“Lyke a faire Lady, but did fowle Duessa hyde”: Spenser with Val Plumwood

Abstract

Scholarship on Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene often attends to Duessa in her villainous dimensions, such as her part in the moral of Book I and alignment with Mary Queen of Scots. But what of the Duessa who is later stripped and shown to be partially nonhuman, with her eagle’s talons, fox’s tail, and bark-like skin? How does her amalgamative identity affect Faerieland’s knights, such as Fradubio’s translation into a tree and Redcrosse into a liquid body? This article reads Duessa alongside ecofeminist scholar Val Plumwood’s Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, particularly her concept of continuity, to address these questions. In so doing, it conceptualizes how, when read as companionate texts, Plumwood’s work allows readers to consider Duessa as an agent of continuity—or interconnection with nature—who creates this change in others. Further, it considers how, in the current moment of climate crises, she offers contemporary readers a template for relating to the environment.