Revisiting the Concept of Love in Spenser's Faerie Queen (1590) and Malory's Le MorteDarthur (1485)

Abstract

The objective of the current paper is to show that employing “lustful love” in literary works is not intended to be taken at a face value. This paper studies the concept of ‘temperance’ in Book II of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen (1590), which seems to be idealized in Guyon’s personality. In contrast, the paper highlights the opposite image of temperance, which is associated with corruption and lustful desires shown by other knights who were taken by worldly desires, excess and imbalance. To do so, a close reading analysis was employed as a method of the current study. The Faerie Queen can be seen as an allegory within an allegory. Spenser intends to make this allegory more ethical and didactic by using characters, symbols, monsters, places, caves, and signs. To convey such ethical and moral themes to the reader, he allegorically symbolizes "lustful love" as an evil and sinful monster when it loses temperance and goes beyond one's rationale. More significantly, in light of such thematic and allegorical concepts of love and temperance, this study compares Spenser’s masterpiece with Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (1485) in the sense that both of them have dealt with this issue profoundly, but in a totally different approach. It is found that Spenser has made Book 2 very didactic, providing readers with various teachings and ethical lessons that always urge them to consider temperance as a real, necessary virtue against temptations. Eventually, it is important to point out that the current study is limited only to Spenser’s Book II.