Dynamics of Desacralization: Disenchanted Literary Talents 9783737003865, 9783847103868, 9783847003861

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Passages – Transitions – Intersections

Volume 1

Edited by Paola Partenza and Andrea Mariani

Paola Partenza (ed.)

Dynamics of Desacralization Disenchanted Literary Talents

This is a peer-reviewed volume.

V& R unipress

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-8471-0386-8 ISBN 978-3-8470-0386-1 (E-Book) This book is published thanks to F.A.R.S. funds of the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, University “G. d’Annunzio”, CHIETI-PESCARA. Ó Copyright 2015 by V& R unipress GmbH, 37079 Goettingen, Germany All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany. Printing and binding: CPI Buch Bücher.de GmbH, Birkach

Contents

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Guyonne Leduc “The Stylistic Desacralization of Man in Britain in the [Sophia] Pamphlets (1739 – 1740)” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Christopher Stokes Desacralizing the Sign: Tooke, Stewart and Romantic Materialism . . . .

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Barbara M. Benedict Satire, Sentiment and Desacralization: The Relic and the Commodity in Jane Austen’s Novels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Paola Partenza Alfred Tennyson’s De-sacralization of the Afterlife . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Roger Ebbatson Seeking “the Beyond”: Desacralising/Resacralising Nature in Richard Jefferies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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John Fawell An Earthy Sacredness: Maupassant’s and Van Gogh’s Christianized Materialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Simona Beccone Displacement-Distortion Theory and the Desacralisation of Aesthetic Categories: the Case Study of Hardy’s “Neutral Tones” . . . . . . . . . . 123

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Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec Geoffrey Hill’s Serpents and Dragons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Esra Melikoglu “Morpho Eugenia”: The Individual Struggle for Self-Realisation and the Question of Morality in a Darwinian World Without God . . . . . . . . . 163 Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

Acknowledgements

In the process of collecting essays for this volume, which is the result of an international research which has involved distinguished scholars, I have accumulated numerous debts towards all those who have given me suggestions and support, and it is my pleasure to acknowledge them here. I am especially grateful to all the contributors to this volume who have accepted to participate in it, and have waited patiently for it, and supported me during the long process of publication; to Prof. Andrea Mariani who, thanks to his extensive experience and culture, has given me precious suggestions for the realization of this enterprise; and to the colleagues of the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, who have accepted to publish this volume. Paola Partenza

Introduction

The idea of desacralization has become almost commonplace, attributing to the word the rejection of what is sacred. One might think that it is strictly connected to theology and its system, or suppose that it implies the relationship human beings have with anything that can express a denial of the spiritual part of life. Martin Heidegger observes “Things are always open to becoming other than themselves, and always resistant to fixation, determination, definition, and therefore precisely because of the lack of a hardcore at their centre; vulnerable to appropriation, exploitation, desacralization”1. The concept of desacralization therefore, has numerous meanings, either from a philosophical or a literary viewpoint. To desacralize implies challenging the sacred or traditional features of an institution, of tradition; it consists in bringing back to reality and historical truth, what had a religious significance, or what was not supposed to be cast in doubt; so we could talk about desacralizing the myth, the mysteries of religion, desacralize the biblical narrative, desacralize the auctoritas in a work of art or literature, desacralize the concept of propriety, and so on. The usage of the verb itself, “desacralize”, often expresses an attitude of generalized irreverence and disrespect toward ideas, opinions, institutions or people, though it is not always and necessarily based on an explicitly and rational denial of its intrinsic sacral character. The theme is both ample and debated in literature and any form of art; if we try to give it a conceptual collocation we discover multifarious approaches and interpretations, but more importantly, a constant use of the topic by authors or artists. As we might argue, the concept of desacralization recalls the idea of antisacred, something that authors, artists, philosophers have continuously tried to focus on in their works, with the purpose of changing a precise order, and the intention of creating something new, eversive but substantially open to the fu1 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2001, p. 11.

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ture, a future that must be questioned and investigated through their own works which appear distant from any form of conventionality. The writers, artists and poets analysed in this collection of essays, have become emblematic of a changed sensibility, of a reflection on nature, language and thought, documenting a sense of uneasiness and disillusionment for the world around them. The idea of desacralization is the starting point to reconsider life and the role of man within a universe that, though fictitious, becomes expressive of political, social or religious macro-structures, which mirror the pain, uncertainty, deception and loss of faith which find their expressions in the critical evaluation of the world we live in. The disenchantment expressed by the authors is the impulse to re-position human beings’ viewpoint in a perspective that might be new and revolutionary. It is a means through which the severe criticism the authors adopt serves to reverse all forms of reification or subordination which human beings are subjected to, creating a literary universe in which a sort of ideological antiphrasis becomes the real way to understand and decipher the world in which fictitious or non-fictitious characters live in. Again, in Martin Heidegger’s words, I would ask: “What does the work, as work, set up? Towering up within itself, the work opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force”2. The scholars’ investigation of Dynamics of Desacralization has made this collection of essays rich and varied, revealing new worlds the different authors have created. What they do is to narrate various types of desacralization interrogating the nature of novels, poems or works of art; certain aspects of being are revealed through various expressions, engaging the multiple levels and the meaning of desacralization providing an articulation and interpretation of it. Guyonne Leduc focuses her attention “on the long eighteenth century (1688 – 1815) defined as the golden age of patriarchy”, in which “man’s authority is reasserted and male domination is assumed in the family as well as in the state; thus man is thought of as a kind of sanctuary (“sacer”), an entity not to be questioned”. Leduc shows how, “at the time of the revival of the “querelle des femmes” in mid-century Britain, a pamphlet by [Sophia], entitled Woman Not Inferior to Man (1739), was to become the epitomy of prefeminist ideas of the time”. Leduc explores the inner being of the female author showing how she refuses the limits of language in order to strive for more equality between the sexes, or at the very least, less inequality, through the desacralization of men. Christopher Stokes explores two eighteenth-century attempts to complete and correct the work of John Locke by concentrating on a wholly materialist account of language. John Horne Tooke and John “Walking” Stewart “worked to undo a dualistic notion of language which bound the body of the letter to the immateriality of the idea.” These accounts were fused with radical Enlighten2 Ivi, p. 43.

Introduction

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ment ideas (that is, “anti-superstition, anti-metaphysics, anti-religion”), and as a result there is a desacralization of the sign. According to Stokes, Tooke and Stewart had very different approaches to analysing the language of Locke and yet they both show “the concrete, material movement of thought in the world and in history”. Barbara M. Benedict’s positions spring from reading Jane Austen’s desacralization as one of the signs through which the author “satirizes the confusion of materiality and morality”. Benedict explores the way that Jane Austen, unlike other authors of sentimental fiction, viewed the contemporary interest in material culture as an “ominous tendency to fetishize objects: to transform material things into vessels of transcendent meaning, with power over the subject”. Benedict highlights the way Jane Austen reveals how eighteenth-century society was morally deteriorating and becoming increasingly materialistic and lacking values. Paola Partenza shows how “the concept of Afterlife is desacralized in the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. Afterlife is seen as otherness which is conceived through traditional religious conceits of redemption and asylum, and which collides with Tennyson’s firm belief in natural process and genetic evolution. The motif becomes obsessive in his poetry showing an unrelieved tension between spirit and matter, imagination and existence. He is convinced that religion and its tradition had produced illusionistic perspective, prompting him to aspire to shape existence into the abiding form of poetry, trying to give optical truth to life on a scientific basis, and giving his suffering a sense of anguish and limitation to a secular mode of reality. Tennyson tackles the problems of the origin of life and the reasons for its stability and continuity. He tries to create a symbolic world as a counterpart of the misleading world of religion”. Roger Ebbatson investigates “the life and work of the Victorian nature-writer Richard Jefferies (1848 – 87)”; he analyses the writer’s “progression of approach and thought away from a primarily realist descriptive mode”. Man’s relationship to the natural world is presented in a detached way by Jefferies, yet the language he deploys is based on a “non-religious resacralisation of the natural world in a philosophical project characterised as a quest for ‘soul-life’ or ‘sun-life’.” Ebbatson shows Jefferies’ desire to move away from the restrictive ‘circle of ideas’ and his search for “the sacred in nature” and a “non-Christian ‘fullness of life’”. John Fawell shifts the topic discussion towards the relationship between art and literature, showing how “Vincent Van Gogh and Guy de Maupassant, despite their obvious differences, are quite similar in their attitude towards nature”. Van Gogh’s religious upbringing was rigid and yet both he and Guy de Maupassant “were devout materialists who responded with an almost pagan ardor to nature” and “both often drew from a Christian vocabulary to describe its ecstatic effect on them”. Fawell notes that “Maupassant and Van Gogh sublimate a lost

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Christianity into a physical passion for this world, a kind of Christianized, ecstatic religion of the earth”. Simona Beccone examines “two fundamental components in the phenomenology of aesthetic experience and categorization: the mutually opposite but complementary processes of ‘aestheticization’ (i. e. the turning of the non-aesthetic into the aesthetic, as a result of an individual/collective practice of cultural sacralisation) and of ‘de-aestheticization’ (i. e. the downgrading of the aesthetic into the unaesthetic, in this case as a result of a cultural desacralisation)”. Beccone’s work is based on the application of a theoretical framework (“Displacement-distortion theory”), which can be found “in a number of recent studies on visual perception and cognitive neuroscience”, and provides an incisive analysis of the complex “perceptual, affective and cognitive phenomena” which are intrinsically part of “our experience and subsequent categorization of the world in aesthetic/non-aesthetic terms”. Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec analyses Geoffrey Hill’s poetry concentrating primarily on the question: “Why does Hill’s poetry consistently engage with images of serpents and dragons, from For The Unfallen (1952) to Oraclau (2010)? In a long first section, some recent discourses about secularization in Western culture are evoked. This is provided as a backdrop to Hill’s poetry, where images of serpents and dragons must be imagined as being linked to Biblical usage and dictionary definitions as well as other literary sources. The occurrences of serpents and dragons within Hill’s work are then examined individually, it emerges that the imagery shifts to allow for positive associations for the Dragon, which is a positive figure in Celtic myth and a symbol of Wales”. Finally, Esra Melikoglu examines the issue showing how “Charles Darwin’s evolution theory dealt “a mortal blow” to teleology. In A. S. Byatt’s neo-Victorian novelette “Morpho Eugenia” (1992), Darwin comes back to life in the protagonist, the entomologist William Adamson (Todd 32), a butcher’s son. His story allows Byatt to reconsider the relevance of atheistic Darwinism to the emancipation of the modern individual from his/her bondage to the old regime, claiming to dictate God’s will to the masses, and the right to self-determination and self-realisation. Byatt explores the question of morality in a world without God. If God does not exist, and if religion’s main function is to sanction oppressive power ; if the atheistic Darwinian man, in his struggle to survive and multiply in a world of natural selection, appears to be another predatory force”, then, the question of the possibility of “an altruistic ideal of morality” exists. P. P.

Guyonne Leduc

“The Stylistic Desacralization of Man in Britain in the [Sophia] Pamphlets (1739 – 1740)”1

In Britain the long eighteenth century (1688 – 1815) was the golden age of patriarchy as defined in Fletcher’s words, “the institutionalised male dominance over women and children in the family and the subordination of women in society in general.” 2 He traces its historical origins to “the institutions of English patriarchy, inherited from Hebrew and early Christian societies, [that] rested upon twin pillars: the subordination required of women as a punishment for Eve’s sin […], and an understanding of men’s and women’s bodies […] in terms of relative strength and weakness. Patriarchy was thus founded upon God’s direction and woman’s natural physical inferiority.”3 This double aspect is not even denied by two early prefeminists,4 Mary Astell (1666 – 1731) and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797), who challenged patriarchal society with the ambition to give enlightened women a better and more equal place.5 In addition, the period was characterized, as the historian Bridget Hill puts it, by “the victory of individualism” which was “a victory for property, and wives by their very legal definition were propertyless,” which meant, she notes, “the reinforcement not 1 This contribution is based on Guyonne Leduc, R¦¦critures anglaises au XVIIIe siÀcle de l’Êgalit¦ des deux sexes (1673) de FranÅois Poulain de la Barre: Du politique au pol¦mique (Paris: L’Harmattan, «Des id¦es et des femmes,» 2010) 383 – 420. Êditions L’Harmattan, 2010. 2 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England 1500 – 1800 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1995) XV. 3 Fletcher XVII. 4 See the definitions given by Joan K. Kinnaird, “Mary Astell and the Conservative Contribution to English Feminism,” Journal of British Studies 19 (1979): 74 and Hilda L. Smith, “Feminism and the Methodology of Women’s History,” Liberating Women’s History : Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. Berenice A. Carroll (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976) 370. See to Ian Maclean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature 1610 – 1652 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977) VIII and “Marie de Gournay et la pr¦histoire du discours f¦minin,” Femmes et pouvoirs sous l’ancien r¦gime, ed. Danielle Haase Dubosc and Êliane Viennot (Paris: Êditions Rivages, “Rivages/Histoire,” 1991) 120. 5 See Leduc, “The Representation of Women’s Status in Domestic and Political Patriarchy in Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft,” “Pr¦sentations, repr¦sentations, re-pr¦sentations,” dir. Antoine Capet, Revue FranÅaise de Civilisation Britannique (RFCB) 15.4 (2010): 11 – 28.

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the weakening of the authority of husband and father.”6 Ruth Perry draws the conclusion that women were “the property of their fathers, husbands or masters.”7 Man’s authority was reasserted and male domination was assumed in the family as well as in the state; thus man was thought of as a kind of sanctuary (“sacer”), an entity not to be questioned. However, at the time of the revival of the “querelle des femmes” in midcentury Britain, in response to lord Chesterfield’s article in Common Sense ; or, The Englishman’s Journal (14/01/1738, n850), the anonymous [Sophia] published, on 22 November 1739, a pamphlet entitled Woman Not Inferior to Man (1739), which was to become the epitomy of prefeminist ideas of the time, where she dismisses the idea of innate female inferiority and its corollary, male superiority (as Astell had done before and Wollstonecraft would do after her) and harshly criticizes men’s so-called usurped power over women. An anonymous answer was written by a male adversary in Man Superior to Woman on 20 December 1739, which, in turn, lead [Sophia] – the same author or another one hiding under the same name? – to write Woman’s Superior Excellence over Man in 1740. In Fielding’s periodical The Champion, the editor, Hercules Vinegar, refers to [Sophia] as “the Championess of the Sex” (n887).8 Her two pamphlets were reprinted separately in 1743 by another publisher, Jacob Robinson, as was also the case of her adversary’s essay, reprinted in 1744 by Robinson, with a slightly different subtitle.9 The controversy was still active in 1751, when all three pamphlets were republished by Jacob Robinson, under a common title, Beauty’s Triumph; or, The Superiority of the Fair Sex Invincibly Proved. This edition respected the material division into three treatises, but used continuous page numbers.10 References will be made to the 1739 edition of [Sophia]’s first 6 Bridget Hill, ed., The First English Feminist: Reflections on Marriage and Other Writings (Aldershot: Gower Publishing Company, 1986) 21. 7 Ruth Perry, “Mary Astell and the Feminist Critique of Possessive Individualism,” EighteenthCentury Studies 23.4 (1990): 452. 8 This column is not to be found in the Wesleyan edition of Fielding’s works. See The Champion (15 November 1739 – 12 February 1741). [Bodleian Library, shelfmark: Hope fol. 106. BP. A. 712]. 9 The subtitle A Vindication of Man’s Natural Right of Sovereign Authority over the Woman. Containing a Plain Confutation of the Fallacious Arguments of [Sophia], in Her Late Treatise Intitled, Woman […] becomes, in 1744, The Natural Right of the Men to Sovereign Authority over the Women, Asserted and Defended, Being an Answer to That Celebrated Treatise Intitled, Woman […]. 10 What was reprinted in 1780 under the title Female Restoration, by a Moral and Physical Vindication of Female Talents […]. By a Lady was not Beauty’s Triumph, as Felicity Nussbaum thinks, but a new and anonymous translation of Poulain’s Êgalit¦ des deux sexes entitled Female Rights Vindicated (1758). See Felicity Nussbaum, “II. Rhyming Women Dead: Restoration Satires on Women,” The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660 – 1750 (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1984) 8.

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pamphlet republished in 1975, a currently available edition.11 The page numbers of her adversary’s pamphlet and of her second one will be those of the 1751 edition, entitled Beauty’s Triumph.12 The [Sophia] pamphlets will first be presented and questions asked as to the identity/ties of their author/s. Then her treatment of men and her attacks on them, first direct, then indirect will be considered before focusing on her treatment of women in order to attack men. * [Sophia]’s two pamphlets are defined as “Treatise[s].”13 The first one is also referred to as “my first essay” (S2 175), “my former Essay” (188) and the second as “my Enquiry” (S2 170). Her adversary’s answer, Man Superior to Woman, refers to her first pamphlet as “that ingenious Essay” (A69) and defines itself as “this little treatise” (A94). In the 1751 edition which makes a comparison possible, the respective length of the three pamphlets increases from 63 pages (1 – 63) to 100 (67 – 166) to finally 138 (169 – 306). The addressor, [Sophia], does not conceal her sex or her social rank (“a Person of Quality”) in the title of her first pamphlet, nor her young age in that of the second (“a young lady” [S2 177]). The addressees are men as well as women who are directly addressed to by [Sophia] since she knows her treatises will be of little importance and less consequence if they are not read by men. Her answer to her adversary is aimed at male readers as she wants to prove his partiality and error to them (S2 176). What is now known with certainty is that [Sophia] and her adversary were very widely influenced by the English translation of the Cartesian Poulain de la Barre’s Êgalit¦ des deux sexes (1673) translated as The Woman as Good as the Man; or, The Equallity of Both Sexes in 1677 by Archibald Lovell.14 Descartes demonstrates the separation of the body and the mind and, thus, the full autonomy of thought from the sexed body, an idea that Poulain de la Barre encapsulates in “L’Esprit n’a point de Sexe.”15 As Perry writes, he “was probably the first thinker to apply 11 [Sophia], Woman Not Inferior to Man; or, A Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Rights of the FAIR-SEX to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem, with the Men (London: Printed for John Hawkins, 1739) (London: Brentham P, 1975) 62 pp. Hereafter in the text Sx will refer to page numbers in this edition. 12 [Anon.], Beauty’s Triumph; or, The Superiority of the Fair Sex Invincibly Proved (London: Printed for Jacob Robinson, 1751) 306 pp. Hereafter S2 x will refer to [Sophia]’s answer, Woman’s Superior Excellence over Man, in this edition and Ax to her antagonist’s essay, Man Superior to Woman, in this edition too. 13 “this little Treatise” (S10, S2 273, 205), “my former treatise” (S2 177, 275, 281, 283, 288). 14 FranÅois Poulain de la Barre, The Woman as Good as the Man ; or, The Equallity of Both Sexes. Written Originally in French, and Translated into English by A. L. (London, 1677) XVIII + 185 pp. Hereafter Px will refer to the page number in this edition. 15 Poulain de la Barre, De l’¦galit¦ des deux sexes [1673], De l’¦ducation des dames [1674], De l’excellence des hommes [1675], ed. Marie-Fr¦d¦rique Pellegrin (Paris: Vrin, 2010) 99.

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Cartesian skepticism to the question of women.” 16 In [Sophia]’s first pamphlet (63 pages) one finds borrowings from fifty-six Poulinian paragraphs; in the second one (138 pages), [Sophia] borrows from fifty-four paragraphs.17 [Sophia] takes up nearly the whole of Poulain’s Woman as Good as the Man in order to write her two pamphlets but the result is rather different from the source text or “hypotext” (to use Genette’s terminology) 18 as she borrows from Poulain some innovative ideas but not all of them, in particular the inequality between ranks, between human beings and not only between men and women. As to [Sophia]’s identity, it remains unknown. Some thought, yet without any proof, that it was a penname used by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 – 1762) because she reacted to lord Chesterfield’s article in Common Sense; or, The Englishman’s Journal (14/01/1738, n. 50) and, ten days later, defended women whom she described as rational beings in her own periodical, The Nonsense of Common Sense.19 That hypothesis was mentioned by C. A. Moore in 1916: “Whether [Sophia] was really Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is a nice question; I think this supposition is probably correct, and that there is good evidence for it which has not been noted.”20 In the 1975 edition of Woman Not Inferior to Man, the verso of the title page reads “the authorship has been attributed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu”. And yet ten years later, in 1985, Moira Ferguson wrote that [Sophia]’s identity was still unknown,21 referring, without any reference, to Robert Halsband, the aristocrat’s biographer, who does not agree with the hypothesis.22 In 1987, Camille Garnier again mentioned a potential mask worn by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.23 In 1964, Myra Reynolds had echoed another 16 Voir Perry, “Chapter Three. The Self-Respect of a Reasoning Creature,” The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986) 71. 17 See Leduc, R¦¦critures anglaises 111 and 219. 18 See G¦rard Genette, Palimpsestes. La Litt¦rature au second degr¦ (Paris: Êditions du Seuil, “Po¦tique,” 1982) 11. 19 The Nonsense of Common Sense, 1737 – 1738, ed. Robert Halsband, 1947 (New York: Northwestern U, 1970) 6 (24/01/1738): 24 – 28. That periodical is reproduced in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy, ed. Halsband et Isobel Grundy (1977; Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) 130 – 34. 20 C. A Moore, “The First of the Militants in English Literature,” The Nation 102.2642 (1916): 196. 21 Moira Ferguson, ed., “Sophia fl. 1739 – 1741,” First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578 – 1799 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985) 266. 22 See Ferguson, ed., 46 (n. 74): “[Sophia]’s identity has never been uncovered. Although Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s name is often suggested, Lady Mary’s biographer Robert Halsband concludes that it is impossible to tender proof either way.” See Halsband, The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956) and Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999) 244 – 45. 23 See Camille Garnier, “‘La Femme n’est pas inf¦rieure — l’Homme’ (1750): Œuvre de Madeleine Darsant de Puisieux ou simple traduction franÅaise?”, Revue d’Histoire Litt¦raire de la France 7.4 (1987): 711 – 13.

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hypothesis suggesting that Lady [Sophia] Fermor (1721 – 1745), the daughter of Thomas, the Earl of Pomfret, and the second wife of Lord [John] Carteret, could be [Sophia].24 Even if it is still impossible to settle the question of the identity or even the sex of the two writers, several questions can be asked: was the adversary a man? Was the second [Sophia], writing Woman’s Superior Excellence over Man, the same person as the first [Sophia]? Was [Sophia] a woman? Doris Mary Stenton suggests that [Sophia] was a man: “unlikely that a woman who felt deeply about the exclusion of women from all professions would have written like the so-called Sophia.”25 Another possibility is that the three writers were one and the same person since at the time it was a rhetorical game to write on both sides of a question. Two critics think that [Sophia]’s adversary and [Sophia] are one and the same person. On the one hand, Moore writes: “the Gentleman, too, was familiar with Poullain […] Why, then, did the Gentleman not expose Sophia’s plagiarism? I think there can be no doubt that the two are really one […].”26 She adds: There is in this book, however, much more material than is to be found in Poullain […] the satires on particular types of women are characteristic of a large body of literature fashionable at the time […]; the historical material added to that found in Poullain was the stock in trade of the anti-feminists. In other words, the Gentleman’s argument required no great labor beyond that of compilation […] If Sophia produced the whole series, it is easy to explain why her opponent’s logic is weak to the point of absurdity and plays so beautifully into the hands of her clever rejoinder.27

The speed with which the pamphlets were written and the variety of the borrowings from Poulain, without repetition, could thus be accounted for : “Sophia must have enjoyed the situation keenly ; she conducted an elaborate campaign and won a great battle for her sex with surprisingly little creative effort. When we consider the freedom with which she used her ‘sources,’ we need not be surprised by the voluminous information exhibited or the marvellous rapidity with which the debate proceeded.”28 Although Moira Ferguson quoted Moore’s hypothesis, she did not develop it: “Once again, the author was probably [Sophia], who employed traditional misogynous arguments including Theophrastianbased, antifeminist character sketches.”29 It remains impossible to prove either 24 See Myra Reynolds, “Chapter III. Education,” The Learned Lady in England 1650 – 1760 (1920; Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1964) 315 referring to Medley, “‘Sophia, a Lady of Quality,’” Notes and Queries 11 (1st May 1897): 348. 25 See Doris Mary Stenton, The English Woman in History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957) 292 – 94. 26 Moore 196. 27 Moore 196. 28 Moore 196. 29 Ferguson, ed., 266.

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that the author of the three pamphlets was one and the same person or to reveal [Sophia]’s and her adversary’s identities. * [Sophia]’s treatment of men is dictated by two elements: her attacks are either to be found in Poulain’s treatise and then developed in her pamphlets or they are to be read without the French philosopher’s influence in the original passages of her texts. When Poulain criticizes men – either openly or not –, and admits men’s wrongs towards women, [Sophia] enhances his attacks using two devices in both of her pamphlets, that is substitution and addition, that either lexically or syntactically reinforce the content. [Sophia] uses them separately or simultaneously. In the case of substitution, she adopts Poulain’s structures and introduces changes within them; in the case of addition, she inserts pejorative terms particularly in her first pamphlet. In the case of overt criticism, [Sophia] resorts to substitution. When, in the wake of Poulain, she refers to men as “judges and parts” in her first pamphlet, she replaces “interested” (P4) by “corrupted,” a more polemical adjective.30 Further down, when she refers to men’s useless study of natural philosophy, she substitutes a derogatory verb, “waste whole years” (S42),31 to Poulain’s more neutral verb “spend whole years” (P77). To reinforce the harshness of the attack of men’s partiality against women’s capacities, [Sophia] adds a past participle complemented by three nouns recurrent in Poulain’s text (“biassed by custom, prejudice, and interest” [S7]), or a verb and an adverb (“have presumed boldly” [S7]) that add reproach or even aggressiveness to the original sentence (“if Men were more just, and less interested in their Judgements” [P4]).32 In her second essay, concerning the obstacles to women’s education, [Sophia] inserts a relative clause making its meaning accurate (jealousy) – “without regarding the little reasons of the Men, whose jealousy is so industrious to divert them from the improvement they might thence gather” (S2 277) –; it was mentioned by Poulain (“the little R asons [sic] of those who would undertake to divert them there from” [P131]). Substitution and addition are also combined in several cases. First, speaking of the prejudice concerning the in30 “if Men were more just, and less interested in their Judgements […]” [my underlining] (P4), “if the Men were ever so little more just and less corrupted in their judgements than they really are […]” (S7). 31 “They spend whole years, and some all their lives, at Trifles […]” (P77), “We shou’d scarcely do like some Men who waste whole years (not to mention many of them who dwell for life) on mere Entia Rationis, fictitious trifles […]” (S42). 32 “Nevertheless, the Men, bias’d by custom, prejudice, and interest, have presumed boldly to pronounce sentence in their own favour […]” (S7 – 8).

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equality of the sexes, [Sophia] replaces the attributive adjective “odd,” in “these odd Opinions” (P3), with a more derogatory one, “absurd,” reinforced by “many,” in “the many absurd notions” (S6), using it yet again at the beginning of the next sentence (“Tho’ there is none more absurd […]”).33 When Poulain indirectly criticizes men’s responsibility for girls’ inappropriate education, as being at the origin of their timidity (P164 – 65), [Sophia] proves to be more concrete (S53), substituting “outrages” for “outrageousness,” and “enslaved” for “subject”; likewise she resorts to the superlative case “the most” to reinforce the attributive adjective “brutal” that she inserts.34 In the case of Poulain’s indirect criticism [Sophia] resorts to the same devices. She uses substitution to indication an inversion of viewpoints, for instance when a fact established by Poulain (few men can be unbiased and admit that the nature of the soul and the body is similar for both sexes) becomes a criticism in her pamphlet; thus “not many” (P5) yields to “extremely few” (S8), the adverb stressing her contempt for men.35 The same technique is used to emphasize the exclusion of women; when [Sophia] wants to know why men think that women are less capable of filling public offices than themselves, she distances herself from the French philosopher by assertings a negative aspect (“excluded from a share”), which allows her to include once again the notion of exclusion (S24, 34) while Poulain uses a positive aspect of this negatively (“not shared with us” [P11]), where he names sharing even if it is lacking.36 When they refer to the obstacles which prevent women from occupying public offices, both writers want to show that the inequality between the sexes is not innate but acquired: Poulain refers to the result of a “conjecture historique” (Êgalit¦ 21) (“Unavoidable necessity” [P26]), [Sophia] is far more polemical, substituting “mannish

33 “Amongst these odd Opinions, we may reckon the common Judgment which Men make of the difference of the two sexes, and of all that depends thereon […]” (P3), “I should never have done, was I to reckon up the many absurd notions the Men are led into by custom: Tho’ there is none more absurd, than that of the great difference they make between their own sex and ours” (S6). 34 “They see themselves exposed helplessly to suffer the outragiousness [sic] of a Sex; so subject to transports, which regards them with contempt […]” (P165), “They see themselves helplessly exposed to the outrages of a sex enslaved to the most brutal transports; and find themselves victims of contempt to wretches, whose prevalent strength is often exerted against them […]” (S53). 35 “But as there are not many Persons, in a condition of themselves, to put in Practice this Advice […]” (P5), “But as there are extremely few among them capable of such an abstracted way of thinking […]” (S8). 36 “it hath not been for want of Natural Capacity, or Merit, that they have not shared with us in that which raises our sex above theirs” (P11), “And that we have not been excluded from a share in the power and privileges which lift their sex above ours, for want of natural capacity, or merit […]” (S36).

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injustice” (S2 183)37 for his objective explanation. When she adds the expression “the extravagance of mannish learning” (S2 264), directly accusing men, [Sophia]’s prejudice against them becomes glaringly obvious whereas Poulain’s observation does not involve individuals in particular [d¦personnalise la responsabilit¦].38 Substitution and addition mutually reinforce one another in her first essay when she writes that men are responsible for spreading the misleading idea that knowledge is useless for women. She against distances herself from Poulain’s observation when she chooses to use an attributive adjective reinforced by an adverb and a noun in “a very great absurdity” (S27) that intensifies Poulain’s “a vulgar Errour” (P118).39 * When [Sophia] takes the initiative to criticize men, she does not seem to be influenced by Poulain except in one case (S14); the nature of her arguments and the violence of her vocabulary are rather different from those she resorts to in the passages where she gets her inspiration from Poulain. Her frontal attacks can take several forms. Thematically she repeatedly debunks men as being judges and parts (S8 [echoing P4], S20, S2 180), in particular as legislators (S2 219 – 20), but without applying her conclusion to her own case. When considering form, her devices can be divided into several categories: first, the rhetorical force of repetition, hammering home short incisive expressions; second, resorting to affects in order to move the reader, two strategies which differ from argumentation which aims to convince the reader. [Sophia]’s attacks can first be found in derogatory expressions about men in general, sometimes verging on invectives. A group of expressions containing the noun “sex,” pointing to the ontological category of the male sex, are preceded by the pejorative demonstrative adjective “that” [iste] reinforced by a pejorative attributive adjective: “that jealous, ungenerous sex” (S46) in the first pamphlet; this is echoed by “that ungenerous sex” in the second one (S2 203, 276). Such expressions as “that corrupted sex” (S2 174) and “that assuming sex” (S2 181) are to be found in the second and “that arrogant sex” in both (S32, S2 170).40 Thanks to such recurrent derogatory terms 37 “Unavoidable necessity that hinders them from playing their part” (P26), “Surely it is not nature, but mannish injustice, which debars us from playing our parts” (S2 183). 38 “It is a Fault in Vulgar Philosophy, to place amongst Sciences so great a Distinction; that, following that […]” (P91), “One grand vulgar error which has crept into Philosophy, through the extravagance of mannish learning, is the very great distinction made among the sciences” (S2 264). 39 “It is then a vulgar Errour to fancy that Learning is useless to Women, because says one, they have no share in Offices […]” (P118), “It is a very great absurdity, to argue that learning is useless to Women, because forsooth they have not a share in public offices” (S27). 40 “Then Cato is forced at last to own that the subjection we are kept under by that arrogant sex,

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(“creatures,” “things,” “objects”), that prove to be more numerous in the first than in the second pamphlet, men are deprived of their human dimension, being almost reified. “Creatures” does not always refer to a human creature; “human being” comes only as a third definition in the COED. The term is fraught with affects – “(often expr. admiration, contempt, patronage, etc.)”. It can be used alone, in the first pamphlet – “creatures of such profound wisdom as these Men are” (S20) – as well as in the second, applying to men in general as in “the fickleness of the male creatures” (S2 205). In 1739, “creatures” is preceded by “lordly” (“those lordly creatures, as they modestly stile themselves” [S1]), where irony (“modestly”) vituperates their self-designation, by “unnatural” (“the unnatural creatures” [S14]), in relation to the everyday behaviour of men in general,41 by “pretty” (“Pretty creatures indeed!” [S17]), when [Sophia] sarcastically mocks men, qualified as “strutting things” (17), who demand to be served – which implies women’s servitude –, and by “superficial” (“make these superficial creatures think it an unnatural sight” [S38]), so as to expose those who are responsible for girls’ lack of education. In her second pamphlet, “creatures” is linked to “ungenerous” (“those ungenerous creatures” [S2 184 – 85] and “those very ungenerous creatures the Men” [189]) or, thanks to antiphrasis, are said to be “such generous creatures” (287). “creatures” is qualified by two attributive adjectives (“what wretched poor creatures they must be, who are […]” [189]) when she shoots an arrow at some men unjust to women. In another example (“Nothing then but a creature as weak as my adversary, and some of his sex” [242]) [Sophia] focuses on an individual and on some of his contemporaries when she condemns the systematic method of her adversary. Lastly her target is once more collective in “those unjust creatures” (“the only way to force those unjust creatures to do us justice is to be just to ourselves […]” [276]): women ought to improve, which is the only way to lead men to be just to them. Reification can be found in nouns such as “thing” and “object.” However, “the strutting things” (S17) refers to a living being because of the present participle, for example the peacock. On the next page “the poor things” (18) oozes with contempt and condescension, not compassion, and is taken up again just afterwards in “these greater, more stubborn brats” (18). The noun “object” (whose second sense in the COED is “Person or thing of pitiable or ridiculous aspect”) contemptuously characterizes men in general as “the very miserable objects” (S2 287). [Sophia]’s lexical variety is enriched by four terms which hint at men: is the effect of violence and imposition” (S32), “the prodigious advantage which education gives that arrogant sex over us” (S2 170). 41 “daily experience reminding us, that all the return we can hope for from the unnatural creatures, for the almost infinite pains” (S14).

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“wretch” (S53), in the sense of a “despicable person” (COED), intensifies a passage influenced by Poulain.42 That negative connotation reappears just afterwards in “Brutes” (S4), in another passage.43 Two instances can be found in the second pamphlet. In a paragraph influenced by Poulain, [Sophia] adds the polemical expression “those headless heartless wretches” (S2 206) with symmetrically constructed attributive adjectives.44 In the second instance, which refers to the double curse which fell on Adam and Eve, “savages” appears in “the savages our husbands” (184). The noun “brat” infantilizes men (“these greater, more stubborn brats” [S18]), whom women should try to please in case some benefit might be obtained so as to improve their own living conditions (“it is a study for life to find out a means of pleasing these greater, more stubborn brats […]” [18]). Second [Sophia]’s attack can be found in derogatory expressions that characterize one category of men linked by various features. Infantilization concerns men having the same job such as scientists, at least those who rely on appearances to defend a geocentric system: “these over-grown boys over lesser children” (S4). Another profession is castigated in the second pamphlet, the medical profession where physicians are denied any intelligence (“sense”): “the shallow heads of Men” and “that unintelligible race” (S2 231) are expressions which mix the innate and the acquired. In the background one can trace a condemnation of the medical prejudice concerning women’s so-called weaker understanding (thinking of the physiological argument of the frailty of the fibres of women’s brains). Men can also share traits when, like Poulain, [Sophia] denounces the writing of History biased against women, expressed by a superlative adjective (“the most presumptuous and daring of the Men” [S2 305] and “the most obstinate of that sex” (S2 305 – 06). A fluctuating category of people share a so-called wisdom, due to unsettled minds, which gathers together individuals who are the targets of recurrent irony in both pamphlets. In the first one, mockery is aimed at the author of the abovementioned article published in Common Sense (“the wisdom of his sex” [S20]) and his fellowmen (“creatures of such profound wisdom as these Men are” [20]). 42 “A Sex; so subject to transports, which regards them with contempt, and that often treats its like with more rage, and cruelty, than Wolves do one another” (P165), “find themselves victims of contempt to wretches, whose prevalent strength is often exerted against them […]” (S53). 43 “It wou’d be rather fool-hardiness than courage to withstand brutes, who want the sense to be overcome by reason” (S54). 44 “They neglected nothing which they thought might serve to render themselves Charming, and Lovely” (P23), “they have neglected nothing which cou’d furnish them with new beauty and graces of body in the eyes of those headless heartless wretches, who want the sense to set a just value on their inward worth” (S2 206).

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The term appears later to criticize the divorce between words and deeds (“When their own profound wisdom is too weak to curb the more unruly among them […]” [22]), or concerning men’s arguments to justify the marginalization of women from public offices (“Wherefore they as wisely conclude, that it must absolutely have been a joint effect of divine providence, and their own sovereign sense, which debarr’d us of sciences, government, and public offices” [22]). Irony is finally used to make fun of Cato four times in “Cato, the wise Cato” (S31), echoed in “the wise Cato” (32) then in “his wisdom” (33), and in “this sage” (33). Two examples are to be found in the second pamphlet: one is ironical and refers to [Sophia]’s adversary and his fellowmen (“your rigid sticklers for truth and sense, called Wisemen” [S2 172]), the other opposes the traditional argument, given by the adversary (A87), whereby the wisdom of lawgivers and of the “wise men” of all times, stresses the fact that they were both judges and parts: “we are told, that it has been follow’d by the wisest Lawgivers, and approved of by the wise men of all ages” (S2 180 [already in S8]; in reality [Sophia] indirectly invites us to question the authority of those who play both two roles. Thirdly she attacks individuals by criticizing an intellectual faculty : in a passage influenced by Poulain (P68),45 “[A] corrupt imagination” (S14) makes critical reference to men’s contempt for women’s role in children’s education. Men’s intellect is yet another target but only in the first pamphlet. In a passage about men’s false motives behind their forbidding women to enter public offices, [Sophia] fights against men’s fallacious reasoning when she ironically mentions “their own sovereign sense” (S22) which is substituted for the no less ironical expression “Wisdom of Men” (P6) in Poulain.46 Then, she goes on vituperating against men’s piece of reasoning that, on the one hand, continues a vicious circle concerning the uselessness of women’s knowledge and their lack of access to public offices (“what a wretched circle this poor way of reasoning among the Men draws them insensibly into” [S27]), and, on the other hand, relies on appearances (“the Men, from their usual talent of arguing from seemings” [35]) and, finally, is based on the force of custom rather than of reason (“so weak are their intellectuals” [36]).47 Fourthly, [Sophia]’s attacks are directed against moral features. Envy is ironically and vehemently mentioned in the first pam45 “There is nothing (then) but fancy, which renders them less Valuable .[…]” (P68), “Surely then nothing but a corrupt imagination can make Men look upon an office of such high importance to them as mean and contemptible, or as less valuable than it really is” (S14). 46 “They as wisely conclude […] their own sovereign sense, which debarr’d us of sciences, government, and public offices” (S22). 47 The beginning of the paragraph reads “Nevertheless, so weak are their intellectuals, and so untuned are their organs to the voice of reason, that custom makes more absolute slaves of their sense than they can make of us. They are so accustom’d to see things as they now are, that they cannot represent to themselves how they can be otherwise” (S36).

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phlet in “so little envious, and so very impartial” (S37), then appears with contempt in “their mean envy” (39). When the second pamphlet denounces men’s obstructing women’s instruction, envy (not mentioned in Poulain’s parallel passage [P160 – 61]) is associated with the already mentioned jealousy : “Such of our sex as distinguish themselves by useful and instructive books […] are frequently forced to hide them from the eyes of the Men, whose envy is ever ready to sneer them out of the true knowledge of themselves and the world” (S2 253). Envy and jealousy are denounced simultaneously in the second pamphlet when it refers to women’s virtues as seen in everyday life (temperance, courage, patience…): “strike envy itself dumb, and force jealousy to do them justice” (S2 287) which is added to Poulain’s text (P54). Jealousy, without envy, is criticized in both pamphlets. Just as envy, it is said to be “mean” when it is first mentioned (“a mean dastardly jealousy” [S24]) and linked to the denial of the advantages to be gained from instruction; it becomes a sexual secondary characteristic in “that jealous, ungenerous sex” (46) and in “their innate jealousy” (48), when confronted with women’s “talents” in the following three examples. As early as the second page, the second pamphlet accuses men’s jealousy (“their grovelling jealousy” [S2 170]) with being the responsible for the above-mentioned denial – which is repeated towards the end in “Men, whose jealousy is so industrious to divert them from the improvement they might thence gather” (277). [Sophia] enumerates literary examples of jealous men, whose victims were women (“Ariosto’s Bradamante, Gonsalo’s Auristilla, and Shakespeare’s Othello” [S2 304]). Avarice, mentioned in the second pamphlet only, is criticized twice as a masculine incentive: in the first case, [Sophia] (S2 182) transforms and limits the term “interest” found in Poulain (P25); in the second case, polemic and prudence (“most of them”) are linked in “that avarice, arrogance, and ambition, which are the great inspirers of the best actions of most of them” (S2 276), which is without equivalent in Poulain. Men’s lack of generosity is recurrently denounced in both pamphlets (also rampant in the adjective “mean” often to be found). On the one hand, it features men in general as in “that jealous, ungenerous sex” (S46) echoed in the second pamphlet by “that ungenerous sex” (S2 276); such a weakness is encouraged by women who, undervaluing themselves, attract men’s contempt for example when [Sophia] rebels against men’s refusal (“that ungenerous sex” [203])48 to allow a young mother to recover by trusting her baby to a wet nurse. On the other hand, such a lack of generosity is seen to characterize men’s particular behaviour towards women: “how ungenerous in denying us the equality of esteem, which is our due […]” (S10); once more it is 48 For the use of this attributive adjective to refer to men in general, see S2 183, S2 184 – 85, S2 189.

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echoed in the second pamphlet: “since the Men are so ungenerous as to disallow us this modest pretension [“an equal right to dignity, power, and esteem”]” (S2 183). Two cases concern the adversary alone (“would ungeneroulsy insinuate” [171] and “my adversary, ungenerous as he is” [207]). In parallel and in contrast, the adjective “generous” is frequently applied to women from the very beginning of the first pamphlet.49 The charge of corruption (“the corruption of that sex” [S41]) is applied to the whole sex in a context that directly associates men with war and injustice and that, conversely, brings into relief women’s aptitude for law and jobs in that field. Lastly [Sophia] criticizes men’s behaviours towards women on the basis of moral failings. If the first pamphlet evokes a whole gamut of proofs from “the little meannesses, not to mention the grosser barbarities, which they daily practise towards that part of the creation, whose happiness is so inseparably link’d with their own” [S10]), the second one provides concrete examples: cunning as a way of preventing girls’ instruction (“the little mean artifices which most of them practise to deprive us of the same benefit” [S2 170] and “the crafty practices of the Men they have been ruled by” [254]), the inconstance of men who are impressed by women’s external appearances (“the fickleness of the male creatures” [205]),50 whereas women, rather than men, are generally reproached for these two weaknesses. One of the most widespread masculine attitudes (at the origin of others) is encapsulated in the term “usurpation” which can be either a “usurpation of authority” (S2, S2 180, 184) or a “usurpation of superiority” (S2 181, 302), the former leading to the latter. It is often associated with the attributive adjective “unjust” (S9, 36 – 37) or “lawless” (S10, S2 302). Like Poulain, [Sophia] focuses on one particular prejudice: “[the belief] they have a natural right of superiority over us [women] […]” (S2), which reasonable grounds men are unable to demonstrate. From the very beginning of her first pamphlet, she exposes the abuses of a usurped masculine authority (“the tyrannical usurpation of authority they exert over us Women […]” [2]) – a recurring accusation in her pamphlets. This charge echoes that expressed, on the one hand, when she introduces reason as the judge in a tribunal she sets up (“an unjust usurpation on their side” [9]), and, on the other hand, when she de49 Women show generosity during men’s childhood (“the Women, in the generous disinterested employ of nursing the Men in their infancy?” [S12], “our more generous souls are biass’d only by the good we do to the children we breed and nurse” [S14]); once men are adult, they do not return it to women (“Such the generous offices we do them: such the ungenerous use they make of them” [S14]). 50 “For observing the fickleness of the male creatures they had to deal with, and finding that external ornaments, added to their native charms, had render’d their / condition more supportable” (S2 205).

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nounces three particular cases of usurpation, the last two of which result in preventing women from entering public office: “which unnatural violence, and lawless usurpation, put into their Hands” (10), “the usurpation by which they first took the trouble of public employments off our hands” (28), and “the disadvantages imposed upon them by the unjust usurpation and tyranny of the Men, they will be found, to the full, as capable as the Men, of filling these offices” (36 – 37). In the second pamphlet, [Sophia] explains a fundamental stage to understand the following occurrences of the word: when man-made law (elaborated by them as judges and parts [S2 181]) cannot demonstrate the foundation of women’s submission, then her adversary (she does not generalize to all men)51 resorts to divine law (184), in particular when he recalls Eve’s punishment as encompassing all women, an argument used by gynophobe writers to account for women’s inferiority : “Our adversary seems to triumph mightily in the scriptural texts he has produced to authorize his / tyrannic usurpation of authority over us” (183 – 84). But [Sophia] deconstructs such an argument that is for her a proof of weakness: “Unable to justify their subjecting us from any laws of nature, he has recourse to divine laws […]” (184). Besides, she objects, Eve’s punishment cannot be extended to all women or justify their submission to men’s domination (“the unjust usurpation of Man” [222]). The sole justification for such a usurpation is the force of custom, exposed by [Sophia]: “And is it not as sorry an excuse which my adversary brings for the injustice of his sex, in usurping an authority over Women, which they can assign no reason for ; to say, that it is venerable from the single consideration of its antiquity?” (S2 180). In the next stage, custom transforms usurpation into tyranny : “in the face of usurpation, though hardened by custom into tyranny” (S2 174 – 75).52 Yet one term is not substituted to the other : they coexist either as an attributive adjective and a noun, as early as the beginning of her first pamphlet: “the tyrannical usurpation of authority they exert over us Women […]” (S2) and, in the second, in relation with her adversary (“his / tyrannic usurpation of authority over us” [S2 183 – 84]), or as two coordinated nouns in “the disadvantages imposed upon them [Women] by the unjust usurpation and tyranny of the Men, they will be found, to the full, as capable as the Men, of filling these offices” (S36 – 37). When [Sophia] takes the initiative in criticizing men, her attack can be indirect. Her first strategy is to disparage men’s motivations. Like Poulain, she considers the reason that motivates them to act for the public good, common to “public” men 51 Likewise she dissociates her adversary from the other men so as to give them, just afterwards, the benefit of the doubt (“at least I would believe there are some among that corrupted sex capable of soaring above prejudice or passion, to discern truth and honesty from fiction and fraud, and to give justice and reason the right hand of usurpation and fallacy” [S2 174]). 52 See, just before, “the mean tyranny of most Men” (S2 171).

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and mothers. The neutral observation (“Glory, and particular interest” [P68]) is replaced by “ambition” (S14),53 also mentioned in her second pamphlet: “that avarice, arrogance, and ambition, which are the great inspirers of the best actions of most of them” (S2 276). Moreover she further blackens the treatment reserved for the women she victimizes. In her first pamphlet [Sophia] condemns that treatment as “ungrateful treatment of ourselves, and the basest contempt of our sex in general” (S14), a comment she adds to Poulain’s observation (P68).54 Then, in a passage not influenced by Poulain, her tone is more incisive so as to vituperate against men who demand women’s subordination. She dramatizes a power struggle by using traditional expressions about women, such as “weaker vessels” (S17), “their drudges” (17), “prey” (18) and “dupes” (18). They are compared to “hapless savages” [S18]); after marriage, when the spouse / husband’s true nature is revealed (“the spaniel metamorphosed into a tiger” [S18]), the wife becomes “a bond-slave to a merciless tyrant” (18). In her second pamphlet, the portrayal of victimization, in different guises, is more radical. One stems from naming when [Sophia] heaps criticism on men about women (among whom she includes herself) in such expressions as “my own injured sex” (S2 171), “my injured sex” (183) and “my fair partners in oppression” (276); she gives women (at least those coming from her social background) a kind of collective awareness. Concerning the matter, she exposes elements that complement the former point. Unequal treatment begins in the cradle (P27 – 28, S2 253) and leads girls to interiorize their so-called inferiority. Victimization can also be deciphered in the attributive adjective “poor” (“the poor women are left to loiter away life in indolence and ignorance” [S2 253]), not found in Poulain (“the Women are let languish in Idleness, Softness, and Ignorance” [P27 – 28]): also in men’s will to belittle women (“as the Men think […]” in “or at best are employ’d in such offices only as the Men think the lowest and most servile” [S2 253]), whereas Poulain just establishes facts (“Or, otherwise grovel in low, and base imployments” [P28]). In fact, such a victimization is an element in a strategy of indirection that does not praise women. *

53 “Masters, Magistrates, and Princes, do not often-times / bestir themselves, but for Glory, and particular Interest […]” (P67 – 68), “If their princes and statesmen sometimes exert themselves in the service of the public, ambition is their motive, and power, riches, or splendor, the point in view” (S14). 54 “The Pains, the Cares, the Troubles, and Assiduities, to which they expose themselves, can in no wise be matched in any other state (of Civil Society) whatsoever” (P68).

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[Sophia] recalls her determination to avoid being prejudiced in favour of women and wants (without always succeeding in doing so) to avoid generalizations in their favour, that could discredit her work. Such declarations are to be found not in her first pamphlet but at the beginning of the second one (S2 170, 274, 275, 277). Her words document the fact that she does not insist on women’s qualities but, at the same time, her bias is displayed in the very title of her essay, Woman’s Superior Excellence over Man. When Poulain praises women, so does [Sophia] in various ways. Either she just emphasizes his compliment by adding the adverb “much” in a process of intensification when she compares men and women: about the kind of desirable education that would decrease women’s vanity, she changes “less subject” (P117 – 18) into “much less subject” (S27),55 then she insists on women’s capacities by intensifying the comparative form “more fit” (P53) into “how much fitter” (S21).56 Or she develops his compliment and introduces men in order to discredit them as she refers to an element (a structure or a topic) found in the source-text twice in her first pamphlet and once in her second. In one case, about men’s responsibility for the obstacles in the way of women’s participation in public offices, the comparison between men and women is developed: “And should have found it no more strange to have seen a Lady on a Throne, than a Woman in a Shop” (P7) becomes “to see a lady at a bar, or on a bench, wou’d have been no more strange than it is now, to see a grave judge whimpering at his maid’s knees; or, a lord embroidering his wife’s petticoats” (S37). In addition, she introduces not one but two masculine elements (“judge” and “lord”) (the rhetorical effect rests on symmetry) so as to discredit them and the physical position of the one, because of the reputedly female activity (embroidery) of the other : both men are ridiculous. In the other case she takes up a topic (invention) favourable to women (P42), to then negatively exploit it (the invention of jargons rather than of remedies) to the disadvantage of men (she pays particular attention to the balance between merits and wrongs, becoming ironical towards men), and therefore to the directly proportional advantage of women (S41 – 42).57 In the last case Poulain and [Sophia] see His55 “Women would be less subject thereunto, if their Sex / were admitted into equal share with ours, of the advantages which occasion it” (P117 – 18), “If Women were admitted to an equal share of the sciences, and the advantages leading to, and flowing from, them; they wou’d be much less subject to the vanity, they are apt to occasion” (S27). 56 “A little Experience is sufficient to inform us, That the Women here are more fit and useful than we […]” (P53), “A little experienced is sufficient to demonstrate how much fitter we are to be guardians over them, that they are to be such over us”(S21). 57 “Women seem born to practise Physick, and to restore the sick to health; for the neatness and complying humour easeth one half of the distemper ; and they are not only proper to apply remedyes, but likewise to invent […]” (P42), “Indeed in our turns we must yield to them in the art of inventing hard names, and puzzling a cure with the number, as well as adding to a patient’s grievance with the costliness, of remedies” (S41 – 42).

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tory as a reservoir of examples favourable to women; he uses it to re-establish the balance between man and women (“to prove that it is in all respects as noble as our own” [P72]); whereas she chooses examples that reinforce her aim. She praises other women so highly that she does them a disservice (excess is meaningless); she cannot prevent herself from mentioning men to condemn some of them (“the most presumptuous and daring of the Men” [S2 305]).58 Or lastly she attenuates the praise coming from Poulain’s text before attacking men. When he does not hesitate to counter prejudice as regards the so-called timorous female or the audacity of some (“There are a great many Women as bold as men” [P163]), [Sophia] does not hesitate to tone down her words (she even goes as far as disparaging her fellow women; does she do so to appear all the more objective) once more in order to inferiorize men (“Are there not Men as void of courage as the most heartless of our sex?” [S52]).59 The substitution of the adjective “bold” by its near opposite (“void of courage”) leads to reversing the comparison from the positive (for women) to the negative (for men). [Sophia] acknowledges the existence of women’s weaknesses yet exposes unjust generalizations about women. To denounce generalizations allows her to better attack men: “from the overstrain’d characters of a few particular bad and foolish Women, as much shun’d and despised by us as by himself, to draw in his conclusion a general odium upon our whole sex; I should think it both wicked and absurd in me to conclude that all the Men are knaves, or fools or both, because much the major part of them are so” (S2 293). She shows her bias: not only is “a few” opposed to “much the major part”, but an inverted echo of that expression also appears five lines further down in “the major part of our sex are virtuous and discreet” (293). The end of her pamphlet is polemical; [Sophia] profits from the exposure of excessive generalisations to better underline men’s cruelty and injustice (“the Men […] satisfied with glutting their cruelty at the expense of the few bad Women who merit their indignation” [303]), which means that she lowers herself to the very faults she denounces. [Sophia] adheres to Poulain’s approach, not to his metaphysical ideas as when, not in De l’¦galit¦, but in De l’excellence des hommes, he opposes general conclusions drawn from small numbers: “le vulgaire […] se laissant toujours aller — l’exag¦ration & — 58 “History, which the prejudiced abuse against that Sex to abase it, may serve to those who look thereon with the eyes of equity, to prove that it is in all respects as noble as our own” (P72), “I could, from the single evidence of History, which is so much perverted to debase us, throw such a dazzling glory round my whole sex, as would suffice to render their honour inaccessible by the most presumptuous and daring of the Men” (S2 305). 59 “That is not universal. There are a great many Women as bold as men, and it is known that the most fearfull make often of necessity a virtue […]” (P163), “But is this universally true? Are there not Men as void of courage as the most heartless of our sex? And yet it is known that the most timerous Women often make a virtue of necessity […]” (S52).

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l’hyperbole, & faisant des propositions generales sur cinq ou six exemples particuliers.”60 Poulain, who does not insert catalogues of illustrious women, also rejects particular cases because such enumerations only take into account, as Bernard Magn¦ puts it, “des faits particuliers, en petit nombre.”61 [Sophia]’s spontanenous acknowledgement of women’s defects does not decrease her zeal in their favour. In the passages where she sets herself free from Poulain’s influence, she is less moderate, more polemical as is proved here by her invectives against men. * [Sophia]’s prefeminism proves to be more fully asserted than Poulain’s in different ways. First she inverts clich¦s that are wide spread in the genre of pamphlets. [Sophia] takes the masculine prejudice concerning women’s weaknesses (imbecillitas), a stereotype found in misogynous and philogynous treatises. She targets even men who grant women some qualities (“wit and conduct”): “There are some however more condescending, and gracious enough to confess, that many Women have wit and conduct; but yet they are of opinion, that even such of us as are most remarkable for either or both, still betray something that speaks the imbecillity of our sex” (S19). This passage is influenced by Poulain who does not however resort to such pejorative terms: “It may be the more Ingenious will add, That there are many Women that have indeed Parts, and Conduct; but that even they who seem to have most, when they are nearly examined, discover still some-what that speaks their Sex: That they have neither Solidity, nor Constancy ; nor that depth of Judgement which they think to find in themselves” (P6). In Chapter I, [Sophia] audaciously applies the clich¦s to men: “Nay, such is the imbecillity of that sex, as well as ours, that even professions are a matter of prejudice” [S5]). However she also includes women as well in the usual clich¦ (“as well as ours”), which strategically may enable her to better impose her critique. The second stereotype is that of the chronological and teleological argument leading to the idea of tutelage. First [Sophia] reverses the chronological argument as in the philogynous tradition: Eve was created second or last as God’s masterpiece. Following Poulain she echoes the teleological argument saying that women are made for men (P6, S11).62 Unlike him, she stresses the religious

60 Poulain, De l’excellence des hommes contre l’¦galit¦ des sexes (Paris, 1675) 83. 61 Bernard Magn¦, “Chapitre IV. Le F¦minisme de Poullain de la Barre,” “Le F¦minisme de Poullain de la Barre. Origine et signification,” PhD (U of Toulouse, 1964) 201. 62 “That they are fit for nothing, but to Nurse, and Breed little Children in their Low Age; and to mind the house” (P6), “that we are fit only to breed and nurse children in their tender years,

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tradition, that of the creation of man first, to then accentuate this feature by adding three verbs: “to obey, serve and please our masters,” that she will also use later.63 [Sophia] also plays on men’s arguments not found in Poulain and reverses them: “Men seem to conclude, that all other creatures were made for them, because they themselves were not created till all were in readiness for them” [S11]); she logically concludes: “it must equally prove, that the Men were made for our use rather than we for their’s” (S11) – an argument that she mentions again in the third paragraph in a preterition: “I foresee it may be urged, that we cannot be said to spend our lives in vain, while we are answering the end of our creation,” that is “as we were created for no other end that for the Men’s use, our only business is to be subject to, and please them” (S19). [Sophia] takes up this argument again in her second pamphlet: “what I observed in my former Essay, that if this argument has any weight, it must equally prove that the Man was made for the Woman’s use, and not she for his” (S2 188). She resorts again to the chronological argument so as to inverse the teleological biblical argument and quotes two passages from her former treatise (S11 echoed in S2 188).64 The teleological argument leads to the idea of women’s tutelage, introduced thanks to a quotation from the periodical Common Sense n8135 that refers to Roman law.65 Two clauses enable [Sophia] to reverse the traditional tutelage of women and to introduce that of men with the insertion of a term based on the noun “guardian”: “were we wisely to conclude, in their way, that therefore all the Men ought to be perpetually under guardianship? A little experience is sufficient to demonstrate how much fitter we are to be guardians over them, than they are to be such over us” (S21); she is more audacious than Poulain.66 She resumes the idea of tutelage and the metaphor in the next paragraph so as to show men their contradictions where their acts differ from their words: “When their own profound wisdom is too weak to curb the more unruly among them, they have no other recourse than to shelter them under our tutelage” (22). Is the obedience of one sex to the other a way of referring again to tutelage or is it a new argument? [Sophia] examines how men exercise their authority to then deduce a simple alternative to women’s future behaviour: either men’s orders come from their passions and not their reason and, as such, women will not obey

63 64 65 66

to mind household affairs, and to obey, serve, and please our masters, that is, themselves foorsooth” (S11). “The pleasant limits of obeying, serving, and pleasing our masters” (S15) et “And as we were created for no other end than for the Men’s use, our only business is to be subject to, and please them” (S19). Vide supra 237. Common Sense (1st September 1739) column 2, § 3. “A little Experience is sufficient to inform us, That the Women here are more fit and useful than we […]” (P53).

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them, or these orders are reasonable and then women will obey them. She does not envisage men’s obedience to women (S16). Yet, in her second pamphlet she reverses the custom of patriarchal order, resting on the Bible, where woman is considered as man’s servant, and [Sophia] refers to man’s obedience to woman, mentioning reason as a justification: “if she ought to obey him when what he speaks is reasonable, there is no solid reason can be assigned why he should not obey her, when what she says is so” (S2 220). Thus [Sophia] accounts for mutual obedience if reason prevails, which eliminates the argument of strength said to be “the old plea”: “unless my adversary pleases to recur to the old plea, the law of the stronger” (221). Second [Sophia]’s prefeminism is more assertive in so far as she refers more to women’s superiority over men than to an equality between the sexes most particularly in her second pamphlet in keeping with its title, Woman’s Superior Excellence over Man; an evolution is to be noted when one compares it with the title of her first essay, Woman not Inferior to Man. Poulain refers to women’s superiority when he reverses the clich¦ of the socalled frailty of women’s physical organs (more delicate fibres, etc.); he interprets it not as a weakness but as an advantage, proving women’s finer perceptions (P86), which [Sophia] echoes but her bias leads her to add a consequence using a comparative of superiority, as in “fitter to answer the ends they were made for” (S24).67 When Poulain hints at an equality between the sexes, [Sophia] transforms the case into women’s superiority as concerns their capacities. When the philosopher writes: “we may observe, that they [women] have giv’n as great markes of Wit, and Capacity, upon all occasions” [P71]), [Sophia] adds two comparative forms stressing women’s superiority : “They have on many occasions shewn a greater excellence of virtue and genius; and their wit as well as their judgment has ever shone with brighter lustre in parrallel [sic] circumstances” (S2 304). In the next sentence, her prejudice concerning women’s capacity to govern makes her substitute the superlative form “the greatest” (S2 304)68 for the attributive adjective “great” (P71). She resorts to a verb about women’s capacities for erudition, to replace the equality mentioned by Poulain, “as compleat as men” (P71 – 72): women’s superiority in “have

67 “And there is nothing peculiar in the disposition of these Organs [ears, eyes, tongue], but that the Women have them ordinarily more delicate, which is an advantage” (P86), “Nor can there be any difference pointed out between any of our organs and theirs, but that ours are more delicate, and consequently fitter to answer the ends they were made for, than theirs” (S24). 68 “That there have been some who have governed great States and Empires with Wisdom, and moderation […]” (P71), “Many have gloriously govern’d the greatest empires with a moderation, dignity, and wisdom” (S2 304).

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surpassed the Men” (S2 305).69 When he calls attention to the complementarity between the sexes as a “partnership” that men should not fear, [Sophia] prefers to refer to women’s superiority (P120, S2 271).70 [Sophia] asserts women’s superior moral virtue even if her prudence is to be detected in the expression “most of them”: “I am for shewing them that our submitting to act in a more confined sphere is only owing to the superiority of our virtue, and that want of that avarice, arrogance, and ambition which are the great inspirers of the best actions of most of them” (S2 276). Ten pages later, she refers to women’s virtuous conduct to their fellow creatures in terms not of equality but of superiority and inferiority and uses the adverbs “beneath” and “below” (reinforced by “so very much in general”; she also resorts to the adjective “inferior to” (S2 287), both enabling her to highlight women’s superiority, and with it men’s inferiority – that of women being limited to physical strength: “Tho’ I cannot think it a jot more absurd to ridicule and contemn such generous creatures, as beneath the very miserable objects they voluntarily submit to serve, than it is to say or think that Women are inferior to the Men, because the former have virtue and fortitude enough, for the sake of peace and charity, to submit to the slavery of humouring the latter, tho’ so very much in general below them, in every consideration but that of bulk and strength [my underlining]” (S2 287).71 [Sophia]’s conviction of women’s superior capacities can be read in two successive paragraphs which sum up her intentions: on the one hand, “surpassing” contradicts “equal” in “If I have too strongly proved our right to an equal share of power, dignity, and esteem with the Men, and our natural capacity of surpassing them, I have notwithstanding never aim’d at wresting the power they are in possession of out of their hands” (S2 275); on the other hand, the attributive adjective “superior” refers to what she could demonstrate / prove in

69 “How many have there been, who have rendered themselves as compleat as / men in all sorts of Sciences!” (P71 – 72), “I could name almost an infinity of others, who have surpassed the Men in their erudition and familiarity with every laudable science […]” (S2 305). 70 “For fear, that if Sciences should become so common, glory might also; and that the fame to which they aspire, should be lessened by partnership” (P119), “for fear, the sciences becoming a familiar to us as to them, we should eclipse all their glory, and shew the littleness of their geniuses by the greatness of our own” (S2 271). 71 “I think it no less unworthy to imagine from thence, (as the vulgar commonly do) that Women are naturally servants to men; than to pretend that they, who have received talents, and particular endowments from God, are servants, and slaves to those, for whose good they employ them” (P51), “Tho’ I cannot think it a jot more absurd to ridicule and contemn such generous creatures, as beneath the very miserable objects they voluntarily submit to serve, than it is to say or think that Women are inferior to the Men, because the former have virtue and fortitude enough, for the sake of peace and charity, to submit to the slavery of humouring the latter, tho’ so very much in general below them, in every consideration but that of bulk and strength” (S2 287).

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her pamphlet: “among the infinite arguments I could produce of the superior talents of Woman” (277). Besides, at the end of her second essay, [Sophia] opposes men’s superiority, that is acquired (“gain’d”) and usurped, and women’s superiority, innate (“original”), which leads her to infer men’s inferiority, that is to say women’s superiority concerning the qualities of their souls as well as their physical beauty while, surprisingly, she does not mention intellectual qualities: In the mean time, what I have here barely hinted will suffice to convince the most obstinate of that / sex, who have any sense left, that if the Men have by fraud and violence, gain’d a superiority of power over us, we still retain our original superiority of sense and virtue over them : and if they are not ashamed of truth, they must own that the best qualities they are masters of give them no more title to an equality with us in the perfections of soul than their homely aukward [sic] figures can justify their vying with us in the charms of personal beauty and graces. (S2 305 – 06)

[Sophia]’s prefeminism is in fact more prejudiced against men than for women. Would she lack arguments? She does not hesitate to victimize women, which does not enhance their qualities. They are given value by a kind of mechanical effect, by an effect of compensation, of new balance but not deliberately thanks to a positive and convincing demonstration. Yet, at the same time, she happens to be less biased for women: she admits the existence of women’s foibles in particular in her second pamphlet that, however, is the more polemical of the two; here [Sophia] gives less credit to the charge of being both judge and part. Does she feel in such a superior position that she can afford to admit women’s weaknesses? If Poulain refers to the relationships between men and women in terms of complementarity as “partnership” (P120), [Sophia] seeks to demonstrate women’s superiority. For her, to be in favour of women means to be against men, a biased reductive attitude not to be found in Poulain’s text. * [Sophia]’s verbal audacity against men seems vehement but is a superficial rashness hiding conceptual timidity when compared to Poulain’s Cartesian philosophical background and innovations. She does not take up his subversive political idea of natural right, of natural equality, of the relativity of ranks. Her prefeminist ideas seem to have developed out of the commercial circumstances of a pamphlet war. Yet she articulates an idea hinted at by Poulain, that he does not fully express, that of a vicious circle: “Why is learning useless to us? Because we have no share in public offices. And why have we no share in public offices? Because we have no learning” (S27). The beginning of the conclusion of her first treatise stresses the contrast between the bad quality of the relationships be-

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tween men and women (contempt and mutual bad treatment [S58]) at that time and what they could be: happiness and mutual esteem (“Whereas how happy might they be, wou’d both sexes but resolve each to give the other that just esteem which is their due” [57]), an idea she repeats after her reference to the advantages of women’s education for men: “By which means both sexes wou’d be happy, and neither have cause to blame the other” (58). [Sophia] was strongly influenced by a man to desacralize men in order to then pave the way for more equality (for less inequality, at least) between the sexes in eighteenth-century Britain.

Christopher Stokes

Desacralizing the Sign: Tooke, Stewart and Romantic Materialism

John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding set a definitive agenda for eighteenth-century philosophy in Britain. With its sensationalist epistemology, tabula rasa theory of mind, and distinction between simple and complex ideas, it provided a foundation so extensive and flexible that everything from edifying Anglican moral philosophy to David Hume’s sceptical anti-metaphysics could be created from its premises. Not least among its effects was to give an empiricist turn to thought of the age, providing a natural vocabulary to be paired with the emergent scientific knowledge coming from fields like physiology, nerve theory and medicine. However, as Berkeley’s idealist twist on the same basic schema proves, the Lockean legacy was by no means inevitably or only materialist (Yolton 14 – 28). One area in which Locke’s speculations were seen by some to be profoundly unsatisfactory – in that they reinforced rather than overturned idealism – was his theory of language. The Essay turns to language in its third book, entitled “Of Words”. Although, as an empiricist, Locke speculates that sensible experiences are at the root of language (e. g. spirit derives from breath, angel from messenger), he also – crucially – moves the sign away from a relation to things by defining it instead via the idea. The necessity of words comes largely because the internal conceptions of our own minds are hidden and require physical expression in order to be recorded by us, as well as presented before and shared with others. We invent signs, and voluntarily ascribe them arbitrary reference to our ideas, in response. This explains why Locke almost immediately moves to discuss the problem of other minds and secrecy. He notes, for instance, that a child might not distinguish between gold as a metal and the colour in a peacock’s tail because the word “gold”, for him, refers not to the objects in question but to the internal conception which might at that stage of the child’s development encompass both peacock and metal. Language is intertwined with what Locke terms a kind of secret referentiality. The first issue in Book III is to show how language can work as (public, rational) communication when it corresponds to entirely private experiences: this flows directly from the philosophical decision to render the site

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of signification the idea rather than the thing. In following chapters, Locke goes on to explain how general terms, mixed modes, relations, substances and other forms find their way into language. However, for the thoroughgoing materialist, the damage has already been done, inscribed in the assumption that the sign is the physical, sensible representation of a non-physical idea in the mind. In this article, I will consider two materialist thinkers – John Horne Tooke and John Stewart – who took their orientation from and against this Lockean account of signs, seeking to offer a fully materialist theory of language. It is my contention that both thinkers do so through a rhetoric of desacralization. Eighteenth-century materialism was, in context, far more than just an ontological position: almost by definition, it was a critical position ranged against metaphysical and religious error. Horne Tooke explicitly connected his linguistic theories with his political trial for sedition, railing against “the officiating Priests” (I.74) whose damagingly false grammar and semantics are indicted as “the everlasting engines of fraud and injustice” (I.75). At the very end of The Diversions of Purley, he avers the wider imperative of “apply[ing] this system of Language to all the different systems of Metaphysical (i. e. verbal) Imposture” (II.516). Similarly, Stewart places himself as a rationalist committed to the perfectibility of humankind, arguing that “the chimerical operations of religious phrenzy will be destroyed, by the doctrine of real existence” (xiii). A critique of language, then, was an ideologically freighted matter. Yet, their philosophies of language were philosophies of desacralization in a more precise way than merely reflecting broader Enlightenment commitments. A logic of desacralization works specifically within the context of the sign and its structure. The key problem created by Locke was wedding the word to the idea. If the meaning of a given sign was an idea, then the sign itself is founded on a dualism between its matter (the letter) and its determining idea (which is purely immaterial). Of course, such a dualistic notion of the sign was bound to trouble a materialist philosophy. As Stewart puts it, under Locke’s hypothesis “there could be no criterion of the truth or falsehood of ideas…a ghost would be as just an idea as a man” (159 – 60). It is telling, therefore, that Stewart and Tooke both foreground a critical component to their theories of language which explodes the “immaterial” side to the sign. They identify a nearly identical set of terms – words like fate, destiny, chance, accident, heaven, hell, providence, angel, saint and soul – and expose them as ghostly quantities circulating meaninglessly but perniciously in language. They survive merely because tying signs to ideas, as Locke did, allows them to survive, “poetically embodied, and substantiated by those who use them” (Tooke II.19). Of course, they are not coincidentally the central and defining terms of religion and metaphysics. Thus, for Stewart, the fundamental sign which must be deconstructed is “God” itself, and its deconstruction is the

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very first gesture in his account of language: “we discover this potent word, God, supposed to be the hinges [sic] of all human action…to be a positive non-entity, and this mighty figure in calculation, to have no existing quantity” (105). He goes on to reflect: “if this fundamental word has been proved a phantom, what becomes of the superstructive words, heaven, hell, angels, revelation? the fabric must fall with its foundation, and their shadows will no longer cloud the reason” (106). Whilst Tooke is not so explicitly anti-religious, he also begins the second volume of the Diversions with chapters on abstraction offering a similar desacralization: These words, these Participles and Adjectives, not understood as such, have caused a metaphysical jargon and a false morality, which can only be dissipated by etymology…the ridicule which Dr. Conyers Middleton has justly bestowed upon the Papists for their absurd coinage of Saints, is equally applicable to ourselves and to all other metaphysicians (II.18)

Tooke’s first example, not coincidentally, is the word “church”: it is described as a sacralized adjective “whose misinterpretation caused more slaughter and pillage of mankind than all the other cheats together” (II.19). We see, therefore, that the broad materialist commitments of both thinkers find particularly apposite articulation in the context of linguistics. A dualistic notion of the sign presupposes what is in essence a body/spirit distinction: naturally enough, a materialist philosophy must attempt to undo it, especially at its most damaging yet persistent site – religious superstition. To offer a fully empirical account of the eighteenth-century sign, then, is to desacralize language itself, to exorcize it of spirits and souls, and to refigure reference away from the ghosts of a false philosophy.

Horne Tooke: The Diversions of Purley and the Disenchanted Sign I want to begin with Horne Tooke, both because he is far better known than Stewart and because I believe that, ultimately, his materialist linguistics is more limited. Born in 1736, Tooke’s career was long and varied. Beginning as a curate, he actually had little interest in religious matters – his faith was described by contemporaries as non credo – which helps to explain the sceptical edge to his later work. He first garnered a degree of public fame through his fervent support for John Wilkes during the Wilkesite political controversy of the 1760s, and he continued to be active in politics throughout the following decades, campaigning on issues such as American Independence and constitutional reform. The first volume of The Diversions of Purley, a treatise in dialogue form which included long series of speculative etymologies, was published in 1786, and reis-

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sued in 1798. By that time, with the French revolutionary decade well underway, Tooke had become a major figure in English radicalism: not least being infamously subject to arrest, trial and ultimate acquittal for sedition, experiences he mentions in the revised version of the Diversions. Somewhat ironically, Tooke – a thorn in the side of the political establishment – ended up by 1801 sitting in parliament through his aristocratic connections, although by that time age and illness were taking their toll. Nevertheless, a second volume of the Diversions followed in 1805, although a projected third and final volume was never published (famously, Tooke burnt all his papers before his death). Although his radical life gave him a contentious reputation among critics, his work as a linguist was highly influential right up until the middle of the Victorian period. The Diversions of Purley makes a radical claim almost immediately. One would assume that the obvious counter-argument to a Lockean semantics would be to return to the classic view that signs refer to things (not ideas). In fact, Tooke credits the relative strength of an idealist grammar like Locke’s – whilst also outflanking it with a deeper philosophical position: B. You seem to forget, that it is some time since words have been no longer allowed to be the signs of things. Modern Grammarians acknowledge them to be…the signs of ideas…And this has made a great alteration in the manner of accounting for the differences of words. H. That has not much mended the matter. No doubt this alteration approached so far nearer to the truth; but the nature of Language has not been much better understood by it. For Grammarians have since pursued just the same method with mind, as had before been done with things (I.23).

Tooke’s assertion is that the errors of linguistics are more cardinal, lying with a mystificatory assumption that “the purpose of Language is to communicate our thoughts” (I.17). In reality whilst some words do possess this communicative function, many – perhaps most – are not framed to communicate per se, but to make communication faster and more efficient. They cannot be analysed in terms of reference (whether to things or ideas), but in terms of the function of dispatch: “many words are merely abbreviations employed for dispatch, and are the signs of other words…these are the artificial wings of Mercury, by means of which the Argus eyes of philosophy have been cheated” (I.27). Through adding the thesis of abbreviation to linguistics, the Diversions radically simplifies semantic classes. There are communicative signs, which do possess what we might conventionally understand as reference. Tooke claims only nouns and verbs truly belong to this class, and I shall address them below. All other types of words (conjunctions, prepositions etc.) are abbreviative signs.

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They work like a kind of shorthand, and can be analysed back into the parts which they abbreviate: hence, the concomitant conclusion that “merely by the means of the Noun and Verb alone, you can relate or communicate any thing that I can relate or communicate with the help of the all the other [types of word]” (I.49). Overlooking the centrality of abbreviation has seduced linguistics into attributing reference where no reference exists: “misled therefore by the useful contrivances of language, they supposed many imaginary differences of things” (I.22). If there were supposed to be eight classes of words, then philosophers assumed they corresponded to eight classes of things in the world (the error, of course, lying in the fact that most of these classes are in fact just abbreviated forms of nouns and verbs, and thus refer merely to the internal workings of language). One can easily see how deconstructing these imaginary projections fits into a materialist project of disenchantment: Tooke describes it as stripping away the wings of the god Mercury (I.27). The Lockean turn did not improve matters, but merely transferred the mystification to the mental sphere. If there were eight classes of words, then it was now assumed they corresponded to eight different operations of mind. The second chapter of the Diversions is a critique of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding resting precisely on the contention that the earlier philosopher systematically confuses ideas and language, and attributes the purely verbal contrivances of abbreviation to operations in the mind. As such, “the greatest part of Mr. Locke’s Essay, that is, all which relates to what he calls the composition, abstraction, complexity, generalization, relation, & c of Ideas, does indeed merely concern Language” (I.39). So, for instance, Locke claims that affirming and denying are operations of mind, which are then expressed through the copulae is and is not. For Tooke, this is all grammar alone. Similarly, Locke’s crucial theory of complex ideas (whereby individual sense perceptions are built up into more abstract conceptions) is also returned to the plane of grammar. Complex ideas are chimerical, because they are merely the verbal effect of signs of abbreviation. For Tooke, the only ideas are simple and single ones, and it is “as improper to speak of a complex idea, as it would be to call a constellation a complex star” (I.37). Disenchanting the operations of abbreviative signs – unwinging Mercury – is, as I have contended above, symptomatic of Tooke’s materialism. However, the materialist project of the Diversions is only complete once all signs have been returned to nouns and verbs: “in English, and in all Languages, there are only two sorts of words which are necessary for the communication of our thoughts…1. Noun, and 2. Verb” (I.47). Once the abbreviating classes of sign have been accounted for, the question arises: what are nouns and verbs? What are these communicative signs to which all others can be resolved? Tooke’s answer is resolutely empiricist:

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The business of the mind, as far as it concerns Language, appears to me to be very simple. It extends no farther than to receive Impressions, that is, to have Sensations or Feelings…. A consideration of Ideas, or of the Mind, or of Things (relative to the Parts of Speech) will lead us no farther than to Nouns; i. e. the signs of those impressions, or names of ideas. The other Part of Speech, the Verb, must be accounted for from the necessary use of it in communication. It is in fact the communication itself (I.51).

One might, of course, pause here. The privilege given to units of sensation does indeed combine very well with a thesis that simple nouns are the foundation of language. Yet what of verbs? Tooke promises to give a full account of them, but his remarks are elusive: as modern critics have observed, the Diversions hesitates over the fundamental relationship between the two classes (e. g. Aarsleff 48).1 However, most would agree that Tooke, at heart, privileges the noun as more fundamental: his is a linguistics of noun-reduction rather than verb-reduction (see McCusick 88 – 92 and Milnes 156). The noun-reductive commitments of the text demand that, ultimately, it should be possible to resolve verbs into nouns, as stated right at the end of the second volume by Tooke’s interlocuter : You have told me that a Verb is (as every word also must be) a Noun; but you added, that it is also something more: and that the title of Verb was given to it, on account of that distinguishing something more than the mere nouns convey (II.514).

Although we never find out what the “something more” is, it is evident that Tooke would wish the verb to fold into an empiricist account of sensation, proving that, as Hans Aarsleff puts it, “naming is the essence of language as Tooke had shown by tracing all words via etymology to the names of sensible objects” (94). This radical simplification of language, into one class of verbal abbreviations and another class of signs derived from basic sensation, attempts a materialisation of linguistics which is also a desacralization. I have already cited Tooke’s critique of abstraction, which reminds us that complex ideas – particularly spiritual and religious ideas – can all be resolved into verbal abbreviations. Etymologies (speculations on which form the bulk of the text) return these metaphysical illusions to physical origins. Yet taken as a whole and with basic units of empirical naming at its heart, Tooke’s philosophy of language is a desacralization in a more general sense too. In the eighteenth century, it was common to see language as uniquely reflective of the free and rational powers of mind – structured through an ordered grammar shared by all human beings, but 1 It was also something noted by those who immediately followed Tooke. Charles Richardson’s 1854 exposition of Tooke, On The Study of Language included an explanatory chapter on “What is a Verb?”, whilst John Barclay’s 1826 A Sequel to the Diversions of Purley was largely made up of “An Essay on English Verbs”. Both sought explicitly to remedy the ambiguity that the Diversions had left open.

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separated by a logical chasm from the brute cries of animals. Language was lifted clear of the normal, blunt operations of nature. James Beattie would be an extreme but not atypical example here, theorizing that the origin of language was empirically inexplicable and attacking materialist accounts of speech as “the work of human art, as houses, waggons, ships, or any other piece of mechanism” (376). In contrast to an empirical understanding, Beattie concludes “that our first parents must have received it [the power of speech] by immediate inspiration” (380) – as divine gift and echo of the sacred logos. As Aarsleff notes, then, language “provided what appeared to be the most cogent arguments of the [idealist] opposition – as, for instance, in the work of [James] Harris, [James] Beattie, [Lord] Monboddo, [Hugh] Blair, and [George] Campbell” (88). By demanding that language is either the direct naming of a sensation, or an act of abbreviation leading back to such a naming, the Diversions brings language back under the aegis of materialist philosophy. It demystifies its origins, and thus forecloses a sacred origin. Whilst Tooke does accept that signs can refer to ideas, the ideas in question are given a resolute, sensationalist simplicity (of the “cat” = cat variety). One only has to look at how the Diversions frames and attacks James Harris as a kind of mysticist to see a desacralizing vocabulary at work against the idealist philosophers of language: First he [Harris] defines a Word to be a “sound significant.” Then he defines Conjunctions to be words (i. e. sounds significant) “devoid of signification.” – Afterwards he allows that they have – “a kind of signification.” But this kind of signification is – “obscure,” (i. e. a signification unknown): something I suppose…like a secret Tradition, or a silent Thunder : for it amounts to the same thing as a signification which does not signify : an obscure or unknown signification being no signification at all…. It would have helped us a little, if Mr. Harris had here told us what that middle state is, between signification and no signification! (I.116 – 7).

Ironically defining himself in a Lockean tradition of “unlearned and vulgar philosophers” (I.118) against these subtle complexities of signification, Tooke’s linguistics aims to restore materialist common-sense. Signs are not be lost in a baffling maze of metaphysics, they are to be returned to the empirical. They refer either to other signs (abbreviations), or to physical experiences (nouns/verbs) – and that is all. No longer bewitched by the immaterial “ideas” inherent in an dualistic theory of the sign, the Diversions offers a purified Lockeanism (purified against Locke himself, of course) and a simple, disenchanted and disenchanting account of words. As William Hazlitt would later put it: There is a web of old associations wound round language, that is a kind of veil over its natural features; and custom puts on the mask of ignorance. But this veil, this mask the author of The Diversions of Purley threw aside, and penetrated to the naked truth of things by the literal, matter-of-fact, unimaginative nature of his understanding, and because he was not subject to prejudices or illusions of any kind. Words may be said to

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‘bear a charmed life, that must not yield to one of woman born’ – with womanish weaknesses and confused apprehensions. But this charm was broken in the case of Mr. Tooke, whose mind was the reverse of effeminate – hard, unbending, concrete, physical (113 – 14).

The idea of language as a unique, even a transcendent, property of the human soul is untenable when the words themselves have been “unsouled”, and when their charm has been broken. That is the wider desacralization at work in Tooke’s The Diversions of Purley.

John Stewart: The Revolution of Reason and the Dialectical Sign Unlike Tooke, who remains a major figure in terms of the history of linguistics, John Stewart is relatively unknown.2 Nevertheless, I believe that his theory of language is fascinatingly radical in comparison with Tooke, and offers a provocative path beyond the sensationalist orthodoxies of eighteenth-century empiricism. It does require taking Stewart’s erudition and his place in a tradition of materialist thought seriously, which is perhaps understandably difficult given that he is best known, if at all, for his eccentricity : carrying out long walks across entire continents (he was known colloquially as John “Walking” Stewart), dressing as an Armenian, adopting a vegetarian diet, and arguing his books should be translated into Latin and buried to escape anticipated censorship and suppression, for instance (see Symonds). Originally a writer and translator in imperial India, once back in England he became a curious figure on the edge of intellectual and literary circles: de Quincey, notably, remarked upon him as an inconsistent and perhaps slightly unhinged genius. Nevertheless, a series of philosophically radical works were published and circulated – half-mystical, given to moralistic screed, and yet also in a tradition of serious speculation on human perfectibility. They bore ambitious titles such as Travels over the Most Interesting Parts of the Globe, to Discover the Source of Moral Motion and The Revolution of Reason: Or the Establishment of the Constitution of Things in Nature. It is in this latter work that Stewart sketches the innovative account of the sign that I shall consider here. Tooke had achieved a materialist linguistics through reduction. His etymologies can reduce all the complexity of grammar to nouns and verbs, and they in turn can be reduced to the most simple forms of sensation. Insofar as he does this, he is a classic British empiricist. Nevertheless, this does leave something akin to an idealist residue right at the heart of the Diversions, insofar as nouns are 2 The only sustained academic attention Stewart has received has been by the critic Kelly Grovier. See Grovier 2005, 2007 and 2008.

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“the signs of those impressions, or names of ideas” (I.51). Whilst Tooke clears away an immense amount of the metaphysics surrounding the sign, he does maintain a basic dualism in the case of the a) noun standing in for b) an impression. His is, after all, a correspondence theory, or “picture theory” of language: he just clarifies correspondence to the point where it exists in effectively a single, simplistic form. Stewart approaches the dualism of the Lockean sign differently. Instead of paring away the structure of correspondence, he actually overturns it. Tooke has been credited with creating a materialism where “language is not so much a medium for expressing thought as it is a way of thinking, a system perhaps necessary for thought” (Marshall 807) – I am going to argue that Stewart goes much further towards a linguistics of this kind. The Revolution of Reason reinvents the idea of language as a medium. The mimetic aspect of the sign, purified through reduction in The Diversions of Purley, is rejected entirely insofar as Stewart contends that signs should not be assumed to function through adequacy of representation: The logic of the schools by supposing sounds and words complete representatives of things, has universalised and perpetuated the chaos of error. This logic, though somewhat purified by modern authors, preserves still so much of false specific representation, that they are totally unintelligible to a realist (114).

A rejection of the mimetic function (at least insofar as it is classically conceived, through the notion that signs are proper and just insofar as they precisely define a referent or signified) is a radical shift. Even very simple nouns, which had an important foundational role in Tooke, are no longer seen as mimetic. So, for instance, Stewart argues that whilst the word “gold” is indeed held to unite certain qualities of the metal in question (colour, texture, and the like) there are also “many unknown qualities which the word does not denote” (125). (One could, for instance, suggest its atomic structure – only discovered by modern physics – as one of these unknown qualities.) As such, Stewart claims, we cannot primarily define the sign “gold” as representing gold in any way, or at least any constant way.3 Instead, in a gesture which Ferdinand de Saussure will also make over one hundred years later, such signs are to be understood as possessing a negative or differential function, relating not to the world or even to concepts or ideas, but only to other signs: “fixed or positive in their discrimination only, as when gold is spoken of, man is not meant”. The essence of the sign is functional, not representational. It must be able to create a space of usage which does not 3 This debate will be continued at a considerable level of complexity in twentieth-century analytic philosophy : Gottlieb Frege’s distinction between denotation and sense, for instance, or Hilary Putnam’s insistence that the chemical composition of a substance like water is irrelevant to picking it out in the external world.

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clash with other signs, and it is this discriminative effect – “to give method to discourse” (126) – which replaces the correspondence or “picture theory”. Things become even more interesting when Stewart turns from “simple modes of being” (125) to his real quarry, which are complex signs like “happiness” or “virtue”. Here, he insists on a culturally relativist schema that denies fixed signification to signs due to their unsettled meaning. There is certainly a colonial arrogance about his suggestions. The concept of virtue, he claims spectacularly and provocatively, is parricide for the sake of escaping torture in America, infanticide for the sake of a family during famine in China, and rationicide (or idolatry) for the sake of civil unity in Catholic Spain. Only when the cultures have advanced beyond torture of captives, routine famines or a social order bound by superstition will the significations alter. There is a clear sense that the European, and more specifically the British, cultural understanding of significant words and concepts are further along the path of human perfectibility on which his philosophy depends. However, the very fact that he claims that meanings are not right or wrong but contextually fluid and flexible betrays a surprisingly cosmopolitan philosophy : “the travelled mind alone has introduced doubt with that power, that it has not merely opened a door to wisdom, but has rendered the temple on all sides an open fabric” (59 – 60). Moreover, because he conceptualizes the referents of these significant terms as part of an unfulfilled trajectory of human improvement, no actually existing culture (including the British) can claim to define them in any more than a tentative, contingent and incomplete fashion. British “happiness” may be conceived as a fuller realisation of the term than African “happiness”, but it is explicitly not “happiness” per se. Encounters with other cultures is the prime way of throwing this contingency into relief. Having committed to this position, Stewart theorizes that the semantics of words like “virtue” or “happiness” can exist only as a fluid and progressive history which is pushed forward precisely through openness to other definitions. Human enlightenment is the shifting of meanings: So long as the nature of things exists in progression, words can only be constituent parts of a definition and explanation possessing unitedly and individually that flexibility which produces progression, parallel to that quality in its archetype. To give that quality of flexibility to words by which they may be made just representatives of their archetypes or things, they must be constantly attended by definition, and definition must be again by explanation (116 – 7).

Once again, therefore, a mimetic understanding of the sign is broken. That is not to say that Stewart entirely rejects correspondence as a goal. Whether with simple signs like “gold” or complex ones like “moral truth”, he does hold fidelity to things as the ultimate horizon of language: “the intercourse of minds in the

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examination and communication of the knowledge of things, can be maintained only by things themselves” (115). However, such fidelity is only achieved by understanding that the signification of a sign is not a fixed quality, an actual moment of representation as if that representation could be completed, but an open-ended process which must be incomplete. Signs are objects of debate, exchange and revision, perpetually tested against things. The real heart of the sign is not mimesis, but human activity itself: “language as the discipline of thought…words, or terms, as flexible and accommodative signs to move on the advancing parallel of progressive truth” (152). This fluid semantics naturally marks out fixity has its enemy : “’Tis congenial to the repose of timid and torpid minds, to cherish the certitude of representation between word and thing”. And yet this certitude has, for Stewart, been the exemplary metaphysical error. It is the root of the “stubborn inflexibility” bred by “custom and prejudice” (118). It is also, notably, the fallacy that Locke commits by making the idea central: On this subject, Mr. Locke has written so erroneously, that to his pen I attribute the present stationary and unprogressive condition of human intellect. He taught that moral ideas were complete essences or archetypes of themselves, and that words, by strictly representing them, were capable of producing moral truth with the same accuracy as mathematical propositions (156, my emphasis).

The attack on Locke is telling because the Essay perpetuates – albeit in the shape of a modern philosophy rather than a religious superstition, but with exactly the same consequences – the paralysis that allows “contemptible phantoms” (158) such as ghosts, souls and angels to exist. If a sign is not continually tested and reinvented in the crucible of human history, but granted a fixed signification, then anything can be believed as long as the word permits the belief. Definitions may be stalled at incomplete and hence deluded stages of development (e. g. Chinese “virtue”); false referents may continue to haunt language (e. g. “providence”). If the connection between sign and signification goes unchallenged, then the “human intellect must remain in a perpetual labyrinth, in which sounds and conceptions will be torturous allies of constant aberration” (167). Against these aberrant philosophies, Stewart advances what he calls a “real dialectic” as opposed to purely “verbal logic”. The latter paralyses reason, reifies and closes definition, and is bewitched by sound over sense; the former is open, progressive and has Stewart’s theory of the sign at its heart: “were the consideration of things and their relation to take place, independent of sound, and language regarded only as the instrumentality of explication, the whole cobwebwork of sophistry would be all brushed away from the mind” (120, my emphasis). As with Tooke, it is words like “God” and “soul” which are the worst cases of sophistry, and of distorted relationships between sound and sense.

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Repeatedly, we find that religion (and its close ally, metaphysics) is the primary engine of “verbal logic”, and sacred or supernatural terms are its most pernicious products. For instance, when considering the proposition that the virtuous man fears God, Stewart objects that: God is a word introduced by the error of custom and education, to denote the personification of the aggregate mass of all the partial energies of existence. Logic, assuming the above definitions for a complete explication of things affirmed in the proposition, produces that conclusion which arrests the progress, or contracts the sphere of virtue; and by inculcating fear for false objects, removes the fear of real evil, and disposes man to a noxious resignation (138).

Real dialectic must expose the false signifier “God” as the legacy of an earlier stage of intellectual development, and redefine “virtue” in humanistic terms. As the text concludes, in a polemical definition which very much borrows the anticlerical rhetoric of the radical Enlightenment, “[verbal] logic uses language with rigid inflexibility in order to fix opinion, dialectic uses language with flexability [sic] to improve and regulate opinion” (148). We see that Stewart’s revolution in understanding the sign is thus intertwined with a broader Enlightenment project: a project of emancipating the mind, of destroying custom, in short, of desacralization.

Materialism, Language, Romanticism All this, of course, comes back to the old error, repeated by Locke, that grants a logical power to the mere idea of a meaning in its immateriality – what we would now call the “signified”. A fundamental danger lies in the spirituality of abstractions, and the necessity becomes despiritualizing abstractions. As Stewart himself avers: “abstraction when analized [sic] into its thing or archetype, will be found to be nothing but materialism or thing itself” (129). I want to conclude by considering Stewart’s materialism in contrast to Tooke’s, and the rather different consequences it might have for a view of Romantic linguistics. The general tenor of Tooke, as I have argued above, is to reduce everything to physical sensation. Stewart works differently : certainly, he is against abstraction, but his theory of language (and his so-called “real dialectic”) is a materialism far removed from the empirical noun-reduction attempted into The Diversions of Purley. Consider the following account of Stewart’s theory : It may be apprehended by some, that by the substitution of real to verbal logic, the intellect would be incapacitated to identify its ideas; this objection will be removed by reflecting, that the present identifications being formed in a false medium, they are like the reflections in water only, the discriminations of shadow from shadow. The iden-

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tifications formed by real logic…would, no doubt, be deprived of closure by their quality of progression; but this progression would have predicamental quality, and would thereby, be able to identify the operations of intellect in such a manner, as would be sufficient to the transposition of ideas or the intercourse of mind with mind, the end and purport of all language (199 – 20).

Two motifs are worth noticing. Firstly, the open-ended or dialectical sign: where Tooke’s reductionist semantics argues that “the business of the mind, as far as it concerns Language…extends no farther than to receive Impressions” (I.51), Stewart’s embraces non-closure and defines signs “by their quality of progression”. Where Tooke draws things back to a basic sensationalist schema, Stewart looks forward and upward to greater and greater degrees of intellectual knowledge. Secondly, Stewart’s materialism is more fundamental in quite literally embedding the advances of intellect in the dialectical quality of signs. As previously stated, language is “the discipline of thought” (152); language is material insofar as it is the instrumentality – the action, the technique – of “the intercourse of mind with mind”. Predicamentality is defined as a movement or function, not as an absolute or inherent quality. For a theorist of human perfectibility like Stewart, human cultural progress – the progress of thought – is a material fact and trajectory in the world, and signs do not refer to this progress, they actually are this progress. This is what makes John Stewart’s account of the sign truly radical. As a sensationalist in the tradition of Locke, Horne Tooke is bound to the picture theory of language. Yet it is the pictorial quality of the sign which allows abstraction, spiritual referents and all the other idealist fallacies: the idea, or signified, is the “soul” of the sign; the signifier is the body. Tooke attempts to remain a materialist despite ultimately referring to the idea by ensuring the idea is heavily circumscribed, and identified with empirical impressions alone (in short, to reinforce the body of the sign with the physical human body). Arguably he manages this, but at the cost of a highly limited theory of language that must ultimately believe that communication in nouns alone would be as adequate as any language currently existing. This is rather far-fetched, and a position avoided in Stewart’s linguistics, which by contrast rests its key assertions on complex human experiences like happiness and virtue. The materialism in Stewart comes not from some narrow conception of rooting everything in individual sense impression (the simplest of all “pictures”), but in the notion that signs are not pictures at all, but instruments – displacing the correspondence theory with a theory of language as action, as human culture, as the movement of thought itself. This is a position that arguably would not find full mainstream articulation until Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose revolutionary philosophy of language (as found in The Blue and Brown Books and, ultimately, Philosophical Investigations) defines signs as operations in the world. Wittgenstein repeatedly

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argues against any mimetic understanding of the sign as bearing a reference to an immaterial picture, considering this a stubborn fallacy : “it is as if one believed that a written order for a cow, which someone is to hand over to me, always had to be accompanied by a mental image of a cow if the order was not to lose its sense” (139e). Merely propelling the language game onwards (e. g. giving the order “brick” and a brick being handed over) is enough for “sense” to have occurred: like Stewart, predication is open-ended and oriented in the futuretense. We know, of course, that Stewart was a relatively minor thinker. His theory of language, too deeply buried among many other eccentric speculations, was not culturally visible in the Romantic period in the way that Tooke’s was. Indeed, the reputation of the latter was considerable, and it is natural that The Diversions of Purley has been evoked in readings of many of the canonical British Romantics (see, for instance, Manly on Tooke and Wordsworth, McCusick on Tooke and Coleridge, Marshall on Tooke and Byron, and Tomalin on Tooke and Hazlitt). Having said that, the prophetic radicality of Stewart’s linguistics reminds us that there were varied positions being articulated, even amongst thinkers who shared similar intellectual legacies and empiricist commitments. Romanticism existed, of course, across manifold philosophical and literary currents – an interest in the materialism of signs (be that Keats’s sensuousness or Wordsworth’s use of epitaphs and inscriptions), the legacy of the radical Enlightenment (which was so often linked to a desacralizing critique of language) but also a concerted resacralizing of language by some key figures (as we find, for instance, in the Coleridgean symbol or the appropriation of prophetic registers by Byron or Blake). The example of Stewart, then, is a reminder that Romantic materialism was diverse: rooted, of course, in a Lockean legacy, but also inventive and experimental in many different directions. Moreover, as Romanticists and post-Romantics ourselves, we might learn a lesson from the anti-mimetic thesis advanced by Stewart. Despite having passed the era of High Deconstruction, there is still an assumption in much literary criticism that the sign – particularly the sign in the secular area – represents a point of crisis. Can language stand for the world? Are words shot through with absence? Is literature, as a merely linguistic artefact, estranged from the sensuous fullness of things, from the fullness of life? These are recurrent questions. Stewart – and indeed Wittgenstein– would counsel us that such agonised thinking falls into the trap of believing that signs carry, or aspire to carry, representations. If the sign is not shackled to the doctrine of “specific representation”, but is rather seen as a material act in the world, open-ended and dialectical, then fraught questionings of the sign’s meaning are shown to be operating on a misconstrued understanding of language. Deferral could never create such anguish in Stewart’s system, which is based precisely on signs re-

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maining open to deferral. It would be interesting to revisit Romantic – and other – poetry with the spectral burden of linguistic idealism suspended, and with something like Stewart’s account of the sign in place instead. Since the New Historicist turn, all critics have been aware of re-inscribing the assumptions of the Romantic Ideology. Arguably our own postmodern predicament with the sign implicitly assents to, and takes its bearings from, a theological desire for meaning to be fully present “in” the sign: whilst there is no doubting a Romantic legacy helps forge this position, perhaps Romanticism – in the shape of a desacralizing Romantic materialism – might also contribute to dissolving it.

Works cited Aarsleff, Hans. The Study of Language in England 1780 – 1860. London: Athlone Press, 1993. Print. Barclay, John. A Sequel to the Diversions of Purley. London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1826. Print. Beattie, James. “The Theory of Language. In Two Parts.” Dissertations Moral and Critical. In Two Volumes. Vol. 1. Dublin: Exshaw et al, 1783. 298 – 400. Print. Grovier, Kelly. “Dream Walker : AWordsworth Mystery Solved.” Romanticism 13.2 (2007): 156 – 63. Print. –,“‘Shades of the Prison-House’: ‘Walking’ Stewart, Michel Foucault and the Making of Wordsworth’s ‘Two Consciousnesses’.” Studies in Romanticism 44.3 (2005): 341 – 66. Print. –,“‘Paradoxes of the Panoscope’: ‘Walking’ Stewart and the Making of Keats’s Ambivalent Imagination.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 52 (2008): n. pag. Web. 14 Dec 2012. Hazlitt, William. The Spirit of the Age: Or Contemporary Portraits. London: Henry Colburn, 1825. Print. Manly, Susan. Language, Custom and Nation in the 1790s: Locke, Tooke, Wordsworth, Edgeworth. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Print. Marshall, L.E. “‘Words are things’: Byron and the Prophetic Efficacy of Language.” Studies in English Literature 1500 – 1900 25.4 (1985): 801 – 22. Print. McCusick, James. “Coleridge and Horne Tooke.” Studies in Romanticism 24.1 (1985): 85 – 111. Print. Richardson, Charles. On the Study of Language: An Exposition of “Epea Pteronenta, Or the Diversions of Purley”. London: George Bell, 1854. Print. Stewart, John. The Revolution of Reason: Or the Establishment of the Constitution of Things in Nature. London: J. Ridgeway, [1790]. Print. Symonds, Barry. “Stewart, John (1747 – 1822).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2009. Web. 14 Dec 2012. Tomalin, Marcus. “‘The New-Invented Patent-Lamp of Etymology’: Hazlitt, Horne Tooke, and the Philosophy of Language.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 42.1 (2008): 61 – 90. Print.

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Tooke, John Horne. Epea Pteroenta. Or, the Diversions of Purley. 2 vols. London: J. Johnson, 1798 – 1805. Print. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. 4th ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. Print. Yolton, John W. Thinking Matter : Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Print.

Barbara M. Benedict

Satire, Sentiment and Desacralization: The Relic and the Commodity in Jane Austen’s Novels

Jane Austen was not, generally speaking, fond of objects. Her novels mainly lack precise descriptions of possessions, interiors, clothing, or decor. However, when Austen does mention specific things, she tends to portray them as representations of – or occasions for – the reduction of human subjectivity and morality into fungible commodities in an increasingly mercenary and crass society.1 Elsewhere, I have explored they ways in which this depiction of things expresses Austen’s resistance to contemporary social changes, especially to the commodification of sociability.2 Here, I would like to suggest that she also saw in the contemporary enthusiasm for material culture an ominous tendency to fetishize objects: to transform material things into vessels of transcendent meaning. Such transcendence appears almost always through satire, in which the sacred, something that ought to be “set apart by ritual, made holy, inviolable,” shrinks into an object.3 Although Austen’s novels include several clergymen, few carry moral authority, and Austen rarely speaks openly about religion. Rather, her work consistently indicts the degradation of spiritual values in a culture of superficiality, materialism and self-indulgence; these flaws appear in the attention characters pay to objects. Things represent the reduction of the sacred to the material and the elevation of the material into the sacred. Objects were newly ubiquitous and significant in the eighteenth century, and hence frequently appear in contemporary satire. Many writers deliberately conflate things and people to show how, in a commercial society, things acquire 1 See Barbara M. Benedict, “The Trouble with Things: Objects and the Commodification of Sociability,” A Companion to Jane Austen, eds. Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (WileyBlackwell Press, 2009): 343 – 54. 2 See Barbara M. Benedict, “Jane Austen and The Culture of Circulating Libraries: The Construction of Female Literacy,” in Revising Women: Feminist Essays in Eighteenth-Century ‘Women’s Fiction’ and Social Engagement, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 147 – 199. 3 Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, Mass.: C. and G. Merriam Co., 1923); see also The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

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human traits: Alexander Pope’s “living Teapots” in The Rape of the Lock (1714), for example, and the Atom, Guinea, Hackney-Coach, and so on, which tumble through picaresque exploits in late eighteenth-century it-narratives (Pope: IV, 49). In a parallel process, writers show how humans tend to decline into becoming things, manipulable bodies in a chaotic world.4 These writers suggest that, in their reverence for objects, humans lose some of their independent autonomy, and become vulnerable to the anti-rational power of projected identity. Objects invested with such power become quasi-sacred fetishes, as Peter Stallybrass explains, separate from the body yet exercising power over it. In contrast, portraying people or ideas as objects denudes them of autonomy : “To treat a subject or concept like an object is to reify, objectify. To treat an object like a subject is to idolize, to fetishize” (De Grazia, Quilligan and Stallybrass, 1996: 3).5 Most sentimental novelists portray the power of objects over characters as an illustration of their characters’ sensitivity to beauty and memory in a heartless, commodifying society. This investiture of objects with sentimental meaning also informs Austen’s treatment of the commercial and the sacred. Jane Austen, however, was engaged in revising the tropes of late-eighteenth-century fiction, and hence she refigures the objects that in sentimental novels serve as quasispiritual mementos as satirical emblems of misplaced feeling.6 This reveals how contemporary attitudes turn both object and subject into purely exchangeable commodities (De Grazia, Quilligan and Stallybrass, 1996: 3).7 Austen’s attitudes toward both objects and sacredness reflect her cultural and religious education. For many Protestant thinkers and clergymen, too great a value for objects hinted at either greed or superstition. Revered things were seen to resemble relics, the props of what was regarded as anti-rational Catholic ritual. By holding a mysterious power over the observer or owner, they were seen to operate as fetishes more powerful than people, or possessed of spiritual force 4 See, for example, Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’ in Things, ed. B. Brown, Critical Inquiry 28 (2001), 1 – 16; Mark Blackwell, ‘The People Things Make: Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding and the Properties of the Self ’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35 (2006), 77 – 95; Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 5 See also Peter Stallybrass, “Introduction: fashion, fetishism, and memory in early modern England and Europe” in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, eds. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1 – 14. 6 For extensive analyses of Austen’s complex attitude toward sentimental novels, see Frank W. Bradbrook, Jane Austen and her Predecessors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), esp. 90 – 119; Kenneth Moler, Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977); and Mary Waldron, Jane Austen and the Fiction of her Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 7 Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, “Introduction” in Subject and Object, 4: the authors note that, “commodification is loss both of subject and of object into pure exchangeability”.

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beyond reason, like the Eucharist. This belief in the power of objects dates from the Medieval period, at the latest, when church repositories held precious or strange objects in order to induce awe in visitors, and to prove moral principles (Pearce: 116). For sentimental writers rejecting enlightenment rationalism, this mysterious power seemed intriguing. Austen, however, whether strictly Anglican or leaning toward Methodism, resisted this attitude, preferring reason “to inform the moral conscience and the manners of the individual and the community,” as Michael Griffin observes (24).8 In her novels, characters who revere things are either foolishly naive, or villainously selfish, aping Romantic rebelliousness, idealism and passion in order to get what they want at others’ expense. There are therefore twin faces to Austen’s hostility toward material things. On the other hand, over-valuing objects degrades feeling, relationship and morality ; on the other hand, the transformation of people, ideas and principles into objects available for commercial exchange degrades phenomena that belong in the moral, not the material, realm. Austen thus associates the fetishization of things with the loss of reason or of faith.

The Sacralization of the Object Harriet Smith, the proteg¦e of the eponymous heroine in Emma (1816), exemplifies a character whose education in sentimental fiction and natural stupidity leads to the mistaken sacralization of things. Harriet has collected a pathetic assembly of discarded objects as souvenirs of Mr. Elton, her lost love. Sometime after they have learned that Mr. Elton had been courting Emma, not Harriet, and after Mr. Elton has married another woman, Harriet brings Emma a parcel she “ought to have destroyed long ago” with “the words Most precious treasures” inscribed on the top (Austen: 338).9 Harriet explains that the items are not gifts, merely “things that I have valued very much,” which she is determined to throw 8 Michael Griffin, Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 24. He argues that, “Austen was highly sacramental. She does not allow any of her characters to achieve an evangelical conversion – that is, a personal soteria by faith in the atoning death of Christ – because her faith is grounded in the catholic and apostolic tradition of mainstream Anglicanism. This mainstream tradition maintains a creative tension between the incarnation of Jesus and the atonement of Christ, which gives it a highly communal attitude towards the relationship between soteria and society”(28). For differing views of Austen’s religious beliefs, see Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), who sees Austen as moving toward evangelism, and Lesley Willis, “Religion in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park,” English Studies in Canada 13, 1 (1987): 65 – 78. 9 Jane Austen, Emma, ed. R.W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), II, iv, 338. All citations refer to this edition.

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away to prove “‘how rational I have grown’.” One item is “the end of an old pencil–the part without any lead,” that Mr. Elton once discarded, most precious because it “did really once belong to him’.” Ironically, this physical evidence reminds Harriet of a passion that he never, in fact, experienced, but which Emma and Harriet together imagined: its impotence as an implement hints at his own inadequacies. By burning it, Harriet promises to reject the sentimental worship of these objects, and follow reason instead of sentiment. The first item in Harriet’s collection still more clearly shows the resemblance between these “‘treasures’” and sacred objects. When she brings it to Emma, Harriet asks, ‘Cannot you guess what this parcel holds?’ said she, with a conscious look. Within abundance of silver paper was a pretty little Tunbridge-ware box, which Harriet opened: it was well-lined with the softest cotton; but, excepting the cotton, Emma saw only a small piece of court plaister. “Now,” said Harriet, “you must recollect.” (Austen: 338)

The plaster is the remainder of a strip of bandage, part of which, at Emma’s suggestion, Mr. Elton had wrapped around his finger after cutting it on Emma’s penknife. Harriet reveals that Mr. Elton “kept playing some time with what was left, before he gave it back to me,” and so “I could not help making a treasure of it” (Austen: 338). Her reverence for this utilitarian remnant evokes the Catholic practice of cherishing relics like fragments of the true cross, crucifixion nails, drops of Jesus’s blood, and bits of the bones of saints. Early churches sequestered such relics, along with precious ritual items like candelabra, chalices and Bibles, in display cases in repositories within the Church itself (MacGregor : 4 – 7). Similarly, Harriet sequesters her relic of Elton in a pseudo-sacred box. When she declares that Emma “must recollect” the incident, Harriet also uses a term that signals the contemplative power relics were thought to induce: by meditating on them, the faithful could recollect Christ’s sacrifice, and imaginatively enter into the spiritual realm by confronting their own sins and the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice. Here, these sacred rituals are ludicrously parodied as Emma exclaims, “‘I remember it all now; all, except your saving this relick… Oh! my sins, my sins!’,” as she confesses she lied by concealing that she had some plaster in order to draw Mr. Elton closer to Harriet (Austen: 339). Portraits in eighteenth-century culture also held both traditional and sacred connotations. Royal and aristocratic families typically possessed a gallery of family portraits, but paintings also had become items of virt¾: collectibles intended to display the owner’s taste and wealth. Charles I, notably, had accumulated an impressive number from all over Europe, as well as commissioning works from famous artists. As the bourgeois in England gained influence and cultural ambition, they too began to collect and commission paintings. In ad-

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dition, gothic fictions typically use portraits as evidence of a character’s right to inheritance (Benedict and LeFaye: 346, n. 5). Austen’s use of paintings reflects both this traditional regard for high art, and the new sentimental reverence for the visual arts as sublime expressions of an emotion or a truth that transcends language and reason. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), the portrait of Fitzwilliam Darcy operates in this way, as a transparent image of his identity that displays something about him that had been hidden from Elizabeth Bennet: she beheld a striking resemblance of Mr. Darcy, with such a smile over the face, as she remembered to have sometimes seen, when he looked at her. She stood several minutes before the picture in earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery…. There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth’s mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original, than she had ever felt in the height of their acquaintance. The commendation bestowed on him by Mrs. Reynolds was of no trifling nature. What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant? As a brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how many people’s happiness were in his guardianship! – How much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow! – How much of good or evil must be done by him! Every idea that had been brought forward by the housekeeper was favourable to his character, and as she stood before the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression (Austen: 277).

The Darcy’s family picture gallery functions as a non-verbal testament, parallel to a sacred painting in its power to compel meditation and convey enlightenment. Elizabeth regards it with “earnest contemplation,” a posture of reverence and personal thought that contrasts with her usual manner of lively conversational wit. Not only does the painting enlarge the owner’s prestige, it places him: it is a visible narrative that records his claim to the lineage he holds and the family’s history.10 Most significantly, it holds the power of literally re-presenting Darcy to Elizabeth in his true guise as an aristocrat with complex relationships and roles, and weighty responsibilities. Informed by the praise of the housekeeper, Elizabeth begins to correct her perceptions: the painting portrays the man beyond – and better than – his own words. While full-length paintings display social power, miniature portraits, which can be carried on the person, possess a more intimate and sentimental charge. They had grown increasingly common following the Renaissance: Henry VIII traveled with a collection he had commissioned from Peter Oliver, to remind him 10 Rachel M. Brownstein notes Austen’s revision of the gothic clich¦ of discovering a skeleton in “Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 53.

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of friends, and in the mid-eighteenth century, Horace Walpole acquired miniatures of many of his acquaintances, which he displayed in a specially-made cabinet (Rigby and Rigby : 226; Lippincott: 82; Benedict, 2006: 698). Miniatures were popular throughout the eighteenth century as mementoes of friends, family, and important figures: in a letter to Cassandra on 25 April 1811, Austen herself commended a miniature of King Philip V of Spain that an acquaintance showed her as suited to her “capacity ;” James Andrews made a miniature watercolor portrait of Austen herself, based on a portrait by Cassandra; and Jane Austen herself scribbled a miniature portrait of Queen Elizabeth on her “History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st” in the second volume of her juvenilia (Austen, 1952: 276; LeFaye, 2004: 83).11 In literature too, especially sentimental fiction, miniature portraits appear prominently among the significant objects.12 They are shown to trigger emotion and underlying morality, and thus to prove or incite the observer’s virtue. In Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1751), for example, the diamond-crusted miniature of the eponymous heroine has the power to restore justice, and rescue both Amelia and her wayward husband Captain Booth. Its value is twofold: as a fungible commodity for commercial exchange, and as a fetishized representation or symbol of Amelia’s goodness. These two values conflict, and express the parallel conflict between materiality and morality in the novel. Similarly, Amelia herself is described as a “Jewel,” an ambiguous designation that hints at Booth’s tendency to barter her, as he comes close to doing by demanding she attend the notoriously lewd masquerade ball, where her face will be masked.13 Penniless, and realizing she must feed her hungry children, Amelia, resolved to go immediately to the Pawnbroker whither she had gone before, and to deposite [sic] her Picture for what she could raise upon it. She then immediately took a Chair, and put her Design into Execution. The intrinsic Value of the Gold, in which this Picture was set, and of the little Diamonds which surrounded it, amounted to nine Guineas. This therefore was advanced to her ; and the prettiest Face in the World (such is often the Fate of Beauty) was deposited, as of no Value into the Bargain (Fielding: 487).

11 Several critics and writers, including Charlotte BrontÚ, compared Austen’s technique to miniature painting: see Janet Todd, “Ivory Miniatures and the Art of Jane Austen,” in ReDrawing Austen: Picturesque Travels in Austenland, eds. B. Battaglia and D. Saglia (Napoli: Liguori, 2004), 120. 12 Janet Todd, “Ivory Miniatures and the Art of Jane Austen,” in Re-Drawing Austen: Picturesque Travels in Austenland, eds. B. Battaglia and D. Saglia (Napoli: Liguori, 2004), 115 – 123. 13 Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), part IV, bk. xi, ch. ix, 490. All citations refer to this edition.

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Nonetheless, although the pawnbroker sees only the value of the precious materials, Amelia’s face holds a mysterious, moral power. When the pawnbroker exclaims at its beauty, a chance customer, revealed later to be Booth’s acquaintance Robinson, looks at it and instantly recognizes Amelia, experiences remorse for her poverty, and signs a confession that he has helped to defraud her of her inheritance. By contemplating the portrait, he has redeemed himself; correspondingly, Amelia’s fortune is restored, Captain Booth repents, and the future unwraps in domestic joy and probity. Ann Radcliffe also uses miniatures as prompts to emotion. In The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), for example, the scene in which the heroine Emily St. Aubert mistakes a miniature portrait of her aunt for a lover of her father’s causes much of her distress in the novel. The description of St. Aubert’s emotion upon gazing at the miniature and Emily’s reaction also demonstrate the way miniatures were used: as prompts to sentimental feelings of love, desire and nostalgia. Shortly after her mother has died, Emily, unseen, approaches her father : On looking through the panes of glass, [Emily] saw [her father] seated at a small table, with papers before him, some of which he was reading with deep attention and interest, during which he often wept, and sobbed aloud. Emily. Who had come to the door to learn whether her father was ill, was now detained there by a mixture of curiosity and tenderness….concluding that those papers were letters of her late mother. Presently he knelt down, and with a look so solemn as she had seldom seen him assume, and which was mingled with a certain wild expression, that partook more of horror than of any other character, he prayed silently for a considerable time. When he rose, a ghastly paleness was on his countenance….He took from among [the papers] a small case, and from thence a miniature picture. The rays of light fell strongly upon it, and she perceived it to be that of a lady, but not her mother. St. Aubert gazed earnestly and tenderly upon this portrait, put it up to his lips, and then to his heart, and sighed with a convulsive force. … At length St. Aubert returned the picture into its case; and Emily, recollecting that she was intruding upon his private sorrows, softly withdrew from the chamber (Radcliffe: 26).

The scene focuses on the intensity of emotion provoked by the precious item. St. Aubert kneels, as if before an alter, and prays; his unaccustomed solemnity and “wild expression” signal a quasi-religious fervor. Moreover, when he opens the miniature, he clasps and kisses it, as if it were a sacred item, before encasing it again to keep for private devotions. Unlike the papers he reads, which remain mysterious to Emily, the portrait appears transparent once removed from its case: Emily can see clearly that it represents an unknown woman, with the power to produce passion. In Northanger Abbey (1818), Austen alludes to this episode from The Mysteries of Udolpho in order to ridicule the sentimental conceit that paintings possess an iconic power akin to religious relics. Catherine Morland, the heroine,

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has been reading The Mysteries of Udolpho, and when, Radcliffe-addled, she finally sees a portrait of the mother of her suitor Henry and his sister Eleanor whom she fears General Tilney has murdered, she approaches it with the convictions of a novel-reader : It represented a very lovely woman, with a mild and pensive countenance, justifying, so far, the expectations of its new observer, but they were not in every respect answered, for Catherine had depended upon meeting with features, air, complexion that should be the very counterpart, the very image, if not of Henry’s, then of Eleanor’s;–the only portraits of which she had been in the habit of thinking, bearing always an equal resemblance of mother and child. A face once taken was taken for generations. But here she was obliged to look and consider and study for a likeness. She contemplated it, however, in spite of this drawback, with much emotion; and…left it unwillingly (Austen: 196).

While not a miniature, the painting works similarly to arouse sentimental feeling. While the image seems to reveal the sitter’s character, like Darcy’s portrait, it does not transparently portray resemblance. In this satirical novel about the delusions of wrong reading, of both books and people, Austen demystifies the portrait as a sign of a truth beyond language. Moreover, viewing it does not produce the cathartic passion or enlightenment that marks sentimental observers. Instead, Catherine must “study” to find meaning in it – just as, ironically, she “studies” gothic fiction in order to (mis)interpret the General as a murderer. Paintings also appear as symbols of delusion in Emma. When the matchmaking heroine undertakes to paint a portrait of the very pretty Harriet, “the natural daughter of somebody,” she intends it to serve as a covert means of igniting Mr. Elton’s supposed love, a similar tactic to her lie about the court plaster (Austen: 23). In her efforts to represent Harriet in the most appealing light to Mr. Elton, Emma adds “a little improvement to the figure…more height, and considerably more elegance” (Austen: 47). Her belief that the portrait will serve as a more powerful representation of Harriet’s charms than Harriet herself underscores the sentimental belief that visual representations portray a deeper reality even than the original face. So it appears to work with Mr. Elton. When Emma entrusts him with the task of taking the painting to London to be framed, he sighs,“What a precious deposit!,” denying that Emma as made the figure too tall (I, vi, 49). Ironically, however, Mr. Elton is thoroughly mercenary, keenly attuned to the pleasures of a luxurious carriage, fine food and creature comforts like sheepskin rugs (Austen: 115). He values the painting as a means to flatter Emma, not as a representation of Harriet. “The Picture, elegantly framed” becomes a commodity to be exchanged for Emma’s hand in marriage and her £10,000 per annum: it is his “deposit” in the hope of the return of Emma’s fortune (Austen: 49). While Austen derogates many collectibles and objects, books and writing

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especially possess a special set of hazards and powers. She often contrasts the commodification of literature, both as the creative act of writing and the consumptive one of reading, with true understanding of literature’s meaning – as, for example, when the social-climbing Caroline Bingley in Pride and Prejudice chooses a book at Netherfield only because it is the second volume of the one chosen by Mr. Darcy, whom she is courting (Austen: 60). This contrast between commercial and ideational conceptions of books appears frequently in sentimental fiction. Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), for example, opens with a preface that recounts the so-called editor’s discovery of the very book itself as a tattered manuscript, used as gun-wadding by a hunting curate. Mackenzie’s ironic contrast between sentimental narrative with figurative meaning and mere paper material underscores the incompatibility between sensibility and the physical world. Indeed, the slender, pale hero of the novel, Harley, possesses a moral sensibility far finer than that of the sweaty, gun-toting curate: while the latter kills animals, the former dies of unrequited love and untreated consumption. The sentimental conceit of the fragmented manuscript serves as a reification of the perceptual fragmentation of extreme sensibility. This trope appears most famously in Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759 – 68), where a blank page, a black page, asterisks, missing lines and other typographical tricks interrupt the reading. Ann Radcliffe’s gothic mysteries also frequently feature crabbed manuscripts, which the heroine discovers to reveal a terrible secret. In these cases, the physicality of the book dominates its moral meaning.14 Perhaps the most obvious example of Austen’s mockery of this conceit is the scroll that Catherine discovers in Northanger Abbey. Believing it to be a confession or narrative of victimization penned by an abused, perhaps murdered, heroine, she eagerly unrolls it only to discover that it is a laundry list. By replacing Radcliffe’s agonized accounts of tyranny and imprisonment with a mundane inventory of clothes to be cleaned, Austen demystifies manuscript itself, and portrays the mundane materiality of writing. The tension between revering the material object and understanding its moral or social significance informs Austen’s representation of letters in particular. Letters have special importance in Emma , a book about misread cues, because the central mystery concerning the secret engagement of Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill is largely conducted by means of clandestine correspondence. Jane goes daily to the post-office, ostensibly to collect the Bates’ letters, but also to fetch and send her own. From the start of the novel, Jane’s and Frank’s relatives praise their letters: in the second chapter, for example, the narrator describes the general view that Mr. Frank Churchill has written “a very hand14 Janet Todd, Sensibility : An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 5 – 6.

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some letter, indeed” to his new mother-in-law, Mrs. Weston (Austen: 18). The letter, however, substitutes for the visit he had promised upon her wedding; thus, its handsomeness masks Frank’s real rudeness, indifference and selfishness, just as his name, “Frank,” belies his secretive character. In another example, the garrulous and lonely Miss Bates boasts to Emma of her intimate relationship with her niece Jane Fairfax by underscoring the length of Jane’s letters to her : “but, first of all, I really must, in justice to Jane, apologise for her writing so short a letter–only two pages you see–hardly two–and in general she fills the whole paper and crosses half” (Austen: 157). When Emma courteously commends Jane’s handwriting, the delighted Miss Bates repeats the compliment twice to her mother. By focusing on the physical aspects of the letter, its length and script, rather than discussing its contents, Miss Bates treats the letter solely as a object: it becomes physical evidence of a presumed affection, an owned thing that replace the un-ownable dynamic of relationship. Exchanges such as this quantify and reify the act of communication and, by extension, the relationship between family members and intimates. In contrast, while reading Frank’s letter confessing his secret engagement to Jane Fairfax at the end of the book, Mr. Knightley comments to Emma on its contents, and in fact deplores its length, disparaging its “fine complimentary opening”(Austen: 225). His use of the letter as part of his conversation with her on behavior, morality and judgment contrasts with the other characters’ fetishization of letters. Although Austen never refers to the Bible itself, she does depict the misuse of books as quasi-sacred objects in a secularizing society.15 In the opening chapter of Persuasion (1818), the conceited and shallow Sir Walter Elliott, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there, he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt, as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century–and there, if every other leaf was powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed (Austen: 3).

The secular Baronetage here stands in for the sacred book of consolation and transcendence: the Bible. Like the Bible, it erases the distractions and disappointments of the present world, the “domestic affairs” of the moment, and replaces them with “admiration and respect” at the “endless creations” of the ages, and the reader’s own place in time. Later, the narrator ironically emphasizes the revered status of the Baronetage by reporting that Sir Walter’s vain, selfcentered daughter Elizabeth, distressed by her unmarried condition, closes “the 15 Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park,” in Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. Ian Watt (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1963), 124 – 40, 228.

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book of books…with averted eyes” (Austen: 7). As the secular equivalent of the sacred text, the Bible, the Baronetage symbolically indicts a society that values heritage, inheritance and status over charity, piety and love. Books also function in Austen’s texts as vessels of sacred values made fashionably commercial and secular. Most obviously, in Sense and Sensibility (1811), the sentimental Marianne Dashwood largely determines her opinion of the scurrilous John Willoughby by his fondness for Romantic poetry. Not only does Marianne judge Willoughby by his cover – his pretense of Romantic spontaneity – but she also confuses her regard for the substance of Scott and Cowper with their mass-produced objectification as items of contemporary fashion. For her, the physical object of the book garners an almost sacred significance. When Elinor and Marianne are fantasizing about the delights of a large fortune, Edward teases them by remarking, “What a happy day for booksellers, music-sellers, and print-shops! You, Miss Dashwood, would give a general commission for every new print of merit to be sent to you–and as for Marianne, I know her greatness of soul, there would not be music enough in London to content her. And books! – Thomson, Cowper, Scott – she would buy them all over and over again; she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree” (Austen: 92).

Edward’s teasing highlights the similarity between sentimental values and the sacralization of objects as relics. Marianne regards the object of the book as just as valuable as its message of the love of nature: she confuses the commodity with the ideal.

The Objectification of the Sacred Austen’s novels center on the specific objectification of what ought never to be made into a fungible commodity : women and marriage. She depicts the use of human beings as objects of exchange in her plots about men and women scheming to marry profitably ; correspondingly, she portrays the transformation of what had been a sacred contract, marriage, into a mercenary calculation. Both appear deep violations of morality. All of her novels chronicle the trials of heroines who struggle to maintain their moral principles and a sense of their own, incalculable value in the face of everyone else’s calculations, and face the looming fear of poverty, ostracization, or contempt in a society that values money above all. The consequences of marriage for money alone appear everywhere: Willoughby’s life-long regret, for example, in Sense and Sensibility, and Isabella Thorpe’s disastrous loss of two suitors in Northanger Abbey. None-

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theless, the consequences of marrying for passion alone are equally hazardous, as shown by the unpleasant marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, and of Mr. and Mrs. Palmer in Sense and Sensibility. Each of Austen’s heroines must weigh the hazards of a life of impoverished spinsterhood against selling oneself for security. None of Austen’s novels, however, explores the consequences of equating people and marriage with profit more thoroughly than Mansfield Park (1814). As many critics have observed, the novel includes an indictment of slavery both in the motif of Sir Thomas’s failing Antiguan slave-plantation, and in the central figure of the creep-mouse heroine Fanny Price.16 Fanny has become an object to be bartered by her poverty-stricken mother, who eloped with Lieutenant Price for love and now literally pays the “price,” of a large family and a small income. Mrs. Price essentially sells her to Sir Thomas, who buys her as an unpaid companion and servant to the penny-pinching Mrs. Norris. The fact that none of the Bertram family consider for a moment Fanny’s feelings at being torn from her family, or the descent from being the eldest in the family to the youngest, from being “important as a play-fellow, instructress and nurse” to a powerless minion, underscores the dehumanization of the girl as a new purchase (Austen: 14). Fanny’s life of menial tasks, steady humiliation and compelled, constant asseverations of gratitude mirrors that of a house-slave: for the Bertrams, her class status and poverty, along with her frail constitution, serve to condemn her as an inferior species of human. The Bertram sisters reflect the degraded, mercantile values of their parents, especially their indolent and superficial mother with her petted pug and her unfinished netting. They too rate their cousin by her possessions, both material (sashes) and personal (languages): They could not but hold [Fanny] cheap on finding that she had but two sashes, and had never learnt French; and when they perceived her to be a little struck with the duet they were so good as to play, they could do no more than make her a generous present of some of their least valued toys, and leave her to herself, while they adjourned to whatever might be the favourite [sic] holiday-sport of the moment, making artificial flowers or wasting gold paper (Austen: 13 – 14).

Fanny’s indifference to their possessions, both material and personal – their clothes and their musical accomplishments – and their instinct to placate her, or 16 William Jarvis, Jane Austen and Religion (Oxon: The Stonesfield Press, 1996), 91 – 94; Edward Said claims Austen uncritically embraced British imperialism, but many other critics have challenged this: for example, Michael Griffin, Jane Austen and Religion, 132 – 4, and Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1979). Edward W. Said maintains that Austen supported imperialism in “Jane Austen and Empire,” in Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978): 81 – 97.

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fob her off, with their toys demonstrates the Bertram girls’ preference for display, performance and consumption over emotion and relationship. This is part of Austen’s repeated disparagement of overvaluing the fashionable, female accomplishments – foreign languages, dancing, embroidery, music, painting and so forth – that were designed to decorate a woman in order that she might snare a rich husband (Poovey : 29; Kirkham: 6 – 9): The details of “making artificial flowers or wasting gold paper” symbolically highlight the sisters’ profligate tendency to turn nature into art, beauty into object. The novel, indeed, opens with a blunt calculation of the monetary value of the young Ward sisters before their marriages. Most highly valued in the marriage market was Maria, the middle sister : About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet’s lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income. All Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match, and her uncle, the lawyer, himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it (Austen: 3).

The narrator ventriloquizes the voice of “all Huntingdon” by denigrating Miss Maria’s dowry as “only seven thousand pounds,” in place of the ten thousand that would make the exchange for a baronet’s status and luxury fair, or “equitable” (my italics). Furthermore, apparently Maria is not markedly more “handsome” than her two sisters, and thus lacks physical beauty to make up for the dowry shortfall. Sir Thomas, in other words, made a bad bargain by buying an overrated commodity. This becomes still clearer when the narrator recounts that the eldest Ward sister, “at the end of half a dozen years, found herself obliged to be attached to the Rev. Mr. Norris…with scarcely any private fortune” while the youngest “fared yet worse” (Austen: 3). Rather than depicting marriage as a commitment of love and faith, the narrator shows it to be a mercenary contract exchanging the female’s body and money for her security. Women become objects in the marriage market. Moreover, Mansfield Park is the novel that most openly confronts religion, and through this the secularization of religious concepts and practices. Indeed, Austen claimed that the novel was “about ordination,” yet the role of religion and spirituality in it remains oddly peripheral.17 Felicia Bonaparte explains this by arguing that the novel works metafictionally, rather than representationally, to offer an ideally ordered portrait of the world rather than a realistic one, and of a world, moreover, that has been inspired by the author’s idea of a new kind of 17 Jane Austen to to Cassandra Austen, January 1813 in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. R.W. Chapman, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 298.

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religion. She suggests that Austen provides this vision precisely because the religious values of contemporary society, embodied by the faulty “father” Sir Thomas, have decayed: as evidence of this “secularism: chapels, as Fanny observes at Sotherton, are no longer used for prayers, clergymen are no longer in residence, no one feels, in God’s very house, the “awful” presence of the deity.”18 While Bonaparte’s interpretation is enlightening, the discussion of religious practices between Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford also enacts Austen’s view of the conflict between materialism and morality in contemporary society. It centers on the difference between Edmund’s idealistic or theoretical view of prayer, and Mary’s cynical estimation of the physical discomfort of the prayers, that is the praying people. After Fanny exclaims that, “Awhole family assembling regularly for the purpose of prayer, is fine!”, Mary replies, laughing: “Very fine indeed!…It must do the heads of the family a great deal of good to force all the poor housemaids and footmen to leave business and pleasure, and say their prayers here twice a day, while they are inventing excuses themselves for staying away…The obligation of attendance, the formality, the restraint, and the length of time–altogether it is a formidable thing, and what nobody likes” (Austen: 86 – 87).

Mary’s skepticism about the possibility of spiritual transcendence reflects what Austen saw as a degrading focus on the body rather than the soul, a preference for the physical over the spiritual, for entertainment over contemplation. Mary’s very speech desacralizes Anglican practices by representing them as examples of feudal tyranny, the exercise of power rather than the invitation to worship. Mary herself specializes in ridiculing many of the values held by conventional society. She deems marriage, rather than a holy institution, a matter of commercial exchange, and one, moreover, based on greed and deceit, considering it “of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others and are least honest themselves” (Austen: 46). Nonetheless, “Matrimony was her object,” and although as a Regency woman she has no viable alternatives, the cynicism with which she approaches this “transaction” exposes her immorality (Austen: 42). When she declares “I would have every body marry if they can do it properly ; I do not like to have people throw themselves away ; but every body should marry as soon as they can do it to advantage,” she commodifies men and women as objects either to be sold or “thrown away.” (I, iv, 43). She openly criticizes her uncle and discusses her aunt’s life, a violation of propriety in Austen’s time and one that Fanny deplores, and even condemns the admiralty in the face of Edmund’s solemn praise. Her indecent pun “ Of Rears and Vices, I saw enough” scandalously reduces the naval institution to body parts and acts, a 18 Felicia Bonaparte, “‘Let Other Pens Dwell on Guilt and Misery’: The Ordination of the Text and the Subversion of ‘Religion’ in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park,” Religion and Literature 23, 2 (Summer 2011), 50; 45 – 67.

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marked example of the reduction of the conceptual to the material, and of the human to the bestial (Austen: 60). She parodies Hawkins Browne’s “Address to Tobacco” to mock Sir Thomas’ patriarchal role, and adheres to “the true London maxim, that every thing is to be got with money” (Austen: 58). Ironically, she plays the harp expertly. In her hands, the instrument of angels becomes a tool of seduction: The harp arrived, and rather added to her beauty, wit, and good humour, for she played it with the greatest obligingness, with an expression and taste which were peculiarly becoming, and there was something clever to be said at the close of every air…. Ayoung woman, pretty, lively, with a harp as elegant as herself; and both placed near a window, cut down to the ground, and opening on a little lawn, surrounded by shrubs in the rich foliage of summer, was enough to catch any man’s heart (Austen: 64 – 5).

This scene of apparent innocence and beauty contrasts with Mary’s real, underlying cynicism. While she has the capacity for redemption, as her attraction to Edmund reveals, in the end her disillusionment and avarice doom her. Like her brother, who pursues Fanny as a rarity to be possessed but instead elopes with Maria Bertram, who is more readily at hand, Mary forfeits the hope of spiritual purity for instant gratification.

Conclusion Objects in Austen’s novels usually operate to satirize sentimental fiction and contemporary society. Occasionally, however, they work symbolically to represent a complex interweaving of the sacred and the commodity. Perhaps the object par excellence that displays this is Fanny Price’s amber cross, worn for her coming-out ball – the occasion of her transformation from servant to bride-forsale. The cross, a gift from her favorite brother William, represents both the bond of love between the siblings and Fanny’s innate, spiritual virtue: not only does it symbolize Christianity, but its material, amber, traditionally holds talismanic power to give long life and health.19 In the context of Fanny’s ball, however, the cross is commandeered for a different purpose: to attract a buyer. The narrator hints at this paradox by recording that, Fanny, “did not know how either to wear the cross, or to refrain from wearing it” (Austen: 257). While she literally lacks a chain to suspend the cross, figuratively, the passage suggests that she does not know how to reconcile its spiritual and practical significance, how to see it as a sacred symbol of faith and also a lure decorating her for the marriage market. The ambiguity of this re-purposing of the cross intensifies when Mary Crawford 19 Jane Austen herself possessed such a cross, a gift from her own brother.

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induces her to choose one of Mary’s own necklaces to hang it on, and then reveals that the one Fanny takes is a gift from Mary’s brother Henry, who is pursuing Fanny for sport. When Fanny attempts to return it, Mary laughs that Henry will be flattered, “seeing around your lovely throat an ornament which his money purchased three years ago, before he knew there was such a throat in the world” (Austen: 259). The repetition of the term “throat” sinisterly characterizes Fanny as mere flesh. Fortunately, the clasp is found to be too large to slip through the ring of the cross: instead, Fanny is able to thread it through a simple and slender chain that Edmund, whom she loves, has just given her. This combination of cross and chain holds symbolic and sacred significance, as a foreshadowing of their holy union in marriage: Fanny recognizes this,“having, with delightful feelings, joined the chain and the cross, those memorials of the two most beloved of her heart, those dearest tokens so formed for each other by every thing real and imaginary” (Austen: 271). In contrast to the elaborate chain, which she also wears, the cross and the chain together, a sacralized object, imply a holy union. The symbolic sacredness of Fanny’s cross and chain stands as an exception to Austen’s usual representation of things intended for personal adornment. Her other novels do feature jewelry that symbolizes marriage, but virtually always as examples of vanity, delusion or materialism. In Sense and Sensibility, for example, the ring made of Lucy Steele’s hair that Edward wears ought to symbolize love and fidelity, but since Edward no longer loves Lucy and has compromised his commitment to her by falling in love with Elinor, instead it stands for the entrapment. Ironically, Elinor falsely believes the hair hers, acquired clandestinely. Similarly, in Northanger Abbey, when Isabella Thorpe fantasizes about the “brilliant exhibition of hoop-rings” she will wear when she is married to the “envy of every valued old friend,” she reveals the commodification of marriage by means of the symbol of the ring (Austen:125). Throughout her work, Jane Austen explores the transformation of the sacred into the commodity, and the object into a vessel of sacredness. Marriage, women, and religion become reified and lose their moral power ; objects become fetishized and acquire too much of it. Austen’s treatment of things enacts her satiric view of sentimental fiction, in which characters invest objects with memory and meaning precisely because of the superabundance of their own emotions, and the obduracy of an unfeeling world; things become their substitutions for flintyhearted people and indifferent institutions. In contrast, Austen mocks the sentimental clich¦s of characterization and plot that betray the Romantic fallacy of confusing feeling and thing, the spiritual and the material. Her novels depict objects as embodiments of misdirected value: rather than symbolizing spirituality or representing feeling, they incarnate the transformation or loss of both in a materialistic society. Objects show the commercialization of feeling and the

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substitution of consumption for relationship and responsibility. They have replaced the sacred.

Works cited Austen, Jane. Emma, ed. R.W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Austen, Jane. Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. W. W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952. Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park, ed. R.W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey, eds. Barbara M. Benedict and Deidre LeFaye. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Austen, Jane. Persuasion, ed. R.W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice, ed. Pat Rogers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility, ed. R.W. Chapman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Benedict, Barbara M. “Jane Austen and The Culture of Circulating Libraries: The Construction of Female Literacy,” in Revising Women: Feminist Essays in EighteenthCentury ‘Women’s Fiction’ and Social Engagement, ed. Paula R. Backscheider. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000: 147 – 199. –. “Saying Things: Collecting Conflicts in Eighteenth-Century Object Literatures.” Centerpiece Article, Blackwell’s Literature Compass: The Eighteenth Century, vol. 3 (2006):689 – 719. –. “The Trouble with Things: Objects and the Commodification of Sociability,” A Companion to Jane Austen, in eds. Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite. Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2009: 343 – 54. Blackwell, Mark. ‘The People Things Make: Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding and the Properties of the Self ’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35 (2006): 77 – 95. Bonaparte, Felicia. “‘Let Other Pens Dwell on Guilt and Misery’: The Ordination of the Text and the Subversion of ‘Religion’ in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park,” Religion and Literature 23, 2 (Summer 2011): 45 – 67. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory” in Things, ed. B. Brown, Critical Inquiry 28 (2001): 1 – 16. Bradbrook, Frank W. Jane Austen and her Predecessors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Brownstein, Rachel M. “Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. De Grazia, Margreta, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass. “Introduction” in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, eds. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996: 1 – 13. Festa, Lynn. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.

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Fielding, Henry. Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin. Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983. Griffin, Michael. Jane Austen and Religion: Salvation and Society in Georgian England. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Jarvis, William. Jane Austen and Religion. Oxon: The Stonesfield Press, 1996. Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass, eds. Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kirkham, Margaret. Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction. Sussex: Harvester Press; Totowa: Barnes and Noble, 1983. LeFaye, Deidre. Jane Austen: A Family Record, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Lippincott, Lawrence. “Expanding on portraiture: The market, the public, and the hierarchy of genres in eighteenth-century Britain”, in The Consumption of Culture, eds. Bermingham and Brewer. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. MacGregor, Arthur. Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Moler, Kenneth. Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. Pearce, Susan M. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pope, Alexander. The Rape of the Lock in Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963. Radcliffe, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonomy Dobre¦. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970. Rigby, Douglas and Elizabeth. Lock, Stock and Barrel: The Story of Collecting. Philadelphia, New York, London: J.B.Lippincott Co., 1944. Roberts, Warren. Jane Austen and the French Revolution. London: Macmillan, 1979. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Todd, Janet. “Ivory Miniatures and the Art of Jane Austen,” in Re-Drawing Austen: Picturesque Travels in Austenland, eds. B. Battaglia and D. Saglia. Napoli: Liguori, 2004: 115 – 123. –. Sensibility : An Introduction. London and New York: Methuen, 1986. Trilling, Lionel. “Mansfield Park,” in Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. Ian Watt. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1963: 124 – 40. Waldron, Mary. Jane Austen and the Fiction of her Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language. Springfield, Mass.: C. And G. Merriam Co., 1923. Willis, Lesley. “Religion in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park,” English Studies in Canada 13, 1 (1987): 65 – 78.

Paola Partenza

Alfred Tennyson’s De-sacralization of the Afterlife

Alfred Tennyson’s poetry marks a turning point between Romantic and Victorian epistemology. He was greatly influenced by the philosophic and scientific thought that reached him through the works of William Whewell and the early scientists of his time, Tennyson pushed the limits of his thinking beyond argument and conclusions found in his contemporaries. The problematic debate of his time firstly was represented by Lyell’s Principles of Geology and, secondly, by Robert Chambers whose Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation destabilized the common idea of a creation exclusively based on God, of a universe whose fundamental criterion was laid on scientific evolution and the adaptation of all creatures to an inevitable genetic development. But, as William Irvine observed: “To the abyss of space, Lyell added an abyss of time, and filled it with the Darwinian facts of struggle for survival and extinction of species” (620). Whereas Chambers in his work tried to include natural sciences within a history of creation, he did not deny the existence of a superior intelligence, but believed in adaptation and progress in creation. He thought that each aspect of Nature was the expression of change and development of higher forms. If Lyell acquainted the poet with nature as violent struggle – also recalled by the poet in the line 15 of In Memoriam LVI, in which Tennyson defines nature “red in tooth and claw” – on the other hand, Chambers’s Vestiges introduced him to the concepts of evolution. In undertaking the analysis of concepts such as time, space, flux and change, he analyzes nature and universe with the purpose of searching for man’s logical significance of the existence of God. Thus Irvine, while acknowledging the poet’s venturing into a “timid transcendentalism” (621), finds a nexus of confusion and fear, lacking the necessary conviction to make his poetry something more than a piece for the immediate occasion, he remarks: “Tennyson saw in his darker moods not the Newtonian harmonies of benevolent intelligence, but blind mechanism and vacant immensity” (620) as the poet clearly expressed in In Memoriam, III. For Tennyson, Darwinism seems to appear before Darwin himself, and the influence of different scientific works gave

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him the possibility to re-consider the whole system of his thoughts, enlightening the ceaseless conflict between science and religion. After Hallam’s death Tennyson searches for a response to death; he desacralizes the afterlife defining it as a mere illusion: the illusion of man’s conquest over death, attributing to religion the responsibility to reduce life before death to a preparation for another life. Tennyson’s unsatisfactory religious doctrine leaves him on the verge, divided between refusal and acceptance: “doubt became a chronic” (Irvine, 620) state of distrust: The Lord let the house of a brute to the soul of a man, And the man said, ‘Am I your debtor?’ And the Lord–‘Not yet; but make it as clean as you can, And then I will let you a better.’ If my body comes from brutes, my soul uncertain or a fable. Why not bask amid the senses while the sun of morning shines, I, the finer brute rejoicing in my hounds, and in my stable, Youth and health, and birth and wealth, and choice of women and of wines? What hast thou done for me, grim Old Age, save breaking my bones on the rack? Would I had past in the morning that looks so bright from afar! (“By an Evolutionist”)

As Lockyer beholds, in Tennyson’s poetry “we are brought face to face with the modern Cosmogony based upon science and Evolution” (9); the poet’s main concern seems to be involved more with the rational consolation of life that is reabsorbed within a natural cycle in which he recognizes creatures that belong to the dead rather than the living. Whereas, afterlife is seen as otherness – albeit for the poet it is an empty otherness – which is conceived through traditional religious conceits of redemption and asylum, and which collides with Tennyson’s firm belief in natural process and genetic evolution (Partenza 103 ff.). The motif becomes obsessive in his poetry showing an unrelieved tension between spirit and matter, imagination and existence. He is convinced that religion and its tradition had produced an illusionistic perspective, and this prompted him to aspire to shape existence into the abiding form of poetry, trying to give optical truth to life on a scientific basis, and giving his suffering a sense of anguish and limitation to a secular mode of reality : “All the inner, all the outer world of pain” (“O, Were I Loved As I Desire To Be!”, l. 5). The tension arising from this dualism caused him to search for symbols which might bridge his inner conflict and quest in a permanent and meaningful form. Tennyson tackles the problems of the origin of life and the reasons for its stability and continuity. If his tendency to see human beings as part of the kosmos – subject to the same principles as the

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rest of nature – persists in his poetic vision, at the same time, he tries to create a symbolic world as a counterpart of the misleading world of religion. While the Romantic tradition saw in these two elements, spirit and breath, the right way to interpret creation and man’s existence, Tennyson, on the contrary, fuses “spirit” and “breath” into the scientific tradition of his time, accepting the theories in which God has nothing to do with the origin of the universe, as he says: “The spirit does but mean the breath” (In Memoriam, 56, l. 7). Probably the most crucial aspect of this process of secular rationalization for man’s existence is the aforementioned idea of the phenomenon of genetic evolution, firstly suggested by Chambers, and secondly by Darwin. Once de-sacralized the original spirit/soul of transcendental creation, Tennyson also desacralizes the soul’s immortality in the afterlife. He opposes it to the creation of a symbolic world, that of poetry, which is Tennyson’s response to man’s dream of immortality, as he points out, “Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?” (“The Higher Pantheism”, l. 4). His contemplation of man’s immortality through poetry stimulates his imagination and reflection giving impulse to a personal poetic philosophy which opens a pathway to the appreciation of nature and the human being as they are, liberated from the chains of the eschatological tradition. He personalizes the meaning of life and death and commends man’s reabsorption in nature as the unique and legitimate outcome. This might be the only expression of his convictions and doubts, showing man with all his frailties and imperfections; and, since he believes man exists in a world of suffering, doomed to accept with hopelessness the distance between the real and the ideal, he tries to transform this distance into something indeterminately in-between: an abyss. The poet imagines this abyss as a “dynamic location” (Fay, 585) which alludes to poetic writing – (it is meant as poi]y, that is compose, write, describe in verse [Liddle-Scott-Jones], in other words, it is meant as the poet’s creative sphere, and his own poetic action) – he considers it as the only location in which any work of art can achieve its eternity. This immediate association of abyss and art might be assimilated with Hegel’s concept of art, according to which “the symbolic artist […] strives to imagine a shape for the meaning, or a meaning for the art” (440). This association establishes a multifunctional pattern: Tennyson exhibits an artistic shape of his idea of abyss translating into poetic form his anxiety, attributing a semiotic meaning to afterlife that appears to be enigmatic and irrational rather than eschatological. The poet’s abstracted relationship to the ideal contrasts with the rationalist vision of the purpose of the poetic art according to which, […] the artist has to create out of the abundance of life and not out of the abundance of abstract generalities, since, while the medium of philosophy’s production is thought, art’s is actual external configurations. […] what the ideal work of art properly provides

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is not only the appearance of the inner spirit in the reality of external forms; on the contrary, it is the absolute truth and rationality of the actual world which should attain external appearance (Hegel Aesthetics, 281 – 2, sic.).

Tennyson was deeply steeped in philosophic, scientific and religious debates that believed the afterlife to be a crucial criterion for a reliable answer to theistic issues. The poet seems to achieve the status of a mystic, and his poetry might be considered “a tool for understanding the concept of immortality” (Jones, qtd. in Mazzeno 39); as Arthur Carr notes: As a recurrent poetic strategy, with its own dialectic equation, the interchanging play of memory and desire seems a mask of the personality. […] If the strategy of the mask of age both conceals and connotes anxiety, it is also sufficient to bind together the elements of a divided sensibility. The war of sense and conscience is no simple opposition between frustration and desire. The dialectic plays in both the inner and the outer worlds at once. There are the arrows of conscience and the chains of obligation. There are the demands of duty and the commands of love. Consequently, the objects of sense pass swiftly into symbols of desire, and the laws of dreams are cast outwards over the objects of sense. […] In these terms Tennyson continues to explore the premises of romantic art, following Byron, then Keats and Coleridge, and even Shelley, in employing egocentric melancholy and the sensuous and supersensuous imagery of dream, and in debating the role of the artist in society (qtd. in Killaham 48 – 49).

My aim in the present chapter is to re-open the familiar case of Tennyson’s “doubt”. I wish to show how insistently Tennyson’s poems complicate this characterization of his work. In 1859 Tennyson re-works an earlier poem, “Tithon” drafted in 1833 (after Hallam’s death), and published as “Tithonus” on the Cornhill in 1860. The poem is frequently explained as an interesting example of classic imagination intruding into a philosophical work. Some scholars have suggested that in it Tennyson is merely representing the views of other thinkers, while others believe that it does, in some way, describe Tennyson’s own thought and feeling. Clyde de L. Ryals, for example, observes that: […] the effect of Hallam’s death on Tennyson’s poetry was a greater objectification of the poet’s inner emotions, and in “Tithonus” he traced his own condition and his own aspirations toward a new poetic orientation. Nevertheless, the fact of Hallam’s demise is still present in his verse, and it manifests itself in a veiled death-wish on the part of the poet and in a desire for another kind of life – which is to say that the poetry directly resulting from the loss of Hallam possesses even more fully than the earlier verse the tension between emotional and intellectual meaning (133).

Ryals thus offers an example of Tennyson’s experimentalism which reflects the tension between inwardness and thought, sense and conscience. In a memorable figuration Tennyson offers a picture of Tithonus as a despairing and meditative character binding myth and thought in a web of sympathy and sensation. The

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poet seems to exhibit what Hegel pointed out, that “the content of myth is thought” (qtd. in Derrida 101), although “the mythic dimension remains formal and exterior” (Ibidem). In the poem the dominant symbol is represented by the myth of Tithonus who is consumed by “cruel immortality” (line 5); in this case Tennyson highlights the dualism of temporal and eternal, which mirrors the poet’s anxious search for an answer to the teleological issue of the universe. Tennyson’s question concerning what is the relationship between mortals and God, the world of living and that of a living-dead is the central focus of the poem. Both are parts of the same quest, and it is reasonable to infer that a solution to the problem of their inter-relationship will, in part, show Tennyson’s intellectual journey. It may be useful to begin by considering the first lines of the poem, noting the ways in which reference is made to the relationship between nature and Tithonus; Tithonus is objectified in the fifth line through the use of the words “Me only”. The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: […]

(lines 1 – 6)

Clear visual and emotional effects are evident in the above lines through the landscape, which expresses the salutary effects in the process of the renovation of nature, as everything is re-absorbed in nature, and is abruptly interrupted by Tithonus who mourns his anomalous condition; he is “consumed” by “cruel immortality”, “I wither slowly in thine arms,/Here at the quiet limit of the world” (lines 6 – 7). But this destruction is moral, he feels he does not belong to any of the worlds depicted, neither the Goddess’ nor men’s. And “the quiet limit of the world” (line 7) is both perceived as the world of illusion, and the exact border which divides man’s possibility from his realization. The clash between man and God (the Goddess) is clearly expressed in lines 28 – 29 which describe the essential nature of this relationship, which is denied by means of a question: “Let me go: take back thy gift/Why should a man desire in any way/To vary from the kindly race of men /[…]?” The alienation of man from the realm of the Goddess is not overcome, Tithonus reflects on his unnatural condition comprehending that that “quiet limit” is not the desired locus amoenus, but the antithesis of man’s idealized paradise. According to this view, the relationship to the Goddess obviously is denigratory and distressing, it dethrones man from sovereign command and agency in nature. His looking back at his past existence and the “glimpse of that dark world where [he] was born”(line 33), make Tithonus aware

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of what he has lost. It is “the quiet limit” which establishes the right distance for a correct vision of himself, he understands that what gives man immortality is represented by the power to die (“Of happy men that have the power to die”, line 70) and finally return to nature as one of its elements: “Release me, and restore me to the ground;/[…] I earth in earth” (lines 72 – 5). It is a vision for which the poet rejects the theological idea of the soul for a more scientific, what we might call philosophical, position. The few opening lines find their solution in the last part of the poem, showing a reassuring circularity which is the expression of the poet’s faith in the mortal and cycling life on earth: Of happy men that have the power to die, And grassy barrows of the happier dead. Release me, and restore me to the ground; Thou seÚst all things, thou wilt see my grave: Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn; I earth in earth forget these empty courts, And thee returning on thy silver wheels.

(lines 70 – 76)

Tennyson’s oxymoronic use of the words “immortality” and “consumes”, mirrors the final lines in which he proposes the only plausible solution: “I earth in earth forget these empty courts” (line 75). The character’s inner torment is unbearable, because he lives in an un-historical temporality, possessing an everlasting duration without form1, or essence. These are terms that will dominate the subsequent reflection. His assimilation to “A white-hair’d shadow” (line 8) is an initial move toward his awareness of being something other than what he in fact was; the poet’s emphasis is on encompassing time in contrast to mere duration. The last lines of the poem can be interpreted as a system in which the phenomena of heaven and earth were deduced from the mixture of two primary elements, light and dark, time and space. It is clear that this part of the poem contains views on cosmology in which all phenomena are interconnected. In fact, from a linguistic viewpoint, we must note that the description is given by Tithonus in the indicative mood as a matter of fact, and for this purpose he uses such phrases as “The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts” (line 49). Although it must be admitted that the statements made about “the Gods” seem at first sight to preclude the possibility of attaching much importance to their space of action and, consequently, the afterlife, the fact that in the last lines of the poem Tithonus wants to return to his origin, it was necessary for him to learn about it, indicate that all these aspects, and consequently, speculations, cannot be ignored. 1 Here the word “form” is meant with the platonic meaning of “idea”.

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Tennyson’s insistence on time reveals his conviction of an abstract and immaterial divinity which is possible, for him, to speculate on in a conscious poetical work, filling the gap determined by his multifarious questions; he emblematically dissolves them in the before mentioned “abyss”, trying to give poetic consistence to something that will necessarily decline through death. This distressing aspect is emblematically described by Tithonus himself, when he is conscious of having become “A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream” (line 8). In reducing Tithonus’s life to a shadow – a frail expression of his reality (“this gray shadow, once a man”, line 11) – the poet suggests a concept of the shadow as being co-extensive with death; it does not imply the measurableness of time, it does not include a beginning, middle and end; with death man and shadow disappear (“And all I was in ashes”, line 23) remaining only what he has done, his work. In the realm of the Goddess, Tithonus’s time – deprived of chronology (“Hours indignant”, line 18) – “could not end [him], [leaving] [him] maim’d” (line 20). Tithonus’s characterisation as “maim’d” echoes St Simeon Stylites’ words: “Unfit for earth, unfit for heaven” (“St. Simeon Stylites”, line 3). The figure of St. Simeon2 is fundamental in understanding Tennyson’s reflection on religion. St. Simeon is too human to belong to heaven, and too heavenly to belong to the earth; his is a position which does not affirm his belonging to the human species, it is a radical de-contextualization which does not sacralize either of the two positions. But St. Simeon Stylites belongs to an unprecedented dimension of Christianity never existed before. The monakos “the monk”3, with his particular solitude, introduces heaven into the secular concept of the world, but in a provocative way, and rather dangerously. The danger of St. Simeon’s singular thought consists in the unilateral and radical way he ascends into the heavenly world, introducing the criterion of the free choice of the will as a fundamental element in the issues concerning faith and its manifestations. By intensifying the symbolic value of the pillar, St. Simeon Stylites desacralizes official religion with its ritual and hierarchy. His is an acephalous position, a position which does not recognize the apex of the ecclesiastical institutions regarding any supremacy of the word or of interpretation. A phenomenon which might come about and 2 In 1827 was published by J.S. Forsyth Demonologia; or, Natural knowledge revealed: being an expos¦ of ancient and modern superstitions, credulity, fanaticism, enthusiasm, & imposture, as connected with the doctrine, caballa, and jargon, of amulets, apparitions, astrology, charms, demonology … witchcraft, & c., London, J. Bumpus., 1827, in which the story of St Simeon Stylites was widely described, it is likely that Tennyson referred to this book when he used this figure in his poem. 3 The word refers to a man who retired from the world and lived in solitary self-denial for religious reasons. The word monk is derived from the Greek monakos, “one who lives alone” from monos, “alone”.

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develop only in the waste lands of Egypt in which the desert is pervasive. The desert has a strong symbolic value which ought not to be reduced to sterility, to lack of water; on the contrary it is this very absence which opens up a new solitary paradigm. From the top of the pillar, the Stylites can observe both the earthly world maintaining a suitable distance, and the heavenly world with adequate closeness; St. Simeon is conscious that – since he is a human being involved in matter more than spiritual essence – the gap between the two worlds is unbridgeable. On the contrary, Tithonus is doomed to contemplate the perennial transformation of the Goddess as a spectator, without taking part in her eternal light and beauty. He is fated to observe, at a certain distance, what happens under his eyes becoming aware of his own deformity and inadequacy. His being in betwixt, located in a place where time is suspended, makes him clearly see the uselessness of his own condition; losing the dimension of time has made him lose his belonging to a genre, for temporality is what makes human beings “becom[e] themselves as sense-makers” (Zaborowski 67). Tithonus’s new condition deprives him of this possibility that is to give sense to his life and the world around him. He complains about the deception suffered by the Goddess, and this anomaly, which he is subjected to, makes him be neither alive nor dead, making him suffer for this unusual and indefinite situation: But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills, And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me, And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was, in ashes. […]

(lines 18 – 23)

So central is Tithonus’s division between sensuous and abstract dimension to Tennyson that it is explicit in the seventh line of the poem, when the speaker laments the loss of his nature, and consequently, of his identity. When he says that he stands “Here at the quiet limit of the world”, Tennyson delineates a sharp division between two dimensions: he knows they are unbridgeable. So we might take this line as axiomatic. If the expression shows the breaking point in the speaker’s conscience – the division between the earthly life of men, and the ideal and abstract life of the Goddess – on the other hand, it exhibits a self-imposed process of osmosis due to his request: “Give me immortality” (line 15). As we have noted, the word “limit” might have a double meaning, if on the one hand it is a barrier for the atheist, on the other, it might be the threshold beyond which a man of faith can reach his complete realization, participating in the essence of God. Apart from the myth, Tithonus’s long reflection and monologue mirror the

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poet’s central crisis, namely that of the final destination of souls, and more importantly the necessity of a transcendental destination. Conceived as a spectre (“this gray shadow, once a man”, line 11) Tithonus is the mental projection of the poet’s questioning and enigmatic dilemma. Tennyson has found in Tithonus a symbol, he has seen the man in himself, in his solitude4. And his liberation corresponds to his purification from illusion, from deception, which is emphasized in the vision of the conscious man who, in the climactic lines that follow, asks: Let me go: take back thy gift: Why should a man desire in any way To vary from the kindly race of men, Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?

(Tithonus, lines 27 – 31)

If figuratively the threshold in the poem is the location from which the character observes two separate worlds, from the poet’s viewpoint poetry becomes a “threshold between mind and nature” (Fay 589), the fact and the transcendence. Tennyson uses poetry to question himself, and Tithonus’s reflection embodies the poet’s doubt. Through its imaginative description of the character – which echoes Milton’s Paradise Lost – the poem provides a resolution for the crisis it describes, “Release me, and restore me to the ground” (line 72), reversing the Miltonic line “Restore us, and regain the blissful seat” (P L Book I, line 5). The coalescent power of these lines recalls those used by the poet in the lines which close the last part of Lucretius: The Gods, who haunt The lucid interspace of world and world, Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind . . . Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar Their sacred everlasting calm! and such, Not all so fine, nor so divine a calm Not such, nor all unlike it, man may gain Letting his own life go.

(Lucretius, lines 102 – 111)

These lines are of crucial importance. Tennyson’s position may be characterized in terms of his elaboration of a detranscendentalised and desacralized philosophy. As John Holmes observes “Lucretius continued to pose philosophical and theological challenges and to figure prominently within debates on the relation between materialist science on the one hand and religion on the other” (268). In the Victorian Age, Lucretius’s theory embodied “the clash between scientific naturalism and Christian theology” (Ivi 266). Lucretius, as a disciple of Epicurus, 4 Cfr. note 3, infra.

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uses his argumentation to explain the movement, change and contingency in the universe. The key word of Lucretius’s theory – expressed in On the Nature of Things – is epitomized by the word clinamen, the “declination of atoms” (Book I, lines 251 – 293, p. xvi), that must be read as the principle of freedom. Lucretius theorises the accidental declination of atoms explaining that “it is only this declination of atoms at quite certain times and places which gives the mind its freedom of action” (Ibid.); as we might argue this position is suited to the Victorian growing need for answers concerning the existence of God. We cannot forget that during the period in which Tennyson wrote his Lucretius, there was a proliferation of works in which Lucretius’s Epicureanism was representative of a new stream of thought, and of an attitude to considering religion not as the only way to reach plausible explanation of creation and afterlife. “Tithonus”, “St. Simeon Stylites”, and “Lucretius” are examples of the poet’s tension and dichotomies between two views of the world; the world seen as completely subjected to transcience and mutability, and the world in which man finds in God the reason for his existence, and consequently the afterlife as man’s reward. But Tennyson’s wish to reach intellectual and rational satisfaction more than spiritual rise, led him, mostly to depriving the afterlife of the sacral authority it claimed through insight into the divine intelligibles underpinning the material world. Sacral insight into intelligibles – the substantial forms, perfections, pure ideas – was the central tenet of scholastic metaphysics, allowing it to build the great system in which the Greek philosophical concept of the divine mind’s intellection of essences could be reconciled with the Christian theological doctrine of the world’s ex-nihilo creation by God (Partenza 85 ff.). In contrast with the traditional and Romantic attitudes in which natural and spiritual merge, appealing to the idea of God’s immanence in nature, Tennyson employs “methods of expression derived from the agnostic school of modern thinkers” (Hopkins Strong 483). His poetry tends to demonstrate “his lifelong struggle to come to grips with the concepts of God, freedom, and immortality” (Mazzeno 44). The poet’s dualistic way of thinking, his being both a “Scientist and Metaphysician” (Hayes 2) prompts Masterman to recognize in his intellectual and poetic journey, questions about the “apprehension of God, the existence of Self, the Hope of Immortality” (7): the pathway opened by the monk, St. Simeon Stylites, who recalls loneliness, free will, freedom, personal thought and any auctoritas to which he had to be subjected. The reading of “Lucretius” implies that the speaker himself is promising to give an account of the origin of beliefs. In any case, we may note that the poet refers quite objectively to the things that appear: A void was made in Nature, all her bonds Crack’d; and I saw the flaring atom-streams

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And torrents of her myriad universe, Ruining along the illimitable inane, Fly on to clash together again, and make Another and another frame of things For ever. […]

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(Lucretius, lines 37 – 43)

Tennyson’s lines lay the poem open to much theorising, he does not speak of an origin, nor of an ending, instead he is inclined to believe in the continuous transformation which gives light to new things and new worlds. Paradoxically, denying the source of the universe, he denies its essence, remarking that everything happens by chance, and the atoms – which join together creating “flaring atom-streams” – give life to “another frame of things” (line 43). Although the poet does not recognize a universal “beginning” in the creation, he cannot deny its incessant transformation and restoration. The lines which follow break the speaker’s conviction; his questioning about “The Gods, the Gods!”(line 111) brings the speaker to the measure of his doubt; Lucretius’s affirmation of the hypothetical existence of God is left to the dºna (doxa), common opinion and belief, he suggests that human beings base their faith merely on subjective convictions deprived of the objective certainty of proof: […] The Gods, the Gods! If all be atoms, how then should the Gods Being atomic not be dissoluble, Not follow the great law? My master held That Gods there are, for all men so believe. I prest my footsteps into his, and meant Surely to lead my Memmius in a train Of flowery clauses onward to the proof That Gods there are, and deathless. […]

(Lucretius, lines 111 – 119)

As we might notice, Lucretius sceptically underlines the relativistic character of knowledge, pointing out that nothing is absolute, – the use of “If” is emphasized – and, he dialectically suggests the existence of true knowledge, 1pist¶lg, which is represented by the inherent transformation of the universe itself, its mutability. It seems that thereafter Tennyson continues to discuss the premises which are fundamental to the existence of God, letting Lucretius say : “How should the mind, except it loved them, clasp/These idols to herself ? […]”(Lucretius, 164 – 5). First he makes statements about the explanation of the universe as a “void” (line 37), in which he “saw the flaring atom-streams / And torrents of her myriad universe,/ Ruining along the illimitable inane,” (lines 38 – 40) showing a materialistic attitude of the universe itself in which there is no room for God. Later he

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asks, if atoms compose the essence of God, he should dissolve as nature does, but he does not find an answer. For this purpose, and almost ironically, he warns against those men like “Memmius” who, as skilled orators, convince and “lead” men by means “of flowery clauses onward to the proof” (line 119). The thematic rendering of visuality and ideology in “Lucretius”, makes it a topical poem expressing a reflexive dilemma; the poet shows his scepticism creating a powerful division between a popular conviction and a conviction based on objective proof and analysis. This might be interpreted as another warning against the pursuit of the way of knowledge of God based exclusively on traditional and abstract principles, but also against another way, along which mortals wander knowing nothing, and rely on “clauses” that might be deceptive the speaker seems to bear the religious connotation of an “initiate”. By placing himself in the condition of the one who has been introduced to the knowledge of philosophy he tries to learn the secrets of the metaphysical world using the same paradigms and concepts typical of rational thought. When the poet says that the “mortal soul” is doomed to vanish and “perish as I must” he reaffirms the “Great Nature[’s] cycles” (as in line 244). Tennyson’s epicureanism is evident in this case. These are the meaningful lines in which the poet, once more, tries to clarify his own tormented idea, the enigmatic affirmation of “blind beginnings” which gave origin to man and all creatures: Those blind beginnings that have made me man, Dash them anew together at her will Thro’ all her cycles – into man once more, Or beast or bird or fish, or opulent flower. But till this cosmic order everywhere Shatter’d into one earthquake in one day Cracks all to pieces, […]

(Lucretius, lines 245 – 251)

Tennyson voluntarily confuses the initial state of things with the impermanent ground suggested by the expression “blind beginnings”, through which he remarks the accidental concept of creation. If blindness is characteristic of “beginnings”, thus denying a divine Creator, it means that physical law has a crucial role in the process of destruction and reconstruction of the architecture of the universe. The poet seems to affirm and believe more in entropy than in a divine Creator. It appears to be the pivotal element around which the Universe itself shows how it is running down and eventually “crack[ing] all to pieces”; everything is tied to momentariness, man included. But man’s presence functions as proof of the progress and dissolution of the universe, in which he has a crucial role. He is the critical conscience of transformation becoming the only proof of the existence of matter ; he seems to say that after death man does not have to

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aspire to an afterlife of souls, dictated by religious convictions but must be conscious of his reintroduction into a cycle in which everything is transformed and not destroyed. This conservative situation is the most subversive form of Tennyson’s desacralization, his acceptance of being part of maternal nature paradoxically preserves man’s impermanency in the world. We might say that in “Lucretius”, as in “Tithonus”, the human being (“man”) is introduced by the poet to provide a logical balance for the “atom and void, atom and void” (line 257) often stressed in a fashion that is rather typical of Tennyson’s style. Is not so far when momentary man Shall seem no more a something to himself, But he, his hopes and hates, his homes and fanes And even his bones long laid within the grave, The very sides of the grave itself shall pass, Vanishing, atom and void, atom and void, Into the unseen for ever, […]

(Lucretius, lines 252 – 258)

Tennyson does not hide the notion that matter and time are strictly related; his stress on the concept of the “momentary” brings it back to the idea of an eternal cycle subjected to time, the only invariable measure which, connected with the earth and nature (matter), can thus give proof of transience accepting death without fear. As John Lammers observes: “Like the Lucretius of De Rerum Natura, Tennyson’s Lucretius […] criticizes aspects of Roman Religion that engender fear and irrationality” (116). Such is, I think, the opinion of most scholars, although Frank M. Turner has argued that Tennyson in this case attacks Jebb’s assertion on the grounds that Tennyson’s Lucretian theory is equivalent to a new philosophy and so finds “subtle parallels between Lucretian materialism and modern atomism” (Turner 335): In modern times the De Rerum Natura is read, not as a treatise, but merely as a poem. In one point of view, indeed, it is a curiosity in the history of thought. No extant work so vigorously embodies the spirit of ancient physical research – the eager scrutiny of Nature’s surface without a suspicion of anything beneath, the effort to seize the worldproblem at a glance, the utter disregard of experiment. But the particular dogmas have no interest for the nineteenth century (Jebb qtd. in Turner 335).

Another way of referring to the school of Epicurus, and certainly the lines about “If all be atoms” (line 114) and “dissoluble” (line 115) do remind us of Epicurus’ notorious style, and thought; while “The lucid interspace of world and world, /Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind” (lines 105 – 106) “until the Gods’ dissolution” (in line 115) might reasonably be taken as a reference to Lucretius’s upward and downward paths. David Shaw believes that the following lines in “Lucretius” – “That men like soldiers may not quit the post/Allotted by the

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Gods” – are a clear reference to Plato’s Republic, and that it is particularly directed against Homer’s myth; in the Republic Plato writes: ‘we should not allow Homer or any other poet to make such a stupid mistake about the gods, and tell us that two jars Stand in the hall of Zeus, full filled with fates. One of the two holds good, the other ill (65).

Shaw in this case is ingenious, but I think that he goes too far. These lines could, of course, refer to the doctrine of predestination – the decree of God by which certain souls are foreordained to salvation – ascribed to Calvinism in the XVI century. The dynamics of the “Evangelical Revival” (Wolffe 112) during the Victorian Age, as John Wolffe remarks, “was to bring about a change in the dominant Protestant theology of the previous period, namely the belief in Calvinistic predestination and salvation of the elect few” (Ibid. 112). The Calvinistic idea of God, based on Matthew 25:41 – “Then He will also say to those on the left, Depart from Me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the Devil and his angels!” – raised many reactions such as that of James Anthony Froude, amongst the others, who remarked: “Oh, I would sooner perish for ever than stoop down before a Being who may have power to crush me, but whom my heart forbids me to reverence” (13)5. Herein, the important point to note is that Froude seems to transfer human imperfection to the Divine; but if it is true that it was not merely a matter of theological or spiritual crises, Froude’s concept is the representation of the historical crises of his time, of his generation, in which the intellectual debates concerning the existence of God and Creation were not epiphenomena but Ariadne’s thread which enlightened the inexorable change of time itself (Froude, Preface). Froude’s main character (Markham Sutherland) in his The Nemesis of Faith (1849), explains his growing doubt as the expression of Victorian scepticism, showing a multiplicity of incongruences present in a doctrine based on false historical claims, criticizing religion, and pointing out that he aspires to believe in “His religion – not the Christian religion, but the religion of Christ” [sic] (Froude 18 – 19) without dogma. Obviously Sutherland is Froude’s voice. Through him the author poses the question of religion without redundancies or artificial hiddenness perfectly inserted into the debate of the time.6 After reading The French Revolution (1837), On Heroes, Hero Worship and 5 See also Josef L. Altholz “The Warfare of Conscience With Theology” in Gerald Parsons (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain, Vol. IV: Interpretations, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988, pp. 150 – 169. 6 As Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth noticed in her The English Novel In History 1840 – 1895, London, Routledge, 1997, p.43, “[…] Markham Sutherland finds faith replaced only by an existential loneliness and grief. His difficulty in getting through the “turning” is permanent, and he dies without reaching any affirmation; yet the pattern of search for resolutions takes place in a

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the Heroic in History (1841) and then Past and Present (1843), Froude felt an intellectual dependence on Carlyle’s view with whom he had few philosophical interactions: [In] answer to the sick question of every thinking soul: Why, if God exists, are there no signs of Him? Why do the affairs of this world go on as if by natural force, as if there were no God at all? The natural, Carlyle said, was the supernatural, the supernatural, the natural …The question which Carlyle asked of every institution, secular or religious, was not, Is it true, but Is it alive? Life is not truth, but the embodiment in time and in morality of a spiritual or animating principle. Truth can be but one. The animated creation varies in every age and country (Brady 92).

But this speculative tendency manifested a concern with the real world and stimulated the thought by which Froude stressed that speculation could not be divorced from nature and real life. He had the same attitude which was characteristic of William Whewell’s idealist philosophy whose theological and epistemological concerns represented the basis of his speculations and theorizings. As Tennyson’s tutor at Trinity College, Whewell also affected Tennyson’s poetics and thought, what he most apprehended is Whewell’s suggestion that man is the interpreter of nature. But to interpret the outer world means to move from hypotheses which might be used to explain a set of observations, and, at the same time, observations can be used to test the truth of hypotheses (Yeo 116 ff.). Upon this conflictual reasoning Tennyson builds his own critical thinking, a system of thought in which he questions the relationship between the Creator and nature, their disproved interdependence. According to him religion gives only an inadequate answer to the universal question of God’s creation and man’s t¦los (end). The lacking of explained instances of the natural phenomena and accuracy create a world of illusions in which man instead of adopting a rational observation of things and explaining all instances of the phenomena, seeks refuge in a world of mythologic beliefs (Partenza 43 ff.). And yet we might consider it necessary for Tennyson to learn not only about secularization and the scientific debate of the time, but also about faith which, as he reaffirms, is based on “The truths that never can be proved” (In Memoriam, 131, line 10). The awareness of a context in which religion has confused the initial state of things with the permanent ground of being, has produced in the poet as a counterpart a system of thought which could even be applied to ordinary human beings who believed in Change as a real thing, the idea of dissolubleness that he questions in “Lucretius” (line 115). Yet, in the face of so many possibilities, he is wisely cautious. Tennyson is deeply divided between the new concepts of science cosmic not a social context, and Sutherland remains intensely, despairingly, insistently, nostalgic for secure faith and uninterested in more temporary or limited resolutions”.

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and religion strongly affected by Darwin’s evolutionary ideas (Ibid. 24 ff.). If in the Origin, God is relegated to an original act: There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved (Darwin, Origin of Species, 363).

While, analysing the Descent of Man (1871), we note that Darwin changed his idea of God who is subjected to an evolutionary process, “There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God” (Descent of Man 65); in other words, Darwin raised questions about the terms of the debate: I am aware that the assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for His existence. […] The idea of a universal and beneficent Creator of the universe does not seem to arise in the mind of man, until he has been elevated by long-continued culture” (Ibid. 395).

In fact, Darwin felt “an infinite debt of gratitude […] to the improvement of our reason, to science, and our accumulated knowledge” (Ibid. 68). This was part of his acceptance of the set of dichotomies deployed in earlier times in which science was associated with the rational, thus constructing a theoretical opposition between the rational and the affective. Epicureanism and “Lucretius” specifically were much “invoked in Victorian debates about religion and science” (Grafton, Most, Settis 546), epicureanism insisted on the concept of the soul which is made up of atoms that do not exist after death, emphasizing, instead, the pursuit of intellectual pleasure. One could produce an even stronger case than that propounded by the Epicureans and Darwin, if one could be sure that the Epicureans at that time held the view that the life was exclusively based on reason whose final result ought to be the calmness or peace of mind, and emotional tranquillity – what Epicurus called atarax†a (!taqan_a), – but the tensions associated with the contrast between science and religion, determined a more complex feeling than the simplistic “appreciation of God’s greatness as revealed in nature” (Yeo 119). Tennyson’s “Lucretius” anticipates what he later wrote in “Despair” (written in 1881, and published in “Tiresias and Other Poems” in 1885): XVIII Hell? if the souls of men were immortal, as men have been told, The lecher would cleave to his lusts, and the miser would yearn for his gold, And so there were Hell for ever! but were there a God as you say, His Love would have power over Hell till it utterly vanish’d away.

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In reflections contained in “The Ancient Sage” (1885) we find that the Epicurean sentiment is pervasive in the doubts the young speaker manifests: “The nameless Power, or Powers, that rule/Were never heard or seen” (lines 29 – 30). If here the young man fails to understand the connection between this kind of knowledge and faith, in the following lines, the sage cautions him against reliance upon sense-perception, and urges him not to judge by reason the proof which precisely that connection sets forth; for reason and knowledge are the limitations which are part of human existence: “Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son” (line 57). God is nameless and all human language about him is relative and symbolic; His essence we cannot know. Enchantment and disenchantment are part of the emotional and rational dialectic that goes on in much of Tennyson’s poetry. If prominently the poet’s central concern is faith and its relation to reason and knowledge, creating a simultaneous awareness of order and disorder ; afterlife remains the crucial element of his meditation. It is, I suggest, the denial of the afterlife, and its desacralization which makes him appreciate the human being as part of nature and its cycle. In conclusion, in earlier poems Tennyson had questioned the theological concept of Nature as perennial depending on God for preservation and the maintaining of due processes, and open to divine intervention. Later, he inverted the paradigm: if theology desacralized nature through the insistence upon a God who transcends it, the poet praised nature and the regularity of order, inserting man in a lucid cosmology in which God is reduced to a mere cultural heritage. If Tennyson’s scepticism allows no faith in the harmony of man and God, he cannot accept the idea of afterlife and immortality as the true life as it is taught by Christian theology. If “Tithonus” redirects man’s position in space and time, in “Lucretius” he perceives he has a crucial dependence on it: it is time that makes man what he is, it is time, which makes man transient, thus giving sense to human existence and not the existence of an afterlife which is related to men of faith. In this way, Tennyson desacralizing the afterlife affirms the “epistemic distance” (Hick, qtd. in Meacock 24) between human beings and their Creator. In rejecting the metaphysics of the intelligible being, in repudiating the theology of the divine mind, the cosmology of an immaterial universe, and the anthropology of man as a spiritual being, Tennyson broke away from a religious poetic tradition, proposing instead the sacralization of the outer world as the expression of the genetic and biological evolution of beings.

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Works cited Altholz, Josef L. “The Warfare of Conscience With Theology” in Gerald Parsons (ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain, Vol. IV: Interpretations, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988, pp. 150 – 169. Brady, Ciaran. James Anthony Froude: An Intellectual Biography of a Victorian Prophet, Oxford, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Carr, Arthur. “Tennyson as a Modern Poet” in J. Killham (Ed.), Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, New York: Longman, 1960. Darwin, Charles. Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Vol. 1, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. –. The Origin of Species, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Deeds Ermarth, Elizabeth. The English Novel In History 1840 – 1895, London: Routledge, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. On the Name, Ed. by T. Dutoit, transl. by D. Wood, J.P. Leavey, Jr, I. McLeod, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995. Fay, Elizabeth. “Archaic Contamination: Hegel and the History of Dad Matter”, PMLA, Vol. 118: 3, 2003, pp. 581 – 587. Forsyth, J. S. Demonologia; or, Natural knowledge revealed: being an expos¦ of ancient and modern superstitions, credulity, fanaticism, enthusiasm, & imposture, as connected with the doctrine, caballa, and jargon, of amulets, apparitions, astrology, charms, demonology … witchcraft, & c., London: J. Bumpus, 1827. Froude, James Anthony. The Nemesis of Faith, London: John Chapman, 1849. Grafton, Anthony. Most, Glenn W., Settis, Salvatore (eds). The Classical Tradition, Cambridge MA: Harvard Univeristy Press, 2010. Hayes, J. W. Tennyson and Scientific Theology, London: Elliot, 1909. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel’s Aesthetics. Lectures of Fine Art, Vol. 1, tranls. by T.M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Holmes, John. “Lucretius at the Fin de SiÀcle: Science, Religion and Poetry” ELT 51: 3, 2008, pp. 266 – 280. Hopkins Strong, Augustus. “Tennyson”. The Great Poets and Their Theology. Philadelphia: Griffith and Rowland, 1897. Irvine, William. “The Influence of Darwin on Literature”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 103, No. 5 (Oct. 15, 1959), p. 620 – 21. Jones, Henry. Tennyson, London: Oxford University Press, 1912. Killham, John (Ed.). Critical Essays on the Poetry of Tennyson, New York: Longman, 1960. Lammers, John. “Tennyson’s Analysis of Christianity in ‘Lucretius’”, Victorian Poetry, 29, 2: 1991, pp. 115 – 130. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, Transl. by Frank O. Copley, New York: Norton, 1977. Lockyer, Norman, Lockyer Winifred. Tennyson as a Student and Poet of Nature, London: Macmillan, 1910. Markus, Julia. J. Anthony Froude. The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian. A Biography, New York: Scribner, 2005. Masterman, Charles F.G. Tennyson as a Religious Teacher, London: Methuen, 1900.

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Mazzeno, Laurence W. Alfred Tennyson: The Critical Legacy, Rochester NY: Camden House, 2004. Meacock, Heather. An Anthropological Approach to Theology. A Study of John Hick’s Theology of Religious Pluralism, Towards Ethical Criteria for a Global Theology of Religions, Lanham Maryland: University Press of America, 2000. Milton, John. Paradise Lost, edited by David Scott Kastan, Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005. Partenza, Paola. Alfred Tennyson e la poesia del dubbio, Bari: Adriatica, 2002, 2012. Parsons Gerald. (Ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain, Vol. IV: Interpretations, Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1988. Plato, The Republic, Book II, 379, d-e, Ed. by G.R.F. Ferrari, translated by T. Griffith, Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Ryals, L. Clyde de. Theme and Symbol in Tennyson’s Poems to 1850, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964. Shaw, David. “Imagination and Intellect in Tennyson’s ‘Lucretius’”, Modern Language Quarterly, 33: 2, 1972, pp. 130 – 139. Tennyson, Alfred. Complete Poems and Plays, edited by T. Herbert Warren, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Turner, Frank M. “Lucretius among the Victorians”, Victorian Studies, 16: 1973, pp. 329 – 348. Wolffe, John. (Ed.), Religion in Victorian Britain. Culture and Empire, Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1997. Yeo, Richard. Defining Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Zaborowski, Holger. “Heidegger’s Hermeneutics: Towards a New Practice of Understanding” in D. Dahlstrom O., Ed. Interpreting Heidegger. Critical Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Roger Ebbatson

Seeking “the Beyond”: Desacralising/Resacralising Nature in Richard Jefferies

Whilst it is undoubtedly valid to claim that, in the nineteenth century, the English “were more religious than at any time since the Reformation”, and that religious belief “was buried deep in the psyche” during this era (Black and MaCraild, 276, 279), it is also recognised that the early Victorian period witnessed a crisis of religious belief, and that this crisis was the occasion of widespread feelings of personal pain and loss. In the “age of steam” the doubts and anxieties generated by the positivist enterprise of utilitarianism, the new discoveries in geology and astronomy, episodic social upheaval and a potently liberal humanism were notably refracted, debated and framed in the literary texts of the period, ranging from Tennyson’s In Memoriam to the novels of George Eliot. Felicia Bonaparte’s diagnosis, in relation to the latter author, is worthy of note in the wider Victorian context: It is just when religion – the world of the eternal and the transcendent – no longer commands faith, as in the scepticism of an empirical age it no longer did, that it becomes mythology, the property not of the priest but of the poet.

(Bonaparte, 15)

The disputatious relation between the established church and nonconformity, and the proselytising mission of the Oxford Movement, served to trigger religious debate, whilst at the same time weakening its hold on the populace at large. The “call to seriousness” embodied in the countervailing movements of Evangelicalism and the Puseyites was possibly a doomed attempt to re-establish the authority of the church in an increasingly secular environment – indeed, the avatars of the Oxford Movement were clearly and exclusively opposed to liberal doctrine or belief. The erosion of spiritual authority witnessed in the early years of Victoria’s reign would lead to a quest for alternative grounds of spiritual justification on both social and personal levels, as evinced by the new “religion of humanity” espoused by Comtean Positivism, which would attract notable devotees such as Herbert Spencer or George Eliot, or by the humane utilitarianism adopted by J S Mill. Overall, the middle years of the century witnessed a growth

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in secular humanism as religious belief gradually but inexorably declined in a process designated, in Tennyson’s poem “The Epic”, “the general decay of faith/ Right through the world” (Tennyson, 583). Whilst the impact of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) was considerable, there had been many earlier portents of evolutionary thought, ranging from Malthusian population theory to Lyell’s geological essays. All these currents swirled imperceptibly towards Dover beach: The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.

(Arnold, 226)

As John Schad has remarked, “by the end of the nineteenth century, the ship of Christianity is, in a sense, beached, or wrecked”(Schad, 3). Schad devotes his study to an account of a range of exponents of “Christian unreason”, but some of the motivations and textual resonances uncovered in his brilliantly unorthodox approach might also be detected in a figure who remained outside or athwart that cultural formation, the agricultural and nature-writer, Richard Jefferies. It is important that Jefferies’ diverse writing project be contextualised within the wider framework of late-nineteenth century “geophilosophy” founded in the understanding that thought takes place, not between subject and object, but in the relation between territory and the earth. All living beings, in this structure of ideas, territorialise by creating a space or place of settlement. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, for instance, calls upon mankind to “remain true to the earth” (Nietzsche, 1961, 42). Writing, like Jefferies, in the age of speeded-up time and globalisation, Nietzsche reflects upon the early nomadic status of mankind, but also upon the need for an anti-Christian settlement with the earth. As Nietzsche would demand elsewhere, “When will these shadows of God cease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deification of nature?” He adds, “When may we human beings begin to naturalise ourselves in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?” (Nietzsche, 1974, 109). In seeking to contextualise this return to nature, it is pertinent to note Jacques RanciÀre’s proposal as to “the great concern of the nineteenth century : the recovery for humankind of what had been made sacred in religion” (RanciÀre, 81). This project of “recovery”, which involves the concurrent dismissal or deconstruction of religious belief, and the quest for a resacralisation of nature, is key to the work of Richard Jefferies, who once memorably declared, “I am nothing unless I am a metaphysician” (Jefferies, 1948a, 282).

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However, before exploring the metaphysical tenor of Jefferies’ “return to the earth”, it is useful to take cognisance of the countervailing tendency in his writing towards a bleak materialist realism. Jefferies’ journalistic career was posited upon his close working knowledge of the late-Victorian agricultural environment, which he depicted via a tellingly Naturalist style in a variety of pieces, as notably in his 1885 essay, “One of the New Voters”. The essay opens with a depiction of the countryside in summer, but sets this seemingly idyllic harvest scene against the figure of Roger the reaper, befuddled with drink, the ale which, in his own words, “blowed him up till he was very nigh bust” (Jefferies, 1937, 215). It is, Jefferies observes, through reliance on “this abominable mess” that “the golden harvest of English fields is gathered in” (ibid., 216). Jefferies offers the reader a detailed catalogue of the flourishing wild life, the rooks, the bees and butterflies, goldfinches and other creatures “busy under that curtain of white-heat haze”, but notes tellingly that Roger “did not interest himself in these things”: His life was work without skill or thought, the work of the horse, of the crane that lifts stones and timber. His food was rough, his drink rougher, his lodging dry planks.

(ibid., 219)

Much of the essay is devoted to an account of Roger’s daily labour. As W.J. Keith remarks, in this writing “we appreciate the intense heat in the cornfield, and feel the aching labours of the toilers in the fields” (Keith, 51): Upon his head and back the fiery sun poured down the ceaseless and increasing heat of the August day. His face grew red, his neck black; the drought of the dry ground rose up and entered his mouth and nostrils, a warm air seemed to rise from the earth and fill his chest. His body ached from the ferment of the vile beer, his back ached with stooping, his forehead was bound tight with a brazen band. (Jefferies, 1937, 220)

There is a significant class element here, in the sense that the labourer is immersed in the landscape, crucially lacking any religious or metaphysical vision. As John Barrell has argued, in his account of eighteenth-century landscape art, the distinction between the learned and the ignorant – the polite and the vulgar, the liberal and the servile – was repeatedly represented in terms of the ability of the former group to apprehend the structure and extent of the panoramic landscape.

(Barrell, 89)

The result of this social formation was that “those who remain imprisoned within their few acres at the bottom of the eminence will have nothing like the same range of objects to examine”. To the contrary, as Barrell remarks, the

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labourers function as “objects in the landscape” (ibid., 89). Jefferies’ essay ends eloquently with a compelling contrast between harvest and harvester : The golden harvest is the first scene; the golden wheat, glorious under the summer sun. Bright poppies flower in its depths, and convolvulus climbs the stalks. Butterflies float slowly over the yellow surface as they might over a lake of colour. To linger by it, to visit it day by day, at even to watch the sunset by it, and see it pale under the changing light, is a delight to the thoughtful. mind. There is so much in the wheat, there are books of meditation in it, it is dear to the heart. Behind these beautiful aspects comes the reality of human labour – hours upon hours of heat and strain; there comes the reality of a rude life, and in the end little enough of gain. The wheat is beautiful, but human life is labour.

(ibid., 227)

A reading of this text by Jefferies may be illuminated by reference to the oeuvre of the painter of French peasant life, Gustave Courbet. In his Marxian analysis of Courbet’s art, T.J. Clark demonstrates how, whilst art is “autonomous in relation to other historical events and processes”, the “encounter with history and its specific determinations is made by the artist”. Thus whilst Courbet’s paintings of rural life, like Jefferies’ agricultural sketches, are composed of ideological material, the artist/writer “works that material” in a process which “gives it a new form” which may function as “a subversion of ideology” (Clark,13). In relation to Jefferies’ precarious journalistic career, Clark’s observation that the public operates as a “prescience or a phantasy within the work and within the process of its production” (ibid., 15) is germane. In other words, vis — vis Jefferies’ mobile trajectory within an essentially lower-middle class formation, there is a “constellation” of factors to be taken into account in a reading of his depictions of peasant life: specifically, his own somewhat d¦class¦ position in rural society combined with his dependent relation with the metropolitan literary audience. Jefferies, that is to say, shares what Clark defines as Courbet’s “ambiguous situation” “between the peasantry and the bourgeoisie” (ibid., 115). Clark trenchantly describes how, in Courbet’s art, “a gesture, or a painting” may become “supercharged with historical meaning” (ibid., 17), and the same can be said of Jefferies’ portrait of Roger the reaper and other agricultural labourers. Clark’s diagnosis of Courbet’s adoption of “a dual attitude, of detachment from the society around him, and involvement” (ibid., 115) is germane to an understanding of Jefferies’ portrayal of a peasant life permeated with a sense of Weberian “disenchantment”, grim materialism and the complete absence of religious consolation. In this respect, it is also worth noting Linda Nochlin’s observation, — propos Courbet’s “The Stone Breakers” (1849), that the painting “implies nothing…beyond the mere fact of the physical existence of the two workers” (Nochlin, 118). Unlike the more religious inflections of, say, Millet’s

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“The Gleaners” (1857), Courbet offers “no reassuring reiterations of meaning in the richly-detailed landscape”: this is a realism, like that of Jefferies, which offers “no consoling analogies”: The stone-breaker was the very epitome of gratuitous, meaningless labour, the bottom of the manual heap. One can scarcely think of a traditional representation of this human zero.

(Nochlin, 119)

As Nochlin argues, Courbet initiates “a whole movement which encompassed Europe from the middle of the nineteenth century, attempting to create a dignified, accurate, serious and sympathetic image of rural labour” (ibid., 121), a movement which would extend to Van Gogh, and one might add, Richard Jefferies. Indeed, this vein of Jefferies’ writing might be productively framed or interrogated through Martin Heidegger’s notable (mis-)interpretation, in his 1956 essay “On the Origin of the Work of Art”, of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes. Whilst, as Heidegger maintains, the picture depicts “peasant shoes and nothing more”, his subsequent analysis leads him to a revealing account of an entire way of life, detecting as he does from “the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker”. He proceeds with a sketch worthy of Jefferies: In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the farspreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles stretches the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth.

(Heidegger, 159)

The “equipmental” status of the shoes means that they belong “to the earth”; that is to say, in a Heideggerian reading, through her reliance upon “an essential Being of the equipment”, the peasant woman “is made privy to the silent call of the earth” (ibid., 160). Like Jefferies’ field-workers, the woman in Heidegger’s vision is the subject not simply of a “report” on reality. To the contrary, the painting “lets us know what shoes are in truth” (ibid., 161). The work of art, whether painting or essay, enables the quasi-religious “unconcealment” of art to take place. We are not, therefore, to misrecognise aesthetic realism. The work, Heidegger maintains, “is not the reproduction of some particular entity”, it is rather “the reproduction of things” general essence” (ibid., 162). Thus it comes about, in an argument of some resonance for a reading of Jefferies, that the peasant woman “has a world because she dwells in the overtness of beings”: Her equipment, in its reliability, gives to this world a necessity and nearness of its own. By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their remoteness and nearness,

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their scope and limits. In a world’s worlding is gathered that spaciousness out of which the protective grace of the gods is granted or withheld. Even this doom, of the god remaining absent, is a way in which world worlds.

(ibid., 170)

We may wish to stress, — propos Jefferies, the Heideggerian diagnosis of “the god remaining absent” as a concept which illuminates the rigour, hardness and irreligion of field-workers’ lives. A similar degree of ambiguity is detectable in an earlier essay, “John Smith’s Shanty” (1874), a grimly framed portrait of agricultural labour which stresses the unrelenting nature of work in the countryside and its effect on the human physique: His chest was open to the north wind, which whistled through the bare branches of the tall elm overhead as if they were the cordage of a ship, and came in sudden blasts through the gaps in the hedge, blowing his shirt back, and exposing the immense breadth of bone, and rough dark skin tanned to a brown-red by the summer sun while mowing. (Jefferies, 1981, 122 – 3)

In spite of a high degree of “muscular development”, Jefferies observes, “there was nothing of the Hercules” about John Smith (ibid., 123), and his diet of bread and cheese furnishes the whole of his meagre lunch on a “cold, raw winter’s day” (ibid., 124). Smith goes on to meet Jim, a hedger and ditcher who recounts the details of his own daily routine: He began work at six that morning with stiff legs and swollen feet, and as he stood in the mingled mire and water, the rheumatism came gradually on, rising higher up his limbs from the ankles, and growing sharper with every twinge, while the cold and bitter wind cut through his thin slop on his chest, which was not so strong as it used to be.

(ibid., 126)

Jim’s home consists of a two-room hovel with a mud floor, whilst outside “the sewage and drainage from the cottage ran into the pond”, generating a damp mist “which crept in through the crevices of the rotten walls” (ibid., 127). By contrast, Smith’s second encounter is with a young navvy who has found employment on the new railway, and speaks of the higher wages available to those who leave the land. When Smith reaches home, his wife criticises him for failing to provide for the family, he retreats to the pub and spends the night drunk in a ditch. After harsh words, he strikes his wife and finds himself up before the magistrate. As Jefferies concludes, “This is no fiction, but an uncompromising picture of things as they are” (ibid., 143). Such texts might be interrogated through the lens of the Marxian analysis of human labour. In his

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Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 Marx speaks of the “alienation of the worker in his product”, an alienation which transforms life into “something hostile and alien” (Marx, 272). Marx goes on to explain how “the more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life” (ibid., 173). Whilst labour elicits “wonderful things for the rich”, for the worker there is nothing but privation, condemning him or her to the “hovels”, “deformity”, “stupidity” and even “cretinism” which Jefferies alludes to here. Men, in Marx’s analysis, work upon nature to create “a world of objects” (ibid., 276). In the monotony of rural labour, man and woman form the link between the instrument of labour and its object, and in this entire body of writing nature is as it were “desacralised”. A quite other tendency is detectable in Jefferies’ later writings, marked as they are by a profound opposition to the inexorable materiality of peasant life. Seeking a transcendent dimension opposed to Victorian positivism and the doctrine of progress, Jefferies draws upon the tradition of Romantic naturephilosophy and American Transcendentalism. In rejecting Lockean epistemology, the American Transcendentalists veered towards pantheism and expressed a belief in “Universal Spirit”. Emerson would argue that the universe consists of “Nature and the Soul”, and in his 1836 essay, “Nature”, as I note elsewhere, he “proposes that the universe is composed of nature and soul, and memorably alerts the reader to the mystical connotations of this distinction” (Ebbatson, 130): Standing on the bare ground – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part and parcel of God. (Emerson, 15 – 16)

This body of thought, with its emphasis on what Jefferies would designate “the Beyond”, seeks a utopian but non-Christian alternative to the prevailing lateVictorian ethos. In The Story of My Heart and other late essays Jefferies attempts to formulate a cancellation of temporal, cause-effect rationality, in favour of an ecstatic cultivation of presence in nature. Jefferies’ meditations on the vantage points of the Wiltshire or Sussex heights are saturated with a sense of space and light, as in his essay “On the Downs”: Stoop and touch the earth, and receive its influence; touch the flower, and feel its life; face the wind, and have its meaning; let the sunlight fall on the open hand as if you could hold it. Something may be grasped from them all, invisible yet strong. It is the sense of a wider existence – wider and higher… Now, at this moment, the blue dome of the sky, immense as it

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is, is but a span to the soul. The eye-glance travels to the horizon in an instant – the soul-glance travels over all matter also in a moment. (Jefferies, 1980, 273)

Jefferies ruminates on an affinity with nature which largely eludes his contemporaries in the age of steam, in a mode of celebratory and quasi-religious response to nature valuably annotated by Walter Benjamin, when he argued that what distinguishes ancient from modern man is “the former’s absorption in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods”: The ancients’ intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance. For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest to us, and never of one without the other. This means, however, that man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights.

(Benjamin, 103)

More than a century earlier, Hegel had proposed the conditions for what he termed “a new religion”, one which he noted, “already announces itself in revelations to single individuals”, characterised by “the rebirth of nature as the symbol of eternal unity” (Hegel, 11). In the first draft of The Story of My Heart, probably composed during 1882, Jefferies would describe how, on ascending Liddington Hill near his birthplace at Coate Farm, …as I walked up…the feeling came to me and my heart began to feel higher, purer, made able to ask and to pray without many words. I prayed that I should possess this aspiration that I felt so deeply. That I should really possess soul-life. (Jefferies, 1947, 141)

On reaching an “ancient entrenchment” at the summit he utters what he would term a “Lyra” prayer : “With the glory of the great sun, oh God, I long, with the great firm, solid, deep and sustaining earth under and with all its strength into the depth and distance and expansion of the ether, with the age and formlessness and ceaseless motion of the vast suns which are but drops in space…by all those things…oh God, I conjure You to hear me, to listen to me, and to put these wishes into me.” (ibid., 142 – 3)

Jefferies’ religious urge, clearly pantheistic and non-Christian, is, as he idiosyncratically expresses it, “To draw forth the Divinity from the bud and the flower and the rain and the light” (ibid., 146). That is to say, in this formation of ideas, “God expresses the divinity which I feel in the dawn and the morning star” (ibid., 147). He feels compelled to deploy the traditional religious terminology of “God”

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and “prayer”, “else I cannot convey my meaning”, which is to seek “an exaltation of the flesh, an enlarged existence, life in a larger mould” (ibid., 147, 153): The whole duty of Man is to seek beauty in himself, in the soul and in the body. I desire to enlarge my soul-nature now…For the present I want it, now, as I feel the sunlight on my hand.

(ibid., 158)

It is in this sense, perhaps, that Jefferies suggests, that “the idea of God is the idea of attenuated matter” (ibid.,162). In the striking and luminous opening of the final version of The Story of My Heart (1883), Jefferies eschews religious convention in his quest for the numinous in nature. Climbing the Wiltshire Downs, he casts aside “the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence” and focuses instead upon a renewed sense of personal identity : “I felt myself, myself” (Jefferies, 2002, 18). Attaining a “view over a broad plain…inclosed by a perfect amphitheatre of green hills”, he as it were projects himself towards the earth: I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the earth’s firmness – I felt it bear me up; through the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me. I thought of the wandering air – its pureness, which is its beauty ; the air touched me and gave me something of itself. I spoke to the sea: though so far, in my mind I saw it, green at the rim of the earth and blue in deeper ocean; I desired to have its strength, its mystery, and glory.

(ibid., 18 – 19)

This scenario remarkably juxtaposes the transcendental, with its rapt response to earth, sun and ocean, and the material, that “dry chalky earth” which passes through Jefferies’ fingers. It is this conjunction which enables the quasi-religious experience which is to be repeated later in the book when, in Sussex, Jefferies comes upon “a deep hollow on the side of a great hill, a green concave opening to the sea”. This is once again a moment of quasi-religious insight, as “Silence and sunshine, sea and hill gradually brought my mind into the condition of intense prayer”: Behind me were furze bushes dried by the heat; immediately in front dropped the steep descent of the bowl-like hollow which received and brought up to me the faint sound of the summer waves. Yonder lay the immense plain of the sea, the palest green under the continued sunshine, as though the heat had evaporated the colour from it; there was no distinct horizon, a heat-mist inclosed it and looked farther away than the horizon would have done.

(ibid., 31)

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It is the power of the religious attunement to nature in Jefferies’ writing which leads to the annihilation of time, enabling him to affirm, “Now is eternity, now is the immortal life” (ibid., 39). These moments of ecstatic non-temporality afford insights denied to either religious or scientific/evolutionary paradigms. As Paul de Man has written, “Earth is precisely the going beyond the obstacle of sense perception toward being”, and yet this “going beyond” remains “rigorously enclosed within the limits of the mediated” to the extent that “it designates the ontological priority of consciousness over the object” (De Man, 40). By the time The Story was published in 1883 Jefferies was already intermittently ill, and often compelled to dictate his final works because he was unable to write. Controversy arose after his early death in August 1887 as to whether, at the instigation of his wife, he had experienced a deathbed conversion to Christianity. Such speculation is largely irrelevant to an analysis of Jefferies’ conception of “the sacred”, which is fundamentally predicated upon the human imaginative response to the natural world. Certainly he deploys religious terminology, but in an original and idiosyncratic style, as when, in his late essay “The Life of the Soul”, he tells how, when he opens his eyes at dawn, “my first thought is of my prayer…the same prayed on the hills and everywhere else so long” (Jefferies, 1948b, 189). As Noel Carroll observes, even if our emotional response to nature is “perhaps shaped by repressed religious associations”, such a response “can be fully secular and has no call to be demystified as displaced religious sentiment” (Carroll, 169). In this piece Jefferies recounts how his “mind prays” in a recurrent pattern of thought: It is in me and within the sunbeam, or the wheat-ear, or the grass. In the secret, separate entity of the soul, wishing, impelled to it, it almost represents or is my soul. The moment I think of myself it comes again, however long pushed aside by work or sense matters. It will therefore be always there, unceasingly praying. Why have I not gone forth for this soul life, searching for it more in the forest and by the sea? (Jefferies, 1948b, 190)

For Jefferies in this mode of exploratory meditation, “There is something through the earth and sun, on the other side”, because “we can only get at the immaterial through material” . In the “daily routine and work” which he traces so trenchantly in the agricultural essays, he writes, “we really forget ourselves”, but those few “who have ever experienced the depth of this feeling must perforce pray with every glimpse of sunlight and of the unknown beyond” (ibid., 191, 192, 193). It is, in relation to this structure of thought, perhaps worth recalling some remarks of Max Horkheimer as regards the installation of the “administrative society”:

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I mourn the loss of the superstitious belief in a Beyond. For the society that gets along without it, every step that brings it closer to paradise on earth will take it further from the dream which makes earth bearable. (Horkheimer, 223)

It is in the final notebook entries, made during the summer of 1887, that Jefferies’ deepest reflections upon the sacred in nature are to be found, in the quest for what he termed “Soul Life”. It is symptomatic of these last ruminations that Jefferies tragically felt “out of place everywhere”, except “lying on the beach or in the meadow – Sun Life” (Jefferies, 1948a, 275). His plangent remarks here combine frustration over his illness with a sense of divinity in the natural environment: I fetich Nature. Sea, sunshine, clear water, leaves. If I can see why not – if they cannot see I cannot help that – I see the sands and the stars, and the subtle cosmical material far up, and feel through, and the more I touch these the greater grows my soul life and soul touch. If I could recover health and strength and touch these I should never for a moment doubt the soul.

(ibid., 283)

Sun Life, in this formation of thought, “is the recognition of the Beyond not in everything but by everything, as the sea now roaring” (ibid., 286), and yet is ironically counterbalanced by Jefferies” concession that “Most people are materialists when they are hungry and like a bit of bread of cheese” (ibid., 287). Within this perspective, Jefferies writes, Christianity is like “all the other superstitions” (ibid., 288), and makes no connection with the living world: Fir tree tops joy in seeing – living the problem. I cannot understand the problem but it is a great delight to feel and live it looking at the tops of the firs.

(ibid., 289)

In this mood Jefferies declares, “The land was endless – the forest no verge – the sea without bound – wander and sail for ever. No limit” (ibid., 289). And yet he feels at times that there is “Nothing for man in nature. There is nothing for man unless he has the Beyond” (ibid., 289). Whilst in his last entries Jefferies avers in Nietzschean style “There is no good but Flesh”, yet he still insists that man should seek “the Beyond”, because he “seems wholly spiritual”. The notes conclude resonantly, “Other side – I dream of Ideality” (ibid., 290).

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Works cited Arnold, Matthew, “Dover Beach”, in Poems, ed. K.Allott. London: Dent, 1965. Barrell, John, 1993 “The Public Prospect and the Private View”, in Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, ed. S. Kemal and I. Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Benjamin, Walter, One-Way Street, tr. E.Jephcott and K. Shorter. London: Verso, 1997. Black, Jeremy and MaCraild, Donald, Nineteenth-Century Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003. Bonaparte, Felicia, The Triptych and the Cross. New York: New York University Press, 1979. Carroll, Noel, “On Being Moved by Nature”, in Arguing about Art, ed. A. Neill and A. Ridley. London: Routledge, 2002. Clark, T.J., Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution. London: Thames & Hudson, 1982. De Man, Paul, The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Ebbatson, Roger, “ “The Great Earth Speaking”: Jefferies and the Transcendentalists”, in The Literary Utopias of Cultural Communities, ed. M.Corporaal and E. van Leeuwen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Emerson, R.W., Nature, Addresses, and Lectures. London: George Routledge, n.d. Hegel, G.W.F., “On the Religion of Nature”, in Between Kant and Hegel, ed. G. di Giovanni and H.S.Harris. Albany : Hackett, 1985. Heidegger, Martin, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, in Basic Writings, ed. D.F.Krell. London: Routledge, 1993. Horkheimer, Max, Dawn and Decline, tr. M. Shaw. New York: Seabury Press, 1978. Jefferies, Richard, “One of the New Voters”, in Jefferies’ England, ed. S.J.Looker. London: Constable, 1937. –, The Story of My Heart, ed. S.J. Looker. London: Constable, 1947. –, Nature-Diaries and Notebooks of Richard Jefferies, ed. S.J. Looker. London: Grey Walls Press, 1948a. –, “The Life of the Soul”, in The Old House at Coate, ed. S.J. Looker. London: Lutterworth Press, 1948b. –, “On the Downs”, in The Hills and the Vale, ed. E. Thomas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. –, “John Smith’s Shanty”, in The Toilers of the Field. London: MacDonald Futura, 1981. –, The Story of My Heart. Dartington: Green Books, 2002. Keith, W.J., Richard Jefferies. London: Oxford University Press, 1965. Marx, Karl, Economic and Philosophical MSS of 1844, in Collected Works, vol. 13. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975. Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spake Zarathustra, tr. R.J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. –, The Gay Science, tr. W.Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Nochlin, Linda, Realism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990. RanciÀre, Jacques, The Politics of Literature, tr. J. Rose. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Schad, John, Queer Fish. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004. Tennyson, Alfred, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. C. Ricks. Harlow: Longmans, 1969.

John Fawell

An Earthy Sacredness: Maupassant’s and Van Gogh’s Christianized Materialism

Vincent Van Gogh and Guy de Maupassant are quite distinct in their artistic temperaments, the former volatile and emotional, the latter lighthearted, calm and amused. Maupassant swam easily in his social world, a preternatural bon vivant and connoisseur of the Parisian scene. Van Gogh found himself in contention with every town and social group in which he found himself, often hounded out of communities that wearied of his eccentric and cantankerous presence. Van Gogh’s abstract landscapes and distorted subjects anticipate the coming Modernism. Maupassant rests comfortably in the conservative aesthetic of Naturalism, distinctly a writer of the 19th century. Van Gogh is the poster boy for the tortured angst of the modern artist. Maupassant seems (at least in his writings) to rest so comfortably in his skin and to so enjoy the simple pleasure of a good story that some literary critics have had trouble taking him seriously as an artist at all. Nevertheless, Maupassant was one of Van Gogh’s favorite writers and exercised no small influence on Van Gogh’s notion of the purpose of art. And the two are quite similar in their attitude towards nature, an attitude, moreover, that is particularly reflective of the materialistic atmosphere of France in the second half of the 19th century. Both Van Gogh and Maupassant, despite their differences, are products of their time. Though Van Gogh came from a stronger religious background, both, in the end, were devout materialists who responded with an almost pagan ardor to nature. And yet nature presented itself so forcefully to each of them that both often drew from a Christian vocabulary to describe its ecstatic effect on them. The result is a kind of powerful, hybrid depiction of nature, part pagan, part Christian, and yet, in the end, wholly of this world, never mystical. Both Maupassant and Van Gogh sublimate a lost Christianity into a physical passion for this world, a kind of Christianized, ecstatic religion of the earth.

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Maupassant’s Cynicism towards Religion Maupassant is famously materialistic. The common line on him is that he was almost incapable of spirituality, that he was gifted, by nature, with a kind of breezy, guilt-free paganism. I’ll suggest later why I think this is not entirely true but that Maupassant was essentially a materialist is clear. Many of his works can be read as rejections and satires of the Romantic spirituality that preceded his generation. “The Graveyard Sisterhood” (also published under the title “Laid to Rest” ) begins, almost as an ode to Romanticism, with the narrator, Joseph de Bardon, visiting his dead mistress’ grave and expressing his appreciation for the sense of human transience and the melancholy wisdom engendered by cemeteries. It finishes, however, with de Bardon getting fleeced by a canny graveyard prostitute who capitalizes on men who are vulnerable to exactly these feelings. “The Jewels” traffics in several Romantic clich¦s: the pure, virtuous county girl who wears her modesty like a flower ; the happy young couple who’s nearperfect marriage is cut down in its prime by the wife’s premature death; the grieving, inconsolable husband who makes a shrine of his dead wife’s bedroom wherein he weeps each night. These Romantic postures are deflated when: 1) it turns out that the pure country girl turns out to be a talented courtesan who has translated her nights at the theater to an extensive jewelry collection, 2) the husband’s Romantic grief dissipates into thin air after he discovers, with jubilation, that his cuckoldry has left him independently wealthy. “Idyll,” a story that is as coarse as it is ingenious, ticks off all the virtues of that literary genre beloved of Romantics, the idyll, as though these virtues were so many items on a laundry list. It has the charming rustics, the lush pastoral landscape, the perfect calm and sleepy atmosphere, the simple folk narrative – all while telling the story of a starving laborer and wet nurse with painfully swelling breasts who exchange favors for each other. Maupassant lived too close to Normand rustics to accept the Romantic idealization of the peasant. The story aims to both fulfill a Romantic genre and dismantle it at the same time. Maupassant was also very distant from the Romantic fascination, particularly strong in France, with the moody mystery of Catholicism. His stories are filled with biting satires of church figures. In “Boule de Suif” it is, ironically, two nuns who finally convince Boule de Suif to compromise her virtue and sleep with the Prussian officer she has been heroically resisting. The officer has detained everyone in Boule de Suif ’s carriage until she accepts his advances and by the end of the story the party with which she’s traveling has turned on her like a pack of jackals, urging her to have sex with the officer so they can be on their way. For most of the story the nuns keep their own counsel, giving the appearance of

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being “absorbed in profound meditation.”1 But when they sense Boule de Suif ’s will begin to weaken it is they who deliver the death blow to her resolve. One of the nuns, a “typical army sister, whose ravaged face, scarred and pitted with countless pockmarks” is particularly forceful in her arguments (59) Then, either by one of those tacit understandings, those veiled complicities, in which all who wear ecclesiastical dress excel, or simply as the result of a fortunate lack of intelligence, an opportune stupidity, the old nun gave tremendous support to the conspiracy. They had thought that she was shy, but now she showed herself to be bold, garrulous and violent (58).

None of the bourgeois with whom Boule de Suif travels acquits themselves admirably, but Maupassant saves his most savage irritation for the nuns. “Mme Tellier’s Establishment” can be read as a particularly wicked satire of religion. In that story, a trio of prostitutes accompanied by their madame, Mme Tellier, travel from Fecamp to a remote country village to stay with Mme. Tellier’s brother, M. Rivet. The purpose of the visit is to witness the communion of Rivet’s daughter, Constance. The townspeople know nothing of Mme. Tellier’s establishment and only see her and her girls as colorful and resplendent examples of city sophistication who show Rivet to advantage. Rivet and his wife do know about the establishment but feel no repugnance towards it, a typical attitude, Maupassant insists, of the Normand peasant. As is so often the case in Maupassant’s stories, the prostitutes are a good natured lot and the turning point of the story occurs when the youngest of the three is moved to tears at the communion ceremony, via thoughts of her own childhood church and departed mother. Her tears communicate first to the other prostitutes, then to other members of the congregation, and before long the entire congregation is weeping in what all consider the most profound expression of deeply experienced religious awe the little church had ever witnessed. “This is God in our midst, manifesting his presence, descending upon his kneeling people in answer to my voice” the priest thinks to himself as he fumbles through his prayers excitedly (111). He makes a special point, at the end of the ceremony, of thanking the four visitors for the elevated religious feeling they introduced to the ceremony and congregation. Maupassant has his teasing fun in this story in which the presence of god is introduced to a community via the sentimental tears of a trio of prostitutes. But the story has an even more vicious satirical ending. Before Mme. Tellier and her girls return to the city, Mme. Rivet lobbies Mme. Tellier on her daughter’s behalf. Maupassant is silent about the specifics of their conversation as he is about the secretive discussions Mme. Tellier engages in with one of her leading backers 1 Guy de Maupassant, Selected Short Stories. Trans. Roger Colet. London: Penguin, 1971, 57.

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when she and the girls return to town. But the implication of both discussions seems to be that Mme. Tellier has not been deaf to Mme. Rivet’s pleas and will find a spot for Constance in her brothel in the future. Little Constance has been welcomed into two communities that day, one sacred and one profane. “La Maison Tellier,” then, is a pretty caustic story of religion and rural life. And yet, Maupassant’s description of the church service is so full of fine detail and expresses such a savorous appreciation for the ceremony’s rituals that it’s difficult to read it as simple satire. Maupassant notes all sorts of fine details in the proceedings. He describes the kneeling children in the choir holding long candles in their hands “that looked like lances tilted in every direction.” He notes how “a little bell tinkled in the dead silence” when the mass began, how “the good sister rapped on her missal” to signal the children’s communion, and how the priest offers “each child, between his finger and thumb, the sacred host, the body of Christ, the redemption of the world”(108 – 110). Now Maupassant doesn’t really believe the sister is good or that Christ is the redemption of the world but he knows his peasants do and their belief bars his sarcasm. His respect and affection for the service is apparent throughout the scene, particularly when the Kyrie eleison burst heavenwards from every breast and every heart. Particles of dust and fragments of worm-eaten wood actually fell from the old vaulted ceiling, shaken by the explosion of sound. The sun beating on the slate roof was turning the little church into an oven; and, as the moment of ineffable mystery drew near, a wave of emotion, a feeling of anxious expectation gripped the children’s hearts and produced a tightening of their mother’s throats (109).

There’s no satire here. Or, if there is, it is exquisitely dry. Everything here is true and moving. The scope of the detail is modest and fine. No belief, no sarcasm. Just a very exact feel for the fine detail of the event. Maupassant never condescends in his description of the prostitutes’ sad nostalgia or of the spiritual tremor they set off in the church congregation, which, he writes, “passed like one of those gusts of wind which bend trees in the forest” (110). Maupassant had a light touch when it came to religion though that is often overlooked by those who see him only as a mocking skeptic. His genius was an openness to all facets of human nature and experience. Like his mentor Flaubert, for example in his short story, “A Simple Heart,” Maupassant could mock piety while being moved by it at the same time. In fact, in “La Maison Tellier” we get a sense of Maupassant, not so much mocking religion, as restoring it to its largest dimensions, with the greatest sinners in the church, a la the new testament, exhibiting the greatest spiritual depth. Maupassant’s oeuvre represents one long, sustained, humorous attack on self righteousness. This attack lends his work a moral vigor that also is often

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overlooked by his critics. Like La Rochefoucauld, Maupassant was characterized by a curious reverse morality, delighting in not only knocking down virtue that parades itself but also in discovering it where people least expect it to be. The prostitute Boule de Suif is the only true patriot in “Boule de Suif,” the prostitutes in “La Maison Tellier” the creatures of greatest spiritual sensitivity. Many of Maupassant’s religious figures, are far from being figures of derision. The Abbe Maritime, in “The Convert,” is a canny diplomatist who converts the town’s leading atheist, the carpenter Theodule Sabot, not via theological badgering, but by withholding a church renovation job from him. The Abbe Marignac in Une Vie is a lovely study in a wise country priest, whose success with the town’s people has as much to do with his worldliness as his spirituality. He was, Maupassant writes, “a true country priest, tolerant, garrulous and kind.”2 He loves food and wine and to tell stories and doesn’t hound those who don’t regularly attend service. But he’s no simplistic Friar Tuck. Maupassant notes that “the priest knew how to make himself agreeable, thanks to that unconscious astuteness which the handling of souls gives to the most mediocre men who are called by the chance of events to exercise power over their fellows.” This passage represents a typical mixture of Maupassant objectivity and affection. The Abbe is a mediocre man. But his vocation, the “handling of souls,” has widened his character. It’s difficult to find any moment in Maupassant’s stories where he handles religion in a way that doesn’t balance satire with kindness and understanding. If Maupassant doesn’t lie about the bad, he also doesn’t shy away from the good. It’s that latter feature that is most underrepresented in criticism of his work but which Zola highlighted in his eulogy for Maupassant (perhaps the greatest few paragraphs written about Maupassant): “He was loved because he possessed a laughing goodness, a profound satire which miraculously is not unkind.”3

Maupassant, Religion and Nature Some of Maupassant’s most interesting stories are those where he mocks religious extremism, while showing a certain sympathy towards those who are trapped in this extremism. In these stories Maupassant, in a sense, saves these figures from their religion and introduces them to his: the religion of nature. Maupassant has often struck me as a descendent of Ovid. Both of their landscapes fairly burst with vitality. Both are cynics of sunny disposition who, while often ruthlessly mocking humans, are unabashed in their love of the physical 2 The Portable Maupassant. Ed. Lewis Galantiere. New York: Random House, 1966, 418. 3 Francise Steegmuller, Maupassant: A Lion in the Path. New York: Random House, 1949, 344.

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world. But Maupassant’s treatment of nature is characterized by a Christian vocabulary that, of course, would have been alien to Ovid and also surprises those readers that have bought the myth of Maupassant as a decadent man of the boulevards, a materialist devoid of spiritual tendencies. He often strips his figures of their religious ideals and then awakens them to the sacred nature of the physical world. “The Christening,” for example, tells the story of a Father Dentu, “a tall red headed fellow, lean and powerful.”4 Father Dentu is presiding over his first nephew’s christening. He has, presumably, performed christenings before but this one, of his own flesh and blood, moves him powerfully. At one point, in the parade from the church to the festivities that would follow the christening, the baby’s nurse asks Father Dentu to hold the baby for a short while and the priest immediately feels a profound connection to the child. Throughout the festivities Father Dentu’s eyes are fixed on the child and fill with tears when he holds the baby in his arms again. The spectacle of his fascination with the child amuses the peasants celebrating, “Go on father, give him the breast” one calls out. The conversation at the party, Maupassant tells us, makes “constant allusion to the generations to come that were heralded by these happy unions”(Miles 141 – 42). Two of Father Dentu’s other brothers, Maupassant notes, were to be married soon. The warmth of the baby in his arms, the chatter about ongoing generations, the taunts of the peasants, all result in the priest understanding for the first time the extent of the sacrifice he has made by his vow of celibacy. Later that night the mother of the child rushes into the party exclaiming that she has found an intruder in her baby’s bedroom. The drunk and outraged men of the party charge to the child’s bedroom only to find Father Dentu there weeping over the sleeping child. Maupassant’s language in describing the priest’s awakening to the beauty of the material world is striking in its spiritual vocabulary. “In his contemplation of this miniature of a man,” Maupassant writes, Dentu “was moved as if by some ineffable mystery, unprecedented in his life, a holy sacred mystery, which was the incarnation of the soul” (Miles, 141). First, let’s note to what impassioned language the famously debauched Maupassant is moved by the prospect of a new born child. The baby is an “ineffable mystery,” “holy,” “sacred.” It has a soul. The passage is reminiscent of that in “Martin’s Girl” in which Martin offers the baby he just delivered to its mother “as if he held the holy sacrament”(Galantiere, 70). Contrary to his reputation as an unrepentant pessimist, Maupassant can be moved – by life. His description of children betray the same gift for sensuality that his descriptions of women do. Like Ovid, he is an equal opportunity sen4 Guy de Maupassant, A Parisian Affair and OtherStories. Trans. Sian Miles. London: Penguin, 2004, 139.

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sualist. “The warmth of the little body,” Maupassant writes of the baby Dentu holds, “through its swaddling and through the cloth of his own cassock reached his lap and came through to him as a very light, very chaste and delicious caress, so full of goodness that his eyes filled with tears” (Miles, 141). Maupassant cuts a wide swath through nature. He is as moved by the warmth of a baby as he is by old Norman peasant women in “The Christening” who are “wizened like old apples” with “backs bent and twisted by patient and daily labor” (Miles, 139) or by a neglected provincial housewife, in “Parisian Affair,” whose uneventful life had preserved her beauty “like a winter apple in the attic” (Miles, 42). The women in his stories are rarely conventional or idealized in their beauty. His stories abound with chubby, vivacious types like the prostitute Rosa in “La Maison Tellier” who is attractive despite being a “little ball of flesh, all belly with tiny legs” (Colet, 90). Maupassant did not need things to be more beautiful than they actually were to find them charming. He liked life as it was, in its multifariousness. Its very homeliness was, to him, its charm. Maupassant’s language in describing Dentu’s fascination with the baby is ironic as well. Maupassant effectively reverses the meaning of the christening ritual. Here, it is the child who provides the priest with a spiritual education. As he looks at the child, Dentu experiences “a tenderness itself new born within him, and not felt by him before.” It’s the priest who is reborn, not the child. The story is very satisfying for anyone who ever balked at the central idea of a christening, that an adult, sullied by years of existence, would somehow remove the taint of sin from a spanking fresh newborn. “Here in essence,” Maupassant writes of the child, “was the great mystery of burgeoning life; of love awakening and with it the survival of mankind; the onward march of humanity” (Miles, 141). Here Maupassant awakens Dentu to his religion: the religion of life, of mankind, the generation of the species, sex, babies, existence. The priest is reborn to life. “Moonlight” tells a story similar to “The Christening.” The Abbe Marignan is a more conventionally one-sided satire of a religious figure than is Father Dentu. He’s a naive type, Panglossian in his faith that everything happens according to God’s plan. He also a violent moralist. When he finds that his niece, who he intends to become a nun, is entertaining a suitor in the woods at night, he heads out to confront the lovers, stopping first to bring his “great cudgel …down on a chair with such force that the back split and it crashed to the floor” (Miles, 61). But when he arrives in the moonlit woods he undergoes a transformation not unlike that of Father Dentu in “The Christening.” The night catches him off guard. The honeysuckle of his garden “wafted its sweet perfume like the soul of fragrance upon the clear and balmy air.” He finds the open country where he intended to confront the lovers “suffused” with a “caressing glow and basking serenely in the tender, languid charm of the night.” Applying his Panglossian

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tendencies to the situation, he asks himself for what purpose the night expressed itself with such lavish charm. Why had God created this? Since night was obviously made for sleep and unconsciousness, rest and all-embracing oblivion, why make it even more lovely than day and sweeter than any twilight or dawn? Why did this slow and stately star, more beautiful than the sun itself, banish all shadow and illumine things too delicate and mysterious for the light of day. Why did the finest of nature’s songbirds not rest like her fellows but sing alone in the darkness of the night? Why this veil cast over the world? (Miles, 62).

The answer to his questions comes in the form of the two lovers appearing on the scene, like Adam and Eve. “The couple gave life to this still landscape which surrounded them like a divine frame. They seemed as one, the single being for whom this calm and silent night was made. They came towards the priest as a living response sent to him by his Maker” (Miles, 63). Here it is not the warmth of a baby, but the sensual love of two young lovers, that represents the fulfillment of God’s word, that fills the priest with a sense of the sacred. Here again the divine is manifested in the “living response” of humans. And here again it is nature that is “divine.” In this scene, far from opposing Christianity to paganism, Maupassant tends to see them as one. Abbe Marignan finds ample correspondence in the bible for what he is experiencing. To the Abbe what he sees seemed almost biblical, like the love of Ruth and Boaz, an expression of God’s will set in one of the great scenes of holy writ. Words from the ‘Song of Songs’ began to form in his mind and the cries of passion, the yearning of the flesh, the fierce, burning ardor of that most tender of poems returned to him” (Miles, 63).

Sexual urge merges with spirituality here; the moonlit night represents “holy writ,” God’s word in the form of nature. Here and in “The Christening”, Maupassant doesn’t mock the priests so much as return them to a fuller view of religion, one endorsed by the language of their own religion. When the Abbe first falls under the spell of the night, Maupassant notes that, despite his faults, he was was, “like some of the early Christian Fathers, blessed with a soul open to rapture and with a poetic disposition” (Miles, 62). The spectacles of two lovers in the night and of the ineffable beauty of the night has restored the Abbe to a fuller, more primitive faith of the past, one less prudish, prurient, conventionally moral, one that hasn’t lost sight of the ties that bind the spirit to the natural world. One sees a similar mixture of religion and paganism in Maupassant’s description of his relationship to nature in his autobiographical essay, “On the Water.” There Maupassant compares his appreciation of nature to that of animals. “I love the earth as they do, not as other men do; I love it without admiring it, without poetry, without exultation. With a deep and animal attachment,

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contemptible and holy” (Galantiere, 646). “Loving without admiring” is not a bad summary of Maupassant’s art in general, its unique blend of warm appreciation and cold honesty. And the last three words of the passage, “contemptible and holy” make the point that so many of Maupassant’s stories too, that the holy often resides in places where we least suspect it to be. We also have to note Maupassant’s ecstatic response to nature, a surprise to readers who think of him only as the phlegmatic, world-weary chronicler of the Parisian boulevard. Maupassant’s response to nature is, paradoxically, both objective and ecstatic. “I love all that lives, all that grows, all that we see…the days, the nights, the rivers, the seas, the storms, the woods, the hues of dawn, the glance of a woman and her very touch” (Galantiere, 646). Maupassant often borrows Christian language in describing his response to nature but, in the end, this Christian influence blends with an attitude towards nature that is inherently pagan. “When the weather is beautiful as it is today, I feel in my veins the blood of the lascivious and vagabond fauns of olden times,” he writes in “On the Water” (Galantiere, 646). In Maupassant’s works, as in Ovid’s, nature fairly bursts with incipient sensuality and eroticism. Both show a subtle feel for nature but not for Wordsworth’s nature that opens “the inward eye that is the bliss of solitude.” Maupassant’s nature quickens the pulse, stirs the marrow of our physical being. For Maupassant, as for Ovid, the pulse of nature is tied to the regeneration of the species.

Maupassant’s Sensual Landscapes Descriptions of nature in Maupassant’s stories, as in those of his devotee, Kate Chopin, are often tied into the sexual current of his story, sometimes comically, sometimes lyrically, sometimes both. In “Story of a Farm Girl,” for example, we can get the gist of what that story will be about, a farm hand’s seduction and abandonment of a farm girl, by the description of a farmyard rooster, and the ease with which it takes its pleasure with the hens in the second page of the story : Every moment he selected one of them, and walked round her with a slight cluck of amorous invitation. The hen got up in a careless way as she received his attentions, bent her claws and supported him with her wings; then she ruffled her feathers to shake out the dust and stretched herself on the dunghill again, while he crowed, counting his triumphs (Galantiere, 26).

The passage not only presages the act of sex, but the farmhand’s indifferent cruelty and, even more, the farm girl’s sad patience in the face of the tragedies that ensue after she becomes pregnant. In “Martin’s Girl” Benoist’s lust for the farmer Martin’s daughter, who has recently arrived at maturity, surprises him, but not us, if we have read attentively

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Maupassant’s description of the farm fields of the area early in the story : “wide brown squares of upturned earth, ready for the sowing, stretched between patches of yellow ground” (Galantiere, 72). “Confessing” tells the story of a girl who is already pregnant, by yet another fly-by-night suitor. And again we might guess the narrative that awaits us by noting the landscape in which “ripe rye and yellowing wheat, pale-green oats, dark-green clover, spread a vast striped cloak, soft and rippling, over the bare body of the earth.” On a slope nearby cows “rest like soldiers at their ease” (Galantiere, 89). All of these passages are uniquely Maupassant. First because of the way they link a fine appreciation of Normand farm life with a sensually charged pantheism. In them we detect Maupassant’s sensitivity to the eroticism of nature. Secondly, because they mingle a warm appreciation of nature with a cold, distant approach to humans, whose life cycles are not seen to be that distant from the other animals on the farm. Again we see Maupassant’s strange mixture of the bucolic and the cruel. His peasants live so close to the land and to animal life that they are practically mere physical phenomenon themselves. One of the most spectacular moments in Maupassant’s writing, in which nature seems to echo or express sexual anticipation, occurs in what many consider his finest novel, Une Vie, the night the young Vicomte and Jeanne tacitly agree they will marry. After a long excited talk, they settle into a pregnant silence and “a limitless calm seemed to settle down on space.” Maupassant describes the sea before the setting sun as “a monstrous bride” who offering her gleaming bosom…awaited her fiery lover now descending to her. Hastening to his fall, he empurpled her with the desire of their embrace. Now he joined her ; and little by little, she devoured him. Then a fresh breeze seemed to arise; a shiver went over the surface of the water, as if the engulfed orb cast a sigh of satisfaction across the world (Galantiere, 411 – 412).

This passage, with its mixture of great peace and turbulent sensuality, is the kind of passage that drew Van Gogh to Maupassant. Both are sensitive to the violence and serenity of nature, often simultaneously. Lewis Galantiere compares Maupassant’s pantheism to that of Hardy (a writer with whom Maupassant has a great deal in common). Neither of these artists were “the light-hearted listeners for the first cuckoo of Spring. Human nature was for them, not pretty but overwhelming.”5 His comments could apply to Van Gogh as well. Both Maupassant and Van Gogh sought to convey, in their descriptions of nature, not its prettiness, but the intensity and confusion of the senses it engendered in them. Neither aimed for a conventional beauty in their landscape. Maupassant writes of a “contemptible beauty,” Van Gogh of a beauty that courts ugliness. Like Ovid, 5 Editor’s introduction, Portable Maupassant. 16.

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they aimed to catch the pulse of nature, which at times was vigorous, forceful, disturbing, at others cleansing, delicate, serene. However nature appeared to them, the most important thing was to convey how it penetrates; not its postcard prettiness but its vitality, its wild energy. Maupassant loved nature like an animal not a man. Van Gogh spoke of his art as an “arm to arm struggle” with nature. Curiously, Millet was the favorite painter of both. Their view of nature was close to the earth, coarse, their human figures often intimately linked to the violent but impressive cycles of animal life.

Van Gogh and Spirituality Let’s be clear : there are great differences between the art of Van Gogh and Maupassant. Maupassant recorded the most debauched oddities of human existence with a bemused chuckle. Van Gogh painted in an anxious fever. Maupassant was the quintessential literary naturalist, his stories aiming at an ideal of neutrality and objectivity. Van Gogh was incapable of painting realistically. His vision was, by nature, distorted and whatever he painted had, to some degree, a dream like feeling. He trafficked in color that was not, as he wrote to his brother Theo, “locally true from the point of view of the trompe l’oeil realist, but colour to suggest some emotion of an ardent temperament.”6 There isn’t any such Expressionist tendency in Maupassant’s art. Maupassant’s book covers have been, traditionally, decorated with quieter Impressionist paintings, like Degas’s studies of prostitutes bathing, calm studies in the quotidian. That said, there is a kind of charged materialism, a spirituality sublimated into nature, in Van Gogh’s work that matches Maupassant’s and marks Van Gogh, not as a Romantic, not as a Modernist, but as a materialist from the late 19th century. Van Gogh, in many ways, reflects the way the second half of the 19th century represents an isolated period of materialism, bracketed on both ends – Romanticism before, Modernism after – by art that is less interested in material reality and more in the mysteries that reality hides from us. Van Gogh began his adult life with a futile search for a position in the Protestant ministry and his early letters are charged with a religious piety. Van Gogh’s youthful religious zealotry wore off gradually, more or less in concordance to his failure to find a successful situation in the world of religion, either as a student or an evangelist. Gradually, he abandoned his religious zealotry altogether for a cult of work and nature. As his most recent biographers have noted, “Naturalist observation had shaped his maturity. Like his brother, he had emerged into adulthood as a man of ‘logic and earthly things’ – an artistic ward of the Frenchman 6 The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh.ed. Mark Roskill. New York: Touchstone, 2008, 288.

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banned from Zundert parsonage (Van Gogh’s home), Emile Zola.”7 Van Gogh rejected a spiritualism characteristic of the first half of the century for a materialism part and parcel of the second half of the century. And he finished his life by fighting against another kind of spiritualism, the moody symbolism of modernists like his friends Gauguin and Emile Bernard who wanted to abandon painting before nature for an instinctive dream language of painting. “I have written to Bernard and Gauguin,” Van Gogh wrote “that I considered that to think, not to dream, was our duty, so that I was astonished looking at their work that they had let themselves go so far” (Letters, 329). Van Gogh began by abandoning a vestigial Romantic spirituality and finished by fighting off an oncoming modern mysticism. In between, like Maupassant, he remained doggedly loyal to a materialistic vision that sublimated his sense of the sacred into a religion of nature. Of course, even as he developed into one of the world’s most famous nonconformists, Van Gogh retained the vestigial thoughts and habits of a minister’s son. Though he aimed to become a free thinker and materialist in the mode of Zola and Maupassant – and lived his life in consortium with prostitutes and in direct challenge to conventional mores – there always remained about him, something of the sober puritan. As in the works of other devout types who transformed into free thinkers, like Hardy and George Eliot, some of the best passages in Van Gogh’s letters are those in which we hear a latent Protestantism. “All the same,” he writes to Theo, “I know well that healing comes – if one is brave – from within, through profound resignation to suffering and death, though the surrender of your own will and of your self-love” (Letters, 323). Van Gogh’s religious past left him with an understanding of suffering that often consoled him during his troubled life. He had the gift of aphorism and many of his most honest, sane and memorable observations are rooted in his Dutch Protestant past. “Pride,” he wrote, after getting the only laudatory review of his art that he would ever be able to really cherish, “like drink, is intoxicating. When one is praised, and has drunk the praise up, it makes one sad” (Naifeh and Smith, 811). Few artists had to endure as much cynicism towards their art as Van Gogh did. This quote is both humorous and heartbreaking in the way it reflects Van Gogh’s inability, like a starving man confronted with a feast, to enjoy praise when it came. But the attitude expressed here is also consistent with a Puritanical cult of work that also sustained him and gave him relief from the general turbulence of his life. Van Gogh often trumpets the saving virtues of labor in his letter. “Slow, long work is the only way, and all ambition and resolve to make a good thing of it 7 Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life. New York: Random House, 2011, 675.

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false,” he writes to Theo. Of course, there are many letters where Van Gogh craves for success but some of his most moving ones are those where his failure only strengthens his appreciation of the rewards of purposeful, anonymous labor. I have always found it touching that his last words to his mother, in a letter to her, were, “Good bye for today. I have to go out to work” (Naifeh and Smith, 846).

Van Gogh and Nature: “A Love of Things that Exist” Still, Van Gogh’s conversion from seminarian to man of “logic and earthly things” was pronounced and Maupassant had no small part in that conversion. Maupassant’s novel Bel Ami was particularly important to Van Gogh and Van Gogh described his ideal of a painter in France as “the Bel-Ami of Midi…a kind of Guy de Maupassant in painting” who would “paint the beautiful people and things here lightheartedly” (Naifeh and White, 590). Van Gogh prized Maupassant’s lighthearted approach to life as only a heavyhearted artist could. With his volatile nature, Van Gogh could never be Maupassant. But, troubled as he was, Van Gogh aimed to rest serenity from nature, even if it only came out of “arm to arm combat.” And, of course, Maupassant didn’t find it easy to be Maupassant either. Calm and phlegmatic as he appears in his writings, in his private life he too was cursed with unshakeable depression and debilitating maladies that, like Van Gogh’s, may have been derived from syphilis. He too descended into madness, attempted suicide and died in an asylum. But, as in Van Gogh’s works, nature in Maupassant’s stories remains sunny, vital, sensual, intense, pagan. Van Gogh’s biographers, Smith and Naifah , quite rightly draw a parallel between Van Gogh, author of “Starry Night” and the Maupassant who penned these words: “I love the night with a passion. I love it as one loves one’s country or one’s mistress, with deep, instinctive, invincible love” (648). These are words that Van Gogh would respond to – “deep,” “instinctive,” “invincible,” – as he would to the notion of making love to nature, of appreciating it in a direct, physical way. Like Maupassant, Van Gogh had a habit of sublimating a lost faith into his studies of nature. He had not so much lost his sense of religious feeling as he had subordinated it into his studies of this world. “I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to confer by the actual radiance and vibration of our colourings” (Letters, 286). Van Gogh sounds like Maupassant when he speaks of a portrait of nature that radiates and vibrates with the eternal, that hums with a spiritual energy similar to that which radiated from a medieval halo. We mustn’t overstate the parallel to Maupassant because of course Van Gogh here is explaining why he distorts nature in his paintings, amplifies its colors, something Maupassant, who

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had nothing of the Expressionist to him, would never do. But where they are parallel is in the intensity of their response to nature and the things of this world, such an intense response that it calls forth from them a religious vocabulary. In reflecting on his “La Berceuse,” Van Gogh wrote to Theo that “had I the strength to continue, I should have made portraits of saints and holy women from life who would have seemed to belong to another age, and they would have been middle class women of the present day and yet they would have had something in common with the first early Christians” (Letters, 325). How Van Gogh, who so often dwelt among prostitutes and made them his companions, must have responded to stories like “Boule de Suif” or “La Maison Tellier” where only the prostitutes have the moral strength and spiritual depth of the ancient saints. Van Gogh’s career, then, is bracketed by an argument with religion. First he moved from his initial devout spirituality to a materialism, like that of so many of his Victorian contemporaries, shot through with vestiges of his abandoned beliefs. And towards the end of his life he found himself preaching the doctrine of this-worldliness against a new wave of mystics, those Expressionists who advocated bypassing the study of this world for an art that came straight from the imagination. “My artistic center is in my brain, and not elsewhere,” Gauguin said. This was a mantra Van Gogh could not appreciate. Despite his inherent bent towards a certain degree of abstraction, and despite his desire to invest the world with a spiritual power in his paintings. Van Gogh could never abandon the belief that his paintings’ vitality came from a careful study of the object he was painting; the thing itself was of importance. This had always been his quarrel with art schools – that they were too remote from the real world. He liked to quote Courbet who said “paint angels? But who has seen an angel?” He complained that there was no academy “where one learns to draw and paint a digger, a sower, a woman setting the kettle over the fire, or a seamstress. But in every city of some importance there is an academy with a choice of models for historical, Arabic, Louis XV, in one word all really non-existent figures” (Letters, 232, 234). When someone asked Theo if he thought Vincent resembled the painter Claude Lantier from Zola’s novel, L’oeuvre, Theo said, “that painter was looking for the unattainable. Vincent loves the things that exist far too much to fall for that.” Van Gogh makes the same point in a letter when he writes, “My attention is so fixed on what is possible and really exists that I hardly have the desire or the courage to strive for an ideal” (Naifeh and White, 675). The visionary Van Gogh has been so celebrated, perhaps out of our popular conception of the artist as an unworldly mystic, as a kind of purveyor of mystical trance, the artist of the skies, that we can lose sight of the naturalist Van Gogh, the Van Gogh who from his early childhood went on exhausting hikes from which he returned, his pack filed with bird nests, eggs, beetles and wild flowers that he then meticulously cata-

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logued and used to decorate the series of modest apartments in which he lived. Van Gogh loved the things of this world. It is above all this intense involvement with nature that explains the power of Van Gogh’s paintings, the hold they continue to have over us. Though I believe that the best pictures are more or less freely painted by the heart, still I cannot divorce the principle that one can never study and toil too much from nature. The greatest, most powerful imaginations have at the same time made things directly from nature which struck one dumb (Letters, 243).

Though he acknowledges the importance of feeling (how could he not, given his art and nature) he reserves his highest praise for art that represents the most transparent and immediate translation of the power of nature, that is a vehicle for a truthful distillation of nature. Hence his affection, like so many of his generation, for Asian art. If we study Japanese art, we see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismark? No. He studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole. Come now isn’t it almost an actual religion which these simple Japanese teach us, who live in nature as though they were themselves flowers (Letters, 295).

Van Gogh saw the Japanese artist’s “religion” of nature, not as a kind of Romantic, trance-like response to nature, but something more rational, a concentrated study of nature. Van Gogh was as committed a naturalist as he was devout student of color theory and if he painted his canvases with great rapidity that rapid seizure of his subject is, his letters tell us, the end result of strenuous analysis of both the subject’s color and its general nature. “You must study for ten years, and then produce a few figures,” he writes to Theo (Letters, 294). It is this careful study of nature that represents to him “an actual religion.” By “religion” he is not referring to the ecstatic application of paint, but something quite its opposite: a sustained concentration, an analytic study of nature. Van Gogh’s thoughts on nature are often distant from our notion of him as a tortured genius. “These canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words,” he wrote to his brother, “the health and fortifying power that I see in the country” (Letters, 338). The goal of his paintings was only “to go out and look at a blade of grass, the branch of a fir tree, an ear of wheat, in order to calm down” (Naifeh and White, 755). We have such a strong tendency to romanticize Van Gogh’s madness that we sometimes forget the most obvious thing about his paintings: that they exhibit a calm, a happiness, a Maupassant-like healthiness that Van Gogh was able to access a great deal more often in his art than his life. He was able, in

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his greatest art, to be the “BelAmi of Midi” even if his personal life was so often marred by guilt, misery and self-doubt. Just as we sometimes forget that the Boulevardier Maupassant wrote about nature with great penetration that borders on religious awe, so we forget that the nerve-wracked Van Gogh often managed to capture nature’s sunny glory, the light, airy happiness of being alive. His paintings would not be as popular as they are with the wide audience they enjoy today if so many of those paintings did not vibrate with happiness. Van Gogh and Maupassant were both miserably unhappy men riddled by illness who created works that sing with the vitality of nature. Both biographies represent a caution against too closely confusing an artist’s biography with their work. Both were calmer, more Godly, more generous creatures in their art than they could ever be in their lives. It is nature, not the self, that is Van Gogh’s lodestar. “Work diligently from nature,” he wrote, channeling Marcus Aurelius, “without saying to yourself beforehand –‘I want to do this or that’” (Letters, 330). When Van Gogh got word that Bernard had created a series of works on Gethsemane, a subject that Van Gogh had been furiously laboring over himself, Van Gogh wrote contemptuously to Theo, “Our friend Bernard has probably never seen an olive tree” (Naife and Smith, 788). This comment is a little comical, as it takes for granted that a good painting of Gethsemane starts with a sound understanding of olive trees, an idea to which not every artist would subscribe. But that line testifies to how Van Gogh took his cue from nature. He told Bernard, who, like Gaugin preached the gospel of painting “de tete,” that he (Van Gogh) would continue “doing what I am doing, surrendering myself to nature.” His brushstroke, he felt, must be “in keeping with the subject”, grow out organically from the shapes he was studying (Naifeh and Smith, 675, 751). Even in his use of color, which would seem to be the most Expressionist aspect of his art, Van Gogh stressed adherence to nature. I retain from nature a certain sequence and a certain correctness in placing the tones, I study nature so as not to do foolish things, to remain reasonable – however, I don’t mind so much whether my color corresponds exactly, as long as it looks beautiful on my canvas, as beautiful as it looks in nature (Letters, 241).

He describes his process of painting from the colors of nature particularly well in a letter written before he went off to work on his famous sunflowers. “Now to get up heat enough to melt that gold, those flower tones, it isn’t any old person who can do it, it needs the force and concentration of a single individual whole and entire” (Letters, 306). This is perhaps my favorite of Van Gogh’s many descriptions of his process at arriving at coloring, emphasizing, as it does, the process, not as a mystical surrender to color, but a Herculean effort to smelt the color via force and concentration, a redoubling of analytic energy. Here, as in his commentary on Asian art, he emphasizes his experience of nature as an act of

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willful concentration and the immense amount of effort that goes into achieving simple effects. Van Gogh’s wild colors did not pop into his imagination; they were drawn, via careful scrutiny, from his subject. And whether they are the colors of a sunflower or a laborer, Van Gogh’s colors are always intense, reflecting his intense apprehension of nature, his “his hand to hand struggle” with it. “I think of the man I have to paint, terrible in the furnace of the full ardours of harvest, at the heart of the south. Hence the orange shades like storm flashes, vivid as red hot iron, and hence the luminous tones of old gold in the shadows” (Letters, 278). The colors Van Gogh chooses for the man are not those that he sees exactly before him. But they are the colors of the man’s life, his work, his climate, his land, his suffering. And they are fierce colors. No happy Romantic peasants for Van Gogh, just as there are none for Maupassant. Both are devotees of Millet. Their peasants are of the earth. Like Van Gogh’s potato eaters, Maupassant’s peasants are sometimes almost insultingly simple or stupid. Van Gogh sees, in his peasant, a man who has to suffer to live like he does and so bakes in the “terrible” red hot colors of the furnace. In the same letter Van Gogh evokes Zola for inspiration and yet there is a celebratory aspect to Van Gogh’s painting one doesn’t find in Zola, a luminous tone of gold in the shadows. That’s the medieval halo, that Van Gogh referred to in the letter quoted above, creeping back into his art, his sense, like Maupassant, of the divinity of the peasant. All this pain and glory which Van Gogh sees built into, or emanating from, his subject comes, not from Van Gogh’s fevered imagination, but from the peasant’s earthy glory. I’m not sure whether Van Gogh is referring to the strenuous labor required to make this painting or the exhausting existence of the peasant he is trying to capture when he wistfully concludes this portion of his letter to Theo by saying, “Oh my dear boy…and the nice people will only see the exaggeration as caricature” (Letters, 278). The glory of Van Gogh’s paintings is not just that they study nature but that they absorb its substance. “Just go out and paint out of doors on the spot itself! Then all kind of things happen.” (This might sound as much like the credo of the Impressionist but when, in that same letter, Van Gogh goes on to explain what he means by “things happening” you can tell he’s no Monet. He writes, with pride of the “hundred or more flies” he has to wipe off while completing a painting, “not to mention the dust and sand”, the thorns that scratch his canvas during hours of walking through hedges and heath, his fatigue and exhaustion from hours in the heat (Letters, 232 – 233). Van Gogh had a dramatic notion of painting. He liked to see it as endurance labor with almost a physical component. Painting this way, in “hand to hand struggle with nature,” broke down the barrier between nature and his canvas. Nature clawed its way into the canvas. “What I have done is rather hard and coarse…but it will give the feeling of the country and will smell of soil” (Letters, 329). Van Gogh aimed to break down the barrier between his canvas and

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the reality it depicted. He wanted that reality to invade his pictures. “I know these canvases are hard to sell,” he writes to Theo, “but later on people will see that there is open air in them” (Letters, 261). Prophetic comment and also as applicable to Maupassant’s landscapes as his own. And that is no coincidence as it was exactly Maupassant’s light hearted revelry in nature that the tortured Van Gogh aimed to approximate.

Conclusion As different as the emotional Van Gogh is, in general, from the often coldly objective Maupassant, their depictions of nature have striking similarities. Both were determined materialists who sublimated a lost faith into a worship of nature. Both employ a Christianized language to describe their materialist apprehension of nature. Both find the sacred closest to the ground, Maupassant with his “animal attachment” to the “contemptible and holy,” Van Gogh with his determination to bring something of glowing power of the Byzantine halo into his portraits of midi peasants. Both had a tendency to see the sacred in the lowest denizens of society. Both jeered at conventional morals and made saints out of prostitutes. Both, even the phlegmatic Maupassant, often tend toward the ecstatic in their descriptions of the nature, though this ecstatic apprehension would more accurately be described as pagan than Romantic. It’s characterized less by calm repose than a sense of imminent vitality, of physical excitement as much as spiritual calm. Both operate within the isolated period of the late 19th century where materialism held sway for a short while before Romanticism reasserted itself in the fevered emotions and dark mystery plumbing of many of the Modernists. Van Gogh, in particular, reflects the way this brief period of materialism is bracketed by more spiritual eras, abandoning his childhood faith at the outset of his career in art and fending off Gauguin’s and Bernard’s mysticism towards the end. Maupassant was, quite simply, the age itself. Aside from the Poe-like stories he wrote at the end of his life, under the strain of mental imbalance, he was impervious to the temptation of mysticism, utterly at ease with the world as it was. That said, like Van Gogh he often turned to Christian language to express the intensity of his love for this world. A young couple making love evokes the love of Boaz and Ruth, “an expression of God’s will set in holy writ.” A comparison of the two also serves to highlight corrections in their reputations that need to be reinforced. Maupassant’s descriptions of nature reveal that he was something more than the cruel humorist of bedroom farces, that he was capable of intense, rhapsodic responses to nature, that he was not unmoved by the power of religious language, that, in fact, he practiced a religion of nature,

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his own particular fusion of Christianity and paganism. Van Gogh’s depictions of nature remind us of how inadequate the notion of him as a troubled dreamer he is. Van Gogh, as his brother points out, loved “the things that exist far too much” to clamor after the unattainable, for all his starry skies. He insisted that his canvases be buffeted and bruised by nature, that they breath with the air and soil of his subjects. The paradox of both Van Gogh and Maupassant is that, devout materialists that they are, both were sensitive to, and appreciative of, religious sentiment. That sensitivity makes their devotion to the grit and grime of earth that much more persuasive. They both found a religion in the appreciation of this world.

Simona Beccone

Displacement-Distortion Theory and the Desacralisation of Aesthetic Categories: the Case Study of Hardy’s “Neutral Tones”

Foveal vs. peripheral vision and the displacement-distortion model During the process of visual perception, the human visual system does not treat all parts of the image in the same way. In fact, due to the anatomical and physiological differences between the central (or ‘foveal’) and the peripheral regions of the eye (the former having a higher density of photoreceptors and ganglion cells than the latter, cf. Shapiro et al. 1), the central portions of the visual image, and of the field of vision as well, are typically perceived with a higher level of visual acuity (i. e. seen at a higher resolution) than those which fall in the periphery, which in turn are seen as relatively distorted, e. g. as blurry at the edges. Besides, and more important, these differences may often lead to different interpretations, by the subject, of the stimulus array, e. g. as being either distant or far from him, or else either relatively static or dynamic (cf. Shapiro et al. 1 – 2; Azzopardi and Cowey 627 – 39). However, and far from being just a scaled, blurred version of foveal vision, peripheral vision appears to be a portion of our visual system in which a number of drastically different percepts and significant types of visual distortions are incessantly produced in the eye and therefore processed by the brain, and it is for this reason that they represent an area of great interest for current to future research. In this regard, a number of studies in visual perception and cognitive neuroscience have recently shown that these perceptual distortions and related interpretations of the image and visual field, produced in the centre-periphery shift, go unnoticed unless they are deautomatized (Hochberg, “Attention Org.” 113 – 14 and Hochberg, “How Big” 302 – 28), for instance through interactive computer displays that have been purposely implemented to emphasize the perceptual and cognitive differences between foveal and peripheral perception (Shapiro et al. 2; Tangen et al. 628 – 30). A noteworthy case in the complex relation between, on the one side, visual perception and cognition, and on the other side, centre-periphery shift, is represented by a method of image presentation, based on alignment and speed,

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which Tangen, Murphy and Thompson have recently implemented in concomitance to a study on contrastive distortion effects and face adaptation (Tangen et al. 628 – 30). In this case, the stimulus consisted in a fast-paced presentation, in cyclical sequence, of a series of male and female faces, generally perceived as ‘normal’, or even ‘beautiful’, by a large majority of people. These faces were previously eye-aligned through a well-known face perception analysis and research tool, PsychoMorph, and afterwards placed on the right and left sides of a computer screen; the observers were then asked to keep their eyes on a cross at the centre of the screen, so that they could perceive the sequences of human faces not through foveal vision, but rather through the peripheral one. As a result of this repeated centre-to-periphery displacement of the objects of perception within the subject’s visual field, a startling distortion occurred: after a certain period of time, the faces in each set were “aesthetically challenged” (628), since they began to appear more and more deformed, as in a caricature. Due to the fact that the degree of distortion appears to be directly proportional to the duration of this particular type of perception, the faces were increasingly perceived as “grotesque”, and “even monstrous” (628 – 29). If the sequence was interrupted by a pause in the processing sequence, the faces were not aligned, or in the case of a variation in the pace of sequenced presentation (either relatively slower or quicker), the effect either lessened or even vanished (629).

Displacement-distortion and the phenomenology of aesthetic experience and categorization The above mentioned experiments bring out a remarkable perceptual and cognitive phenomenon: the relative (and often repeated) subject-object displacement, between the centre and the periphery of the visual field, is directly proportional to a subjectively perceived effect of visual and therefore cognitive distortion of the object of perception. This distortion consists in an increase, directly proportional to the temporal duration of fruition, in the number of impediments to recognition of the object’s original shape, i. e. its ‘normal’ perceptual configuration, and it may take the form of a simple defocusing, or blurring of its edges (this latter is anyway present in ordinary seeing, e. g. when we perceive objects with ‘the corner of the eye’: Shapiro et al. 1), or even, of a more marked deformation, that is, of a more severe form of distortion, this time resulting from a further quantitative increase in impediments to recognition (e. g. the highly distorted, grotesque and monstrous human faces described by Tangen, Murphy and Thompson). In my view, these experiments are of great significance for the study of art.

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While exploring the relation between perception and cognition in terms of a relation of direct proportionality between, on the one hand, a centre-periphery displacement of the object of perception in relation to the subject’s visual focus, and, on the other hand, the distortion effects whereby produced (i. e. defocusing and deformation), they in fact intersect a crucial issue concerning another phenomenon in which the individual’s perception of reality is crucially dependent on the different relative positions assumed by subject and object: our perception and consequent encoding of the world in aesthetic terms, that is, the phenomenology of aesthetic experience and categorization. As we will see now, in this domain also, a peculiar type of subjective manipulation of experience occurs, in this case accomplished through two cognitive operations, opposite and complementary to each other : ‘aestheticization’ (i. e. the turning of the nonaesthetic to the aesthetic) and ‘de-aestheticization’ (i. e. the downgrading of the aesthetic into the unaesthetic). Secondly, in the domain of aesthetics also, any change in the subjectively perceived configuration of the object is a direct consequence of an alteration in the subject-object relative positions occurring not only on the spatial, perceptual and cognitive planes (as in the processes of displacement and distortion) but also, and as I will show later, on the affective plane of emotion, feeling. In this latter case, the alteration involves the process of aesthetic encoding and perception, as it will determine the individual and collective modes of inclusion, marginalization and then exclusion of a given percept of experience (initially non-aesthetic) in relation of the aesthetic spectrum, either at its centre (as an object/category which is encoded, and therefore perceived, as ‘aesthetic’), at its periphery (if seen as ‘less aesthetic’), or else outside it (if seen as ‘no more aesthetic’, i. e. unaesthetic), and according to different cultures and historical periods. In this connection, and notwithstanding some crucial differences which I will discuss throughout, the above described displacement-distortion process not only manifests a structural analogy with the phenomenology of aesthetic experience and categorization, but also, and more important, it may provide a valid tool for a more thorough interpretation, based on cognitive neuroscience and visual perception, of the dynamics of a phenomenon such as this, multifaceted and often elusive to scientific analysis. Of course, any attempt to apply this model to the domain of aesthetics has inevitably to be made on the assumption of some preliminary considerations. First of all, the structural homology between the subject/object spatio-perceptual dislocation and the dynamics of aestheticization and de-aestheticization – as a process of centralization, marginalization and then exclusion of an object in relation with the individual and collective aesthetic spectrum – becomes conceivable only if we intend, analogously to what occurs in the displacementdistortion model, the interaction between the subject and the object of experience in relative, rather than absolute terms. As for the domain of aesthetics, this

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necessarily leads to a classification of the notions of ‘aesthetic object’ and ‘aesthetic category’, anyway inevitable in our post-Kantian era, on the basis of subjective parameters (relatively and arbitrarily determined) rather than objective parameters (aprioristically established). In other words, these notions will be envisaged not as a series of absolute and predetermined labels (e. g. Beauty, Grotesque, Horror) and corresponding objects (e. g. the organicistic world of Nature; the distorted forms of the lusi naturae; supernatural, demonic entities such as ghosts and vampires), but rather as arrays of perceptual constants and affective outcomes (e. g. pleasure, satisfaction, desire; amazement, contempt, estrangement; displeasure, repulsion, fear), associated by individuals or whole cultural groups in given historical periods to different objects or sets of “objects in the world” (Fenner 34), as a result of a turning of the non-aesthetic into the aesthetic, that is, as a result of two crucial cognitive operations. The first one is the attribution, by cultural agreement, to these concrete percepts of subjective experience, of the capacity of arousing a series of expected perceptual and cognitive outcomes. The second one consists in their subsequent inclusion in the circuit of cultural production and fruition, as objects now experienced, by collective agreement, as actually possessing those properties ontologically (Morphy 664), i. e. as objects now capable of activating, in their users, the aesthetic modes of reception and production. Therefore, ‘aestheticization’, or the turning of the non-aesthetic to the aesthetic, will consist, in this perspective, in a subjective manipulation of the object, since the inclusion of the latter, as a centralized element, in the individual and collective aesthetic spectrum, is not accomplished on the basis of ontological features it actually possesses, but through a culturally agreed attribution of a certain number of outcomes to a series of corresponding percepts. It is in this first meaning that aestheticization can be seen as a twofold process of displacement-distortion. As a displacement, this phenomenon involves a dynamic interaction between a subject and an object of perception, whose positions are always relatively rather than absolutely determined. As a distortion, it also entails a subjective manipulation of the object’s configuration, resulting from a crucial change in the subjective attitude towards the object itself. Besides this – and even more interesting for artistic studies – the displacement-distortion model does not only apply to the intra-structural dynamics of ‘aestheticization’, that is to the dynamics taking place between the extratextual reality of sensory experience and the cultural domain of art, but also, to the infrastructural dynamics at the basis of ‘de-aestheticization’, that is to phenomena taking place, instead, within both the cultural circuit of artistic communication and, more important, within the borders of a historically determined individual and collective spectrum, and concerning the downgrading of the aesthetic into the unaesthetic, through the crucial sub-phases of marginalization and exclu-

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sion. In this case also, an important shift in the relative subject-object positions (displacement) leads to a series of important subjective manipulations of the object (distortions). These latter correspond, in this respect, to a series of subsequent alterations of the original configuration of the object (this latter here corresponding to the configuration which allowed its cultural encoding in aesthetic terms), that is, to a series of successive changes in the response to it by the subject, and which determine a series of corresponding changes in the position occupied by that same object within the aesthetic spectrum (from its centre to the periphery, as in the marginalization implied in the perception of the object as ‘less aesthetic’; from the periphery to the outside, as in exclusion, when the object is re-encoded as ‘no more aesthetic’). Analogously to what occurs in the optical deformations described in the displacement-distortion model, also in the case of de-aestheticization the changes undergone by the aesthetic object/category during its downgrading into the domain of the unaesthetic, follow a pattern of subjectively perceived formal alterations which matches, as I am going to show now, with the phenomena, described in the domains of cognitive neuroscience and visual perception, of defocusing and deformation, as two important successive sub-phases in a same process of subjective manipulation. However, before going any further in the application of the displacement-distortion model to the dynamics of aestheticization and de-aestheticization, including the crucial sub-phases of defocusing and deformation, a second preliminary consideration has to be pointed out: in fact, and notwithstanding their structural homology, the two processes nevertheless manifest a crucial difference. On the one side, the displacement-distortion process involves primarily spatial and optical phenomena, since the dislocation of the object in relation to the subject’s focal centre is a sensory stimulus which is perceived within the visual spectrum, that is, in the physical space, and since the distortion effects whereby produced, however hallucinatory, always correspond to the perceptual and cognitive outcomes of an ocular phenomenon produced by that same dislocation. Within the domain of aesthetics, on the other side, not only does the displacement-distortion process involve perceptual and cognitive phenomena (the displacement of the object in relation to the centre of the aesthetic spectrum consists, in fact, in a shift in the attribution of a series of perceptual constants, thus, in a cognitive labelling of it: cf. e. g. the Romantic aestheticization of Nature as ‘beautiful’ object) but also a third decisive element, virtually absent (or, at least, not structurally decisive) in the other domain. Far from being a mere shift in the physical space, between the physical, optical poles of proximity/distance, centre/margin, in relation to the subject’s eye and field of vision, in the domain of aesthetic experience and encoding, the displacement-distortion process is a shift in the subject-object relative positions taking place in the internalized dimen-

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sion of the subject’s psyche, and involving a rather affective polarity, and articulated by a series of euphoric and dysphoric opposites. Aesthetic experience, in fact, is based on an activity which is of great importance in this domain: the ‘exercise of taste’, a perceptual and emotional process resulting from the complex interaction between, on the one side, the sensory contemplation of the object, and on the other side, the recognition, by the subject, of his/her own affective response to it (Korsmeyer 268 – 69). This affective response depends on our subjective perceptual peculiarities (both innate and conditioned by culture: Bell et al. 59; Vygotsky 96 – 145) and it besides regulates, like a sort of individual eudaemonic thermometer, our sensory and emotive reactions to perception, re-organizing them in couples of complementary polar opposites, euphoric and dysphoric, such as pleasure-like vs. displeasure-dislike (Korsmeyer 268 – 69). The exercise of taste, subjective and individual, is the very heart of the formulation of any ‘aesthetic judgement’, that is, of the evaluative process, arbitrary and divorced from any test of objectivity, which constitutes a further decisive step in this experience. In this phase, the euphoric-dysphoric couples, generated by the exercise of taste as purely perceptual and emotional outcomes of sensory experience, are now consciously rearranged by the subject in a hierarchical system of values (and polarized accordingly), so that the object/phenomenon is attributed a posteriori a series of qualities. Due to the evaluative nature of this activity, these latter are all ascribable to the domain of salience (for example, as for the positive euphoric pole of pleasure-like, the object may be now encoded as ‘interesting’, ‘important’, ‘valuable’, ‘significant’; on the other side, as for the negative dysphoric pole of displeasure-dislike, the object is now seen as ‘not interesting’, ‘nonessential’, ‘ordinary’, ‘insignificant’) and it is precisely according to the degree of this sort of “salience-coefficient” (Zemach 55) that the object is envisaged as possessing (or else as not possessing) the quality of being (or else of not being) aesthetic (Zemach 53 – 55). It is in this connection that the application of the displacement-distortion model to aesthetics, that is the passage from a series of primarily optical phenomena occurring in the physical space (i. e. the polar opposites of centre vs. periphery, and, correlated to the former, of proximity vs. distance) to a series of primarily psychic phenomena, as those involved in aesthetic taste and judgement, and organized by affective opposites (pleasure-like vs. displeasure-dislike; salient vs. non salient; aesthetic vs. unaesthetic), becomes theoretically conceivable. In this respect, if applied to the domain of aesthetics, the physical opposition of spatial proximity vs. distance can be thus transposed into the affective opposition of emotional closeness vs. detachment. This latter, in fact, originates in the euphoric-dysphoric eudaemonistic polarity which is at the basis of the ex-

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ercise of taste. In this connection, pleasant objects (that is objects matching with the subject’s sensory and affective expectations) move the subject’s euphoric response, so that this latter’s affective link with them, once established, becomes stronger in a relation of direct proportionality with the level of sensory and emotional satisfaction produced in the interaction, therefore the subject-object relation is one of emotional closeness; unpleasant objects (that is objects which do not match with the subject’s sensory and affective expectations) move the subject’s dysphoric response, so that they are experienced by him with an increasingly affective detachment. On the other side, the spatial opposition of centre vs. periphery structurally overlaps with the evaluative polarity entailed in aesthetic judgement (aesthetically salient vs. aesthetically non salient, or ordinariness), since the superimposition, by the subject, of either one or the other of these euphoric-dysphoric properties to the object, inevitably modifies his/her own behavioural attitudes towards the latter, making him/her place it either at the centre or at the periphery of the aesthetic spectrum, that is, experience it either as an aesthetically salient or as an aesthetically non salient entity, therefore inducing him/her to either aestheticize or de-aestheticize it.

Displacement-distortion and aesthetic sacralisation-desacralisation Due to the affective and evaluative components of the exercises of taste and of aesthetic judgement, the displacement-distortion process of aestheticization and de-aestheticization can be seen as a twofold mechanism of cultural sacralisation-desacralisation. On the one side, aesthetic centralization can be seen as a process of sacralisation, in that it consists, analogously to the corresponding phenomenon described by anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists (Eliade 20 – 24; Freud 24; Marshall 64) in a semiotic practice of de-contextualization, or demundanisation, of a given object of experience from the virtually indistinct continuum of everyday life, made through a culturally agreed attribution of the key property of salience, that is through its encoding as unfamiliar, unique, unexpected, and therefore significant, precious entity (Berger 26; Durkheim 44; Eliade 20 – 24). In the case of aesthetics, the property of being salient even acquires a supplement of symbolic and pragmatic importance. Aesthetics, in fact, is closely related to artistic communication, so that the attribution of this property to a given object of experience is always the result of an evaluative process in which a vital importance is ascribed to the key notion of informativity, or the rhematic

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property of carrying high communicational load through the constant introduction of new informational content – i. e., information which is perceived by the subject as unexpected, unfamiliar, sometimes even ‘alien’– and in which a constant relation of direct proportionality between novelty and information constitutes a major requirement for successful communication (Lotman, Art. Text 70 – 71). As in sacralisation, in aesthetic centralization also, the attribution of salience is arbitrarily and subjectively made ex post, that is, accomplished independently from the object’s ontological characteristics. In fact, and analogously to what occurs in sacralisation, where all objects and phenomena of experience can potentially be perceived as sacred (Eliade 12; Durkheim 35), also in aestheticization anything can be potentially perceived in aesthetic terms and therefore put at the centre of the aesthetic spectrum (Bullough 87 – 117; Panofsky 28). Analogously to what occurs in sacralisation (Callois 20, 60 – 61, 90 – 91; Durkheim 44; Marshall 65), also in aesthetics the attribution of salience is a symbolic de-mundanisation of the ordinary having significant pragmatic outcomes, in that it produces an important shift in the behavioural attitudes of the object’s users. These latter, in fact, and as it already occurs in the case of sacralisation, once they conventionally agree in experiencing it as if it was really an aesthetically salient, therefore unique, precious, special entity, they also convey, by cultural agreement, to place it at the centre of their perceptual, cognitive and affective interest, and therefore use it (according to a pragmatic mode which is similar to the tabooing of the sacred in religion: cf. Freud 24; Callois 100; Durkheim 44), as a canonized, often almost unalterable model for the production and fruition of new cultural products; a model which now occupies the centre of the individual and collective aesthetic spectrum as a culturally sacred entity. On the other side, de-aestheticization, including the sub-phases of marginalization and exclusion, can be compared to a process of desacralisation in that it consists, analogously to this latter, in a culturally encoded practice of remundanisation, or normalization, of an object/phenomenon through the subtraction of the perceptual, cognitive, affective properties which previously allowed its users to encode and decode it as a symbolically and pragmatically salient entity. As it occurs in the domain of religion (Hubert and Mauss 57) in aesthetics also this re-contextualization of what had been previously sacralised entails a twofold cognitive manipulation of the object. First of all, it consists in a demotion of the object from the centre to the periphery of the spectrum (or even outside it, as in the case of exclusion) and from the symbolic and pragmatic system in which it had been previously engrafted, as direct result of the subtraction of the property of being salient. Secondly, this process at the same time implies a significant change in the value which is now ascribed to the object, since what previously occupied the dominant central position and now begins to

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be marginalized till complete exclusion from the system, as a result of the passage from the marked condition of salience to the unmarked status of normality, is also dysphorically re-encoded. In aesthetics, one example is the fact that any promotion of a new artistic movement, and corresponding aesthetic parameters, into the centre of the aesthetic spectrum of a given cultural group, in a determined historical period, occurs at the expense of the preceding ones (cf., e. g. the Romantic reactions to Neoclassicism, itself a heated response to Rococo) since these latter are devaluated accordingly, that is encoded as less aesthetically salient than the new ones. This said, we are now able to define, within the displacement-distortion model, the two crucial sub-phases of defocusing and deformation. These latter can be in fact applied to the above described phenomena of subjective manipulation of the object, occurring during the opposite but complementary processes of cultural sacralisation, i. e. aestheticization, and of cultural desacralisation, i. e. de-aestheticization, as they structurally overlap with the affective and cognitive components involved in both processes, and articulated, as we know, by the axiological pairs of emotional closeness vs. detachment and of aesthetically salient vs. ordinary. On the one side, the optical concept of defocusing can be in fact re-encoded with respect to the psychic notions of emotional closeness vs. detachment – defined above in relation to the domain of aesthetic taste – to refer to the initial phases of aesthetic desacralization, when the subject’s affective link with the object (which still occupies the centre of the aesthetic spectrum, but which will soon recede into the periphery) begins to weaken, so that the euphoric association, made by him or her, between the object and the domain of the aesthetically salient (and which represented the cultural reasons for its collocation in the focal centre of the aesthetic spectrum) now appears as less evident than before, that is, than it was in the initial phases of aesthetic sacralisation. To use the optical metaphor which guides us in the encoding of the descriptive terminology of this study, the object’s configuration (until that moment culturally defined and thus recognisable, because of its affective proximity to the subject’s aesthetic system of values), now begins to blur, or, it appears as ‘defocused’. In other words, it passes, in the subject’s affective perception of it, from the status of being aesthetically salient (typical of aesthetic sacralisation) to that of being increasingly less aesthetically salient, and typical of the passage from aesthetic sacralisation to aesthetic desacralisation. On the other side, the term deformation will be applied to the twin notions of aesthetic sacralisation-desacralisation as the two complementary sides of a same subjective phenomenon of perceptual, emotional and cognitive manipulation of the object. In this sense, the term will refer to the alteration, always subjectively perceived, of the original configuration of the object (that is, the configuration it

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possessed at the beginning of the process), and resulting from the accomplishment of either one or all the above described three forms of subject-object relative displacement in relation to the aesthetic spectrum (i. e. centralization, marginalization and exclusion), as the manifest outcome of the manifold shifts in value attribution (euphoric evaluation, in the case of its inclusion and then centralization within the spectrum; dysphoric devaluation, in the case of marginalization and exclusion), made by the subject during the exercise of aesthetic judgement.

Repetition and entropy This said, a last crucial issue still remains to be explored: the reasons behind the process of aesthetic sacralisation-desacralisation described so far. Again, a crucial hint towards the solution of the problem is provided by a key feature in the displacement-distortion model: the notion of ‘repetition’. In this model, repetition is a fundamental shared component of the above mentioned experiments on the deautomatization of central-peripheral vision (see par. 1 above). In these studies, in fact, it is the reiteration of the centreperiphery shift stimulus – i. e. the relative subject-object displacement from the central to the peripheral regions of the visual field – which creates the perception of a series of discontinuities between what is seen with the central (foveal) parts of the eye and what is seen peripherally – i. e. with the corner of the eye (Shapiro et al. 1; Tangen et al. 628 – 30). What is important to note here is that the subsequent cognitive outcome of this displacement – i. e. the acknowledgement by the subject of a series of distortions, often progressively increased, in the object (defocusing, deformation) – is directly proportional to the temporal duration of the centre-periphery shift stimulus. In other words, it depends on how long this relativization of the point of view and of the object’s spatial collocation in relation to the subject’s visual field will last, that is, how long the stimulus will be reiterated (e. g. in Tangen’s experiments, this pertains to the cyclical series of alternating faces). In this connection, the more is the stimulus repeated (that is, the more it lasts in time) the more will the distortion be perceived (cf. Shapiro et al. 1). Conversely, any interruption in the sequence of repetitions, e. g. as in the case of the introduction of a pause which breaks the continuity of the chain, immediately interrupts the hallucinatory distortion effect (cf. Tangen et al. 628). Therefore, not only does repetition represent, as a component of the centre-periphery displacement of the object in relation to the subject’s visual field, a necessary condition to the effects of distortion (defocusing, deformation), but also it appears to be directly proportional to them, in relation to the temporal duration of

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the subject’s fruition: the more the persistence of the stimulus, i. e. its reiteration, the more are the distortion effects acknowledged by the observer. If we now turn to the phenomenology of aesthetic experience and categorization, a series of crucial analogies with the displacement-distortion model can be detected. In this case also, and as I will try to show now, the temporally prolonged repetition of fruition is a necessary condition to a subjectively perceived distortion in the object, since this latter is directly proportional to the former : the more is the fruition of the object delayed in time, the more is the distortion perceived by the subject. In addition, and unlike what occurs in visual perception, in the aesthetic domain repetition is a necessary condition for displacement: in other words, it is the start-up spark of any change in aesthetic categorization, either as euphorically oriented spur to the centralization of aesthetically sacralised objects, or as dysphorically oriented move to the marginalization and exclusion, from the individual and collective spectrum, of the aesthetically desacralized ones. As can be easily imagined, thus, the notion of repetition is of critical importance for the application of the displacementdistortion model to the dynamics of aesthetic experience and categorization, since it provides crucial insights into how this phenomenon occurs and, more interestingly, into the reasons why it takes place. First of all, and in relation to the dynamics of aesthetic change, I will use the term ‘repetition’ to refer to the pragmatic factors involved in the circuit of artistic communication, and more precisely, to the phenomenon of the re-use of objects and related sets of perceptual categories, in given historical periods, as canonized items, that is, as signs which temporarily occupy the centre of the aesthetic spectrum, as culturally sacralised items, and are therefore transmitted as dominant components of a shared repertoire within a given community (i. e. as sets of shared meanings which the members of that group conventionally agree to use as models, or schemata, for the interpretation and formation of all cultural products within their communicative circuit: cf. Iser 21 and Even-Zohar 18). However, the temporal duration of this perpetuation of canonized signs and texts is directly proportional to their progressive devaluation in terms of aesthetic worth (i. e. to their desacralization) and thus to their gradual but progressive marginalization in, and therefore exclusion from, the individual and collective aesthetic spectrum. Information theory gives us an exhaustive explanation for this phenomenon: repetition, although a fundamental component of communication, is at the same time highly problematic, as it may turn into ‘redundancy’, i. e. a form of “noise”, to say it in Lotman’s terms (Lotman, Art. Text 75 – 76), or of disturbance to information transmission, whose temporal duration is directly proportional to the amount of informative loss (Lotman, ibid.). As Lotman points out, although repetition is strategically important for both artistic and non-artistic semiotic

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structures, since it conveys the thematic, or given, informational content without which any communication would be soon doomed to failure (Lotman, Art. Text 104 – 7), it at the same time constitutes a critical feature within artistic structures. In fact, the informational sameness brought by repetitive patterns without any variation or with low levels of variance (either in form or meaning, or both) is an entropic phenomenon which inevitably leads to an “automatization” of the relation signs-referents (Lotman, Art. Text 70 – 72; Even-Zohar 17 calls it “petrification”), that is to a progressive reduction, then exhaustion, of the semiotic complexity and informational effectiveness of signs and texts, through a lessening of the number of deautomatized, non-systematic material (i. e. rhematic content, perceived as relatively new information), with a subsequent decrease in the degree of “unexpectedness” (Lotman, Art. Text 71 – 72), or ‘explosiveness’ (Lotman, Cult. Expl. 25 – 32, 158) of the structure. The above mentioned outcomes of repetition weaken a fundamental component of art, while potentially leading, in a directly proportional way to the duration of fruition, to communicative breakdown. In this special type of semiosis, in fact, the unpredictability of semantic outcomes is always directly proportional to the system’s informativeness, i. e. to its capacity of transmitting new informational content for the whole duration of fruition (Lotman, Art. Text 71 – 72; cf. also Steiner’s definition of art as “maximalisation of semantic incommensurability in respect of the formal means of expression”, Steiner 83). Due to the semiotic detriment brought by repetition, and caused by an imbalance between the automatization entailed by repetitive patterns and the de-automatization introduced the rhematic ones, the structure is increasingly felt as being less informative, therefore losing its specificity : in sum, it inevitably turns into a non-artistic form of communication, where the rate of “predictability […] increases in proportion to the reader’s perception so that at the end of a sentence a considerable part of its structural means becomes redundant” (Lotman, Art. Text 71). If we transpose these dynamics into the domain of aesthetics, where emotion and attention constitute the affective components at the basis of the subject’s response to the object, the triad of repetition-automatization-entropy appears to be of crucial importance for the formalization of the dynamics of aesthetic experience and categorization on the basis of the application of the displacement-distortion model. On the one side, any aestheticization involves in fact a process of ‘rhematicization’, since the culturally agreed attribution, to an object of experience, of the quality of being salient – itself a necessary prerequisite for the inclusion and subsequent centralization of it in the aesthetic spectrum – corresponds to an encoding of it as an unfamiliar, unknown, sometimes even totally ‘alien’ entity, that is, to the production of new informational content. At the same time, though, any aestheticization also coincides with a process of

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cultural sacralisation, according to which the object, once put at the centre of the individual and collective spectrum of interest, is therefore inserted in the pragmatic mechanisms of the re-use, and becomes a canonized semiotic item, i. e. an item entailing repetitive and increasingly stereotyped schemata for its production and fruition. As a result, the subject’s response to it will be gradually but progressively automatized, with the consequence of depleting its informational efficiency. It is in this connection that aesthetic desacralization as a displacement-distortion process occurs: by effect of this changes in the subject’s attitude, the canonized object undergoes a process of manipulation (distortion) which will gradually alter (through the sub-phases of defocusing and deformation) the perceived configuration of it from the axiologically positive pole of the ‘aesthetic’ to the axiologically negative one of the ‘unaesthetic’. This is a process of progressive centre-to-periphery displacement occurring within the individual/ collective aesthetic spectrum of interest, as the object passes from the status of a new, rhematic item, informationally salient, therefore also aesthetically worthy (centralization), to that of a stereotyped, conventional item, informationally less salient, therefore aesthetically less worthy than before (marginalization), or even no more informationally salient, therefore no more aesthetic (exclusion). In this connection, the application of the displacement-distortion model to the domain of aesthetics, besides being relatively new for the humanities, may also constitute, in my view, a valid heuristic tool to the understanding, explanation, and even prediction, of the manifold phenomena involved in the everchanging perceptual, emotional and cognitive relation between the subject and the object of aesthetic experience and categorization, both in an individual perspective (as it relates to single authors and texts) and in a collective one (as it relates to wider cultural groups and historical periods). Of course, a reasonable test for this analytical model is to see whether it can apply to specific texts and, in a more general sense, to whole artistic movements and historical periods. I will focus my analysis on a relatively brief poem, which anyway can be reasonably seen as an exemplary text for this specific purpose: Thomas Hardy’s “Neutral Tones”.

Thomas Hardy’s “Neutral Tones” In terms of centre-periphery relations, “Neutral Tones” can be envisaged as a sort of poetic snapshot of the initial phases of an epoch-making event: the gradual but progressive shift in position, by the aesthetic category of Romantic ‘Beauty’, from the centre to the periphery of the individual/collective aesthetic spectrum of the early Victorian period. Historically, this progressive margin-

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alization of Romantic ‘Beauty’ can be traced in crucial liminal figures such as those represented by the High Romantics (Swinburne, Hopkins, Arnold), where it prefigures the definitive exclusion of this category from the system, an exclusion which will take place in later art, both in the individuals’ poetics (such as that of Hardy himself, as exemplified by “Hap” and his novels: see Langbaum 33 – 34) and in the collective one as well (especially, of course, in the Modernist critical reactions to Romantic sensibility, and exemplified by Eliot’s poetics). As many critics have pointed out, in this poem the disenchanted, melancholic voice of the speaker poetically enacts a subjective process of grievous devaluation, or reconsideration in dysphoric terms, of his own past (Bailey 55 – 6; Bloom 37; Johnson, Crit. Intr. 178 – 79; Langbaum 44 – 5). This is a comprehensive, wide-ranging process, in what it includes both outer experience (as symbolized by the paradigm of Nature, central in ll. 1 – 4 and 15 – 16, and by the woman’s appearance, ll. 5 – 6, 9 – 12 and 15), as well as the objects of the internalized dimension of the psyche (in this case symbolized, in Stanzas II – III, by the paradigm of Love, the psychic reality par excellence, and by the lovers’ deceitful speeches of ll. 7 – 8). At the same time, though, the poem’s two dominant paradigms and main objects of the speaker’s dysphoric reconsideration, Nature and Love (the landscape of ll. 1 – 4 and 15 – 16 is drained of colour and dismal, the relationship with the woman, presented in ll. 5 – 12, has come to an end), represent two key features which are clearly reminiscent, by axiological reversal from the positive to the negative pole, of the aesthetic sensibility of the previous Romantic age (Persoon 37 – 39), as these objects were commonly ascribed to the category, instead euphoric, of Beauty (cf. Pagnini 7 – 23 and Abrams 184 – 86). This indicates that the devaluative process here presented goes far beyond the intratextual level – where it concerns an affective relation, such as that involving the speaker and the key objects of his past experience – to the collective plane of intertextuality – where it indexically points towards the relation, instead cultural and in this case detectable at the enunciative level of the implicit author, between the fictional universe of this text and the key category of Romantic Beauty, itself reminiscent of the aesthetic sensibility of the previous age. By effect of indexicality, Romantic Beauty is thus evoked in the text as a dysphoric signic ghost, as this aesthetic category, characteristically encoded as euphoric in the source code and therefore promoted as a central feature in Romantic texts, is instead perceivable, in Hardy’s target text, only indirectly, and besides through its axiologically negative reversal. Undoubtedly, indirectness is an expressive choice which frequently occurs in concomitance with intertextual relations in literature (Todorov 15). However, in “Neutral Tones” this evocation of Romantic Beauty, by axiological reversal from the positive to the negative pole, goes far beyond simple intertextual referentiality. In fact, it expressively points towards a phenomenon of aesthetic de-

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sacralization: the crepuscular, declining phase in which a given object/category, previously encoded as aesthetically salient and therefore ‘sacralised’, is now dysphorically devaluated, and then gradually but progressively marginalized to periphery, till its definitive dismissal as an entity which is no more aesthetically salient and its subsequent reinsertion into the indistinct continuum of the ‘nonaesthetic’, that is of everyday ordinariness. Besides, and as I will try to show in the present analysis, this process of aesthetic desacralisation is a good testing ground to check the validity of the displacement-distortion model, as it has been artistically crystallised by Hardy in primarily optical terms, that is, through reference to a type of sensory perception, the visual one, which also constitutes the main field of application of this theory, in the domain of neurosciences.

Defocusing In “Neutral Tones”, the first phase of this desacralisation process, defocusing, takes place in Stanzas I – II (ll. 1 – 8), and retains a structural value, as its development coincides with both the poem’s metrical and thematic articulation. In ll. 1 – 4 this phenomenon involves the set of objects which are related to the dominant paradigm of Stanza I, Nature (“1 pond”, “1 winter day”, “2 sun”, “3 leaves”, “3 sod”, “4 ash”); in ll. 5 – 8 it entails the set of objects related to the paradigm which dominates Stanza II, Love (“5 eyes” and the distinctive features of the language of lovers: “6 riddles”, “7 words played […] to and fro”, “8 love”). In both cases, and in conformity with the displacement-distortion model, this distortion phenomenon consists in a progressive disturbance of the subjectively perceived ‘normal’ shape of all these percepts (that is of the configuration these two sets had in the remote past, evoked by indexicality, and encoded as such in the Romantic canon) in terms of a subjective perception of them as affectively and perceptually blurred, as well as progressively unrecognizable, alien entities, that is as percepts now less able of arousing in the speaker the emotional and sensory outcomes with the same intensity as before. This is due to the fact that they are now fatally receding, along the parabola of subjective experience, from the euphoric pole of emotional involvement and sensory vividness (proximity), in which they were centralized and clearly recognized by the subject as parts of an expected affective and perceptual frame of experience, to the neutral pole of emotional and perceptual detachment (distance), according to which they are now being marginalized, and therefore die away into affective and perceptual indistinctness. This condition of relative defocusing of Nature/Love is expressively highlighted by a skilful and systematic manipulation of the signified and signifier of the text, made at both the lexical level and on the planes of rhythmic patterning

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and sound texture, to convey a generalized effect of lessening in the capacity of poetic materials themselves to vividly elicit the reader’s emotional and sensory response. At the lexical level, defocusing can be detected on the plane of semantics and on the visual plane of eidetic categories, where it constitutes the main expressive result of the axiological reversion of the Nature/Love paradigms, reminiscent of the euphoric category of Romantic Beauty, into their dysphoric complementary opposites, as they both are now unable of arousing in the subject the emotional and sensory outcomes with the same intensity as before, and are thus felt by him as affectively detached. In this case, defocusing is suggested by the immobility (“1 stood”, “1 pond”, “3 lay”, “4 fallen”) and chromatic desaturation (“2 white” sun, “4 gray” leaves) which characterize, in ll. 1 – 4, the wintry countryside (“1 winter day”, “3 a few leaves”), as topical space of the inhibition of natural cycles (“3 starving sod”), and by the character of affective apathy and emotional stagnation which characterizes, instead, the speaker’s love relationship with the woman (ll. 5 – 8), now depleted of the timic vitality and attentiveness it formerly possessed. This latter trait becomes detectable, for instance, in the image of the woman’s roving “5 eyes”, whose inability to keep their optical target, the speaker, at the centre of the visual focus, then to maintain a persistent and therefore focused vision on him, is an optical diversion which, besides being consistent with the phenomena of centre-periphery shift analysed in the above mentioned studies in neuroscience and visual perception, it also poetically crystallises a distraction which is occurring in the woman’s psyche, on the plane of emotion. The speaker, in fact, formerly represented the object of her love, was therefore placed at the ideal centre of her desiderative spectrum, and consequently functioned as a stable target of her emotional attention. By effect of Hardy’s artistic modelling, now that their love relationship has come to an end, the emotional marginalization undergone by the speaker in the woman’s psyche has its optical equivalent in this image, as its perfect objective correlative. This generalized affective-perceptual detriment of Nature/Love, occurring at the more manifest levels of the text, is reinforced by rhythm and sound patterning, as Stanzas I – II make also perceivable, on the plane of the signifier, a generalized effect of hazing in the auditory shape of poetic language, thus modelling, on the material plane of the poetic word, a twofold phenomenon of distancing and defocusing which is already occurring on the metaphorical plane of the signified. This outcome is reached through a skilful exploitation of the relative rhythmic and sound effects which the reader experiences in the linearity of reading, in passing from the first Stanza – whose rhythmic patterning (triple iambic rhythm, with scheme 4443) transmits a generalized effect of restlessness, anxiety, frustration – to the second Stanza, where this effect soon turns into relative inertness and acoustic lethargy, and is reminiscent of a sound dying

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away, as if perceived from a distance. First of all, the strong potential energy implied in the double offbeats, i. e. pairs of weaker rhythmic pulses, is a spur to development, to a freeing of articulatory energy which is regularly impeded by the stronger beats which fall in words connoting stasis, impediment, dysphoria (“1 stood […] pond […] winter”; “2 sun […] white […] chidden of God”; “3 few […] lay […] starving sod”; “4 fallen […] ash […] gray”) and words which do not connote stasis in the langue, but which are here influenced by the co-textual ones, instead axiologically negative, in virtue of rhythmic and rhyme connections (“1 winter day”, rhyme fellow to the chromatically dysphoric “4 gray”; “2 God”, “3 starving sod”, the association between these two latter being reinforced by internal rhyme). Secondly, the phonic texture confirms what occurs at the level of rhythm: the frustration of energy is in fact an expressive phenomenon which is also phonosymbolically detectable. First of all, this effect is brought out by the cadenced reoccurrence, among relatively more gentle, feeble sounds (such as those carried by vocal sounds and clusters of voiced consonants, especially the fricatives, such as in “3 leaves”) of consonant sounds and clusters in words carrying stronger rhythmic accents, and phonosymbolically attributable more to the harsh heaviness of noises than to the harmonious levity of musicality ([st] in “1 stood” and in “3 starving”; [tS] in “2 chidden”; [gr] in “4 gray”; [S] in “4 ash”). In the second Stanza, an increase in auditory hazing becomes perceivable in the rhythm and sound texture. This latter, in fact, develops the frustration of potential energy, which in the first Stanza took place through heaviness and stasis, into the inertial prosody of a sound which is now dying away, as if perceived at a distance, thus in fact suggesting, on the plane of the signifier, the condition of affective and perceptual distancing of the subject in relation to the objects of his past experience, now spatio-temporally remote; a condition which constitutes the direct effect of the prospecting distancing implied in his narration. This becomes evident, first of all, in the contrast between symbolic dynamism, evoked at the semantic level, and symbolic stasis, instead suggested by the rhythmic pattern of these lines. On the one side, in fact, dynamism is evoked: 1. in the image of the projection of sight from the subject to the object of perception (“5 [y]our eyes on me”); 2. as physical movement, exemplified by the chaotic wandering of the woman’s eyes (“5-6 rove / Over”), and as swinging dynamism, although somewhat wandering, in this case emblematized by the words exchanged by the lovers (“7 words played between us to and fro”); 3. as metaphorical movement of the intellect, as that which is required to solve “6 riddles”, although “6 tedious”; 4. as temporal progression (“6 years”); 5. finally, as affective dynamism, such as that of emotion, evoked by “8 love”. On the other side, though, phonetic and semantic dynamism has its counterpart in the heaviness of the rhythm, as the regular, cadenced solemnity of the triple iambic patterning

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which dominates in Stanza II transmits an almost funereal sense of gloomy melancholy. This latter, in fact, while expressively counterpointing, by contrast, the dynamism which is instead detectable at the phonetic and semantic levels, anyway weighs it down, making movement indefinitely tending to stasis, and finally turning the feeble whistle of the fricatives into deadening inertia. This expressive shift from symbolic dynamism to inertia, which seems to characterize the prosodic rule of Stanza II while differentiating this latter from Stanza I, is also perceivable in the dash at the end of line 7. If in l. 4 this punctuation mark was framed within an iambic structure, therefore emphasising the expressive effect which dominates in Stanza I (the frustration of energy through the heaviness conveyed by co-textual rhythmic and sounds patterns), here the use of dash produces a different expressive outcome: its trochaic structure (it in fact occurs after a strong rhythmic beat) imposes a syntactic and prosodic pause which indefinitely suspends reading in a dimension of indistinctness; this expressive effect is further emphasised by the spatio-temporal vagueness already suggested, on the semantic plane, by “7 to and fro”. In this connection, the “Neutral Tones” of the title become expressively pertinent as the fundamental symbol of this subjectively perceived distortion, a distortion which affects both the elements of the enounced (visual quality of the landscape and of the woman) and those of the enunciation (rhythm and sound texture), and which progressively transfigures, between Stanza I and Stanza II, all objects of subjective experience into blurred, defocused entities, now affectively detached, thus also seen as perceptually remote.

Deformation: grotesque and horror Defocusing, however, is not the last step in this process of subjective distortion: in accordance with the displacement-distortion model, in fact, also in “Neutral Tones” the desacralisation of the objects of experience (Nature/Love) is a process of subjective devaluation which triggers a further and decisive manipulation. This new subjectively perceived phenomenon of distortion corresponds to deformation, and constitutes the direct outcome of the affective and sensory detachment generated by this previous normalization of formerly salient objects into the periphery of grey ordinariness, as it formally models, in terms of a visually perceivable disfiguration, a dysphoric perception which is already entailed in defocusing. In reason of this, deformation assumes the traits of a hallucinatory phenomenon in which the objects are now transformed into percepts that, since they appear as increasingly repulsive, are thus ready to be totally excluded from the individual spectrum of interest, as non-aesthetic entities. In this case, the objects, here related to the paradigms of Nature/Love, are

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gradually transformed, under the reader’s eyes and through the enunciative voice of the speaker, first into near-grotesque monstrosities (Stanza III, ll. 9 – 11), then into perturbing near-horrific entities (Stanza III, ll. 11 – 12). The first sub-phase of deformation, grotesque, consists in a dysphoric exacerbation of defocusing, since it manifests, as I will try to show throughout, a structural and thematic continuity with the first half of the poem, dominated by this initial stage of distortion. This exacerbation becomes first of all perceivable on the visual plane, in terms of a significant change in the eidetic configuration of the objects related to the Nature/Love paradigms: these latter, in fact, now shift, within the speaker’s subjective perception, from the previous condition of blurred and vague entities, characteristic of Stanzas I – II, to a sudden increase in visual detail, suggested in ll. 9 – 11 through reference to the synecdochic particulars of the woman’s bodily appearance (her “9 smile”, itself even spatially localized with anatomical precision on her “9 mouth”, and shaped like a “11 grin”). On the logical and structural planes, by virtue of this sudden increase in visual detail, and besides, by virtue of the paratactic structure which dominates in the poem and which occurs here also (“11 and”), these minute anatomical particulars are perceived by the reader as a bunch of heaped images, i. e. not as interdependent parts of an organic, natural whole (as the face of the woman should normally be, even in the synecdochic presentations of it, e. g. in the tradition of Petrarchan love lyric), but rather as an almost Picassian aggregate of mechanically juxtaposed discrete parts. Accordingly, the smile of the woman is presented as something which is “9 on” her “9 mouth”, not as a constitutive part of it (e. g. as a shape the mouth can assume). This produces the expressive outcome of displaying it as an incongruous, decontextualized detail, a percept now sensed by the observer as being out of place. Visually, the integrated action of these two constitutive features in the subjective presentation of these objects of the speaker’s experience (1. the enhancement in realistic detail through heightening of anatomical particulars and 2. the correlated effect of decontextualization of these same particulars, which makes them coexist as mechanically juxtaposed details, not as parts of an organic, coherent whole) outlines a particular kind of subjectively distorted perception which is consistent with two among the visual and cognitive components of the experience and representation of the grotesque: the subordination of the organic to the mechanic (Ciancio 8), and the heightening of realistic detail, itself an expressive characteristic of caricatural representations (Swain 107 – 38). Deformation is also perceivable on the affective plane, where it assumes the traits of the emotional outcome, axiologically negative, which is often experienced in the subjective perception of an object as a repulsively ugly, monstrously bizarre and grotesque entity : contempt (Mitchell and Snyder 63 – 64). This

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becomes evident in the sarcastic turn which characterizes the enunciative voice in ll. 9 – 10, in concomitance with the presentation of the deadening smile of the woman (“the smile on your mouth was the deadest thing / Alive enough to have strength to die”). In fact, this textual segment reveals, with a pun of bitter, cold humour, the speaker’s contemptuous attitude towards some physical detail (“9 smile […] mouth”) which presumably represented for him a fascinating aspect of the woman during their past love relationship, not only on the visual plane (the lady’s ‘smile’ is a well-known topos in the long tradition of the love lyric, from the ProvenÅal troubadours to the Sicilian School and Petrarch, where it synecdochically points to the archetypal idea of female beauty), but also on the intellectual one. The “9 mouth”, source of language emission, is also presumably the origin of the witty skirmishes of love, exchanged in the past among the couple as “7 words played to and fro”, but now turned into “6 tedious riddles”, i. e. messages whose hidden meaning (“riddles”) and emotional effectiveness are now lost (“tedious”) in the remote past. They in fact have been “6 solved years ago”, with a subsequent loss of the enjoyment which arises from the intellectual activity of decoding verbal games and encrypted messages, such as riddles. In this connection, the nominal syntagm “11 grin of bitterness” poetically presents, both in visual and emotional terms, the subjectively perceived grotesque deformation undergone by the woman in Stanza III. First of all, the use of “grin” iconically models the distortion process undertaken by the smile, as this latter has become not only broader, but also it has assumed the dysphoric traits of a grimace, i. e. a facial expression which is characteristic of the canonized apparatus of grotesque imagery (Zarifopol-Johnston 168 – 69). Moreover, the lexical choice for “bitterness”, with its denotation of sharpness of taste (cf. OED 1.a.), expressively alludes to the affective side of the experience of deformity and misshapenness, which is again characteristic of the grotesque, and which involves “distaste”, “disappointment”, and “dissatisfaction” (Mitchell and Snyder 63 – 64). The closing textual segment of Stanza III (from “11 swept thereby” to “12 [l]ike an ominous bird a-wing…”) marks a significant change in the progress of the imagery, as it coincides with a further exasperation of the distortion process undergone by the objects of the speaker’s experience. This is made in terms of a further increase in the impediments to recognition and through an intensification, proportional to it, in dysphoric attribution, both exerting the expressive outcome of worsening the grotesque effect subjectively attributed to the “smile” of ll. 9 – 10, and turning it into an unsettling entity which now has been totally detached from its original owner, the woman, and besides has assumed the traits, both perceptual and affective, of an uncanny, unrecognizable otherness, that is, of a horrific presence: the “12 ominous bird a-wing”. Above all, this crucial turning of the smile from the grotesque misshapenness

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of a “11 grin” to the perturbing otherness of the “12 bird” is reached through the increase in impediments to recognition allowed by the semantic deepening of the mouth paradigm. Between ll. 11 – 12, new perceptual traits are in fact added to this object of the speaker’s experience. First of all, “10 swept thereby” develops the seme of chaotic, drifting dynamism – previously introduced in the text by the wandering “7 words” – into a slightly different type of movement, whose spatiotemporal elusiveness (“11 thereby”) and impalpability (“11 swept” alludes to a movement characterized by swiftness and smoothness, therefore difficult to be clearly perceived, either through sight or hear), far from being a return to the previous stage of defocusing, is instead re-encoded by the speaker as a precisely clear-cut new naturalistic image, that of the flying “12 bird”. In this case, however, the seme of elusiveness (itself already detectable in the literal meanings possessed by “bird” and “a-wing”, in the system of the langue), instead of being an objective correlative of the emotional distancing implied in defocusing, is now related to a new emotive outcome: the unsettling, disturbing sensations arising from the perception of the threatening inauspicious (“12 ominous”). In this connection, the “12 ominous bird a-wing” models two fundamental components of a new attitude of the speaker towards the objects of experience: 1. an exponential intensification in dysphoric attribution, which worsens the already axiologically negative contemptuous repulsion, detectable in ll. 9 – 11 in relation to the woman’s smile, turning it into a worrying trepidation (“12 ominous”), more akin to the fear arising from horror than to the contempt elicited by grotesque; 2. the fact that the affective and perceptual distancing implied in defocusing and in grotesque deformation is now become deeper, since it has turned into complete cognitive detachment. This last attitude is suggested by the position of almost total alienation assumed by the speaker in respect to the woman’s smile: this latter exists as an entity which is now totally disconnected from the spectrum of his past experience, since it has turned into the “ominous bird”, that is into a newly introduced naturalistic object, not included in the landscape which constituted the main object of narration, in Stanza I. Besides, and more important, the bird is totally out of his reach, not only on the perceptual plane (as suggested by the elusiveness paradigm) but also from an intellectual standpoint: it is an indefinable, uncanny otherness, with which the speaker can only interact through the symmetrical logic, that is with the mode of being that, according to Matte Blanco, also presides over the immediate perception of our dysphoric bodily sensations when we experience intense fear, helplessness, or horror (Matte Blanco 218, 242). In this connection, the poetic signifier models this phenomenon of estrangement and alienation as an expressive effect which is also detectable in the speaker’s voice. First of all, on the syntactic plane, the use of the indefinite article (“12 an”), further reinforces the speaker’s incapacity of having a clear

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intellectual grasp of this elusive experience. Secondly, on the plane of punctuation, the suspension marks at the end of line 12 exert an effect of syntactic deferral which perfectly parallels the dysphoric suspense of the bird’s fly in a spatio-temporal dimension of indefinite apprehension, itself consistent with the meaning of “ominous” as worrying feeling of something bad which is about to happen. Finally, on the plane of rhythm, the ominousness conveyed by this image has its perfect counterpart in Hardy’s choice for the gloomy, almost funereal cadence of duple rhythm, which characterizes this closing part of the Stanza and which now seems to prevail over the frenzy dynamism of triple rhythm, therefore superseding the effect of grotesque awkwardness of ll. 9 – 11, with a more perturbing sense of horror. In Stanza IV the phenomenon, presented so far, of subjective desacralisation of the objects of experience finally comes to a symbolic and formal synthesis. Devaluation becomes apparent in the image of the “13 keen lessons that love deceives”, in which the disappointment suggested by “deceives” crystallizes the frustration of the expectations in the informative power formerly retained by this crucial type of emotional exchange, and now fatally lost. Deformation, on the other side, becomes perceptible in the second action performed by deceptive “love”, and symbolized by “14 wrings with wrong”: alteration of shape is iconically suggested by “wrings” (cf. OED 2.b), while one of its immediate outcomes, the subjective perception of the object as a decontextualized and warped entity, is evoked by the meaning of “wrongs”, as this latter denotes incorrectness, inappropriateness, fault, both ontologically (cf. OED I.1.c.) and morally (OED, I.1.a.).

Repetition In “Neutral Tones”, a text which provides a poetic presentation of the dysphoric side of the displacement-distortion process, that is of aesthetic desacralization, the phenomenon of informational consummation brought by repetition can be detected at both the intratextual level of the speaker and on the planes of lexicon and syntax. As for the former, the automating effects of entropic repetition as useless tautology, mere non-informative noise, can be detected in the semiotic detriment of the language of the lovers (ll. 5 – 8), and more precisely in the already mentioned image of the “6 tedious riddles”. As for the planes of lexicon and syntax, entropic repetition becomes evident in the systematic reoccurrence, throughout the text, of identical or analogous words and patterns. This reoccurrence which formally models this process as a property of the signifier, thus making the reader actually experience the informational consummation, brought by entropic repetition, as a series of effects of formal redundancy which

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noticeably wear out the poem’s own semiotic material. At the level of lexicon, in fact, repetition becomes entropic redundancy as the reoccurrence, in the explicit (ll. 15 – 16), of the key words or, in certain cases, their synonyms, and of images already used by Hardy in the rest of the poem (“1, 16 a pond”; the “2 sun”, “2 white” and “2 chidden of God”, reoccurs in “15 the God-curst sun”; the “3 few”, “4 gray” “3 leaves” which “3 lay” on the ground and which “4 had fallen from an ash” reoccur as “16 grayish leaves” which edge the “pond”; “4 an ash” reoccurs later, as “15 a tree”; the description of the woman’s physical appearance and expression, presented in ll. 5 – 6, 9 – 12, is evoked later by “15 your face”), is here co-textual to a progressive and generalized effect of linguistic simplification. This latter is first of all semantic, as suggested in the passage from particular to general nouns (“4 ash”, “15 tree”), and from the synecdochic details of the woman’s physical appearance and expression, presented in ll. 5 – 6 and 9 – 12, to the more concise and semantically less specific “15 your face”. Secondly, this effect can also be perceived syntactically, in the passage from the relatively more extended patterns of the first part of the poem, to the relatively more contracted ones, instead occurring in the poem’s closure (cf. ll. 2 and 15, where the incipital description of the “2 sun” is later summarised in the compound “15 the God-curst sun”; ll. 3 – 4 and 16, where the ash “3 leaves”, described in ll. 3 – 4, are later crystallised in a single, more concise image, that of the “16 pond edged with grayish leaves”).

Conclusions Noise, in artistic texts, is always transformed in information, due to the dynamic interaction between the automaticity brought by repetitive patterns and the deautomatizations instead produced by rhematic informational content (Lotman, Art. Text 75 – 77). Analogously, in “Neutral Tones” the detriment of this text’s informational material, which is in turn involved in the displacementdistortion process of desacralisation, in it presented, is a dynamic process of semiotic consummation which paradoxically regenerates itself from its own ashes: it prefigures, in fact, the formation of a new artistic structure which will soon occupy the focal centre in the individual and collective spectrum of aesthetic interest, both in British culture, and more generally, in Western aesthetics, from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. This becomes evident at the level of the implicit author, in Stanza IV (ll. 15 – 16), where the patterning of the imagery appears as radically transformed, if compared to what occurs in the preceding three Stanzas, and notwithstanding the informational detriment brought by entropic repetition, both at the semantic and formal levels. On the contrary, it is by effect of this dominant repetitive pattern, which structurally induces the reader to anaphorically compare these

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last textual segments of “Neutral Tones” with the preceding ones, that an important formal switching between two different modes of discourse patterning and imagery conception emerges. On the one side, in fact, and if compared with ll. 15 – 16, ll. 1 – 4 are dominated by a relatively more sustained mode of discourse, due to the presence of three types of extended formulations chosen by Hardy to present the natural landscape and the woman’s appearance: description (ll. 1 – 4, 5 – 6 and 9 – 12), narration (all verbal forms, from ll. 1 – 12, are in the past tense, that is in a tense which is characteristic of this mode of discourse) and simile (“2 as though chidden of God”, “5 [y]our eyes on me were as eyes that rove”, and “12 [l]ike an ominous bird a-wing”). On the other side, and by effect of a drastic tropic contraction, in ll. 15 – 16 these two central components of the poem’s imagery, the natural landscape and the woman’s appearance, are drastically transformed into relatively more condensed images (“15 [y]our face”, “15 the God-curst sun”, “15 a tree” and “16 a pond edged with grayish leaves”), whose formal conciseness makes them now appear as more similar to the iconic, paradigmatic synthesis of metaphor and symbol, than to more extended, syntagmatic and logocentric modes of discourse, such as narration, description and simile. This overcoming of the logocentric, syntagmatic mode of sustained discourse by relatively more iconic and paradigmatic patterns is also perceivable on the logical plane. More precisely, it becomes evident in the suppression, occurring in ll. 15 – 16, of all the chronotopical coordinates and causal links which characterized the narrative presentation of both the natural space and the woman in the rest of the poem, and in the fact that a presentative, rather than narrative, mode of expression now prevails in the text, due to the presence of verbal forms at a typically “commentative”1 tense, present: “13 deceives”, “14 wrings”. This crucial choice exerts the function of orienting this concluding section of the text towards the hic et nunc of enunciation (thus encouraging its paradigmaticity), rather than towards the then of prospective narration, instead dominated by syntagmaticity. This switch from the first and the second type of imagery configuration is the result of an authorial strategy of replacement of a basically syntagmatic chain of clear chronotopical events and causal distinctions by a sequence of juxtaposed images, now metaphorically and symbolically charged, which inevitably exerts the pragmatic effect of drastically fragmenting the linearity of the text into a series of paradigmatically interrelated modules. This indicates that an element of novelty is beginning to peep out in the poem, as well as in Hardy’s poetic universe. Even more important, this element is remarkably modern, if compared with the historical period in which “Neutral Tones” has been conceived and 1 Weinrich 29 – 31 and 63 – 68.

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composed (1867), since its main components (paradigmaticity, fragmentariness, centrality of the symbolic/metaphoric modes of discourse) are more compatible with the forma mentis of a Modernist poet (Johnson, “ ‘Broken Images’ ” 400) than to that of a Victorian writer. In this connection, this poem retains a great historical value, as it enacts, through the dynamics of the displacement-distortion process, an evolution occurring at the deeper, and in a certain extent also preconscious, levels of form and structure, between older modes of conceiving the poetic word (here identified by Hardy with those of the previous artistic generation, Romanticism) and a different conception which is instead beginning to emerge in the individual and collective artistic spectrum of the mid-nineteenth century, and which will be soon canonized, as a new aesthetically sacralised model for the production and fruition of literature, by Modernist authors such as Eliot, Joyce and Woolf.

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Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec

Geoffrey Hill’s Serpents and Dragons I see I’ve defined a poem. Something I’d say held over, deep in reserve, so that it may strike. – Geoffrey Hill, Without Title, page 55.

For Geoffrey Hill, the sacred has always been a legitimate aspect of existence. His education and upbringing were Christian, with the trappings of historic Christian culture fostered by singing in a church choir and being present during church services. Hill has chosen biblical imagery throughout his poetry to connect with the sacred roots of Western Culture, from the earliest phases of his career as published poet, even while sociological theories of secularization were emerging. In Britain, secularization theory was clearly articulated by Alasdaire MacIntyre in the 1964 Riddell Memorial Lectures, published as Secularization and Moral Change (1967): My basic argument is then that when the working class were gathered from the countryside into the industrial cities, they were finally torn from a form of community in which it could be intelligibly and credibly claimed that the norms which govern social life had universal and cosmic significance, and were God-given (14 – 15).

Professor Sayed Hossein Nasr, the first Muslim invited to deliver the Gifford Lectures in 1981, published as Knowledge and the Sacred (1981), was motivated by a desire to help the West and “aid in the resuscitation of the sacred quality of knowledge” (viii). He felt that this could be done in part by showing that in the Orient “knowledge has never become divorced from the sacred” (viii). In the Orient knowledge has always been related to the sacred and to spiritual perfection. To know has meant ultimately to be transformed by the very process of knowing, as the Western tradition was also to assert over the ages before it was eclipsed by the postmedieval secularization and humanism that forced the separation of knowing from being and intelligence from the sacred. (vii)

And although Nasr detailed the process of separation between knowledge and the sacred, he also gave examples of Western intellectuals such as Goethe (96), Thomas Taylor (97), Blake (98), Whitman, Emerson (99), Ren¦ Gu¦non (100 – 5) and others, who were influenced by Oriental and/or Islamic traditions, and fostered a re-entry of the sacred into Western culture. Less than a decade after Sayed Hossein Nasr’s lectures, Salman Rushdie’s

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Herbert Read Memorial Lecture, “Is Nothing Sacred?” was delivered by Harold Pinter, while Rushdie, who was under Fatwa, remained in hiding. Also in 1990, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks prophetically asserted in the Reith Lectures that the reaction to Secularization, the loss of social significance for religious consciousness and institutions, would be fundamentalism. Sacks cited Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” for giving secularisation “its most memorable image,” but also Max Weber, for the notion of “disenchantment” (2). Modernity was a one-way street and religion had been caught facing in the wrong direction. Science had displaced it as a source of knowledge. Liberalism had dethroned it from the seat of political power. Post-enlightenment ethics had shattered its moral base of authority and obedience. Social changes had destroyed the communities in which it grew. If religious faith survived at all, it would be in the form of private consolation. (2)

Sacks saw that one early example of religious modernity occurred when Jews in France were invited to become French citizens after the French Revolution in 1879, thus effectively forcing them to undergo “the privitisation of faith” (4). Sacralized faith, on the other hand, would desire to make everything holy : “eating, drinking, work, rest, welfare and legislation, love and war” (Sacks, 4). For the American Catholic Andrew Greeley, the sociological theory that dominated the latter part of the twentieth century could be compacted into one slogan: “Modernization, Urbanization, Individualization, and Rationalization have produced Secularization” (57). And yet, religion still managed to influence political movements in the West, such as the Civil Rights movement in the United States or Solidarity in Poland (59). For Greeley, who denied that there was ever “an age of faith”1 (60 – 62): Religion exists to confirm and reinforce and renew hope through its crises, major and minor, daily and lifelong. More precisely religion grows out of those experiences, major and minor, in which hope is confirmed, reinforced and renewed. Therefore, religion arises and continues because of the human propensity to experiences that renew hope. (27).

Like Greeley, Sacks maintained that possibilities of sacralization continue to exist in Western culture: 1 Notably he argues that the Council of Agde in 506, which obliged weekly mass attendance, and the First Lateran Council, requiring a Christian to receive Holy Communion once a year “would not have been imposed if frequent Church attendance and reception of Communion were typical behavior.” (Greeley, 1995, 61). He also cites other scholars who have implied that the Middles Ages were not the mythical Age of Faith: Jean Delumeau (1977), David Gentilcore (1992), Jane Schneider (1990), Irene Flint (1992), Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie (1974), Carlo Ginsburg (1983), John Bossy (1985), C. John Sommerville (1992), and Robert Whiting (1989) (62).

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…religious values are still active within our frame of moral reference. They have been eroded but not altogether eclipsed. They lie at the heart of some of our deepest moral commitments: to the worth of the individual, to society as a covenant rather than as a contract, to morality itself as a communal endeavour, and to the family as the crucible of personal relationships. (Sacks 10).

David Martin, in On Secularization (2005) explained how the notion of secularization was consistently presented as the victory of science over religion via Bacon, Machiavelli, Petrarch, the French and German Enlightenments, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Marx, Sartre, Russell, Ayer, Rorty, etc.(8). Martin follows Charles Taylor in judging that “the Christian sources of contemporary mentalities are overlooked because no longer identified by their ‘Christian names.’” (Martin 8). Charles Taylor, in The Secular Age (2007), a book that evolved from the 1999 Gifford Lectures, addressed the fact that governments in the West no longer bear any relationship to the sacred. In the present “anthropocentric climate” the notion of Hell and judgment has been diminished and the punishment of God disappears, “leaving only his love.” Christianity, suggests Taylor, makes a “slide to Unitarianism”. Taylor spends a good deal of the latter sections of the book discussing violence and unleashed passions. In earlier times, “sexuality was connected to the sacred” and “violence, in the form of war” was also “ritualized” (see ch.6), hence limiting destruction. A growing number of sociologists would seem to agree that the secularization thesis ran its course in the latter half of the twentieth century, with religious leaders being left largely unaffected, as they continued to allow religion to permeate their lives and encourage sacralization among those to whom they ministered (see Barnett and Stein, 3). Of course, the discussion continues, and Simon Green’s The Passing of Protestant England (2011), which considers “the secularisation or, more properly, the desacralisation of British politics during the twentieth century” (10), or the positioning of Jean-Luc Nancy, as found in Retreating religion: deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy (2012), should be read in conjunction with Rowan Williams’s Faith in the Public Square (2012). Williams notes that people at present wonder if “an adequate vocabulary” exists “for speaking of evil?” (Williams 11). The secularism of our time “leaves us linguistically bereaved” (11), he suggests, and “we are vulnerable because we have no way of making sense of the most deeply threatening elements in our environment” (11). Williams, who apart from being a theologian and the former Archbishop of Canterbury, is also a poet, and finds that art is an important response to secularism: Art makes possible a variety of seeing or readings; it presents something that invites a time of reception or perception, with the consciousness that there is always another

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possible seeing/reading. Imaginative construction begins in the sensing of the world in this way, a field of possible readings, therefore never reducible to an instrumental account – related to one agenda, one process of negotiation at one time. Instead, there is an indefinite time opened up for reception and interpretation: the object is located outside the closures of specific conflicts and settlements of interest. (13 – 14).

Bearing the general religious and historical contexts of the twentieth century in mind, it seems useful to consider how Hill uses and has used serpents and dragons then, in part related to their Biblical symbolism, and associated with evil, particularly in the Apocalypse. Revelation 12 describes a pregnant woman, faced by a red seven-headed dragon that waited to eat the child as soon as it would be born. The child escapes, and “Michael and his angels fought against the dragon” resulting in the dragon being “cast out” of heaven, given over to earth, representing “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (Revelation 12:1 – 9, King James Translation). The Christian Bible thus closes with an allusion to the Genesis story of Eve being tempted by the serpent. The word dragon occurs only in final book of the New Testament, but the Hebrew word tan had been translated variously as dragons or jackals, sometimes distinguishing between a creature of water or dry land (the RSV translation has used the word jackals for land creatures; Cruden 161). In all cases evil is involved.2 Dictionary definitions suggest that the word dragon was used in Middle English from the 13th century on. Webster’s gives five definitions: a huge serpent, a mythic animal (with scales and claws), a violent combative person, draco, and something formidable or baneful. The notion of serpent is also connected to the Biblical leviathan. Leviathan refers to a sea monster or large sea animal, and when capitalized, may indicate the state (thanks to Hobbes in 1651), especially a totalitarian state, or refer to anything formidably large. Within the Bible, the word occurs four times, exclusively in the Old Testament, and is associated with the “crooked serpent” in Isaiah 27:1.3 In Paradise Lost, Satan is the Leviathan, as he lies “With Head up-lift above the wave, and Eyes / That sparkling blaz’d…” (Book I, lines 193 – 4, 200). In Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), one of the names used for whales is Leviathan. Julien Green may have had that great whale, and the obsession of Ahab’s revenge on his mind, when he wrote about destructive adulterous love; “On ne sait jamais quand la vie va vous trahir / You never know when life will betray you” in Leviathan (1929). Since Hill’s use of the term in the 1950s, it has made its way into science fiction via Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), where large worm-serpents live in sand rather than water, and features also in Scott Westerfield’s uchronian novel Leviathan (2009), which takes place in a time just prior to World War I. Paul Auster’s novel Leviathan (1992) features a great 2 Ps 91:13; Isa 27:1; 51:9; Jer 51:34; Ezek 29:3; and the “dragon well” of Nehemiah 2:13. 3 See also Job 41:1; Ps 74:14, 104:26.

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beast that swims around the Statue of Liberty, and a death linked to memories of the bombing of Hiroshima, in the very birth date and time of the character Benjamin Sachs. Indeed, another literary work also links World War II to the watery beast. Arno Schmidt in three stories contained in Leviathan (1949), suggests that Berlin being bombed by the allies was also a manifestation of Leviathan as an evil creation as well as an inherent part of the divine creator. Hobbes had previously noted that war was part of the human condition. In George Oppen’s poem “Leviathan” (1965), language seems unreliable; the wind, an evocation of poetic inspiration in the Biblical Psalms, “moves a little, / Moving in a circle, very cold.” It seems that poetic inspiration has grown somehow reptilian, and communication is erratic. W.S. Merwin’s poem “Leviathan” published almost a decade earlier in Green with Beasts (1956) may owe something to Ted Hughes, whose The Hawk in the Rain he reviewed for the New York Times in 1957 (Robinson, 26). But the poem bears the mark of Anglo-Saxon verse, that was undergoing a revival of popularity in the 1950s,4 and especially the tenth-century poem “The Whale” found in The Exeter Book. The description of the beast is graphic: The hulk of him is like hills heaving, Dark, yet as crags of drift-ice, crowns cracking in thunder, Like land’s self by night black-looming, surf churning and trailing Along his shores’ rushing, shoal-water boding About the dark of his jaws; and who should moor at his edge And far on afoot would find gates of no gardens, But the hill of dark underfoot diving, Closing overhead, the cold deep, and drowning. He is called Leviathan, and named for rolling…5

The first poem of Geoffrey Hill’s first volume, For the Unfallen (1959) began with the poem “Genesis” (first published in 1952) in which “the watery Leviathan” is an active part of the “myth for man” (Hill, SP 2006, 4). Writing in the early 1950s, Hill was probably also thinking historically, about the nazi state as Leviathan. In his version of creation, the creatures are also prone to violence. In King Log (1968), in “The Assisi Fragments” which might be a retelling the Genesis myth, the serpent is present, but without malice or malevolence:

4 Like Hill, Merwin may have been familiar with Sweet’s Anglo Saxon Reader (1950); see J. Kilgore-Caradec “La mise en soi(e) du royaume: Les Hymnes de Mercie de Geoffrey Hill” in Nathalie Koble, Amandine Mussou, and Mireille S¦guy (eds), La me´moire du Moyen Aˆge dans la poe´sie contemporaine (Paris: Hermann, 2014). 5 Merwin’s “Leviathan” has been set to music in five movements for bass trombone, male voice, and intermedia by Joseph Klein (1998). http://music.unt.edu/comp/josephklein/files/KLEIN_ Leviathan.mp3.

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And there the serpent Innocently shone its head. (Hill, SP 2006, 45)

Like Melville’s Moby Dick, which opens with a series of extracts about whales taken from a variety of sources and gathered by a “sub-sub-librarian,” Hill’s allusions may be either Biblical or cultural, or both. One of Melville’s introductory quotations is from Isaiah: In that day, the Lord with his sore, and great, and strong sword, shall punish Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea. (xix).

For Melville, the Biblical serpent, dragon, and Leviathan are all associated with evil on some level, and his work will serve to enrich existing mythology. Hobbes, on the other hand, saw the Leviathan as “a Commonwealth or state – (in Latin, Civitas) which is but an artificial man” (Melville xx). Christian perspectives are affirmed and questioned in Hill’s work, but they are almost always fully present, as in the fourth section of “Funeral Music”: Let mind be more precious than soul; it will not Endure. Soul grasps its price, begs its own peace, Settles with tears and sweat, is possibly Indesctructible. That I can believe. Though I would scorn the mere instinct of faith, Expediencey of assent, if I dared, What I dare not is a waste history Or void rule. (…) (Hill, SP 2006, 35)

There may be other allusions to dragons or serpents, though those words are not used, in passages of poems that refer to demons or furies (“A Pastoral” CP 54, “The Imaginative Life” CP 82; “Three Baroque Meditations” CP 89 – 90). “A Song from Armenia” contains a lizard, used in descriptive metaphora, in a context of erotic memory (CP 100). In Mercian Hymns (1971), in Hymn XII, there are spades digging (and perhaps they relate to the mass grave of the previous hymn). “They struck the firedragon’s faceted skin.” The phrase is anaphoric in the poem, with the third person plural pronoun used with an active verb three times: “They clove…. They ransacked epiphanies” (Hill, SP 2006, 72). It seems that “the fire-dragon’s faceted skin” would here evoke the presence of evil. Hymn XXII, in reminiscence of child adventures, relates war games: “I huddled with stories of dragon-/tailed airships” (CP, 126). The dragon suggests adventure; alludes to St George’s victory over the dragon, with St George being evoked by Germans, French and English as support in World War II. Perhaps the dragon is a reminder of the constant presence of evil for the reader, or at least in the young child’s conscience.

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Tenebrae’s poem “‘Christmas Trees’” begins with “Bonhoeffer in his skylit cell” still working “Against wild reasons of the state” (CP 171) – against Leviathan in other words. What are Bonhoeffer’s words, “quiet but not too quiet” that “We hear too late or not too late” (171)? Bonhoeffer, whose readings on secularization led him to think that we lived in a world “come of age,” was preparing a three part study, from his prison cell in 1944, to explore the concept of a world that would function without God, “as though God does not exist” (Pugh 46). Bonhoeffer’s preoccupation was to find a way to make Christianity operative in a society that no longer acknowledged the sacred. He was asking, “How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even ‘speak’ as we used to) in a ‘secular’ way about ‘God’?” (qtd. Pugh 84). Bonhoeffer’s parenthesis is telling: when God is absent, does the Verb continue to exist? He wanted to know “who Christ really is, for us today” (qtd. Pugh 85). In “De Jure Belli Ac Pacis” in Canaan (1996) Hill’s dragon symbols once again take on significance that relates both to evil, tyranny, and human choice. The Leviathan of the nazi state is expounded on in depth in this poem, with the immediate subject again being German resistants to Hitler. The epigraph to the second section of the poem, in German, evokes the struggle between archangel Michael and the dragon, and in the body of the poem, the image is rendered in English: “On some envisioned / rathaus clock, geared like a mill, the dragon / strikes, / the Archangel, unseeing, unbowed, / chimes with each stroke” (Canaan, 31; SP 150). In section seven of the poem the impression given is that evil is unleashed in an all-powerful manner : Smart whip-tap at boot-top, absolute licence of the demons to wreak their correction (Canaan 36; SP 155)

The circumstances of inflicted death under nazi rule offered Evil “new depths of invention, children’s / songs to mask torture…” (37; SP 156). In poems of Christian martyrdom, such as these, Hill has poetically rendered a part of the Christian example of faith. Hill shows a hope, a melancholy hope and struggle to fight to keep something of Christianity alive in us now. As Hill wrote in The Orchards of Syon XXXVIII: Our lives discerned like stars depth-hung in water. Impassively the sempiternal casts deep for endurance. And here – and there too – I wish greatly to believe: that Bromsgrove was, and is Goldengrove; that the Orchards

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of Syon stand as I once glimpsed them. But there we are: the heartland remains heartless – that’s the strange beauty of it.

Without Title (2006), names an impressive list of religious and theologians, among whom Father Guardini (6), Karl Rahner (9) … but Hill had been doing such a roll call since The Triumph of Love (1998). The seventh Pindaric of Without Title mentions Leviathan: Poetry’s a public act by long engagement. I’ve run myself against it; if inured the spikier the better, my old blood! Begloried, sheer of state, armed by the sea. All-funding eloquence the shallow leach, the curiosities – bones from Leviathan with a wrenched hook or two, and jewelled eyes. Bravo, our constitution of report, and barren empire basking on its tides. (WT 41).

In such a context, “Jonah and Job” are also mentioned (page 47), and, in the 16th Pindaric, there is an allusion to the dragon: Say, Coriolanus fought from dark to dark, a thing of blood. Not what I had in mind. He could turn cities ashen being devoured by his brain-dragon-worm, scarred travesty, bespoke himself a dragon in a fen, a lonely dragon – and he was alone. (WT 50)

In the next pages are allusions to Melville and Cocteau (51), whose Le Dragon des Mers (1955) was based on a trip made by Cocteau, Marcel Khil and Foujita to Japan in May 1936. Without Title also contains the poem “Broken Hierarchies” at the end of the volume (78 – 9).6 It is an amazing poem, replete with natural beauty and allusion, where Appalachian music may refer to celtic Irish-Welsh-Scots descendants in the mountains, who express “a wild patience / replete with loss” (78). The poem may allude to Bonhoeffer’s “quiet words” in “a man’s low voice that looms out of the drone” (79) and the final stanza, evoking Baudelaire, may signal when the “world come of age” began in poetry. This is also an intense war poem, if one reads the rain of the beginning as a metaphor for bullets, as was the case in The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Pe´guy (1983). In such a reading the “Appalachian music” (one recalls that Edgar Allen Poe wished that the US would be 6 Hill’s volume of collected poems, Broken Hierarchies (Oxford University Press) was published in November 2013.

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called Appalachia) is stuck in a repetition of violence with drones. In May 2006, drones were given permission for use on civilian US territories, and their increased military use makes such passages of Hill’s work seem prophetic. When it comes to describing evil, and perhaps even predicting it, he is a master. By the time Hill publishes the Daybooks, certain perspectives seem to renew his prior use of dragon mythology. He takes it outside the Christian sphere. Interpretations of Oraclau/Oracles (2011) must allow for the possibility of a new consideration of the dragon as a positive figure, being the symbol on the flag of Wales, and in Welsh Literature where it designates a leader or chief who exhibited bravery. Hill, having discovered his Welsh ancestry had submerged himself in things Welsh, and no doubt his friendship with Rowan Williams heightened his appreciation for Druid culture.7 The term Pen Draig, meaning head dragon, was transformed into Pendragon, a name used for King Arthur, son of Uther, who was first mentioned in Welsh poetry.8 The dragon symbol appearing on the Welsh flag supposedly originated in the symbols of Roman cavalry ; with red dragon emblems on pennants. Dragon heads in metal complete with cloth tails and whistles were carried by cavalry units. In the eighth century, Wessex Saxons carried standards of a gold dragon into combat. And after the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 that ended the Wars of the Roses, Henry Tudor waved the red dragon over his ancestor’s colors of white and green. In the poem, Hill teases: … Could you fit Y Ddraig Goch on the old union flag Without ruining the design? (Oraclau section 92, page 31)

Fittingly, the red dragon is mentioned in the latter part of the poem, in the thirteen sections entitled Welsh apocalypse (sections 88 – 100), showing awareness of the contrast between Welsh apocalypse and Biblical apocalypse: Let us draw, there is time, the red dragon. The implications of its stance eclipse Destiny in Apocalypse, Babylon-brawling Greek agon…(Oraclau section 96, 32)

7 It was also about this time that a “Geoffrey Hill” published, through a vanity press, a book called The Last Wizard (Author House, 2009). The novel awash with typographical errors might have been a kind of Harry Potter-like spoof by an acquaintance, but it hardly seems to have been by the poet. A more recent work called Slade, The Assassin (2012), and also dealing with fantasies of wizards, was published by a “G.R. Hill.” 8 The BBC explained such basic notions in a show and on their website, to which this section of the paper is indebted: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/themes/guide/ch18_rise_of_ national_consciousness.shtml; http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/history/sites/themes/society/flag_ welsh_literature.shtml

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Here one may well envision the extraordinary sixth-century B.C. Babylonian Dragon Relief, featuring an orange-beige scaly creature against a blue background, with pointed tongue, extra clawed-toes, and long tail. It was on display in London’s British Museum in the exhibit Babylon: Myth and Reality (November 2008-March 2009). D.H. Lawrence’s poem “Snap-Dragon” to which Hill alludes in the next lines is an erotic narrative of the speaker’s seduction by the woman’s playfulness with a flower : “I like to see,” said she, / “The snap-dragon put out his tongue at me” (18). In the poem, the male speaker is lured by the woman, lured by the snap-dragon, and then also teases her with it: I pressed the wretched, throttled flower between My fingers, till its head lay back, its fangs Poised at her. Like a weapon my hand was white and keen, And I held the choked flower-serpent in its pangs Of mordant anguish, till she ceased to laugh, Until her pride’s flag, smitten, cleaved down to the staff. (20)

It is as though Lawrence had taken up the Genesis account of the serpent’s temptation and re-written it: the temptation of sex, the “Sin!” of the first stanza, that is accomplished before the poem ends, with the speaker concluding the poem with “And death, I know, is better than not-to-be” (21). As Walker Percy’s character Sutter wrote, in The Last Gentleman (1966), “Lewdness,=sacrament of the dispossessed. In the face of demystification the only reality remaining is the touch of skin on skin.” But Lawrence is also the knight who attacks the woman with the dragon (or the snap-dragon), in a twist on the usual story-line. He was an author having his fun with mythic symbols, and so is Hill. In section 97, the Welsh apocalypse continues: Again dusk-fallen snow ghosts its own twilight Where the red dragon spat fire to the chapels, From the dark forge-heart wrought apostles. (Oraclau page 33)

With the Welsh apocalypse taking place in the coal mines, the dragon also bears a different meaning than the strictly Biblical one, which was linked to evil. On the Welsh flag, it is a symbol of fortitude in the face of adversity. So there – Y Ddraig Goch swipes His tail of frenzy through Apocalypse Creating mayhem among the Types. (34).

In a secularized, desacrilized world that had “come of age” as Bonhoeffer saw it, there can only be a lot of “mayhem among the Types”! But this particular kind of poetry, that requires thought, is a kind of pillar for humanity, whether churched or not. Rowan Williams has suggested that “the combination of robust poetics, a

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self-scrutinizing theology and a politics resolved against one-dimensionality” could be “some insurance against the heart’s vulgarity.” (22).

Works cited Alexandrova, Alena, Devisch, Ignaas, Kate, Laurens ten and Rooden, Aukje van (eds). Retreating Religion: Deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy. New York: Fordham UP, 2012. Barnett, Michael and Stein, Janice Gross (eds). Sacred Aid. Faith and Humanitarianism. Oxford: OUP, 2012. Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy. New York: Doubleday, 1967. Reprinted New York: Anchor Books, 1990. Brett, R.L. Faith and Doubt: Religion and Secularization in Literature from Wordsworth to Larkin. Cambridge and Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1997. Brown, Callum G. “A Revisionist Approach to Religious Change” in Bruce, Steve (ed). Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, 1998, 31 – 58. Cruden, Alexander. Cruden’s Complete Concordance to the Old and New Testaments. 1737, 1761, 1769. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1988. Davie, Grace. Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging. Oxford: 1994. Francis, Leslie J. and Ziebertz, Hans-Georg (eds). The Public Significance of Religion. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Greeley, Andrew M. Religion as Poetry. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1995. Green, Simon. Religion in the Age of Decline. Cambridge: CUP, 1996. Green, Simon J.D. The Passing of Protestant England: Secularisation and Social Change, c. 1920 – 1960. Cambridge: CUP, 2011. Hill, Geoffrey. Canaan. London: Penguin, 1996. Hill, Geoffrey. Selected Poems. London: Penguin, 2006. Lawrence, D.H. Selected Poems. Ed. John Lawton. London: J.M. Dent, 1998. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Secularization and Moral Change. The Riddell Memorial Lectures of 1964. London: OUP, 1967. Martin, David. Does Christianity Cause War? Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. –. On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Preface by Charles Taylor. Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: The Odyssey Press, 1981. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. Knowledge and the Sacred. The Gifford Lectures, 1981. New York: Crossroad, 1981. Melville, Herman. Moby Dick or The Whale (1851). Oxford World’s Classics. London: Chancellor Press, 1985. Merwin, W.S. “Leviathan” in Green with Beasts. London: Hart-Davis, 1956. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Preamble: In the Midst of the World; or, Why Deconstruct Christianity?” and “On Dis-enclosure and Its Gesture, Adoration: A concluding Dialogue with

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Jean-Luc Nancy” in Alexandrova, Kate, Roode (eds). Re-treating religion: deconstructing Christianity with Jean-Luc Nancy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012, 1 – 21; 304 – 343. Oppen, George. “Leviathan” (1965). http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/238466. Pugh, Jeffrey C. Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonheoffer in Troubled Times. London: T. & T. Clark, 2008. Robinson, Peter. “Naked for the Master: W.S. Merwin, Selected Poems” Times Literary Supplement (March 14, 2008) 26. Sacks, Jonathan. The Persistence of Faith: Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age. The Reith Lectures 1990. London: Continuum, 1991, 2005. Seligman, Adam. Modernity’s Wager. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000. Shah, Timohty Samuel, Stephan, Alfred, and Toft, Monica Duffy (eds), Rethinking Religion and World Affairs. Oxford: OUP, 2012. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. 2007. Kindle Electronic Book. Williams, Rowan. Faith in the Public Square. London: Bloomsbury, 2012

Esra Melikoglu

“Morpho Eugenia”: The Individual Struggle for Self-Realisation and the Question of Morality in a Darwinian World Without God

As Karl Marx asserted, the Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin’s evolution theory1 dealt “a mortal blow” to teleology (qtd. in Holmwood and O’Malley 51).2 In A. S. Byatt’s neo-Victorian novelette “Morpho Eugenia” (1992), Darwin is resurrected in the protagonist, the entomologist William Adamson (Todd 32), a butcher’s son. His story allows Byatt to reconsider not only the relevance of atheistic Darwinism to the emancipation of the modern individual from his or her bondage to the old regime, claiming to dictate God’s will to the masses, and right to self-determination and self-realisation. It allows her to reconsider also the question of morality in a world without God. William refutes the assumption of the existence of God.3 Indeed, religion, he believes, often functions merely as a buttress of the rich and powerful. And the atheistic Darwinian man, in his struggle to survive, or dominate, and multiply in a world of natural selection, appears to be another predatory historical force. In a world (apparently) without God, what is, then, to persuade the individual to uphold an altruistic ideal of morality? It is only by virtue of the intervention of Matty Crompton, a Darwinist, socialist and an abolitionist in one, and the child servant Amy that William proves in action that there is a place in it for both selfrealisation and a sense of moral obligation towards the destitute other. 1 Robert Grant, Chevalier de Lamarck and Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, rejected the assumption that biological species are fixed before Darwin. Patrick Matthew and Edward Blyth, moreover, discovered natural selection before and Alfred Russel Wallace roughly at the same time as Darwin. 2 In I Have Landed: The End Of A Beginning in Natural History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2011), 123, Stephen Jay Gould notes that Marx sent a copy of Das Kapital to Darwin. Yet Gold argues that he probably read only a small portion of the volume, since most of its pages are uncut. 3 Actually, Darwin proved to be entangled in contradictions. Some time after his voyage on the Beagle (1831 – 36), which took him to southern islands, South American coasts and Australia, he dispensed with God and developed his theory of evolution. It was “Presumably … pressure from the religious lobby” that caused him to insert “‘the Creator’ in the second and all subsequent editions” of On the Origin of Species (Dawkins 403).

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“Morpho Eugenia” opens about a year after William’s return to England from his expedition in the Amazon. It is 1859, the very year that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was published.4 After Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1841) and Marx and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848), Darwin, too, stirred Victorian England. William, as noted above, represents the alter ego of Darwin, who is directly referred to by him. Both travel to South America, Darwin also to other places. William returns as a naturalist, while Darwin, as William Bynum notes, probably became one some time after his return (xxiv). Both keep a journal already before they join the expedition. Moreover, both show a great interest in especially the social ants and bees. And, despite a certain evasiveness, both reject God and criticise slavery abroad and the exploitation of the poor at home. What divides Darwin and his alter ego is their class: the one is a member of the upper-middle classes5 and the other a butcher’s boy. William “mean[s] to be a great man”, too. But in order to realise himself and move through the class-structure, he must first deliver himself from his bondage to God and His supposed representatives on earth, his religious father, Robert, and the old regime. The modern individual demanding the right to self-determination came to feel that to acknowledge God and His deputies on earth was to acknowledge subjugation. Marx states that “It teaches, as religion is bound to teach: submit to authority, for all authority is from God” (“Leading Articles” 34). Again, he remarks that the oppressed “must recognise and acknowledge as a concession of heaven the very fact that they are mastered, ruled, possessed” (“Contributions” 41).6 The masses were told that the old regime, that is, the allied church and aristocracy, was sanctioned by God and that rebellion against its rule was blasphemy. Religion has thus been responsible for “brutal authoritarianism … Its role, with some honourable exceptions, has been to consecrate pillage and canonize injustice” (Eagleton xvii). William, who is brought up by his father, who lives in dread of hell fire, which threatens to consume his son, too, records in his journal “his self-castigation for the sins of pride, of lack of humility, of selfregard” (9). While his father entertains modest ambitions for his son, but wishes him to remain a God-fearing man, William eventually prepares to emancipate 4 In A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfried Laurier UP, 2004), 152, Jane Campbell erroneously claims that “Morpho Eugenia” opens two years after the publication of The Origin of Species. 5 In his introduction to On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (London et al.: Penguin Books, 2009), xvi, William Bynum notes that Darwin was “The son of a Shrewsbury doctor and grandson of the famous pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood I.” 6 In Beyond Good And Evil (Mineola, New York: Dover, 1997), 34, Nietzsche observes that “The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice: the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all selfconfidence of spirit; it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation”.

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himself from what he comes to see as an oppressive Father in heaven and likeminded father on earth as well as his seemingly divinely ordained station in the world. God supposedly created a class-bound world and fixed every individual’s station therein. Yet William’s father, a Methodist butcher, wishes for his university-educated son a good, expanding trade. According to Robert, it is perfectly legitimate to strive to improve one’s situation, but the supposedly divinely ordained class-divide shall be preserved. While Yorkshire, where he and William live, is the scene of fierce class struggle, Robert sells “prime beef for mill owners and mine owners… and scrag end and faggots for miners and factory workers” (9). Although the lower classes are also invited to the Last Supper, they shall know their place. What allows Robert to desire upward mobility for his son are not only the French Revolution and the ongoing Industrial Revolution, but Methodism, a Protestant denomination. Before the emergence of Darwinism, dissenting Protestantism, too, divested traditional authority of power. Believing in a personal relationship between the individual and God, it emancipated Protestants from the authority of the Pope. As generally acknowledged, the Calvinist concept of the elect, according to which a prospering business is the sign of salvation by grace from God, moreover, greatly contributed to the emergence of liberal capitalism and atheistic materialism. William is, however, the more radical son who rises up in revolt. His shipwreck on his journey back to England from the Amazon not only refutes the assumption of the existence of God, but rewrites the creation myth. The Darwinian man is born in the water, where all life began, and, like all other species, in his struggle for survival, moves out on to the land. According to evolution theory, species are not fixed to a particular spot on the earth. Again, descendants inherit certain traits from their ancestors, but can depart from them and demonstrate infinite variations.7 The ideas of mobility and accumulation of profitable structural variations, then, by analogy, support the lower-class individual’s right to upward social mobility. William inherits his looks and anatomic skills from his father, but departs radically from him and his station. He is the naked man stripped of his roots and worldly possessions and must now remake himself as a free man. He is not only cast off by his father because of his rejection of God, but his shipwreck, furthermore, costs him almost his entire collection of valuable specimens. They would have earned him both a reputation as a naturalist and a considerable income. What remains is self-possession. Orphanhood, as Terry Eagleton, in his discussion of Charlotte BrontÚ’s character the disconnected Jane Eyre, comments, “leaves the self a free, blank, pre-social atom: free to be injured 7 For Darwin’s thoughts on the role of inheritance, see Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London et al. : Penguin Books), 2009, 22 – 24.

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and exploited, but free also to progress, move through the class-structure, choose and forge relationships, strenuously utilise its talents in scorn of autocracy or paternalism” (26). Yet William cannot afford for long to scorn paternalism. It proves to be both his destitution and desire to be a great man that leads him to accept the Reverend Sir Harald Alabaster’s invitation to stay at Bredely Hall. Here, in the world of masters and servants, the Darwinian man must resist the lure of power and commit himself to a moral stance. Sir Harald represents at once the growingly obsolete “Deus absconditus” (76), the ancien r¦gime and enlightened theologian. His largely white hair and “patriarchal beard” (15) as well as clerical collar and monkish gown attest to his role as God and earthly authority. He philosophises, reads and writes about all matters divine, as also reminiscent of unworldly saints, who devoted their lives to the service of God. The reasons for his resolution to open the gates of his country house to William, the atheistic Darwinian man and socially mobile class-enemy, are twofold. On the one hand, with the transition from the feudal world to liberal capitalism, the Alabastor family, an oppressive and unproductive body, is about to become obsolete and lose the struggle for survival. Natural selection or “social evolution begins to favour the mercantile class” (Wagner 35). The surname “Alabaster” is of significance here. Alabaster is a mineral shaped by environmental conditions and hence not immune to change.8 William’s intellectual labour and resourcefulness shall help the family to adapt themselves to changing times. On the other hand, Sir Harald is also the old paternalistic master who is determined to prevent the radicalisation of the lower-class atheist. William shall be (re-)absorbed into the feudal family, over which the Reverend rules with God-like power. Despite initial deference, William eventually exposes the idea of a holy and benevolent alterity that is in a state of transcendence of contaminating materialist reality as a mere illusion. Sir Harald speaks of a morality founded on love, but implements a politics of exploitation. To lure him back, Sir Harald not only provides Adam(son) with a latter-day Eve, that is, Eugenia, but offers him power. In the Genesis, God asks Adam to name the creatures of the earth, which are infinite evidence of His work as Creator. This privilege affirms man’s status as His special creation and his sovereignty over the other creatures. Likewise, William shall label the Deus absconditus’ purchased specimens and thereby share his generative powers and sovereignty over the lower classes. Despite considerable wavering, William escapes the snares that are laid out for him. His task of labelling the specimens expands to a narrative in which we witness what Alister E. McGarth refers to as 8 The apparently adaptable Sir Harald is the soft calcium alabaster. His eldest son and heir, the snobbish Edgar, who refuses to change, and possesses an Arabian stallion, is the hard calcite alabaster of the ancient Egyptians.

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“the shift from traditional authority”, supposedly dictating the will of God to the masses, to the individual’s “authority of experience” and scientific observation (15). His narrative bears testimony to a new world in which the old tyrannical God and power structure become more and more obsolete. Yet his narrative also attests to William’s temporary alliance with the exploitative Sir Harald and reluctance to rise to moral action, as reminiscent of the cold indifference of a large portion of Victorian society to the misery of the poor. William, by then married to Eugenia, is aware that he and Matty Crompton, whom he sometimes chances upon in the schoolroom, “were both poor, both semi-employed, both, now, relations of the masters but not masters” (74). He must disconcertingly realise that he is neither a servant nor a master, indeed, that “he had no place” in the house (74). William thus resumes his role as the distanced scientific observer, also engaging with Sir Harald in a series of debate on religion. William, on the one hand, concedes to the Reverend that “the religious sense, in some form or another, is as much part of the history of the development of mankind as the knowledge of cooking food” (34). On the other, he subscribes to Feuerbach’s belief that “our God is ourselves” (89) – that is, made by and in the image of man. Feuerbach dwells on the creation of a perfect God of love and moral justice by human beings who uphold these attributes (18). William, who used to take long walks in the countryside back in Yorkshire, “looking for signs of Divine Love” (10), eventually came to believe in a wrathful God. It is not only the inexorable law of Nature, which William observed in the Amazon, that causes him to refute, or at least contest, the assumption of a benevolent God. His wrathful deity is also made in the image of cruel men, such as his butcher father. And William identifies Sir Harald as another cruel patriarch and God. Sir Harald, in upholding an outdated paternalistic relation, in one of his morning prayers in the chapel, makes use of the old argument from paternal love, according to which the love of the Divine Parent embraces the whole creation. He presents God as a wise and benevolent Father and himself as His like-minded representative. Actually, the Reverend embodies Aquinas’ concept of the Deus absconditus, the absent or hidden God. His existence is not really knowable by human beings through contemplation or examination. An inscrutable and unknowable abstraction, the absent God robs the world of meaning. Neither do human beings understand Him nor does God seem to understand them. Indeed, His ways are, as Eagleton notes, thought to be unjust, indeed hostile to humankind, and cause misery (210). William observes that Sir Harald proves to constantly be buried in his study, located next to the chapel, in allusion to the fact that “sacred” derives from (ME) “sacren”, which means – among other things – “dedicated or set apart” (Gove “sacred”). God, who represents the category of the sacred in theology, or a radical alterity, is conceived of as set apart

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from the flawed material reality. He is thus considered to be untouched by change and imperfection. So alienated is the absent God from the changing world that He can neither recognise His own creation nor make meaning of it. Sir Harald purchases specimens from adventurous scientists, like William, and abandons them in the stable in a haphazard state. Yet the absent God is not only alienation from His creation, as noted above, He is hostile to it. Sir Harald speaks to William of “something beyond yourself” that is thought to allow the individual to obey “Our Lord [who] bade us ‘Love our neighbours as ourselves’” (59, 84). Yet he is a member of the predatory old regime and thus the cause of suffering. Emmanuel L¦vinas observes that “We think that the idea-ofthe-Infinite-in-me, or my relation to God, comes to me in the concreteness of my relation to the other man, in the sociality which is my responsibility for the neighbour” (xiv). He speaks of “the rising moral misery of the industrial era” and the individual’s “responsibility-for-the-other” (4, 10). The other is, he says, “a face, proletarian nakedness, destitution” (13). Yet Sir Harald does not assume his moral obligation to the proletariat, but exploits them as well as the servants and slaves abroad. The leisure that allows him to lead a scholarly, and supposedly immaterial and saintly, life is more immediately provided by a whole army of drudging domestics. Conceived of as creatures made by a lesser god, they are exiled to the obscure spaces of the house. The money to employ servants at Bredely Hall and lead a leisurely life is, moreover, as William learns, made in the Lancashire cotton trade, which relied on slavery in the United States and the exploitation of the cotton mill workers in England. In fact, the ancestral country house owes its very conception to England’s exploitation of its colony India. Bredely Hall was, as William narrates, “built like a mediaeval manor house, but with new money” (22), that is, the dowry of Sir Harald’s father Robert Alabaster’s wife, the daughter of an East India merchant. Sir Harald’s above-mentioned morning prayers in the chapel, then, clearly serve to preserve his rule in the house and culture, at large. They shall instil obedience in his servants, semi-servants, William and Mattie, and younger children, while his wife and eldest daughter absent themselves. Frank Dawes points out that “Biblical texts were used in Victorian times as a form of propaganda, or indoctrination, to keep the lower orders”, and potentially rebellious children, “in their place. In the case of domestic servants, the object was to show them that it was the will of the Almighty that they should stay in servitude and not complain” (46). Religion, as Marx comments, also creates an “illusory happiness”, or false consolation, for the dispossessed, which must be “abolish[ed]” in order to “demand their real happiness” (“Contributions” 39). In the chapel, the servants must suffer not only to be differentiated from their superiors by their black uniforms, but to be relegated to the back rows. Dawes notes

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that “Even in heaven, it was assumed, the class barriers would be maintained” (49). William must distance himself from Sir Harald. Yet, like Darwin, he generally shrinks from overtly and systematically criticising the social injustice he observes. William’s motives are conflicting. On the one hand, as noted above, the Darwinian man, in his struggle to survive and multiply, threatens to emerge as another predatory force. On the other, he is also the scientific man who distances himself from dogma. William explains to Matty, who suggests that he writes a study : “I have no settled opinions to advance, and no wish to convert anyone to my rather uncertain views of things” (92). The uncertainty of his ideas is not only suggestive of evasion, but undermines the notion of pre-ordained design and implies his refusal to put himself in the service of any master narrative. The postmodern strain in Darwin, who reminds his readers, in On the Origin of Species, that he is proposing an “argument” rather than establishing a fact (401), has been noted by Gillian Beer (16). William is, moreover, reminiscent of the mature Marx, who not only held that philosophical ideas, including ethic and abstract humanism, were closely related to material conditions, but that they were utterly useless. “The philosophers have”, Marx objects, “only interpreted the world, in various ways, the point however, is to change it” (“Theses” 64). Rather than opinions, empirical and descriptive socialist theory or science was to serve as a tool that would allow socialists to expose cruel capitalist practices. But then again, the scientist, a “measuring instrument and mirroring apparatus”, as Nietzsche argues, “places himself generally too far off to have any reason for espousing the cause of either good or evil” (77). It is, as noted above, Matty, a political agitator of sorts, and the victimised child servant Amy who force William to take sides. Despite the fact that she is related to the Alabaster family, Matty’s lack of financial means and status as a spinster mark her as their inferior. She is rather associated with the servants and treated by her relatives as such. The lonely and sparsely furnished attic room she inhabits was one of the traditional sleeping places of historical servants. Again, her dark dresses with starched white collars are reminiscent of the plain uniform a female servant was expected to wear in order to make her easily identifiable as such. Her thinness reminds us of the diminutive Amy. Yet Matty received a very good education from her father, a tutor. She proves to be familiar with Darwinism and, even before William’s entry into their world, together with the children, collects and observes animals, as did, as McGarth states, many Victorians (3). The co-author of The Swarming City, a natural history based on their study of ant communities, Mattie is, furthermore, reminiscent of Darwin’s (male) and female correspondents, who, as Janet Browne notes, provided data relevant to his scientific observations (28).

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Matty emerges also as a socialist and abolitionist, thus, unlike William, uniting scientific observation with (a more overt) political and moral commitment. It is, as Jane Campbell notes, thanks to Matty’s intervention that William begins to emancipate himself from the Alabasters (149). He may be disillusioned with the hidden and impersonal God, but his longing for Eugenia is reminiscent of Feuerbach’s assumption that the human being longs for a “personal God”, that is, Jesus Christ, “the God-man” (Essence 140 – 141). For William, Eugenia represents the opposite of the amorphous Amazon – she is a goddess of beauty, design, purposive totality and symmetry, who shall save him. Matty must, then, emancipate William not only from Sir Harald but also Eugenia’s influence. Conveniently, Eugenia, during another of her many pregnancies, withdraws to the world of women. Matty proposes that she and William – together with the (other) oppressed denizens of Bredely Hall, the smaller children of the family, the governess, nurse, gardener’s boy, Tom, and his little brother – observe social life in ant colonies. William’s decision to keep quiet on the project of writing, in co-operation with Matty, a study based on these observations, suggests his awareness of having joined a sort of conspiracy. Together the group set up the Mother Nest, which is modelled on Queen Victoria’s Summer retreat, Osborne, and her colonies abroad. Sir Harald speaks of “a primitive form of altruism, self-sacrifice, or loving-kindness” in the society of bees and ants (86). Yet among the many kinds of ants he and the others observe, are “the Blood-red slave-makers, Formica sanguinea” (79). Eventually going on a “great Slaving-Raid” (97), they snatch away the infants of the Wood Ants. William tells the group that the Formica sanguina are dependent for their survival on them as slaves who rear the children and provide food.9 The economy of Victorian England, in fact, its very survival, depended on the labour of the servants at home, among them many children, and slaves abroad. Like Darwin, William does criticise the institution of slavery abroad, but remains evasive about the social injustice in England. Despite his blow to teleology, Darwin actually expressed his belief that “With the more civilised races, the conviction of an all-seeing Deity has had a potent influence on the advance of morality” (Descent 914). Yet studying abroad not only nature and animal life, but the atrocious nature of slavery, he blames “the Catholic desire of making at one blow Christians and slaves” for the nearextinction of Indian natives in San Carlos, the chief town of the Chilo¦ Island (Voyage 269). Similarly, William tells Matty and the others of his observations of slavery in Brazil and pronounces the institution to be “evil” (80). He, too, points to the futility and mockery of religion. Jesus Christ’s self-sacrifice was the 9 For Darwin’s own account of the slave-making Formica Sanguinea, see Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London et al.: Penguin Books), 2009, 199 – 203.

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ransom that God paid to free humanity from the Devil. Yet the buying of enslaved child captives from the Man‚os tribe by the Portuguese is, as William explains, also called “ransom”. He concludes: “And the concept of ransom – in both the theological and humane sense – is thereby debased” (81). The slave-buying Portuguese are most likely Christians. William, early in the novelette, thinks of the “Portuguese missionary friars” (24) in the Amazon and likens Sir Harald to them. The Christian religion, as practised abroad, is thus the cause of evil. However, while Darwin, albeit very rarely and hesitatingly, turned his eyes also to the destitute in England,10 William refrains from overtly criticising domestic affairs. Darwin admits that “if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin” (Voyage 475). While William proves evasive, Matty and Miss Mead provoke him to take a moral stance (Weinroth 215). They not only criticise slavery, but England’s implication in, indeed economic dependence on, the upholding of this institution abroad and at home. The year is 1862; the industrial north of England depends on the import of baled cotton from the United States, where slaves work on the cotton plantations. Overproduction during 1859 – 60 and the outbreak of the American Civil War, which was to end slavery, in 1861, caused the interruption of import. As a result, the Cotton Famine or Cotton Panic broke out in Lancashire (Henderson 10 – 11). An abolitionist, Miss Mead condemns slavery as “a horrible trade”, her empathy with the slaves being obviously motivated also by her own low position in a class-divided world. She says: “A terrible war is being waged at present across the Atlantic, to secure not only the liberation of the unfortunate slaves, but the moral salvation of those whose leisure and enrichment are sustained by their cruel labours” (100). Although she does not say so openly, before the Panic, the Alabasters have, as noted above, made considerable money in the cotton trade, from which William, the son-in-law, also profits. The family are thus among those who must be saved from their moral deprivation. Moreover, Matty deplores that they must “fight on the side of the slavemakers, to preserve the work, that is the daily bred, of our own cotton mill workers” (100), whom she conceives of as another sort of slave. She speaks of the mill workers who, in the animal world, correspond to the male ants, which are called – “’factory hands” – as “machine-slaves”, adding that “our own philanthropists … seek to rescue [them]” (103). These “philanthropists” are contemporary socialists like Marx, Engels and others. Yet William remains silent. Actually, as noted above, he comes from the industrial North, where the histo10 Darwin rarely expressed overt criticism of social injustice in England. This evasion, together with his emphasis on the struggle for survival, resulted in fascist ideologists’ enlisting of evolution theory in their attempt to justify one class, race and nation’s struggle to dominate another.

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rical class struggle was fierce, and is himself of a modest origin. Again, he set out on his expedition to the Amazon11 together with other men, among them Alfred Wallace, who is obviously a literary reflection of the historical socialist of that name. Wallace was influenced by Robert Owen, the pioneer in British socialism, and submitted his own evolution theory to Darwin.12 But William is not quite ready yet to (fully) commit himself to socialist and abolitionist ideas as well as act accordingly. Matty’s persistent provocation does, on its own, not have the desired effect. It is only when he repeatedly becomes the immediate witness of the child servant Amy’s distress that William is persuaded to take action. While the Reverend indulges in his supposedly saint-like spiritual life, Amy, whose back is curved from hard labour, must rise at dawn to kill the beetles in the scullery. Her name, which derives from (old French) “Aimee”, means “beloved” and, as the past participle of “amer”, “to love” (Harper, “Amy”). She is a reminder of the divine imperative to love in a callous capitalist world. We are also reminded of Marx, who stated that “The head of the emancipation of the German is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat” (“Contributions” 52). Amy proves, moreover, to be reminiscent of Daniel Defoe’s servant character Amy, who emerges as the shadow protagonist of Roxana, Or the Fortunate Mistress (1724). This other Amy, brutalised by her mistress Roxana’s withdrawal of love, allegedly murders her daughter Susan. William takes notice of the many servants “whisk[ing] away behind their own doors into mysterious areas” (74). Yet his scientific curiosity never leads him to follow them there, which suggests a certain indifference. It is his own above-mentioned disturbing awareness that he has no place at Bredely Hall that eventually urges on him the servants’ existence and misery. One very early morning, on his way to the kitchen, the sleepless William chances upon Amy, who is emptying the traps laid the night before for the swarming beetles. In view of her plight, he compares her with “her imprisoned Coleoptera, struggling and hopeless” (75). To the crime of social inequality is added that of child labour. “Precepts of hard work” that would teach children economic, social and moral principles, James Walvin points out, “were com11 Darwin’s expedition was not only sanctioned by Queen Victoria, who represented both head of the Church of England and of state, but implicated in imperial-colonial expansion (Amigoni xiii-xiv). 12 In his introduction to On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (London et al.: Penguin Books, 2009), xxix-xxxi, William Bynum states that Wallace sent Darwin his own manuscript on natural selection. Darwin had not yet completed his own work, tentatively entitled Natural Selection. In order to establish his priority, Darwin was advised to proceed as follows: “Wallace’s communication, along with portions of Darwin’s earlier letter to the American botanist Asa Gray (1810 – 88) describing his ideas and some extracts from his 1844 essay, were hastily arranged to be read at the Linnean Society and then published in the society’s journal.”

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monplace in children’s literature throughout the nineteenth century” and betrayed an “anxious[ness] to shape the embryonic labour force to the unaccustomed rigours of industrial labour”(105 – 6) – or domestic service. It is his immediate witnessing of Amy’s sexual abuse by Edgar, which cruelly mocks the divine imperative to love, that forces William to intervene and free her from her exploiter’s grip. William has observed Edgar, a man of unchecked “brute strength”, and his brother Lionel return from hunting “with heavy burdens of bleeding creatures” and “blood often on their hands” (61, 82). This blood alludes to the predatory nature of the master-class. William’s later decision to provide for the pregnant Amy, who is sent away without a character and must probably go to the workhouse, marks the dissolution of his ties with the Alabaster family. William finally rises to moral action. Darwin notes that all social animals, including the human being, at some stage, acquired the instinct to sympathise with and aid members of the same community (Descent 478). In the case of human beings, he observes, it is not only “the social instinct”, “habit” and “obedience to the wishes and judgment of the community” (Descent 472), but “the reverence or fear of the Gods or Spirits” (Descent 485) that prompt them to perform acts of kindness. Yet he also refers to “savages” abroad, who, albeit “not guided by any religious motive”, would rather die “than betray their comrades” (Descent 482). He thus implicitly acknowledges the independence of ethic from religion. Indeed, we see that William does, despite his ongoing struggle to emancipate himself from God, sympathise with the exploited Amy and eventually seek to ameliorate her condition. Darwin notes that the less developed human being was more inclined to perform an act of altruism, if it would earn him social approval (Descent 913). William, who desires a higher social status, may earn Matty’s approval, but not the Alabaster family’s. He is clearly acting against his self-interest, thereby making a moral, rather than utilitarian, choice. In fact, he demonstrates a higher sort of morality, which, as Darwin remarks, requires that the human being “reject baneful customs” (Descent 493). William not only struggles to liberate himself from God, but is emancipated by both Matty and Amy from Sir Harald and his world rooted in the “baneful custom” of class-division and slavery. Darwin, furthermore, observes that, in the higher man, it is his “improved intellectual faculties”, rather than instinctual impulses, which allow him to “declare … I am the supreme judge of my conduct, and in the words of Kant, I will not in my own person violate the dignity of humanity” (Descent 481). Darwin believes that man’s reason will make him an independent moral agent and direct him to acts of altruism. The modern world, however, holds reason responsible for hurtful self-repression and self-division in individuals, which, in turn, are prone to trigger conflicts in society, rather than acts of kindness. Byatt, on the other hand, acknowledges the importance of both the scientific intellect

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and human heart. Knowledge certainly sets the scientist free from the shackles of traditional authority, but, as noted above, Amy reminds William also of the importance of love. It is also the victims that must function as moral agents in their culture and make ethical demands. Neither an absent or tyrannical God nor abstract humanist ideas can mobilise allegiance and moral actions. The eavesdropping and spying servants in stage comedy traditionally expose the wrongdoings of their betters and serve as “preachers” (Alison Scott-Prelorentzos 10) – or indeed as God. The invisible servants, “who”, as Matty says, “know everything that goes on” (155), direct the course of events. The stable boy delivers a message to William, which tells him that he must go see his wife, whom he finds in bed with Edgar. William has previously observed Edgar’s obsession with breeding horses and hounds, which is suggestive of his struggle to maintain also the purity of the Alabaster blood through inbreeding (Todd 35). The dark crime at Bredely Hall, incest or aristocratic inbreeding, which aims at the preservation of the classdivide, is, finally, fully revealed. While William and Matty are free to leave, Bredely Hall, bereft of their revitalising energy, is presumably doomed to become extinct. The servant collectivity as quasi God is a reminder of the original role of Christianity. Engels notes that it was once the religion of “the poor, the miserable, the slaves and the rejected”, preaching salvation from bondage and destitution in Rome (“Bruno Bauer” 172). Although the Christian religion eventually became a weapon of oppression in the hands of the powerful, Byatt does not wish to let go of its promise – salvation, we are reminded, is possible. Servant characters traditionally usher in “the positive unreality of utopianism … in order to recall that things might well be otherwise” (Robbins 47). The moral values they uphold are those of the countryside, from where many Victorian servants were recruited: “social inclusiveness” and “mutual charity and protection” (Robbinson 29, 44). Moreover, Bynum notes that the last paragraph of On the Origin of Species carries E. M. Forster’s message, “Only connect” (xlii). Darwin invites us to contemplate “an entangled bank”, where “different, but dependent”, life-forms come together (Origin 426). In The Descent of Man, he presents a human society guided by altruism, the source of which is not God, and emphasises the co-dependencies between human and other animal life. Marx, who put little faith in moral ideas, too, believed that a change in the material conditions would eventually produce a classless society. Feuerbach wrote of love and morality. So, is there hope for the future? In the last scene, William and Matty are travelling on a ship through the darkness of the night. Are they truly delivered from the shackles of God and Divine Providence and journeying through a history which is unpredictable? The dark void is suggestive of the very beginning of a new life, or God’s original

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act of creating the world. Ambiguity prevails. The butterfly that Captain Arturo Papagay brings to William and Matty’s attentions and that is identified as the Monarch reminds us of William and Sir Harald’s debate: does its beauty, “symmetry, and glorious brightness” (58), evince the workings of a Creator or the inexorable law of Nature? William and Matty can actually neither be ultimately free in a divinely ordained world nor in the natural world of sympathising and clashing life-forms. But this reality does not absolve them from moral responsibility. They stand together in the darkness, as suggestive of mutual give and take.

Works cited Amigoni, David. Introduction. The Voyage of the Beagle. Charles Darwin. London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. vii-xiv. Print. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots. Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print. Browne, Janet. “Darwin’s Intellectual Development: Biography, History and Commemoration.” Darwin. Eds. William Brown and Andrew C. Fabian. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2010.1 – 30. Print. Byatt, A. S. “Morpho Eugenia.” In Angels and Insects. London: Vintage, 1993. Print. Bynum, William. Introduction. On the Origin of Species. Charles Darwin. London et al.: Penguin Books, 2009. xv-lx. Print. Campbell, Jane. A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfried Laurier University Press, 2004. Print. Darwin, Charles. “The Descent of Man.” In The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: Modern Library, n. d. 387 – 864. Print. –, On the Origin of Species. London et al.: Penguin Books, 2009. Print. –, The Voyage of the Beagle. London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Print. Dawes, Frank. Not in Front of the Servants: Domestic Service in England, 1850 – 1939. London: Wayland, 1973. Print. Dawkins, Richard. The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. London et al.: Bantam Press, 2009. Print. Eagleton, Terry. Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Print. Engels, Frederick. “Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity.” In On Religion. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975. 170 – 79. Print. Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Trans. George Eliot. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1989. Print. Gould, Stephen Jay. I Have Landed: The End Of A Beginning in Natural History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2011. Print. Gove, Philip Babcock, ed. “sacred.” Websters Third New International Dictionary. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 1981. Print.

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Harper, Douglas. “Amy.” Online Etymology Dictionary. 2001 – 12. Web. 3 Nov.2012. http:// www.etymonline.com/index.php?search-amy& searchmode-none. Henderson, William Otto. The Lancashire Cotton Famine, 1861 – 65. Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1934. Print. L¦vinas, Emmanuel. Of God Who Comes to Mind. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1986. Print. Marx, Karl. “Contributions to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.” In On Religion. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975. 38 – 52. Print. –, “The Leading Article in No. 179 of the Kölnische Zeitung.” In On Religion. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975. 170 – 79. Print. –, Letter to Ferdinand Lasalle. London, 16 Jan. 1861. Qtd. in Holmwood, John and Maureen O’Malley. “Evolutionary and Functionalist Historical Sociology.” Handbook of Historical Sociology. Eds. Gerard Delanty and Engin F. Isin. London: Sage Publications. 2003. 39 – 57. Print. –, Letter to Friedrich Engels. London, 18 June 1862. Qtd. in Gould, Stephen Jay. I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Print. –, “Theses on Feuerbach.” In On Religion. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975. 62 – 64. Print. McGarth, Alister E. Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good And Evil. Mineola, New York: Dover, 1997. Print. Robbins, Bruce. The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Print. Scott-Prelorentzos, Alison. The Servant in German Enlightenment Comedy. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: University of Alberta Press, 1982. Print. Todd, Richard. A. S. Byatt. Plymouth: Northcote House, 1997. Print. Wagner, Jill E. “Class Consciousness, Critter Collecting, and Climactic Conditions.” Victorian Newsletter 112 (2007): 32 – 50. Print. Walvin, James. A Child’s World: A Social History of English Childhood, 1800 – 1914. 2nd ed. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1984. Print.

Notes on Contributors

Simona Beccone is a lecturer and researcher in English Literature at the University of Pisa (Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistics). Her research interests focus on Metaphysical poetry (George Herbert), Romantic poetry (John Keats), Elizabethan literature (Shakespeare), literary theory, literature and the visual arts. Within these fields, her most recent publications include four monographs and a series of articles whose aim is to detect and reconstruct the main cultural codes and psychoanthropological, archetypal opposing forces which can be found at the underlying (deep) structure of poetic texts, with specific interest in the iconic, anagrammatic and phonosymbolic components of artistic language. Barbara M. Benedict holds the Charles A. Dana Chair of English at Trinity College, CT, USA. She has published Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English prose Fiction, 1745 – 1800; Making the Modern Reader : Cultural Mediation in Early-Modern Literary Anthologies; and Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early-Modern Inquiry ; She has also edited Wilkes and the Later Eighteenth Century for the Eighteenth-Century British Erotica series, and co-edited with Deidre LeFaye for Cambridge University Press Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. She has written over 70 essays on the British fiction, poetry, science, and popular and book history of the long eighteenth century. Roger Ebbatson is currently Visiting Professor at Lancaster University, having previously taught at the University of Sokoto, Nigeria, the University of Worcester, and Loughborough University. He is the author of a number of studies, including Lawrence & the Nature Tradition (1980), Hardy: Margin of the Unexpressed (1993), An Imaginary England (2005), Heidegger’s Bicycle (2006), and most recently Landscape and Literature 1830 – 1914 (2013). John Fawell is a professor of Humanties at the College of General Studies at Boston University. He has published widely on film and literature, with articles

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on 19th and 20th century writers such as Valery, Tolstoy and Tennyson and books on Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, Sergio Leone and studio-era Hollywood. Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec teaches English at the University of Caen and the Catholic University of Paris. She co-edited La Po¦sie de Geoffrey Hill et la Modernit¦ (2007), Selected Poems from Modernism to Now (2012), Poetry & Religion: Figures of the Sacred (2013) and was guest-editor for a special issue of the Bulletin L’Amiti¦ Charles P¦guy in English (142: P¦guy Alive, 2013). She is also co-editor of the on-line journal of the English Department of Paris Diderot University, Arts of War and Peace. Guyonne Leduc, Professor at the University Charles de Gaulle-Lille 3, agr¦g¦e (English), a former student of the Êcole Normale Sup¦rieure, works on literature and the history of ideas and mentalities in XVIIth-XVIIIth-century England. She published her PhD on Morale et religion dans les essais et dans les M¦langes de Henry Fielding (1990), a book on L’Êducation des Anglaises au XVIIIe siÀcle: La Conception de Henry Fielding (1997) and one on R¦¦critures anglaises au XVIIIe siÀcle de l’Êgalit¦ des deux sexes (1673) de FranÅois Poulain de la Barre: du politique au pol¦mique (2010). She published many articles and co-edited several books in the series “Des id¦es et des femmes”. Esra Melikoglu is Professor of English at Istanbul University, Istanbul, Turkey. She is the author of Allies and Antagonists: The Ambivalent Relationship Between the Servant and the Child of the House in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Interactive Voices in Intertextual Literature: the ex-centric female, child, servant and colonised and critical essays on the servant character, post-colonial and feminist issues in literature. She is also the co-editor of an anthology of English short stories and an anthology of American short stories (published in Turkey). Currently, her research is devoted to the (neo)gothic and ghost story. Paola Partenza teaches English Literature at the University of Pescara-Chieti (Italy). Among the many authors to whom she has devoted essays are William Godwin, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Christina Georgina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, T. S. Eliot, Shakespeare and Andrew Marvell. She has published a volume on Tennyson’s poetry, Alfred Tennyson e la poesia del dubbio (Bari 2002), co-edited the volume Il punto su Cristina Rossetti (1997), and published a volume on female writings: Sguardo e narrazione. Quattro esempi di scrittura femminile. Wollstonecraft, Hays, Austen, Gaskell (Rome 2008).

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Christopher Stokes is a lecturer in Romantic literature at the University of Exeter (UK). He is the author of Coleridge, Language and the Sublime (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and articles on Coleridge, Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, William Wordsworth and others in a range of international journals. His current project is a study of Romantic prayer.