Case in point: the Red Cross Knight who dominates Book One of The Faerie Queene, as pious a protagonist as might be imagined, a man whose life’s ambition is to enter orthodoxy’s dictionary—“see also holiness, probity, and St. George”—single-minded even by the norms of allegory. So how does this chain-mail messiah behave when the degenerate witch Duessa throws herself at him in the guise of the fair maiden Fidessa? We might expect Sir Red Cross to resist. But no. The enchantress has only to wiggle her wiles, and soon our randy chevalier has “poured out in looseness on the grassy ground,” which means exactly what you think it does. I was staring up at the starry winter sky, drained and sated and vaguely enjoying the sensation of being carried away from the Circus of Atonement on a stretcher borne by Major Powers and another Valkyrie, when it occurred to me that just as Spenser had exonerated his knight, so might Natalie eventually pardon my dalliance with Joan of Arc. Or if my wife failed to forgive me, then perhaps I would in time gain absolution from the readers of the self-serving memoir I was certain to write one day.
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