God’s Only Daughter: Spenser’s Una as the Invisible Church by Kathryn Walls (review)

Kathryn Walls’s ground-breaking study challenges the established criticism of Una in Book One of The Faerie Queene. In the Introduction, Walls adumbrates the three main parts to her thesis. She argues that Una undergoes an unspecified transformation in which its textual absence is its most important feature. The implication of this transformation is the basis for Walls’s second point that Una needs redeeming. Once born again, Walls further argues that Una does not represent the Elizabethan Church, but St Augustine’s ‘City of God’ as the invisible Divine Church.

Chapter 1 discusses Una’s fallibility. Walls reassesses the standard interpretation that Una represents ‘truth’ and unchanging purity. Even with critics who accept Una is fallible, Walls goes further to argue ‘that fallibility is Una’s defining characteristic’ (p. 20). She begins by reinterpreting Una’s famous injunction to the tired Red Cross to add faith to his force while battling Errour. However, Walls does not attribute Red Cross’s eventual victory over Errour to Una’s injunction as spiritual intervention. She states instead that Una simply boosts Red Cross’s confidence.

The second half of the chapter re-examines the episode where Red Cross and Una take shelter in the wandering wood. By fleeing from a storm Walls interprets as Noah’s Flood, she argues that both Una and Red Cross are sinful. What makes Walls’s argument more convincing is that Una’s naming of the wandering wood and Errour’s den leads to the inference ‘that Una has been here before’ (p. 32). Therefore, along with Red Cross, Una must also be in spiritual error. It is also telling that Una is not named until near the end of the first canto, and then it is only in connection with Archimago’s false Una. Walls points out that leaving Una unnamed until this moment is consistent with the impression that she is not perfect.

In Chapter 2, Walls breaks new critical ground by stating that Una is transformed when she wakes up from her bed and then chamber before leaving Archimago’s house. She argues persuasively that the creation of the false Una and the flight of Red Cross, who is false himself through being deceived by Archimago’s model, constitute Una’s redemption. Walls then discusses Una’s submissive lion as ‘the Incarnation of Christ (and its death the Crucifixion)’ (p. 49). Following her own logic, Walls argues that Una is also Mary as the first member of the Christian Church. Walls is careful to add, though, that Una does not simply represent an individual Christian or the Elizabethan church, but more specifically she signifies the redeemed of the True Church.

Chapter 3 analyses Una as representing the City of God in more detail, especially through how Augustine developed his ideas from biblical sources that also influenced Spenser. With reference to an invisible Church, Walls ascertains through the House of Holiness that holiness for Spenser was not linked to buildings. Chapter 4 examines Spenser’s use of figurative biblical history. Walls argues that this history has an allegorical impact on Una’s meeting with Abessa who ‘moves through three time zones’ (p. 83). Walls also argues that the sequence of events leading up to and including Abessa’s flight to her mother’s cottage are steeped in biblical allusion. She then reconsiders the implications of Una failing to recognise Archimago.

Chapter 5 rereads the significance of the fauns and satyrs. Walls argues that they signify the pagans from the Acts of the Apostles who are converted to Christianity by the early Church. Chapter 6 focuses on Una’s dwarf, the importance of whom, especially to Una, Walls contends has been completely overlooked by critics.

In Chapter 7, Walls extends her thesis that Una represents the invisible Church by adding she also echoes God as the Holy Trinity. In...