ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 demonstrates how the politics of Man’s fragility is inseparable from a racial ideology of slavery. By putting Book VI of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596) in conversation with Louis Le Roy’s commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, I establish that the poem represents the Salvage Man as a natural slave to the “civil” characters who enter into his forest. Rather than become civil himself, the Salvage Man is shown to be congenitally predisposed to serving others who are physiologically more vulnerable and in need of his labor. I argue that Spenser’s depictions of physically weak characters racialize the need to be served by others. Vulnerability is here a racial category used to naturalize the enslavement of bodies imagined to be stronger, harder, and less than Human in their resilience. The chapter ends by rereading the Salvage Nation episode in light of the Salvage Man’s representation of natural slavery, showing that these two encounters align Human vulnerability and racial whiteness. Taken together, these episodes suggest that to be Human is to be feeble, white, and in need of enslaved bodies.
