Maybe She’s Born with It: Spenser’s Una, Milton’s Eve, and the Question of Golden Hair

Abstract

This essay reopens the question of why Spenser’s Una and Milton’s Eve have golden hair. Una’s golden hair is allegorical; Eve’s golden hair is less so. Yet in both cases, the unstable function of hair color as a racial marker proves meaningful. Both Spenser and Milton actively work to subordinate the questions surrounding golden hair as a racial marker to claims of a universal truth that should render difference obsolete. By insisting on the relevance of race, this essay details how Spenser and Milton still uphold what we would now label a Eurocentric standard of beauty even while questioning attachment to golden hair as potentially idolatrous. In both Book I of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, the problems of particularity in relation to universality are not so much resolved as they are deflected into narratives of rocky conjugal unions. It is important that Redcrosse and Milton’s Adam both have hair of unspecified color. This essay pays special attention to the precedents set by Italian epics, in which the allure of golden hair is a site of racial fantasies and anxieties.