ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the poet's use of outsider figures and the landscapes typically associated with them, to show how these serve to underline the ideals of citizenship. Hell is a city which resembles a wilderness, and its citizens resemble the archetypal medieval wilderness-dwellers: not only the various minority groups normally excluded from civic life, but also barbarians, wild men or women, and monsters. It is significant that a negative view of animals as representative of evil forces is a specific characteristic of the culture of medieval civic society. Like Hell, Purgatory has a concentric structure, defined by a series of boundaries which the pilgrim, like the souls being cleansed, has to cross in order to make progress. The garden is the complete antithesis of the Dark Wood, the place of salvation which opposes the place of sin, and the pilgrim's state of mind on entering Eden is in complete contrast to his feelings on finding himself in the earlier wood.
