The Consequences of Pride in The Redcrosse Knight

The castle of pride is a place in "Book One" of The Faerie Queene, "The Redcrosse Knight," that was said to "Be built on very weak foundations but was painted over to look pleasant.” This implies that feeling too much pride can draw you into a situation more dangerous than it seems. It also implies that pride can give you less of a reward than you originally thought and can have a consequence if you don't think about it beforehand.

The Faerie Queene has a lot of irony and coincidences in it, but perhaps the easiest to see is the irony in what happens to the Prideful in the Queen's castle. Whether a pretty girl baited them into it, or they just felt like it, there were jousts and duels held in the castle grounds where one person would almost always die. It's pretty much a 50-50 with your life hanging in the balance, and if you win you get the Queen's approval and glory. However, this would make you want to fight another duel, and then another, until eventually you would run out of luck.

The knights waste their lives for glory and get the exact opposite. They get dumped into a giant pile of corpses outside the wall when they lose the duel and die, and all they get in the end is dishonor and death. The knights fight for glory but march straight into dishonor and shame. They would be far better off going off to battles of actual importance, but almost none of them turn away from the castle, instead marching to their doom. This one of the most tragic and ironic parts of the story.

What can we pull from this story other than irony and the knights not clearly thinking? We can also pull the deeper meaning from one of the rulers of the castle. The book, when describing the queen, says, "Likewise, the queen shone in the pride of her princely state, looking to heaven. Despising all humility, she was seated high, and underneath her scornful feet lay a dreadful dragon with a hideous tail. In her hand, she held a bright mirror, wherein she frequently gazed upon herself, taking great delight in her self-loved image. For she was wondrously fair, as any living creature. Yet, as the daughter of grisly Pluto and sad Proserpina, she was also the Queen of Hell, and so swollen with pride, that she fancied her peerless wrath surpassed that of her parents."

This was referencing pride at its highest peak: being vain, selfish, and wrathful. She was clearly the very image of pride, who ran the poorly engineered castle, which was made on sand. This could be an easter egg referring to the parable from The Bible, where the wise man built his house on the rock, and the foolish man built his house on the sand.

`When the storm came, the foolish man's house went splat.