Spenser’s Poetics of “Transfixion” in the Allegory of Chastity

Critics have frequently recognized the unsettling relation between allegory and violence in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, perhaps especially in the Allegory of Chastity. Working within a critical trend that links this violence to rape, this paper nonetheless suggests we might shift our attention to a somewhat different trope—one that Spenser consistently employs at key moments of allegorical production. For Spenser, it is not just rape but “transfixion” more specifically that exposes the violence implicit in allegory. In the transfixions of Amoret and Malbecco the text reveals the gruesome site (and sight) of symbolic production in all its horror.