Spenser, Donne, and the theology of joy

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Wntr, 2006 by Adam Potkay

Sans-Joy, analogously, represents something that Redcrosse, either as the individual Christian or as the spirit of the true church, must fight against yet cannot conquer. The character Sans-Joy appears directly after Redcrosse reproves the "joyaunce vaine" of the House of Pride, specifically the spectacular parade of deadly sins led by its queen, Lucifera, and beheld with gawking admiration and shouts of joy by her courtiers and "Huge routs of people" (1.4.36.5). As reasonable as it may seem to turn one's back on characters such as "Lucifera" and "Sathan," Redcrosse's doing so immediately occasions the appearance of Sans-Joy, a figure who in certain ways resembles Redcrosse, beginning with the red of his sign:

   Whereas an errant knight in armes ycled,

    
        
    
    
    
    
  And heathnish shield, wherein with letters red   Was writt Sans ioy, they new arriued find:   Enflam'd with fury and fiers hardyhed [hardihood, over-boldness],   He seemd in hart to harbour thoughts unkind,   And nourish bloody vengeaunce in his bitter mind.   (1.4.38.4-9) 

In the same way that Sans-Loy embodies a psychological aspect of Satyrane, so Sans-Joy bursts out, as it were, from Redcrosse's head, the personification of his repressed tendencies toward fury and violent retaliation. Such tendencies are glimpsed in his reaction to the House of Pride but are fully on display in the early cantos of book 1: when Redcrosse first erroneously perceives Una to be unchaste, "halfe enraged at her shameless guise, / He thought haue slaine her in his fierce despight" (1.1.50.2-3); when he is fooled again, he "would haue slaine them [the illusory Una and her lover] in his furious ire," but is physically restrained (1.2.5.8).

The joylessness that Redcrosse must struggle against, and that Sans-Joy embodies, seems fairly broad in its parameters. Manifesting itself after Redcrosse's rejection of Pride's pageant, it seems initially to connote an immoderate rejection of all earthly or fleshly joys. And yet, paradoxically, Sans-Joy later feasts and flirts among Lucifera, Duessa, Gluttony, Sloth, and a company that may include Redcrosse, too, "in ioy and iollity" (1.4.43.5). Indulging in the pleasures of "bowre and hall"--the same pleasures we find later in The Faerie Queene in the "Castle Joyeous" of book 3, canto 1--Sans-Joy comes to embody the absence of spiritual rather than sensual joy (1.4.43.6). In sum, Sans-Joy seems designed to represent both the loss of worldly joy in passionate fury and the loss of spiritual joy in carnal pleasure. Both forms of joylessness besiege Redcrosse, whether we consider him as the warfaring Christian or the spirit of the true church.

Joy is something that Redcrosse lacks up until the very end of book 1. To recall Hooker, "The Spirit of the Father kindles into the soule of a sinner, truly humbled and inlightned, love and joy." Redcrosse becomes receptive to joy's spark only at the end of his saga, in his betrothal to Una. For most of the first nine cantos, Redcrosse, when not exploding into fury or unwonted lust, is "too solemne sad" (1.1.2.8). There is, overall, a cast of angst to Spenser's imaginative world. Harold Skulsky uncovers "the theology of doubt" centered in Redcrosse's encounter with Despair (1.9) but spread throughout the book: doubt in appearances and the possibility of certain knowledge; doubt in fiduciary faith or assurance in one's own election. (38) Along with this anxious concern for the future, a "dull melancholy" lurks within the present moment, both in the House of Pride (1.5.3.5), where it might be expected, and in Una's house of blessedness (1.12.38), where it is not. Responding to such cues, Douglas Trevor finds a pervasive "sadness" in the book, but seeks to redeem it as a holy sadness, a tristitia Christi that contrasts the furor melancholicus or Galenic manic-depressiveness that he, following John R. Maier, sees embodied in Sans-Joy. "For Spenser," Trevor claims, "sadness--not joy--is the exact opposite of melancholy," particularly the furious melancholy of Sans-Joy. (39)