Allegraphy and The Faerie Queene’s Significantly Unsignifying Ecology

This essay undertakes two tasks. First, it suggests that the narrative elements within an allegorical text (here, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene) that do not participate in the allegory might rather belong to an expressive mode related to but distinct from the allegorical. I call this mode the “allegraphical”; while allegory depends on multivalent signification, allegraphy celebrates episodes of resistance to the imposition of such conceits. Second, this essay explores three such allegraphical phenomena within The Faerie Queene. These case studies—focusing on a woman, a horse, and a topographical feature—refuse to signify allegorically, instead maintaining their own subject-making literality. Their allegraphical labors outline an ecological hermeneutic—an interpretive practice that acknowledges the meaning-making possibility of a text’s interconnected elements when they refuse to be conceptually instrumentalized.