light of the ontology and epistemology of the post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Drawing on Deleuze’s interpretation of Baruch Spinoza, I compare the characters of Spenser’s poem to Deleuzean affects, differential intensities that come into being through their varying relations on a “plane of immanence.” Where influential recent arguments have characterized allegorical materiality in The Faerie Queene in terms of deadness and aesthetic emptiness, I will instead emphasize the immanent vitality and generativity of matter in Spenser’s poem. Entering into Deleuzean Becomings as they encounter other bodies in the differential field Spenser calls “Faerie land,” the denizens of Spenser’s Faerie, I will argue, produce affective significance in excess of the delimiting violence of allegorical abstraction. This excess, finally, opens the possibility for our own divergent encounters with the poem—for readings that bring Spenser into differential relation with thinkers of our own historical era.