Teaching British Literature: A Companion to The Longman Anthology of British Literature 9780321027375

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Teaching British Literature

A Companion

to

The Longman Anthology of British Literature

David Damrosch Christopher Baswell Clare Carroll

Kevin J.H. Dettmar

Heather Henderson Constance Jordan

Manning Anne Howland Schotter Peter

J.

Chapman Sharpe Stuart Sherman

William

Jennifer Wicke

Susan

J.

Wolfson

Digitized by the Internet Archive in

2012

http://archive.org/details/teachingbritishlOOdavi

Teaching British Literature

David Damrosch

Columbia University Christopher Baswell Barnard College

Anne Howland Schotter Wagner College

Constance Jordan Claremont Graduate University Clare Carroll Queens College Stuart Sherman

Fordham

University

Cynthia Wall University of Virginia

Peter Manning University of Southern California

Susan

J.

Wolfson

Princeton University

Heather Henderson Mount Holyoke College William Chapman Sharpe Barnard College Jennifer

Wicke

University of Virginia

Kevin

J.

H. Dettmar

Clemson

University

Teaching British Literature

A

Companion

to

The Longman Anthology of British Literature

David Damrosch General Editor

Christopher Baswell

Anne Howland

Schotter

Constance Jordan Clare Carroll Stuart

Sherman

with Cynthia Wall

Manning

Peter

Susan

J.

Wolfson

Heather Henderson William

Chapman Sharpe

Jennifer

Kevin

Wicke

H. Dettmar

J.

B LONGMAN An

New

York

•

Don

imprint of Addison Wesley

Reading, Massachusetts Mills,

Ontario

•

Sydney

•

Longman,

Menlo Park, •

Mexico City

Inc.

California •

Madrid

•

•

Harlow, England

Amsterdam

Editor-in-Chief: Patricia Rossi

Senior Editor: Lisa

Moore

Developmental Editor: Mark Getlein

Supplements Editor: Donna Campion

Management: David Munger/DTC Makeup: Karen Milholland/DTC

Electronic Project

Electronic Page

Teaching British Literature:

by David Damrosch

Copyright

©

Longman,

Inc.

A Companion to The Longman Anthology of British Literature

et al.

1999 Longman Publishers USA, a division of Addison Wesley

All rights reserved.

No

part of this

book may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval

system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, pho-

tocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 0-321-02737-X

345678910-VG-0100

CONTENTS

General Editors Preface

xi

The Middle Ages Norman Conquest

Before the

Beowulf

1

The Tain bo Cuailnge Judith

3

8

The Dream of the Rood PERSPECTIVES: ETHNIC Taliesin

9

AND RELIGIOUS ENCOUNTERS

14

The Wanderer

15

Wulf and Eadwacer and The Riddles

Wife's

The Arthurian Myth PERSPECTIVES:

16

in History

Gawain and

Sir

Thomas Malory 33

the

38

William Langland

58

Plowman"

Mystical Writings

Cloud of

Literature

in

29

Context 64

67

68

70

Play of the Shepherds

and Travel

75

21

THE HISTORY OF BRITAIN

Unknowing 69

Norwich

The Second

IN

Green Knight

Geoffrey Chaucer

Richard Rolle

and Romance

25

Sir

"Piers

Norman Conquest

ARTHURIAN MYTH

Marie de France

The

Lament

19

After the

Julian of

10

72

22

Contents

vi

The Voyage of Saint Brendan Sir

John Mandeville

76

Margery Kempe

78

Middle English

Lyrics

Religious Lyrics

82

The

80

85

Tale of Taliesin

Dafydd ap Gwilym William Dunbar

75

86

90

Robert Henryson

92

The Early Modern Period 95

John Skelton

y

Sir

Thomas Wyatt 96

-^Henry Howard, Sir

Earl of Surrey

Thomas More 98

George Gascoigne

Edmund

Spenser

Sir Philip

Sidney

—

Mary

111

Whitney

Context

in

116

I

121

Walter Raleigh

"The Discovery" Richard Barnneld

123 in

Context

William Shakespeare in

Elizabeth Cary

126

127

Christopher Marlowe

Othello

117

118

Aemilia Lanyer

128 132

Context

138

140

ON WOMEN AND GENDER Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton 143 PERSPECTIVES: TRACTS

__^^

116

Herbert, Countess of Pembroke

Elizabeth

Sir

102 103

"The Apology"

-* Isabella

i

GOVERNMENT AND SELF-GOVERNMENT

PERSPECTIVES:

~

97

Ben Jonson John Donne

146 149

Lady Mary Wroth

154

141

100

n

i

S with conventional ures like

Venus (who

is

silent

in

dream vision poems, often config-

anyway) and Nature. With the parliament of birds,

though, several highly characterized and occasionally obstreperous female voices

come

into play,

and bespeak

a social posture that extends

beyond the dream.

It is

interesting to consider the convergence of such voices (prominently the turtledove

and goose) and the entry of Middle English colloquialism. At the same time, as Elaine Tuttle Hansen has pointed out in an intriguing reading of the poem, the formel's delay, her very refusal to speak and her choice not to choose a mate, focus power on her. (See "Female Indecision and Indifference in the PF," Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, [1992], 108-40.) And her year's delay extends the liminal moment of female influence and choice, both within the conventions of courtly poetry (that usually seeks a solution) and the social negotiations of marriage. This aspect of the PF looks forward significantly to the convergences of gender, class, and vernacular voice in the Canterbury

Tales.

The Canterbury

Tales

The General Prologue The

clearly

fragmentary nature of the Canterbury Tales poses problems of interpre-

The most

in-

fluential of these has been the exegetical approach, which sees the pilgrimage as

di-

tation that have tempted

rected

to

the

New

Augustinian view, D.

which

many

Jerusalem as

W.

construct unifying schemes.

critics to

much

Robertson,

Jr.

establishes the pilgrimage frame,

as

to

Canterbury. To support

leans heavily

on

this

the General Prologue,

and on the prologue

to the Parson's Tale,

Geoffrey Chaucer

which promises Jerusalem

to

show the way

celestial"

(A

to "thilke parfit glorious pilgrimage

45

/ That

highte

Preface to Chaucer, [1962], 373).

Readers of various theoretical persuasions, however, have found this view reNew Critics such as E. Talbot Donaldson point out that such a moral-

ductionist.

reading misses Chaucer's irony and complexity. Glending Olson, in Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (1982) questions Robertson on historical istic

grounds, reminding us that there was a medieval theory justifying the use of ature for pleasure, as well as for instruction.

He

the pilgrimage (the "outer frame" of the Canterbury Tales) ful

purpose of the story

telling contest (the

liter-

argues that the serious purpose of

balanced by the play-

is

"inner frame"), which has been gener-

overlooked (156). For Olson, too, the General Prologue looms large, for it is here that the Host, Harry Bailey, most clearly articulates his view of the importance of pleasure in literature. While later on he appears naive or philistine in his ally

insistence that pilgrims

anced Horatian prize

supper

tell tales

ideal of pleasure

will

be the pilgrim

of "mirth," here the Host expresses a more bal-

and

who

he

profit, as

tells "tales

winner of the

stipulates that the

of most sentence and best solas."

While the Hosts aesthetic ideals will prove to be at odds with the puritanical ones of the Parson which conclude the Canterbury Tales, the fact that they have a precedent in the medieval theories of credibility

(Olson

literature as recreation gives

them

a

measure of

157).

Historically oriented critics

who view the

Canterbury Tales in

its

social context,

such as Stephen Knight, David Aers, and Lee Patterson, have also taken issue with Robertson's view that the ideal of hierarchy was universally accepted in the

Middle Ages. In a recent

article

David Wallace speaks

for all of

them when he

writes of Chaucer's struggle "to assess the possibilities of a complex, urbanizing, aggressive, post-bastard feudal society" ("In Flaundres," Studies in the

Age of

The historical critic who has particularly focused on the Jill Mann, in Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The

Chaucer, 19 [1997], 84).

General Prologue

is

Literature of Social Class

and

the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (1973).

shows how Chaucer draws on the nobility, the clergy, and the commons— for

the criticism in Estates Satire of failing to

all

She

three estates—

perform their proper

function.

Such

satire

is

particularly sharp in the case of the clergy.

the increasing insistence of the

by John Wycliffe,

who

laity

on

a role in religion,

The Prologue

reflects

an insistence exemplified

challenged the efficacy of the Eucharist and the necessity of

the priesthood as an intermediary between

God and human

beings.

follower of Wycliffe, Chaucer shares his objection to the hypocrisy of

orders of the Church, particularly that of the

friars.

The

While not

a

many of the

fraternal orders, the first

of which was founded in the twelfth century as part of a reformist movement, claimed that they begged because they had given up property in imitation of Christ's apostles, but by the

end of the fourteenth century they had

in fact

amassed a great deal of wealth.

While Mann shows Chaucer's debts to Estates Satire, she also shows how he goes beyond the genre with the ironic technique of the naive narrator. By refusing friar and the parto dwell on the harm that his immoral pilgrims do-as when the

Geoffrey Chaucer

46

doner lead unsuspecting souls

damnation with

to

their

empty absolutions and fake

relics— this narrator appears to accept all the pilgrims at their

own

flattering esti-

mation, leaving the readers themselves to supply the judgment. This becomes pecially clear at

moments when

discourse, but then slides into near-quotation,

being taken over by that pilgrim; the effect of the

Monk,

es-

the narrator transmits a pilgrim's views in indirect

is

if his

is

voice (and mind?) were

particularly egregious in the portrait

lines 177-88.

Donaldson's influential distinction between "Chaucer the pilgrim"—an

E. T.

persona—and "Chaucer the poet" {Speaking of Chaucer,

ironic literary

[1970], 1-12)

has been questioned, but clearly the sophisticated author of the Canterbury Tales

could hardly have been as naive as he appears. self-deprecating narrator

is

It

should be pointed out that the

in fact part of a well-worn medieval literary convention,

used by Boethius, Dante, and Christine de Pizan,

among

others.

Questions about narrators pertain not only to Chaucer the pilgrim, but also to the pilgrim narrators of

each of the

tales,

enough of which

are included in this

anthology to explore their relation to the portraits of the pilgrims in the General Prologue.

The

influential theory of a consistent dramatic appropriateness of tales

to tellers formulated by [rpt.

1970]),

George Lyman Kittredge (Chaucer and

Nonetheless, students can appreciate such relationships

when

For instance, the General Prologue's portrait of the Miller lotries"

is

confirmed by his

and deafness

is

1915

his Poetry,

should be pointed out, has been somewhat discredited.

it

tale,

and

its

do

pertain.

as a teller

of "har-

they

reference to the Wife of Bath's boldness

dramatized and explained by her

own

prologue. (Inconsistencies

also reward discussion, however, such as the fact the Prologue's detail of the

Wife's clothmaking— of interest to feminist critics as a source of financial inde-

pendence

for a middle-class

woman— is

omitted from her

own

prologue. There,

The

she attributes her wealth instead to inheritances from her husbands.) Pardoner's portrait as a scoundrel in the General Prologue suited both to his prologue, in ences,

and

which he boasts of his skill at cheating his audipunishment of greed, which con-

sell

absolution to the pilgrims themselves.

intriguing, though, to consider occasions tale:

particularly well-

to his tale, a gripping account of the

cludes with his offer to

the

is

when Chaucer

It is

equally

did not suit the teller to

the virtually faceless Nun's priest— mentioned in the General Prologue

simply as one of "prestes three" accompanying the Prioress—tells one of the most brilliant tales

of

all.

The

Miller's Tale

Nicholas has just grabbed Alison by the crotch and she, for the moment, ing

none of

just a

it:

"Do way youre handes,

for

your curteisye!"

(line 179).

This

hav-

is is

not

key turn in the fabliau structure of the Miller's Tale, but equally a comic

high point in the In turn,

it is

tale's

extended parody of the verbal conventions of courtly

a particularly sly part of the Miller's broader attack

the aristocratic class

who were

love.

on the values of

the cultural consumers of courtly love.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Although the

among

flict

W.

contains no explicit reference to contemporary political con-

the classes, scholars point out the considerable

had

that millers in Lee

tale

obscure place

if still

in the discourse of the Peasants' Revolt. (See the fine discussion

Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, [1991], 254-58.)

of John

47

The famous

of the revolt, refer to an allegorical miller (see "Piers Plowman in Context: the Rising of 1381"). And Millers were important through-

letters

out

Ball, a leader

medieval rural society

late

as the first agent in the

transformation of crops into

goods, a crucial link then between farm and town. Certainly Chaucer's Miller

is

openly eager to challenge hierarchy and social

order within the confines of the pilgrimage community. speakers that the Host

trying to stage-manage,

is

He

usurps the order of

and thereby alters the

social

mean-

ing of tale telling. In one shout he imports values of verbal skill (his are immense)

and

and displaces the Host's emerging plan of tale eminence and the archaic model of the three estates. (This

liveliness in several senses,

telling linked to social

point can be supported by turning to the General Prologue portrait of the Miller;

note the implicit If

class challenge

of carrying a sword and buckler, line 560.)

the Miller's interruption generates a slippage

pilgrimage fiction (loud voice versus social rank)

among

narrative orders in the

opens

also

it

a

gap in the con-

ventions of transmission of the textual product, the tales themselves. Chaucer has

opened the implicitly

sayn

.

.

.

Tales as a

mammoth

?" his

of a "cherles

memory, repeating the

he heard,

tales

he urges modest readers, "Turne over the

tale,"

story

how could

a

I

more

narrator asks, line 59. But now, seemingly shocked at the prospect

other tale" (line 69) in

The

exercise of

out loud before a (presumably courtly) audience: "What sholde

itself,

man

yet economical?

what must suddenly be conceived

further,

as

drunk

It is

is

a perfect

brilliantly paced, full of brief

managed

still

and

and chese

leef,

an-

book.

example of strains between a

as the Miller claims to be

occasionally slows into beautifully

as a

manage

teller

and

tale:

a story so layered

telling characterization that

body and

description, especially of the

dress of Alison.

The

Miller's tale

is

a fabliau,

cuckoldry (and what genteel

on terms

like "queinte,"

with

critics

its

used to

typical plot of sexual call

"hende," and "privee."

He

consciously manipulated by an artisan like the Miller,

with which he "quits" the

class

and

its

punning

thus uses a genre

"of the

bourgeois-but does that mean "about" or "controlled by"? brilliant response

competition and

"the nether kiss"),

it

If

we

see

it

as a

genre

invites celebration of the

and worldview of the knight.

If

seen as an aristocratic property, the audience can react with the churls therein depicted. The narrator's ambivalence toward condescension about even repeating the tale reflects some of this potential instability of

however the genre

is

reception.

Along with

its

complex internal

plot, the tale also

of the Knight's Tale. There, in a similar love triangle, (finally in a

tournament)

for the attention of a

manages

to

parody the plot

two captive knights compete

young noblewoman

whom

initially

Knights lady, Emelye, is they have not even met, and wait years for her favor. The in prayer) is to have only (spoken wish almost entirely passive; her one expressed neither man, and that wish

is

denied.

Geoffrey Chaucer

48

The

more

from the Knight's

different

courtly vocabulary ("For derne love of thee,

is

and animal

life,

first

lily-and-rose

Can Alison

then grabs

beauty of Emelye.

there a person residing in so global a

among men? Note how

tale,

thickly

or

is

she rather

how

she

sets

bound up she

how

the other hand, consider

handles Nicholas' sexual approach, and

The

is

be claimed as an agent in the

On

in all that restrictive clothing.

is

effectively she

up the conditions of any

fu-

gift.

figure of Alison engages a

tion of a

spille," line 170)

of old John's wealth (note her costly clothing and her purse), and then

of the broader social competition

ture sexual

1

elaborate, but deflated by his

both domesticated and wild, through metaphor and analogy,

But, feminist critics have wondered,

an icon

more

the character of Alison.

overwhelming the conventional range of reference?

is

nicely, yet

Nicholas spouts a bit of

The tale's most powerful answer to the Her description draws in vast areas of

very narcissism and apparent effeminacy.

Knight, though,

lovers.

lemman,

what he wants. Absalon's aping of courtship

plant

romantic competition

Miller's squabbling suitors parallel this

they couldn't be

young wife married

to

web of biblical

reference in the tale.

an old carpenter echoes the Nativity

Nicholas dupes old John with a tale of Noah's flood repeating ticularly a version

itself.

But

The

situa-

story,

and

this

par-

is

of Christian story and action as practiced within urban culture:

attendance at liturgical celebrations, and civic productions of biblical dramas such as

Noah, the

Nativity, or the play of

Herod

in

which Absolon

acts (line 276).

There

Song of Songs and other Old Testament imagery. This network of reference has invited some reductionist allegorical readings of the tale, but also subtler comments on the exploration of human and Christian love that at some points seems continuous in the tale. With old John tucked up in the attic, awaiting a second flood, Nicholas and Alison make are also quieter but equally emphatic echoes of the

love

Til that the belle of

And The

freres in the

tale's close is

boundaries between

Laudes gan to ringe,

chauncel gonne singe,

(lines

547-48)

Saturnalian: pitch darkness, the hot coulter, the explosion of attic

and bedroom,

private

house and communal

gaze.

Along

with the laughter here, a strain of male sexual violence and injury also emerges: John's

arm broken,

one hand, Alison

Nicholas's ass burnt by the traditionally phallic coulter. is

the one uninjured character at the end of the

tale;

On the on the

other she does seem to be dealt out of a scene of violent physical (and comic) ex-

change among men. Indeed, even Absolon's effeminate delicacy seems effaced by

odd negotiation with the blacksmith. For all the tale's aim of fillup the limited perspective and erotic desiccation of the Knight's Tale, and for

his rage

ing

all its

and

his

laughter, the Miller's Tale also closes with the violent

competition

laid, literally, bare.

underpinnings of male

Geoffrey Chaucer

49

The Wife of Bath s Prologue and Tale Dame Alison of Bath is a central focus of recent Chaucer criticism, yet (for all her garrulous sociability) a solitary and somewhat isolated figure in the pilgrimage community. There are two other women travelling to Canterbury, the Prioress and "Another Nonne," but both are

women

for

mercantile

in holy orders.

in the secular world, in marriage, class.

The General Prologue

So the Wife of Bath alone speaks

and

portrait

ter sketches, exploiting traditional associations

in the unstable, socially striving

is

one of Chaucer's great charac-

with dress, physiognomy, and social

conduct. Her comically fashionable hat

(as big as a shield, the narrator says) and her sharp spurs challenge male chivalry; her repeated widowhood challenges some notions of marriage; and her red face and hose suggest a bold sexuality that threat-

ens the model of male erotic aggression. (These same details of her dress also underwrite associations made by some patristic critics between the Wife and the biblical Whore of Babylon.) The Wife is an eager participant, even a competitor, in the rituals of public culture. She attends mass often, but wants to be at the offering.

common

And

she

is

an

inveterate traveller

women

with historical

on

first

in line

pilgrimages, a habit she has in

interested in aspects of the religious

life,

like

Margery Kempe.

The Prologue

The Wife of

episodes of her past. tors:

It is

Bath's Prologue

useful

first

to set

is

out

long and dense, spanning its

main moments and

many

interlocu-

the lengthy debate with an unidentified clergyman about a sixth husband,

and the further clerical issues that accompany the debate; the three old husbands lumped into a single story (why?); the brief mention of her fourth husband the reveller; and the closing tale of her battle and peace with Jankyn. This is autobiography presented as a series of arguments with men in different kinds of authority, and suggests the way that Alison has created herself in constant battle with various male discourses. The question this leaves is whether she triumphs in that combat and

creates a self that

among

versions of

is

her own; or whether, rather, she

womanhood

is

trapped inescapably

already present in those discourses. Recent

cism from several theoretical perspectives

is

selected

and

criti-

lucidly introduced in The

Wife of Bath, ed. Peter G. Beidler (1996); the collection includes a well-glossed text

and the

The

editor's discussion of "Biographical

and

Historical Contexts."

Wife's Prologue and Tale have been the object of a great deal of very pro-

ductive critical research and reflection, especially by feminist scholars, in recent

decades. For two major statements, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual (1989), chapter 4,

and

Politics,

Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender,

(1992), chapter 2. Assessments of the Wife vary widely, nonetheless.

Is

she to be

approached as a positive model of economic independence and a degree of self-determination? Or is Alison a kind of unhappy warning of the unavoidable costs of self-creation? Responses are based partly on the critic's estimate of Chaucer himself,

and the degree of independence from the more conservative values

of the era

that is attributed to him. These estimates have also been informed by deconstructionism, with its lively attention to the limits imposed on verbal self-creation (authorial or personal) by the ideologies always

embedded within

language.

Geoffrey Chaucer

50

Consider Barrie Ruth Strauss 's insertion of addresses to

women

telling

comment on

inside addresses to

the Wife's Prologue: "Her

men

exposes the major

quirement of phallocentrism—that masculine discourse enclose feminine

re-

dis-

course" ("The Subversive Discourse of the Wife of Bath: Phallocentric Discourse

and the Imprisonment of Criticism," English Literary History 55 [1988], 531). One might add the question, what women? The Prologue speaks to "wise wives," but there aren't any others in the pilgrimage; and the Wife recalls her old gossip Alisoun, but she's now dead ("God have hir soule!"). The Wife does seem haunted by her male opponents; she can't stop arguing with them. She husband's book of misogynist those very texts in the Wife's

own

finally

burns her

last

but many readers would recognize scraps from

texts,

story, especially in

her manipulation of her

first

three husbands.

Jankyn's "book of wicked wives"

Wife:

literacy.

The

own

Wife's

is

talk

almost a

is

fetish object

of male power over the

thick with textual references, but they are

often partial or slightly wrong; and they are just the kind of material that could be

memory from

the public culture of liturgy, sermons, and biblical

drama book with which to torment her. Yet the Wife's body itself is repeatedly figured as a text, a document authenticated with "sainte Venus seel" on it (line 610), or a book that Jankyn can "glose" (line 515) both sexually and textually. This textual struggle over control of the book and the body provides the climax of the Wife's Prologue. Another way of approaching these issues of pilgrim voices, gender, and textual power is to look at the manuscript setting of the Prologue. If facsimiles of the Ellesmere Manuscript (ed. A. Egerton, [1911]) or the Hengwrt Manuscript (ed. Paul Ruggiers et al, [1979]) are available, show students one of the heavily glossed held in

that the Wife enjoyed.

By

contrast,

texts listed in Jankyn's

a stable

The

glosses provide, to a medieval reader of these

much

of the Prologue in the very Latin misogynist

pages of the Wife's Prologue.

manuscripts, the sources of

Jankyn has

book. So while the Wife

dence and triumphs, the book

is

is

(orally) asserting

(textually) asserting the priority

her indepen-

and continuity of

a hostile tradition. This displacement of opposition onto the glossed page leads

back to the double conventions of poetry in Chaucer's time—at once a performed

medium and one Critical focus

available for private reading in a book.

on

the Wife as a

woman and a

merchant has obscured an equally

important and poignant aspect of her situation: mortality. The Wife of Bath periences age (and, well past forty, the prospect of old age) with a

nation that

my

world

is

humorous

very appealing. See especially her very moving speech,

as in

my

time," lines 475-85.

At the same

connected from any of the comforts of the church or

"I

ex-

resig-

have had

time, she seems utterly disits

promise of a

life

beyond

the body.

The Tale

If

the Wife's Prologue asserts her position against a series of clerics and

husbands, her Tale

is

a brilliant counter-version of a great bearer of aristocratic

male values, the Arthurian countered in the

texts in

tradition.

She

reverses a pattern of conventions en-

"Arthurian Romance." Instead of a Guinevere

who ma-

nipulates law as an instrument of unjust vengeance (as in Marie de France's

Geoffrey Chaucer

queen of the Wife's Tale only seeks

Larwal), the

The

the injured gender. cal sense

punishment come from

Wife's Arthurian knight ("chivalrous" only in the techni-

of "mounted")

is

a

common

the plot, further, but the central

moners. The

to have

51

rapist. Not only do women control most of women-the raped girl and the crone-are com-

tale also explores the further irony that the discourse

of true "gentil-

comes from the mouth of the low-class crone. The knight's submission to the crone, and her miraculous transformation into a young lady both beautiful and faithful, mark the Wife's entry into a fantasy as complete as any in earlier lesse"

Arthurian romance. But

at least

it is

a fantasy for the pleasure of a female teller.

The Pardoners Prologue and Tale Chaucer's Pardoner has exercised a creepy fascination on his audiences from the moment of the Canterbury pilgrimage to the reader of the late twentieth century. In that fascination

Chaucer's

text.

lies his

power, both as an agent in the church of his day and in

The Pardoner moves along

the great force of language and

boundary he threatens tale-telling

project.

to

its

undermine the

The Pardoner

and wavering boundary between

a fine

rhetorical underpinnings; by delineating that

is

efficacy of clerical language

and of the

the Tales' great (and perhaps tragic) de-

mystifier.

Scholars have expended a great deal of learning and effort trying to establish the Pardoner's exact physical status and his sexual relation to the bears his singing a "stif

burdoun." (For a

"The Pardoner's Homosexuality and he

a

man born

and goat it

without

which he

to

misses the point.

is

The

testicles,

pilgrims as

"What

it is

is

the sheer

Matters,"

[1980], 8-22.)

or a eunuch, or a hermaphrodite

he?"

is

is

(like

the hare

is

largely generated

modern

and connected relics.

by what

to

is

unknown, unasked,

(silently) as eagerly

by the

critics.

physiognomy

in the

General Prologue por-

has laden himself: clothes, pilgrim

This only adds to the spectacle of the Pardoner, If this is freakish, it also has a

ther exaggerated by his high but piercing voice.

tain pathos, like his efforts at fashionable dress.

pulsive

fur-

cer-

There emerges a sense of a com-

internally divided wish to be part of a

and

Is

important, but to a degree

probably a question asked

amount of stuff with which he

badges, pardons, fake

PMLA 95,

fascination with the Pardoner, as with any figure of ex-

(loquaciously) by

Just as important, trait, is

It

compared)? This discussion

treme physiological difference, unspeakable.

How

Summoner who

Monica McAlpine,

full discussion, see

group from which he

will always

be divided by physiology, by sexual practice, and equally by the self-isolation of the con man from his victims. Yet the Pardoner also exploits the fascinated gaze of this

and

his other publics, connecting the fascination caused by

verbal skill

physiognomy

to his

isolation, see the in holding their attention. (Regarding the Pardoner's The Idea of the in Howard Donald by deeply involved discussion

superb and

Canterbury Tales

The Pardoner

[1976], esp. 342-45.) raises the religious question of

whether true

Equally, though, he

can derive from a corrupt clergy. schemes by which the institutional church

raises the

lays

faith

and

salvation

bare the rhetorical

money on which

it

has

(like

Geoffrey Chaucer

52

become dependent. The Pardoner's prologue,

the hospital for which he works)

and the

tale

he attaches thereto, are presented as a sample of

in sermonizing.

They correspond

mons, which are elaborated commentaries on

rum

many medieval

ser-

biblical passages (such as radix malo-

usually following a loose rhetorical division: (1) theme, (2)

cupiditas),

est

his professional skill

neatly to the structure of

protheme, a further introduction,

(3) dilatation,

the fuller exposition of the

text,

exemplum, an illustrative anecdote, (5) peroration or "application" of the exemplum, and (6) a closing formula. Parts 1, 4, and 5 are clearly present in the Pardoner's discourse, and perhaps 6. (4)

The Pardoner's

cynical exposition of his technique here

by two parody masses.

He

further exaggerated

is

turns the pilgrims' road-side stopping place into the

church-like setting for his sermon, but

first

he announces

at this ale-stake I

wol bothe drinke and eten of a cake.

and the murder of their companion, by conwhen he was sent to fetch "breed and

Later, the rioters celebrate their riches

suming the wine poisoned by win ful prively."

The Pardoner's him. His eerie

tale

their victim

rhetorical force

fully

is

of the three rioters

hold our attention exactly because

is

equal to the attention his looks draw to

full

(like his

of powerful and creepy episodes, that

own body)

they are evocative yet

resist

explanation: the passing corpse, the bizarre exegetical mistake through which

full

the rioters set out to find the person "Death," the old the crooked way and the gold.

The

tale

man

encountered

moves seamlessly from

its

at a stile,

"realistic"

open-

ing into an almost allegorical story.

The

final ploy

of the Pardoner's sermon

is

so daring that

it

may almost be

invit-

ing exposure: he asks for contributions. Harry Bailey responds with a degree of

whose own

rage

from

excess

may stem

less

from the Pardoner's

The Host

reacts by speaking out loud exactly

and silenced the rest of the pilgrims: phony as his relics. By naming the power, the Host also silences him.

The

kiss

that the Pardoner's "coilons"—testicles—are as lack that

had given the Pardoner such

It is

vites the Host's explosion; the

Pardoner's

eerie

(intended to be a sort of "kiss of peace") imposed by the Knight at the

and emptied of meaning. ass; yet

It is at

once layered with paradox

the invitation to kiss the Pardoner's relics that in-

Host suggests that would be more

like kissing

the

and sexual practice the Knight tries to impose a

that in turn raises the homoerotic kissing

implied by the General Prologue. of social concord.

tiple

than

and virile prowess. the absence which has so fascinated

very close of the tale rewards careful discussion.

kiss

religious cynicism

his disentanglement of Harry's earlier equations of verbal

Is it

On

possible?

Is

exposures of the Pardoner's Tale?

top of

all this

any symbolic practice possible after the mul-

Geoffrey Chaucer

The Nuns Prologue

munity

53

and Tale

Priest s Prologue

Given the Knight's urgent will to repair rifts in the pilgrimage comend of the Pardoner's Tale, it is worth discussing his decision to in-

at the

terrupt the Monk's Tale. In a sense, the Monk has told a series of tales, lugubrious and very much alike, under the general rubric of tragedy. This he defines in the most reductionist sense of the fall of men in good places, for reasons the Monk scarcely pauses to distinguish, with

no hope of restoring their fortunes. It is a notion of genre the Knight summarizes in three lines, urging instead stories of "joye and greet solas" (lines 5-8). Is his alternate formula any more complex, though?

The

Host, always respectful of social hierarchy,

man and

the big

complaint: the

shifts his

is

almost too eager to agree with

The Host repeats the Knight's terms but putting him to sleep. When the Monk refuses

share in his authority.

Monk

Harry's request of a hunting

is

the Host turns instead to the Nun's Priest. His coding continues; to the Knight and even the Monk, he used the respectful "Ye" and "you," but for the Nun's Priest uses the familiar form "thou." (Note the tale,

social

form of the second person that Harry uses at the end of the the change? How else does the Host register his new respect

The Tale No other story among the sibilities

of the frame

tale as

What

tale.

for the

has led to

Nun's

Canterbury Tales exploits the echoes

densely and playfully as does

this. It is

Priest?)

and pos-

framed not only

by the pilgrimage contest, but also by the domestic world of the widow and her cottage that surrounds the farmyard;

and that yard and

its

events in turn frame

Chauntecleer's three exempla defending his theory of dreams.

nermost

tales

Animal

is

fable provides the initial genre

from which the Nun's

was a widespread and popular form in the high and in school texts. Part of

animal and human, or jarring

The

first

of these

in-

about pilgrims, and thus mirrors the outermost.

its

appeal

lay in the idea

later

Priest plays.

Middle Ages,

of reading on two

This

especially

levels at

once,

and moral. Chaucer explores this delightfully, in the but funny movement back and forth between worlds of animal and human

reference.

Consider the nice

sisters (typical in a

Upon

literal

domestic

moment when flock)

"and

his

Chauntecleer's hens are said to be his

paramours"

(line 102).

this easily recognizable generic ground, the Nun's Priest adds an extraor-

dinary range of generic and topical reference, pushing the

little

ever bolder (or wilfully preposterous) extremes. The Nun's

occasion for reflection

on

serious issues of the day:

story of a rooster into

Priest

makes the story an

dream theory of course, but

also

and predestination, pride and flattery, and Boethian issues of contentment As events heat up and the rhetoric builds, it begins to suggest details like the prophetic dream, the armed pursuit, the epic apostrophe and

free will

versus worldly goods. epic in

made between The language of tragedy enters, too, clearly parodying the Monk's Tale. Romance is evoked in terms like Chauntecleer's "aventure" (line 420) as well as references to stories like the "Book of

epic simile,

and the use of long

Chauntecleer's

fall

Launcelot de Lake"

and the

(line 446).

catalogues. Explicit comparisons are

of Troy and Carthage.

fall

The gap between

literal

topic

and

referential language

seams threaten to gets greater and greater, funnier and funnier, until the

whole thing burst open-which

is

exactly

what happens

in the plot.

split,

the

Geoffrey Chaucer

54

Such together.

gaps, or course, are the stuff of animal fable, bringing dissimilar things

The Nun's

Priest offers a very gentle social critique

through his restrained

use of the language of noble food and architecture in the description of the

widow's cottage and

life,

which

extended by the

is

more exaggerated entry of

far

the language of courtly love with Chauntecleer and Pertelote. Such modest social

more gendered

and Germanic diction (e.g., lines 201-07). Consider too the different cultural deposits from which their speeches draw. Pertelote uses medical precept, wives' tales, and reference to the quite elementary "Cato." Chauntecleer draws in arcane dream lore, saints' lives, and other men "more of auctoritee" (line 209). parody

shifts to a

hen: his polysyllables

vs.

analysis in the differing dictions of rooster

her monosyllables,

Romance

vs.

Chauntecleer uses the language of courtly love as a source of power over his spouse. His merely decorative use of French and Latinate terms, citation of "auc-

frequent use of enjambed lines and elaborate syntax,

toritee," his

his

most

culturally pretentious. This

Latin. His style, though,

is

most marked

all

signal

not primarily an expression of pomposity

is

man

at

in his false translation of (for

he

is

a

brave beast) but rather an enactment of his power and learning as a means of ex-

world which has

ercising control in a

just

been threatened. Like

storytelling gen-

means of reorganizing a world that resists our logic and desires. Such language as a means of access to bravery and control is doubled by Chauntecleer's sexual desire. He faces any terror to show his love and virilerally,

ity

Chauntecleer's language

is

a

to Pertelote.

The garden

setting also takes

And

the medicinal garden.

when Chauntecleer

on

ever richer resonance as the story proceeds.

but in Pertelote's prescriptions

a chicken yard,

is first

starts

it

becomes

porarily) the

enemy who

a medieval love garden, by implication,

That association

is

penetrates the garden and destroys

happy world of the

It

soon takes on aspects of

invoking the language of courtly love. This in turn

evitably includes echoes of the garden of Eden.

the red-and-black

it

man and wife who

live there,

in-

enhanced by (if

through

only temhis

powers

of verbal persuasion.

The

fox's rhetoric,

starting places for

and Chauntecleer's

rhetoric of condescension, are only the

an ever more parodic and

The Nun's

self-reflexive rhetoric as

temptation and

fall

dress "destinee"

and Venus who aided Chauntecleer's

occur.

Priest uses the figure of fall,

the rooster's

apostrophe to ad-

and apostrophizes the

rhetorician Geoffrey of Vinsauf for his skill in lamenting the death of Richard the

Lion-Hearted. This hyperbole sets the stage for an inverse inarticulate shouts

and

yells,

when

the

widow and

all

move of language

into

the barnyard animals set out

to rescue Chauntecleer. It is

in this passage (lines

discussed reference to

the

tale's

628-30) that the Nun's

human shouts, and

Priest

makes

esting. Is this to

be taken as a kind of anxious evasion?

courtly indifference (by 7

but much-

and then more inter-

reference to historical cataclysm in ancient Troy, Arthurian

Plantagenet England, the extreme concision of the reference

Priest). It

a brief

murder, in the Peasants' Revolt. Following

is

Chaucer himself) or

Or

is all

does

it

the

suggest a mild

clerical indifference (by the

relevant here to distinguish the job of this priest, serving a

Nun's

community

Geoffrey Chaucer

55

of nuns, from the local parish work of the Parson, described in the General Prologue.

The Nun's

Priest describes Chauntecleer's salvation

But does Fortune have anything

Fortune.

from the fox as a turn of do with it? Or rather does

to

Chauntecleer use his tongue to get himself out of the into?

He

uses the fox's

own

trick, guiling

temptations of this world through his

the beguiler.

own wit and

fix

that his tongue got

him

He

escapes the dangers

and

craftiness.

The

pursuit

is

gaudy

but irrelevant.

The frequent moral plicit

interpretations attached to animal fables have invited ex-

moral, even allegorical readings of the Nun's Priest's Tale, particularly by pa-

Chauntecleer has been interpreted

tristic critics.

form of the

devil in the

fox. Certainly there are

scription of the fox) to invite

poem

reach of the

some symbolic

as a priest figure

enough

seriously

we

take

of the referential

and .

often-cited formulation of .

."

(line 674). Is this to

be

on reading? Is it the only instruction? How do with how firmly we draw a line dividing

Priest's instruction

it

has something to

constant ironizing even of the most serious references), from the

the tale (with

its

Nun's

comments on

Priest's

much

goes unregarded in such a reading. Nonetheless, the Nun's

allegorical reading, "Taketh the moralitee

taken as the Nun's

details (as in the visual de-

reaction. Yet

Priest begins to close his tale with a traditional

moral and

tempted by the

that

a highly moralized reading. If

tale. If

it is

commonplaces with the same

that line

is

very clear, then this

may solicit

unstable, could the Nun's Priest be voicing these

sort of raised eyebrow

he used in regard to the com-

monplaces about rhetoric or about Troy and Arthur? The value of such irony

is

that the reader can explore uncertainty without being forced to repudiate the story

or rhetorical posture under scrutiny, or even the "moralitee." As

out the

tale,

one can parody what one

The Introduction is

to

The

directed to the

show the

Jerusalem

(D.

way

W.

a fictional character

who

Canterbury pilgrimage

to "thilke parfit glorious pilgrimage

Robertson,

critics,

is

clear through-

the Parson's offer in his prologue

Jr.,

A

Preface to

/ That

highte

Chaucer, [1962], 373).

this view, the Parson, as the ideal pilgrim, has

speaks for Chaucer. Other

is

loves.

Parsons Tale

New Jerusalem leans heavily on

celestial"

own account

even

exegetical interpretation that the entire

pilgrims the

According to

also enjoys,

moral authority and

however, have dissented, regarding the Parson as

treated ironically. His long treatise

on penance, by

his

devoid of any poetic ornament, violates the Host's injunction to the

"fable," the pilgrims not to bore the pilgrims by preaching. By disdaining to tell a contest, but shows tale-telling the of rules the by play to refuses Parson not only

The World and the that he "confuses fiction with falsehood" (Gabriel Josopivici, Book, 11971]).

While elaborate attempts have Tale and specific been made to demonstrate parallels between The Parson's one might expect Canterbury tales, these are in reality the chance correspondences

From

the Tale:

Remedy

for the Sin of Lechery

Geoffrey Chaucer

56

when an are

ior

manual of sin and an encyclopedic account of human behav-

exhaustive linked.

(See

E.

Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer, [1970], 164-74.)

T.

some

in marriage, a

on the tales' treatment theme of many of the

remedy

for the sin of lechery,

Nevertheless, the portion excerpted here throws

of the ideal relationship of tales.

The Parson

men and women

suggests marriage as the primary

light

Woman's status in marriage is explained by the history of her creation in a much more subtle way than the stereotype of "Adam's Rib" would suggest. God made her neither from Adam's head (lest she rule over him in "maistrye") nor from his foot (lest she "be holden although he gives the avoidance of sleeping

late its

due.

too lowe, for she can nat paciently suffre") but from his

rib,

so that she should be

"felawe unto man."

This apparent statement of equality between the sexes, with

its

echoes of the

concerns with "maistrie" in marriage which the Wife of Bath introduces in her Prologue, should be read in the context of what follows, however. For the Parson

on

goes

woman

to say that the

should be subject to her husband, and that while

married she "hath noon auctoritee to swere ne to bere witnesse withoute leve of hir

housbonde that

is

hir lord." In fact,

both views were considered orthodox in

Chaucer's time: that a husband should treat his wife kindly because she was his

companion, and that she should be subject

One

to his rule.

can see connections with some of the other Canterbury

Parson's distinctions

among

the

tales in

the various reasons for sex between married people,

and the degrees of sinfulness they

entail.

The

first

and second reasons— the en-

gendering children and the "yielding the debt" of their bodies—are laudable, but the third—to avoid lechery— is a venial sin, and the fourth— "for amorous love to accomplice thilke

.

.

.

brenning delit"—a deadly one. By that calculation, two of

Chaucer's most engaging characters are damned: the Wife of Bath's claim that

"God bad

us for to wexe and multiplye" will not save her, for she admits to enjoyand makes no mention of having had children, and Chauntecleer's making love to his hens "more for delit than world to multiplye" is a deadly sin. After reading even a short passage from the Parson's Tale, students might noing sex

tice that, for all his

moral rectitude, the Parson's

tale

is

rather boring.

And

if

they

compare him with that other preacher, the Pardoner, they will be faced with the ironic contrast between a good man who tells a bad tale and a bad man who tells a

good one, reflecting the vexed question of the relation between morals and which hovers over the Canterbury Tales as a whole.

es-

thetics

Chaucer's Retraction Even those

critics

most

skeptical of Robertson's

judgment of the individual

tales

tend to agree that The Parson's Prologue and Chaucer's retraction, and even his tale,

should be taken

straight.

According to Alfred David, the retraction

moving statement of the limitations of art," and of the ature for 238).

He

its

own

sake in a chaotic

"is

a deeply

difficulty in justifying liter-

and corrupt world (The Strumpet Muse, [1976], been expressed by

sees the tension as transcending Christianity, having

Plato, Virgil,

and Kafka, among

others.

Many,

if

not most,

critics

agree with the

Geoffrey Chaucer

view that Chaucer itual world,

is

serious about

abandoning the world of experience

but students have great

that he was insincere,

making

difficulty in accepting this.

for the spir-

They often

insist

deathbed repentance. Nor are they con-

a cynical

vinced by being told retractions were

57

common

in medieval

poems with any

erotic

content, such as Andreas Capellanus's De amore or Chaucer's earlier Troilus and Criseyde, for they see these too as ironic. But irony, in the end, may be too easy an

explanation of the contradictions of writers from the past

To His

Adam and

Scribe

Complaint

to

who

His Purse

In To His Scribe Adam, Chaucer ruefully wishes a skin disease

reproduce his words

failed to

as

he intended them.

uscript himself, in a laborious process of rubbing

parchment, in preparation

for

In

rewriting.

frustrate us.

Now he

on

a copyist

who

has

must correct the man-

and scraping the old ink off the volume of the Chaucer

their

Variorum, George Pace and Alfred David point out the "poetic

justice of the

on Adam's head," in that "he will have to scratch his scalp just as Chaucer had to scratch out Adam's mistakes" (Geoffrey Chaucer, The Minor Poems [1982], 26). While the poem is decidedly playful, it also points to a serious concern that Chaucer had for the transmission of his works to posterity, a concern enthreatened curse

demic

to writers in a manuscript culture.

The

critical history

of this

lyric

can give students insight into the range of

terpretive stances—from the literal to the exegetical to the feminist— from

in-

which

Chaucer can be approached. For the echoes of the first Adam in the scribe's name have tempted several critics to move beyond the literal interpretation mentioned above to read the scribe as

an

poem

as a Christian allegory. R. E. Kaske, for instance, sees the

Adam whose

fallen

While such

workmanship mars the creation of Chaucer, who

God

stands in the relationship of

to his literary work.

exegetical criticism,

attributes the Fall to Eve,

Carolyn Dinshaw actually

would on

relies

which affirms

traditional gender hierarchy

and

seem to be antithetical to feminist criticism, it

in her analysis of To His Scribe

Adam, the

epi-

graph to her book Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (1989). In her project of illuminating "the varied and nuanced uses of gendered models of literary activity in Chaucer's works"

(9)

she

cites

scribes To His Scribe

Kaske and engages in similar allegorizing activity as she deas illustrative of Chaucer's complex relation to patriar-

Adam

chal language. Ringing changes lates as

the

modern

"haste," she argues that

final

word, "rape," which she trans-

more commonly

glossed meaning,

Chaucer presents himself as simultaneously

spect to the parchment,

own work with

on the poem's

"rape" as well as the

and rape

victim, with respect to

word "points out

and

or which

these acts are performed, or

these acts reveal-the page, the

meaning-with the feminine"

(9).

text,

pen

as

related acts of signifying-

allegorizing, interpreting, glossing, translating-with the masculine

on which

re-

that literary activity has a gendered

structure, a structure that associates acts of writing

surfaces

with

violates his

his fallen language (10). Following the medieval tradition of

phallus, she argues that this

tifies

rapist,

Adam, who

the

and that iden-

from which these

literal

acts depart,

sense, or even the

hidden

Geoffrey Chaucer

58

While students may It

reminds us that

terprise"

own

find Dinshaw's

be reminded that she too

starts

"literary

glossing overingenious, they should

with a recognition of the poem's

production in the

meaning.

literal

fourteenth century

late

a social en-

is

and that Chaucer "is unavoidably dependent on the copyist for the acand indeed, the very intelligibility of his works" (3). Students

curate transmission,

might want to compare To His

Scribe

Adam, which makes such self-conscious referon the technology of

ence to the conditions of a manuscript culture, to the riddles

poem can be

writing from the Anglo-Saxon period. Chaucer's

them more

in

its

For while the Anglo-Saxon authors, braced

and

its

clerics in a culture that has

marvel at the power and novelty of end of the Middle Ages, laments the

literacy,

writing at the

seen to resemble

awareness of the medium, than in the judgment of

it,

however.

only recently em-

writing, the secular Chaucer, corruptibility of the

medium

practitioners' incompetence.

The second Chaucerian lyric, Complaint to His Purse, illustrates another on authors in the Middle Ages—their dependence on patrons.

straint

Richard ten his

F.

of Gaunt,

and

Green,

first

Poets

and

Princepleasers, 11980]).

major poem, the Book

Duke of Lancaster,

to a lesser extent

in

of the Duchess

Chaucer

(1369-72)

is

thought to have

at the request

commemoration of the death of his

he wrote for patrons

con(See writ-

of John

wife Blanch,

as his career progressed. Complaint to

on patronage as a civil servant rather Chaucer faced the accession of a new king— Henry IV—after many years of depending on his predecessor, Richard II, for a pension. There is no record of Chaucer having sent this poem or of Henry having responded to it, although Henry did augment the earlier pension within the His Purse, however, reflects his dependence

than a poet. In 1399, the

last

year of his

life,

year.

This

poem combines two

conventional genres, the French begging

poem and

To explore Chaucer's technique of some of Chaucer's other humorous

the love complaint, in a particularly witty way. parody, students might enjoy comparing twists

on the

it

to

courtly love complaint. Examples might be the speeches of the aris-

and of Chauntecleer in the Nun's Priest's and of Absolon in the Miller's Tale. Both To His Scribe Adam and Complaint to His Purse, finally, reveal Chaucer's sophisticated awareness of the constraints on authorship under which he worked,

tocratic birds in the Parliament of Fowls Tale,

whether material or economic.

William Langland Piers Piers

Plowman

is

Plowman

an exceptionally open, polysemous

text, in several senses. First, de-

spite fierce editorial efforts in the past three decades, the text itself

bated

and

issue.

its

much

Langland's

poem

swiftly gained popularity

many manuscript copies— over discipline.

fifty

remains a de-

with a range of audiences,

survive—were not always produced with

Second, Langland himself was constantly altering his

through at least four major revises. (The selections here are translated

text,

from the B-

William Langland

text,

59

on while

written in the years before the Rising of 1381.) These revisions went

earlier versions

tions copied

were being copied, and many manuscripts of one

text also

have por-

from another. Further, Langland's use of protean and overlapping

symbolic and allegorical characters, as well as his mysterious prophecies, have vited various emphases

and

interested textual communities: the leaders of the Rising of 1381 for instance, later

on

in-

and have been appropriated by highly

interpretations,

agents of the Protestant reformation. Langland

still

invites eager

and

but often

conflicting interpretations.

The

William Langland's "identity"

Identity of "Will"

(a

problematic term here)

has been constructed mostly from hints and word-plays within his poems, such as

have lyved in londe

.

.

.

my name

is

Longe Wille"

(passus 15, line 152).

He

the Malvern Hills in the southwest, and various districts in and around London, pecially Cornhill, a

work

own

as a

poor

district.

And

A picture

emerges of a

man

exploration of

Do

how

social order

mourner, praying for the dead.

in a liminal world

but educated, finding unstable and

within

ill-paid

He

also says

between clergy and

how

he

poor

laity,

employment, and involved in a

should operate and

life-long

a Christian should live

it.

these elements derive from a historical person, though, or

produce a largely fictive narrative "1"

name

es-

he mentions more glancingly his marginal

comforter in the homes of various patrons (which perhaps involved his

poetry), as well as professional

begs.

"I

refers to

who

"Will" carries moral overtones, and

is is

do they

rather

a character in a visionary fiction?

The

an aspect of the dominant Aristotelian

psychology of the later Middle Ages. Chaucer, we have seen, creates a rather bumbling and bewildered narrator, clearly distinct from the courtier bureaucrat known in his extensive ever,

life

does suggest

records.

One

note in an early manuscript of Piers Plowman, how-

parallels, at least,

between the persona Langland and the poet:

It is known that Stacy de Rokayle the father of William de Langlond was generous and lived in Shipton under Wichwood, holding from the lord Le Spenser in the county

of Oxford. The aforesaid William made the book that called Piers

is

Ploughman.

(Translated in The World of Piers Plowman, ed. Jeanne Krochalis Peters, [1975],

and Edward

xi.)

well has spent time in the west country around Malvern Hills might north, the to used, (and choose to use the alliterative meter that was popular there why the poem avoids by the Gau/am-poet); yet an audience in London might explain chivalric narratives in alliterthe kind of regional dialect found in Gawain and other

A

poet

who

ative verse.

Despite the allegorical

mode

that seems archaic to

modern

readers, the

notions of the poet poem's persona corresponds intriguingly to romantic and later living in poverty (even, an eccentric genius, speaking from the social margin, and the narrator acknowledges, wearing odd clothes). One reason that Langland's dreamer so engages us

himself in the very failures

and

social

practices

is

he

as as

that he so often implicates castigates.

So

his

initial

William Langland

60

panorama of

(line

53

((.)

But he has already portrayed himself "In the habit

of a hermit unholy of works" (line

Meed

as a figure of sexual license

that he

is

and phony hermits who

society in the Prologue attacks the unstable

go off on pilgrimage

"ravished" by her dress

in quest of wonders.

3), travelling

and financial corruption, but and adornments (2.17).

He

depicts

also acknowledges

Langland and Chaucer The careers of Chaucer and Langland thus seem to overlap both in time and place, though they lived in very different social worlds and worked in largely different poetic traditions. Scholars still wonder if they knew each other's work; certainly they compare interestingly at moments such as the social panoramas of the Prologues to Piers Plowman and the Canterbury Tales. The audiences of Piers Plowman and Chaucer may have overlapped at certain points, such as educated readers of the upper merchant class and some religiously serious members of the lower reaches of the court. Otherwise their apparent audiences largely diverged;

Chaucer was taken up by

seems to have appealed to Piers

clerical

and their supporters, and Langland and modest mercantile readers. The figure of

aristocrats

Plowman was invoked by key

Second

"

Letter" in

Piers

figures in the Rising of 1381 (see "John Ball's Plowman in Context"), and by the "Lollard" followers of

the religious reformer (later declared a heretic) John Wycliffe. Both appropriations

overlook the complexities and deep conservatism that tainly Langland's revisions

and expansions

he wanted to distinguish his position

clearly

is

clear in the B-text; cer-

in the C-text (after 1381) suggest that

from the Lollards and the 1381

rebels.

Qenres and Traditions Both the great appeal and the great frustrations of Piers Plowman derive from the variety of genres within which it operates, often moving

among

several simultaneously.

Langland seems always to have been more con-

cerned to pursue his twin social and spiritual concerns than to stay within any one generic framework.

The outermost structure of the poem and out of our

that generic setting fades in

when,

as at the start

form

invites

is

It

a

dream vision, though

can be very important

of passus 18, the narrator consciously seeks sleep as an escape

from the mundane world and an access ditional

attention.

to vision. (Langland's use of this highly tra-

comparison with The Dream

of the Rood,

Caedmon's dream

in

Bede, Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, and Arthur's dream in Malory.)

At the same

time, the dreamer's encounters with the workings (or failures) of

secular society regularly partake of satire

and

social complaint,

sometimes to passages of apocalyptic prophecy. The

rise

dream

vate

is

only one example,

among many,

of

how

social

which

in turn give

world within a

Langland's

poem

pri-

tries to

yoke together questions about the workings of public order and about the role and of the individual soul. Toward the

fate

latter

end, he also borrows from the genre

of the penitential manual, and from pilgrimage narrative internalized as private journey. Even the tity

As

may inform a

poem

narratives;

a quest to discover or achieve personal iden-

of pilgrimage and wandering,

indeed in

Mandeville's

Both

romance motif of

the persistent wandering of the narrator and his

five

of

its

Piers

first

dream

vision.

Plowman has

links as well to travel

poem

appears along with

manuscripts the

Travels.

in the

dream

quest,

and

in the social encounters that

emerge within

it,

William Langland

Langland repeatedly exploits the varied resources of

poem, though,

a strategic

is

theme,

allegorical story or

and highly

is

flexible tool.

61

allegory. Allegory in the

To seek

a single, continuing

to invite frustration in the reader. Instead,

uses allegory as a form so naturalized and continuous with

more

Langland

"realistic"

modes,

among allegorical kinds, often playing with several at once. So in passus 18, the "human" dreamer watches four allegorical women derived from a line in the Psalms; these reflect typological thinking, in which moments in the Old

that he slips easily

Testament are

fulfilled in the

cation "Book," and finally as

an

allegorical knight

Plowman

Piers

that at times

is

it is

New. They then converse with an abstract

all fall silent

and rescue

personifi-

and watch (with the dreamer) Christ from

historical characters

so peppered with Latin phrases,

arrive

hell.

and sometimes

brief passages,

almost a macaronic poem. (For an example of that form, see

"The Course of Revolt" in "Piers Plowman in Context.") These phrases derive from Latin poetry and from the liturgy, but most often from the Bible. The many ways that the biblical passages relate to the surrounding vernacular

poem

Langland's deep acquaintance with traditions of four-fold exegesis: gorical

(dogma and

gogical (eternity,

belief in this world),

life

moral (action in

suggest

literal, alle-

this world),

and ana-

beyond this world). Biblical quotations are hubs around

which episodes often develop. So

are individual allegorical characters,

who may

seem initially to close off or resolve an issue, but whose more troubled and complex reaction in the dreamer. For instance, Hunger enters in passus 6 to force "wasters" to work in Piers' half-acre; but his presence in turn presence often sparks a

leads Piers to think about not, work.

And

how

this in turn

to deal

with those

opens the

reality

who

still

of want even

will not, or

among

who canwho do

those

work.

Langland in His Time

Langland's double preoccupations, as well as his mixture

of dream, spiritual quest, and social

satire,

have led to a persistent divide in

criti-

best approached in terms of moral behavior within a so-

cal attention. Is the

poem

cial structure set in

current history?

Or

is it

more

truly a private quest,

informed

by secular history only in so far as that history points toward an apocalyptic end in which all people come under divine judgment? Critics often acknowledge both questions, but tend to concentrate

poem

of such

and range. places and recent

size

erences to local

work of

The

historicist

and Marxist

on one or

the other, as

historical setting of the

events, have

critics in

made

it

may be

inevitable in a

poem, and

its

dense

an exciting arena

recent decades.

Two

ref-

for the

recent collections

and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, offer fine examples of these approaches: Steven Justice Justice and Kathryn Steven ed. Authorship, Written Work: Langland, Labor, and eds.

Politics, and Gender in Late Kerby-Fulton, (1997), and The Powers of the Holy: Religion, (1996). Staley, Medieval English Culture, ed. David Aers and Lynn literary context of comthe Even if they are to be approached carefully, within social problems do bulk large in Piers plaint, satire, and moral polemic, current

Plowman.

Weak

lazy peasants, indulkings and weak knights, corrupt officials and opponents, all come into play. The plagues and the shrunken

gent clerics and their

and the early sections of the labor market that resulted get their mention,

poem

62

William Langland

are deeply

concerned with the changing place of the peasantry, and

to legislate social stability in the face of that change.

official efforts

Again and again, the dreamer

invokes conservative social models like the theory of the three estates, only to find

them abandoned or inadequate to the social interactions he witnesses. The poem's central focus on a plowman engages the very classes where social competition, social change, and resistance to both, were being played out most openly and angrily in Langland's time. How effectively he reflected the tenor of his era becomes clear in the adoption of his chief character in the discourse of the Rising of 1381;

that

not the end of his aims

is

is

how

equally clear in the laborious revisions that adop-

tion seems to have sparked.

The Prologue

works very well

It

to the Canterbury Tales.

Both

to teach this along with the

offer a social

tings of the visionary "field full of folk"

From what

panorama, though

and the

General Prologue in contrasting set-

"realistic" tavern in

posture does the narrator begin his journey?

Southwark.

Is this initially

a seri-

What sort of "wonders" is he after? Given the many disguisings and fakon, how should we react to a narrator taking on a costume and a some-

ous quest? ery later

what

false identity?

Note the "romance" language of magic and marvel, and the

site

of the dream by a stream, a frequent boundary with the uncanny, as in Marie's Lanval or even the second encounter with the Green Knight in initial

hell— is almost an

emblem

Gawain. The

for the dual preoccupations of the rest of the

Explore the swift and effective

and

Sir

geography of the dream— the secular world, but bracketed by heaven and

address.

(if

sometimes confusing)

poem. mode,

shifts in tone,

A literal and "realistic" figure (e.g. the Pardoner) will suddenly engage

in allegorical action (lines 74-75).

suddenly to "you"

(lines 76).

Or

Or

the dreamer will shift from general address

attention will

move from

figure like "Lewte" to a narrative allegory like the rats

these shifts correspond to

The opening and energy. Despite their

modern notions of the

closing scenes of the classes

mutual echoes, they seem

a complex personified and mice. Consider how

associational logic of dreams.

and

work have an engaging

their

also to shift

from the

allegorical

landscape of the beginning to a more specifically urban scene at the end. Along

with the corrupt and rator,

false clerics (lines

40

who

ii.)

mirror one aspect of the nar-

who correspond

note also the minstrels and "word jugglers" (line 35)

other of his roles. Friar in Chaucer's

Compare

the friars here (lines 58

ff.)

General Prologue, especially their

to an-

with the depiction of the

self-serving biblical exegesis;

also the Pardoner in both.

The

arrival

of the king brings another of the estates into

duces the theme of national governance. Here, as often levels

of government, Langland becomes a

little

tripartite formulas, especially the three estates,

(also

encountered in Chaucer's Parliament of

but also intro-

when he

considers upper

on

quite traditional

vague, relying

and notions

Fowls).

play,

The

like

"common

lunatic clerk

profit"

opens up

more complex debate on the king and his role. He is the kind of marginal figure Langland often invokes, whose perspective reveals the limits of a prior model. The story of the rats and mice may reflect baronial resistance to royal authority,

but belling the cat doesn't involve any overthrow; rather

it is

a strategy to avoid

William Langland

wrath. Note

how the

63

narrator pulls away from interpreting the passage: an allegory

so transparent can involve danger.

Passus 2 This passus opens with the dreamer in dialogue with Lady Holy Church, seeking grace but also a knowledge of "the false." She turns his attention to

Lady Meed, then fades from the scene.

If

Meed begins

(from Holy Church's per-

become more complex and morally uncertain. She figures the role of money in an economy where cash was replacing the older ties of feudal and communal obligation; she is spective) as a personification of "the false," her implications swiftly

a relative of the king.

As the

story of Meed's marriage emerges, she

becomes

less

of a moral agent, more a source of power whose users need to be chosen well. Efforts to determine her proper spouse carry with

them

a

erence, including the corruptibility of the justice system. in the Prologue)

from the unspecified dream place

whole frame of legal

The scene

ref-

again shifts (as

to the seat of royal justice at

Westminster in London, and the wonderful visual spectacle of

justice officers fig-

and others riding on them. Meed is a yet more complex figure, though. She also refers to Alice Perrers, the avaricious mistress of the aging King Edward III. Her red clothing has been taken to signify the biblical Whore of Babylon. At the same time, as Clare Lees

ured as horses, with Meed, her suitor

False,

has recently pointed out (in Class and Gender J.

Harwood and

She

is

in Early English Literature, ed. Britton

Gillian Overing, [1994]), Meed's gender requires close attention.

men, including the dreamer, though she is dethan her body. And for all the bad inMeed has little agency in the passus; she is carried from

desired by practically

all

scribed in terms of her costly array rather fluences attributed to her,

to another as others decide

one suitor or judge Passus 6 This

who

should best control

passus introduces the figure of Piers the

more and more resonance

in the rest of the

poem,

Plowman, who

until Christ, as

her.

will take

an

on

allegorical

knight, jousts with death in Piers 's arms in passus 18. In passus 5, the seven deadly sins

(and related characters) have displayed themselves in a tavern scene, and

gretted their wrongs. Repentaunce, as a priest, shows

They cry

for grace to seek Saint Truth,

once he has plowed ety, it is

the

a guide,

his half-acre.

plowman who

the three estates, and

but don't know

he knows Truth well and

plowman suddenly Now, though, they want says

gives

them the way

how

to find the way; then a

them

which the plowman

Rather than the

sets various agents to

class

re-

to penitence.

instructions. is

also willing to

of knights ordering

work along

do

soci-

traditional lines of

expresses his class's willingness to support the knights

and

clergy.

The

narrative oi repentance

and the quest

for Saint Truth, though, quickly give

way under social pressures recognizably specific to Langland's time. The deadly sins references to the risreturn to some of their practices such as sloth, informed now by market after the Black Death. ing expectations of peasants in the shrunken labor

which landowners tried to Equally the passus registers the oppressive legislation by limit

wages ("the

statute," line 320).

between these social forces. Knighthood is of no help enforce its own laws. Piers calls to him, being too involved in good manners to Piers tries to mediate

64

William Langland

on the

instead

figure of

Hunger,

who

The prophetic

people to work but then embodies a those

who

work.

passage with which the passus ends pulls the

casional apocalyptic mode.

than any

gets

among

complicating factor of real want even

Its

general tone of foreboding

poem

into

its

oc-

may be more important

specific prediction.

Passus 18

After

much wandering and

a period of wakefulness, the narrator

again seeks sleep—but as an access to vision, or as an escape from the world? There

dream and the

follows a dense interweaving of Will's

Easter narrative

and

its

Christ appears under a series of allegorical guises: as the Samaritan, as a

liturgy.

knight in the arms of Piers, as a trickster beguiling the great beguiler, Satan.

though, at high points of the Easter story (Longinus at the

Repeatedly,

Crucifixion, the Harrowing of Hell), the allegorical structure fades away into simple narrative.

The

entire passus also uses the public culture of drama.

dreamer looks from a window with stagings of the Passion. attitudes

found

There he

comes

At one point the

urban magnates looked

at

dramatic

listens to Faith's anti-Semitic diatribe, similar to

in the mystery plays

in Winchester Psalter, p. 415.

Crucifixion, he

Faith, as

and

When

in images like that of Christ's tormentors

the dreamer withdraws in fear from the

to another implicit stage setting,

"He descended

into hell."

Here he draws into the shadows and witnesses another dialogue, between four legorical

women drawn from

the Psalms. (Note

how

al-

these allegorical figures offer

narrow and broad perspectives: Faith's close view of the trial and crucifixion, the four "wenches" and whole picture of Christ's conception, life, and death.) They in turn become the audience for a dialogue in hell, Christ shatdifferent vantages,

tering hell's gates, to bring "all

and

his extraordinary (and doctrinally daring) speech

men's souls" out of hell

carol until Easter

This visionary episode, with

medium acts

of

Judgment. The four

promising

women

then

dawn.

spectacle, does not lead the

him waking

at the Last

its

of allegorical audiences and dramatic

layers

dreamer to some elevated

state.

Rather,

it

ends with

into a domestic setting, calling his family to the universally available

human

contact with the divine: church liturgy and the participatory

of the Easter Service.

Piers

Plowman

in Context:

The Rising

of

1381

Despite

its

only incremental

long-term effects, the Rising of 1381 must have seemed almost apocalyptic to

London merchants and magnates

at the time. It

contemporary America on quite such call lic

a

the riots that followed the

disorder, burnings,

and

a scale,

Rodney King verdict

initially

who needed

have had a more elaborate

(if

ticular

Or do

group or

difficult to

imagine in

justice

re-

in Los Angeles, with their pub-

The

gone wrong, and

rioters

had

a similar un-

chastisement; the 1381 rebels, however, seem to

highly plastic) program for change.

Are the reactions printed below, of individual?

an event

disorganized official response.

comparable sense of righteous wrath and

certainty about just

is

but students might be invited to

for all their variety, "subjective" in the sense

they rather reflect the interests and preoccupations of a par-

class?

William Langland

As noted

Langland seems to have revised

earlier,

Piers

Plowman

65

after 1381, to

distinguish his social complaint from that of the rebels. But in the earlier B-text,

he had identified many of the attacked. Despite the

social and ecclesiastical failures which the rebels also more complex position Langland did take, and despite the

conservatism of much of his reaction,

it is

some

ing" of Langland. Indeed, even

a useful exercise to pursue a "rebel read-

conservative elements in Langland

would

themselves have struck responsive chords with the idealistic faith in

the king.

nobles, divinely ordained

commoners in 1381, such as his Both Langland and the rebels made him a figure above

and

a true friend of

commoners.

All these texts focus, positively or negatively,

on the phenomenon of peasants

using various forms of public and written expression. John Ball uses overt

refer-

known and learned poem, Piers Plowman, and The Anonimalle minutely records Wat Tyler's articulate if disrespectful dialogue with

ences to a widely Chronicle

King Richard. At the same time, the Chronicle laments the more general "hideous cries

even

and horrible tumult" of the commoners beheading foreigners. The rebels are less human when the aldermen surround them "like sheep." In "The Course

of Revolt" the rebels are "laddes lowde"

Gower allegorizes them wholesale that only mimics language. This

informs the reference to

them

is

and

Rebellion:

merely "schowte" (lines

whose

sole speaker

is

England

17, 29).

subhuman

Flemings in Chaucer's Nun's

that

Priest's Tale.

texts are magisterially discussed in

And

a jackdaw, a bird

the treatment of the rebels as

killing

These and a wide range of related Justice, Writing

who

as beasts,

by Stephen

1381 (1994). For a broader perspective,

consult also Jesse Gellrich, Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century: Oral Contexts of Writing in Philosophy,

Politics,

The Anonimalle Chronicle royal authority in

London, and

and

Society (1995).

This passage centers on the Tower, the seat of a series of public confrontations

Richard and the rebels at the borders of the

city.

The almost

between King

apocalyptic

mood

is

emphasized by two different scenes when the king watches great secular and ecclesiastical houses burning, and in the writer's prediction of divine vengeance on the rebels. (The rebels attack church property as

much

as that of aristocrats;

com-

pare Langland's complaints, persistently divided between clerical and lay power.) to the traditional It is significant, however, that the Chronicle does not look sources of royal force, the armed aristocrats, for action in the revolt. Note how the even king's noble counselors are repeatedly depicted as confused, ineffectual, (after Smithfield) cowardly.

This bears comparison with the knight's useless inPlowman (6.159-70). Consider too the

tervention against Waster's laziness in Piers

mayor and armed aldermen-citizens, not noblemen-in the critical meeting of Richard and the rebels. Where do the chronicler's sympathies lie? Is here? (In this regard, there another sort of anti-aristocratic perspective at work role of the

too, consider Richard's

emphasize

unrecorded but long interview with the anchorite.

Why

it?)

with a great sense These episodes from the Chronicle are wonderfully depicted, woman" raising "wicked of a of detail and the setting of scenes, such as the detail or the herald Tower, the from the alarm and preventing the Archbishop's escape is also a There chair. king's bill to the commons from an old

having to read the

66

William Langland

poignant sense of invoking ancient

rituals, especially ecclesiastical, to resist disor-

Note the public procession from Westminster Abbey

der.

performance of the

liturgy

to his beheading. (This detail

predecessor,

Thomas

to greet the king, or the

from which the Archbishop of Canterbury

may

is

dragged

consciously echo the martyrdom of Sudbury's

Becket, during mass at Canterbury.)

These moving but ineffectual ceremonies contrast sharply with the disordered encounters of King Richard and

Wat Tyler

though,

Mile End and Smithfield. Tyler

at

and

picted as willfully insulting in speech

commons

(The

gesture.

is

de-

as a group,

kneel to the king.) Tyler's demands keep increasing; the king accedes,

all

and the chronicler gives no hint here of how swiftly Richard will disavow all his promises and turn on the rebels. Indeed, the violence at Smithfield is attributed to

no group, noble or common, but

to individuals at the edge of each: Tyler

and

the king's valet from Kent.

Here and elsewhere in reports of the Rising, language and the written record are the objects of great but ambivalent attention.

The

rebels

freedoms, on the one hand, but they also reject the king's

and

anyone

kill

who

could write the kind of

want

a charter of their

first bill,

official writs that

then seek out

had brought such

burdens of taxation upon them. The rebels are in turn hostile then naive in their trust of

documents. They demand the physical presence and voice of the king

Smithfield, but accept his use of the very language of charters ("confirm grant").

The

chronicler himself implies considerable cynicism in Richard's manip-

ulation of documents; Richard's

and maintain

their king,"

first "bill"

and he has

a

rewrites the Rising as a "desire to see

whole

series

of charters copied in an effort

to appease the rebels. (His authentication of the bill with his signet seal

invocation of traditional, but here insincere,

Langland's emphasis letters

on

ritual.)

charters in the Lady

Meed

Gawain and

Green Knight.

the

Can

this

is

another

This bears comparison with

episode, or the corruption of

by Mordred in Malory's Morte Darthur. By contrast, writing

tized in Sir

at

and

is

never thema-

be related to that poem's general

cultural conservatism?

and Second Letter Beyond the clear echoes of Langland poems use the tone and diction of the kind of prophetic passages found in Piers Plowman elsewhere. The rebels' ambivalent preoccupation with written language is discussed above. These poems and letters may be more significant for their efforts to appropriate written documents to the aims of the rebels, than for their specific content. For recent discussion, see articles by Richard Firth Green and Susan Crane in Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara John

Ball's First

here, the

Hanawalt (1992), 176-221.

The Course ances of the

As with The Anonimalle

of Revolt

of The Course of Revolt

not immediately

is

commons under the

esying vengeance; yet

dowghty knyght"

it

calls

(line 33).

poll tax,

Chronicle, the social

the murdered treasurer, Sir Robert Hales, "that

The mixed

Latin and English lines imply a fairly edu-

cated audience, though the English lines have sense without the Latin.

the "Kyng" (lines 3, 45)?

mons be compared

Can

alignment

The poem acknowledges the grievand speaks with them as "vs alle," prophclear.

a poet positioned in

What about

sympathy both to king and com-

to the attitudes of the chronicler? If the rebels are nonetheless

Mystical Writings

"ffoles" (line 13),

is

poem? Compare

there any positive agent in the

67

this troubled

Who

but unstable perspective to Langland's shifting sympathies and complaints. is

poem calls upon? Gower, John The Voice of One Crying

the final agent the

and more

clearer

simplifies the class affiliations of the rebels,

ing

all

freemen with the nobles. Gower's

allegorizing a

them

jackdaw but

Gower's tone in Vox Clamantis

persistently hostile to the rebels

first as

explicitly

text

making them

and group-

peasants,

does not register the rebels as human,

domestic animals then

as wild beasts.

an agent of Satan, leading

Further, the false rhetoric of the

all

is

He

than the selections above.

Wat Tyler

is

a hellish cloud to

not just

London.

daw has an audience incapable of anything but

mass response. Gower's attack on plowmen contrasts almost entirely with Langland's more nu-

anced and complex picture of laboring society and in the absolute to be ordained

moral terms of the

devil,

its ills.

Just as Tyler

was defined

so the proper role of peasants

by God, and immutable. Like

Tyler, the resistant

is

assumed

peasant

at-

is

tracted into the wild animal world by comparison with a fox. Yet Gower's wish for

a restored past

is

not very different from the desire of the peasants for a restored

strong kingship and equal justice. Both project the social order they desire nostalgic

myth of a

on

a

better past.

Mystical Writings For

and eager search

their specialized language

all

ence of

divinity, these texts also

nacular literature, religious and secular, of the

"Middle English Mystics" make a

among

scholars

would

for a

more immediate

experi-

connect to dominant themes and motifs in

less

later

ver-

Middle Ages. Indeed, the

coherent group than their traditional

title

imply. Rolle combines his ecstatic style with strong pastoral

aims; The Cloud of Unknowing comes from an ancient Neoplatonic tradition; while Julian of Norwich uses her visions only as the basis for a quite complex speculative theology. They have parallels to other literatures in the widespread idea of quest,

pilgrimage as a

means

thereto,

mysterious agencies. This

is

and

interior transformation

found not

through contact with

just in specifically religious literature,

but in

the Arthurian Grail quest and other romances. Langland's elaborate, semi-dramatic narrative of the Passion is echoed by Dame Julian's vision of the Crucifixion. And are the metaphorical aspects of Langland's Will, as a mental quality and quester, attainment. mystical in role its and soul the present in The Cloud's discussion of

Behind even Chaucer's humor and deft social critique, let us remember, is the quest deeply serious model of pilgrimage and the spiritual accomplishment-the for the heavenly Jerusalem-it symbolizes.

Wolfgang Riehle's The Middle English texts. Important work appears in the England, ed. text

is

Mystics (1981) remains a key study of these series

The Medieval Mystical Tradition

Marion Glasscoe (1980-92). The broader

explored by Sarah Backwith,

Medieval Writings (1993).

A

fine

cultural

and

Christ's Body: Identity, Culture,

recent essay

is

and

liturgical

in

con-

Society in Late

worth seeking out: Nicholas

68

Mystical Writings

Watson, "Visions of Inclusion: Universal Salvation and Vernacular Theology in Pre-Reformation England," Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 27 (1997),

Watson

145-87.

also contributes the chapter

Cambridge History of Medieval English

"The Middle English Mystics"

Literature, ed.

to the

David Wallace (forthcoming,

1999).

Richard Rolle Richard Rolle provides a good

first

look

at writings

about

many as

he was

spiritual quest;

enormously popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and

his

work

sur-

hundred manuscripts. Rolle explores the major themes that appear in mystical tradition, but uses characterisitic imagery of warmth, sweetness, and song. He also borrows freely and quite openly from the Song of Songs (especially in imagery of thirst and longing) and the Psalms (for ideas of praise and song). His mixed verse and prose may derive from Boethius's book of philosophical quest, The Consolation of Philosophy, where Rolle could also have encountered notions of exile and avoiding the delights of the world. The song that closes chap-

vives in as

five

and presents Jesus

ter 2 reflects all these influences,

ways that

will

as

an overmastering

Rolle did not

work

in the

immediate milieu of his contemporary John Wycliffe

(though both were Oxford-trained) and the school of Bible translators

under Wycliffe 's

an eager

inspiration. Nevertheless, Rolle's call for

goods of the world was enthusiastically taken up by Wycliffe and lowers after Rolle 's death. In fact, he

of university theology; see the Prologue.

models such Rolle

is

as

And

an approachable writer

He

union found

particularly

the text

reflect

This

many

is

itself

literal

going back as early as

with

The images of heat and

language, from "real

warmth"

to "as

if

a real

own memory of past wrongs and

its

still

(by himself or oth-

angry response.

very divided account of

women.

Like

Jerome, Rolle had a deeply ambivalent

St.

atti-

and nuns, among

whom may

have been his

own

sis-

women three women

the other hand he invokes traditional misogynist associations of

instability

and

excess. In this chapter,

were deserved, but he

still

haps" touched one of

women

in

On the one hand, many of his English works were composed

for the direction of recluses

on

and

in differ-

of attention, sometimes between

an episode of divided, sometimes

tude toward women.

ter;

shifts

it

enacts Rolle's warning about slipping back into the con-

clearest in chapter 12

clerics

logic

some continen-

in his emphatically personalized voice

Rolle's

cerns of the world. Repeatedly, his ers) generates

in

explores his imagery rather locally, using

metaphorical and (apparently)

And

and

he does not reach toward (and even

spiritual

ent ways rather than as part of an extended argument.

fire."

from the

his "Lollard" fol-

Bernard of Clairvaux.

his very inconsistencies.

sweetness

who worked

exile

hostile to the involved questions

is

seems to deny) the highest aspirations to tal

lover in

be taken up by Margery Kempe.

can't quite

them

rudely);

themselves, and thanks

he admits

his rebukes by

put himself in the wrong (note

God

and

how he

"per-

even his lesson he transfers from the

instead. This does exclude

women

as the

Richard Rolle

69

agents of Rolle's reform, but note that for Rolle

(as in chapter 2) the highest level of contemplation empties any mortal agency, making the singer just a conduit of

divine song. Having thus reported his tributes that

same

quality to

women

own immoderation,

at the close

women

into symbolic roles.

By contrast, Rolle tends

to imagine mystical

tively,

Rolle presses

in chapter 15, Rolle speaks of "doughty warriors."

on

is

at-

accomplishment in terms of male

own spiritual awakening and withdrawal from

action. In the story of his

speakers

nevertheless, Rolle

of the chapter. Positively or nega-

Here

the world

too, his discussion of evil-

colored by quite specific private memories. Yet the same chapter goes

to a very

nine months

Compare

moving account of later to "spiritual

a first

moment of mystical warmth, and access own inner harmony and song.

sounds" and his

the bodily experience of the divine here with the

approach in The Cloud,

its

more

intellectual

avoidance of imagery of bodily desire. Rolle 's imagery

of food and drink are distinct from that in

Dame

Julian, linked

more

to the

Eucharist than to Julians domestic experience. Rolle's memories are usually warn-

from

ings, calls

uses the

a

memory

initial spiritual

world he wants to (and cannot) leave behind. Julian by contrast of her visions almost as a text for exegesis.

Compare too

Rolle's

experience in a chapel, Julian's in her family home, and Margery

Kempe's often in public spaces such

as cathedrals or roads.

The Cloud of Unknowing This text uses ideas and imagery of neoplatonic Christianity going back to the so-

pseudo-Dionysius and his translator and commentator John Scotus Eriugena. This tradition moved into the high and later Middle Ages through the

called

England.

Hugh

of

had daughter houses and texts distributed in Victor was widely read in England and Andrew of St. Victor

who

Victorines in Paris,

St.

in turn

spent years there as an abbot.

From

this long-established mystical tradition,

The Cloud of Unknowing creates a

voice of restraint, calling for submission to authority even in private spiritual growth. It echoes ecclesiastical anxiety about undirected mysticism, lay access to

the mysteries of faith, and any religious experience registered at the level of bodily The author connects the "false ingenuity" of interior quest to dangers

sensation.

of devilish deception.

The dominant

figure of the cloud

avoids pleasurable senses like heat and taste, for the

and dark. The Cloud about

is

far

more troubled and

more

explicit

and waiting

in darkness

abstract notions of light

than Rolle or

Dame

Julian

the limits of worldly language in expressing spiritual experience.

Note the persistently hortatory tone, and dependence on imperative verbs. The His author works through instruction and warning, and avoids private experience. emphasis on the great

difficulties

of spiritual progress

may

specifically

counter

Christian may achieve some Rolle's assurances of the ease with which the yearning he emphasizes forgetting as Indeed sweetness. and experience of spiritual warmth quite differently a prerequisite to contact with the divine,

Julian of Norwich.

And

the whole church, since

he links it

aids

all

spiritual

improvement

from either Rolle or

explicitly to the

souls, even those in purgatory.

work of

70

Richard Rolle

The

negative account in chapter 4 of a soul wavering between the divine

"memories of things done and undone,"

is

Rolle reports. Given the accompanying imagery of

and admonition

critique of Rolle ing, if

and

comparable to the very experiences

to his followers.

fire,

this

could even be a direct

Chapter 52

offers explicit

warn-

not about Rolle himself, then about the sensory experience of spiritual

ele-

vation Rolle describes.

Julian of Dame

Julian of

Norwich

is

an important

Norwich figure in

Middle English theology and

is a major player in a movement among women more immediate and responsive religious faith (often within an even broader urge toward "affective piety"), and to find a verbal medium by which to communicate those and other experiences. This created considerable anxiety among the traditional controllers of language and of social and religious dogma. Dame Julian, Chaucer's Wife of Bath, and Margery Kempe work very well when taught as a group of female voices within these movements right around the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. One might begin, though, with a

mysticism. Equally, though, she across

Europe

detail in

to experience a

The Anonimalle Chronicle, where a "wicked

woman" among the

1381 rebels

an alarm and prevents the Archbishop of Canterbury's escape from the Tower. Though the Wife of Bath is Chaucer's fiction, and Dame Julian and Kempe raises

historical people, all three (and the

through some

medium

essarily negotiating

wicked woman) leave behind a textual record

of male language, both by using amanuenses and by nec-

with a whole language whose underlying ideology

(at best)

is

ambivalent toward women. (Such problematic mediation of "female" perspective is

found again

One might

in

"women's songs" among the Middle English

lyrics.)

discuss their connections of religious quest within domestic set-

tings or secular quest in the context of religious action; their different strategies of

language; differences of mobility and stability; their dialogue or negotiation with

male agents of

clerical authority; their

est gentry class; the

connections of

all

apparent birth into the mercantile or modthree to kinds of public culture (liturgy, ser-

mons, drama); and the imagery of marriage and domestic experience (In

most of these

ligious enthusiast

in

all

Rebecca Jackson, a free African-American in Philadelphia before

the Civil War. She too was from a modest bourgeois family, struggled with acy,

three.

regards, the three resonate intriguingly with the writing of the re-

illiter-

and experienced visionary dreams dense with domestic imagery.) Dame Julian created a place for her spiritual ambitions, and a degree of social

power, by choosing the

women's mobility and

life

of an anchorite, which avoided traditional critiques of

love of public display. (See just

of Bath's Prologue.) For

all

their enclosure

such accusations in the Wife

and modest

life,

though, anchorites

gained a certain prestige thereby. Consider the report, in The Anonimalle Chronicle. that Richard

II

made

the Rising of 1381.

confession and talked with an anchorite right in the

crisis

of

Julian of

Julian explicitly calls herself "unlettered" (chapter

means call

it

did not preclude access to a wide variety of

Norwich

2),

although whatever that

texts.

Within what we might

her empowering humility, Julian uses two very daring linguistic

her meditations are not centrally on Bible sions as "texts" for exegesis that went

thing" in her hand, chapter

"little

5).

on

texts; rather,

Nicholas Watson rightly

Dame Julian's wish dieval affective piety,

calls a

to this

life,

From

religious thinking.

for "bodily sight" of the Passion

and with

tra-

motherhood-as the

is

coherent with

death

illness close to

me-

later

visual representations of Christ as the literalizes ideas

Man

of

of dying

Conversely, the three

texts.

are metaphorized as contrition, compassion,

and longing

for

possible critique of these ambitions by acknowledging their ec-

her wishes in the will of God, and by repeatedly asserting of her

when

Passion (chapter

on the

these she produces what

orthodoxy. This deflection by reference to a male agent early visions, as

early vi-

Second, she imports the specific setting of

found in monastic vows and in mystical

centricity, leaving

own

for decades (such as her meditation

"vernacular theology" ("Visions of Inclusion," 146).

Sorrows. Her desire to experience an

wounds she desires God. Julian deflects

strategies. First,

she uses her

ditional female experience in her class-household, wifehood,

fundamental metaphors of her

71

4).

is

persistent in Julian's

her curate's crucifix stimulates her bodily vision of the

This

is

balanced by her vision of the Virgin Mary and her

"cre-

ated littleness," later seen "high and noble and glorious" (chapter 25). (A similarly

double vision of Mary appears in Middle English

lyrics

devoted to

The extreme physicality of some of Julian's visions can be which become

into discrete units,

elaborated in her sight of the salvation of

up

building

all

Along with

for Christ's complete suffering, she also separates his

her compassion

wounds

her.)

startling.

wound

mankind. She

sites for

body and

theological meditation. This

is

in Christ's side (chapter 24) as a space for the

also controls rhetoric nicely at key points,

of repeated phrases, such as Christ's "I

am

he

.

.

."

by the

in chapter 26, or

the famous lines, Christ's response to Julian's long meditation on sin and its origin in chapter 27, "but all will be well." It is typical of Julian to place this expansive rhetoric in the

mouth

of Christ, not her own.

and the domestic imagery of her meditations, Dame for inJulian constructs a theology of widespread salvation, rather than a program the and that dividual vision. She is emphatic that her visions do not privilege her,

From

fruit

this bodily vision

of her exegesis does not depart from the

church. She

60 and

is

writing not just for contemplatives, but for

61 especially explore Christ

and humanity, and

through a detailed narrative of mother's tection

and

Mother

Jesus

dogma any

Christian learns in

all

believers.

God and

love: gestation, birth,

Chapters humanity,

nourishment, pro-

chastisement. Breast-feeding, for instance, becomes the image for and the Eucharist. Following traditions of polysemy in Biblical exe-

image toward a number of ends. The breast itself elsewhere Christ's spear wound, and Holy but thus' suggests the Eucharist, maternal imagery leads her reader into Julian's Church. Gender is fluid, however; statement, "I am he whom you Christ's of an ever richer sense of the implications

gesis,

Julian will

move

a single

love of man tor woman (a the specifically gendered and hierarchicalized Christian commentary), of centuries trope from the Song of Songs, spiritualized by

love."

From

Julian of Norwich

72

Julian expands the belovedness of Christ to include varieties of love within a family,

especially love for the mother.

also seen in

many Middle

The convergent

English religious

Dame Julian

Studies partly or entirely devoted to

and Mystical Experience

in

the

languages of love and faith are

lyrics.

Women

include Frances Beer,

Middle Ages (1992), and Denise Baker, Julian of

The context of Julian's theology

Norwich's Showings: from Vision to Book (1994)-

out in Caroline Walker Bynum,

is

Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the

set

High

Middle Ages (1982).

The Second Play of Forms of play and public culture

term than "popular culture" in

this con-

were influential shapers of medieval experience, both sacred and secular. At

text)

a

(a better

the Shepherds

number of such

cultural sites, the line

between enactment and awesome

formation becomes highly porous. Clearest

summon

at the altar

where the

trans-

words

priest's

the transubstantiation of bread into the body of Christ, this porosity

mysterious but present in the public performance of a poem, with the

less

evitable ventriloquism of voices that entails.

many mobile

is

in-

Medieval public culture involved

which one group's space and identifying objects moved temporarily into another's: secular events like formalized jousts and tournaments; rituals in

accompanied with

royal entries into cities, often vants;

and

religious processions

recitations, music, tableaux

vi-

out of the church and into the spaces of commerce

and production. The great Middle English biblical dramas enacting the story of creation, fall, and salvation, were developed in the thriving but contentious towns of the East Midlands and north, that had been greatly enriched in the fourteenth century by trade (particularly with the Netherlands and Flanders) and especially by the export of wool.

The mercantile

in a network of guilds,

prayers for

and

bourgeoisie formed

both religious

members' souls

trades).

after death)

much

(for the

and secular

These guilds were only one

site

of

its

identity by participating

establishment of chantries and (for

members of various

of contact, and

strife,

crafts

between the

lay

bourgeois and the clergy; their encounters were also more ritually enacted in the

many

public religious processions that

drals into the settings of

and even more

ilar,

moved from

the parish churches and cathe-

urban trade and manufacture. Public sermons had a sim-

hierarchicalized, impact.

Corpus

Ritual processions were especially elaborate at the Feast of sixty days after Easter

iday

became

rived

and

close to the

summer

solstice,

and

this early

Christi,

summer

hol-

a frequent occasion for the production of "mystery plays," a title de-

from the continent and the Latin mysterium, referring

organized in guilds. In medieval England, they were

to the trades or crafts

often called

Corpus Christi

plays, for the

church holiday with which many were associated. These productions

were a dense

site

of

communal

identity

and

contest; the

urban

craft guilds

(and

probably rural religious guilds) financed production and often supplied staging

and

actors directly, while the texts

show

every sign of

coming from

clerical

hands.

The Second

A

particularly intense notion of identity

is

Play of the Shepherds

73

implicit in the spectacle of craftsmen

and other workers of medieval England watching their opposite numbers in biblical history, and sometimes seeing one of their own guildsmen playing such a theatrical role.

Especially in the

an

earlier

work of the "Wakefield Master" who wrote, or

form, The Second Play of

the Shepherds,

revised

from

the professional pride and discon-

tent of contemporary laborers fold into the

drama of salvation. (The play has its to the one already available—Alia eorundem the manuscript says, "another of the same.") The Wakefield Master, almost certainly a cleric, was a brilliant and innovative dramatist. He depicts complex and

name because

it

began

as

an alternate play

changeable characters in vigorous, colloquial dialogue, rich in proverbial

interjec-

and more "naturalistic" (if also less awesome) than was attempted in earlier drama like the York Cycle, and he engages these characters in evolving relationships that imply a past and a world beyond the play. This accomplishment is the tions,

more impressive

He

is

in that the Wakefield Master uses a challenging nine-line stanza.

not only a good poet, though. The play

nicely together (in settings that

and

lie

is

theatrically brilliant;

close together

on

its

scenes flow

the stage), at once structured

related by repeated motifs like song, sleep, challenges at doorways, disguise

and recognition. The famous grumbling of the shepherds as the play opens, and Mak's hunger later on, are intriguingly similar to some of the laborers' grievances in the Rebellion of 1381, and to social satire widespread throughout the later Middle Ages. In addition to the hostile forces of nature (in which the audience would recognize the inheritance of Adam and the fall), the shepherds lament the bondage of servile tenure, marriage, and serving

about taxes and

men

of their

own

They complain and II, for all their

class.

oppression by "gentlery men." Yet Shepherds

I

complaining, are not outside the system of oppressive service, as they abuse their own servant Daw. Hunger is present throughout the play.

"moan" need not mean, however, that the play supports any rebellion on their part. Their complaints and violence disappear in the face of the Nativity of Christ, and they are drawn into a socially and musically That the shepherds voice

their

harmonious expression of praise; their economic and class hostility turns to charand sheep-stealer Mak is similarly atity. The subversive comedy of the magician play. In both ways, the tracted into a parodic echo of the Nativity by the end of the into normative acplay ultimately draws these potentially subversive expressions tions of faith.

complex and subtle use of figural and biblical commentary, tytypological thinking. In its narrow meaning as applied to as historically real, but events Testament Old approached pological interpretation This effect

is

only one aspect of the

play's

also as precedents or prefigurations that

New

would only be

fulfilled

by events in the

Adam of St. Victor comTestament, especially the Incarnation of Christ. As things." This kind future of shadow a is Law Old "The Hebrews 10:10:

mented on

frequently reflected in Langland's Piers Plowman and in history, Ibounden. It was so influential a way of looking at

of typological thought lyrics like

Adam

lay

is

extra-biblical legend and even mows though, that typology sometimes shaped

ot

The Second

74

One might

secular history.

person

(say a

Play of the Shepherds

even consider a kind of reverse typology, in which a

shepherd) takes on his

fullest significance as

he

participates, or wit-

nesses the enactment of a prototype in sacred history.

The

implications of an extended typology are most elaborately developed in

The Second Play of

the Shepherds in the scenes

newborn, swaddled baby and

its

of

Mak disguising

his stolen

ram

as a

discovery by the three shepherds. This extraordi-

nary scene uses slapstick comedy at once to figure and to parody the transcendent events of the Nativity that, in the ously.

The scene

Lamb

the

at

economy of the

play, are

occurring simultane-

Mak's house of course neatly doubles the Nativity scene with

of God: the beast swaddled between

Jesus swaddled between

two

beasts.

Mak and

Gill

is

replaced by baby

But the binding of the ram further draws in

the iconology of the Passion, and Mak's wife swearing to eat the sheep/baby she's tricked the

The Shepherds (with their symbolic e.g. the Book of Luke 15:3-7)

shepherd,

(whose social

which they

good

link to the iconology of Christ as are the mediators

between the audience

and the transcendent history of the Nativity They move repeatedly from conflict to harmony, both

stresses they reflect)

participate).

and musical,

cial

if

shepherds also parodically forecasts the Eucharist.

a

(in so-

kind of middle ground between the comic disputatious house-

hold (and bad singing) of Mak, and the Holy Family and singing of the angels. Their decision to toss

him

Mak

in a blanket (game as

to his death as a sheep-stealer

is

punishment) rather than deliver

the act of charity that qualifies the shepherds

for the angelic

message that follows. Indeed the stanzas in which they make their

modest

the infant savior, with the refrain of "Hail!", provide the dramatic

gifts to

gesture that

makes the baby into

These stanzas are also

a

a holy icon.

high point in the Wakefield Master's

tense yoking together oi highly referential

erence within

humble and

literal

objects in the play

scene, in the gifts of the shepherds: cherries, a bird, est,

craft,

with their

and idiomatic language. The density of refespecially touching in this

is

and

a toy ball.

These

are

mod-

but cherries appear in a number of legends of the Annunciation, the bird implies

both the ascent of mankind with the Incarnation and the dove of the Holy

and the tennis the three

Mak

gifts

ball

may

Spirit,

kingdom of heaven. Together humanity, spiritual primacy, and lordship.

suggest an orb, symbol of the

echo Christ's

sacrificial

most complex and resonant character in the drama. His unruliness and preference for theft over work suggest the hostile portraits of some peasants found in writers like Langland and certain chroniclers of the Rebellion of 1381. Mak is more eloquent about his plight than the wordy shepherds, for inis

certainly the

man that walks on the moor, / And has As both a role-player within the drama (pretending to be a yeoman of the king and feigning a southern accent) and a magician, he links ritual magic and theatricality. Mak is more broadly a speaker for the nonChristian uncanny in his efforts to explain the monstrous "child" evoking a range

stance

when he

not

his will!" (lines 196-97).

all

identifies himself as "a

of folk belief: the child

is

bewitched, or a changeling switched by

inconsistent with the redemptive structure of the play, in as a

comic anti-Christ (named

as his child), replaced

"Sir Guile" by his wife

which

elves.

and having

by the higher "magic" of the Incarnation.

This

Mak may a

is

not

be seen

"horned lad"

The Voyage of Saint Brendan

The

play's

convergence of secular and sacred, and

are further supported by

its

exploitation of typology,

conscious juggling of time schemes.

its

75

Time

collapses in

the overt anachronisms of the shepherds' and Mak's speeches, calling on Mary and the Passion, and swearing by martyred saints, before they even witness the Nativity

"By him that died

for us all"). This can be compared to the penetrability, or near disappearance of time in the Eucharist, where the body of Christ is present (e.g.

among

the faithful. in the

Britain,

The

play invokes a related overlap of places,

we had

shepherd's dream-"I thought

first

England"—and elsewhere. In such like the shepherds seem almost to forebears a millenium

and

a context, could local

Bethlehem and us

laid

near

full

and contemporary

figures

enact, not merely mimic, the revelation of their

a half earlier?

The Second Play of the Shepherds has attracted a large body of scholarship and ical

interpretation;

the collections by Beadle and

Bibliography give a good cussed

on the

first

Research has also interested

little is

board for

New

crit-

in

the

itself in

later

fo-

thinking and contemporary iconology.

the socioeconomic setting of the plays in the

Middle Ages. The material thus uncovered (much

of it collected and edited in the Records of Early English Drama

though

listed

look at the range of approaches. Earlier writing

play's links to typological

urban public culture of the

Emmerson

series,

1981-ongoing),

of direct relevance to the Wakefield Cycle, has provided a springHistoricist critics, interested in the place of the plays in the

drama of urban public

culture. Feminist readers have

wider

been exploring the analogies

between the characters of Gill and the Virgin Mary, and their connections to male speakers in other vernacular works like those of Chaucer and Langland.

fe-

Literature and Travel

The Voyage of Most students if

Saint Brendan

are engaged by the sheer wackiness of The Voyage of Saint Brendan, even

know about saints' lives and pilgrimage narratives. (And why should with this. Remind them that most travel literature is about encountering

they don't

they?) Play

things that are bizarre, and that characters in the text also react with both confusion and wonder as they meet the uncanny and miraculous in their journeys.

Like a lot of medieval Irish literature, this story works more through pattern and repetition than through a single narrative line. It's a good place to challenge

our dependence on "story." In this regard it could be compared to the rich tenlike the Book of sions between geometry and representation in early insular art broad structure the motifs: repeated Kelts. It can help to start by discussing some years; versions of of voyage, return, and report; numbered patterns of days and denial; a quest ascetic of degrees exile and quest; miraculous provision of food;

handed down For

all its

across generations.

marvels, The Voyage connects to

might miss. Saint Brendan was a great

traveller

some

historical realities students

and missionary

like

many

of his

The Voyage of Saint Brendan

76

and founded

peers in the early Irish church,

women

Holy men and

Iona.

The technology of Brendan's boat

munities or alone as hermits.

and

accurate;

and the

series

several monasteries

on

islands near

did withdraw to small islands, living in loose comis

contemporary

of islands he encounters, barely visible in the mist, are

not unlike clusters of the Arans and Hebrides.

and wondrous voyage, the battle cohort and leader, geography given meaning through some heroic struggle. If The Tain represents a conservative This

is

a great text to explore the Christian adaptation of native genres

world-views: the

preservation (and celebration) of early narrative, The Voyage's synthesis of ancient

forms and new ideas ical

voyage (echtrae

is

more ambitious. For

instance the very old genre of the mag-

or immrana) involves supernatural creatures, pleasure, material

plenty, plastic time,

and

How do

a tardy return.

these get deployed

on

a template

of Christian spiritual quest? Numerical patterns (especially threes) noted in The Tain, here take

on echoes of the

profound obligations in

reflects

story (Old Testament

manna,

Trinity

and days of

early Irish society,

New

Easter.

but

is

The

provision of food

here aligned with biblical

Testament loaves and

fishes).

On

the other

hand, a quite new realm of significance comes from the detailed introduction of the Christian calendar (like the 40-day fasts that recall Lent), echoes of the liturgy, the Psalms, and

Book of Revelation.

Brendan's sainthood also pulls together tribal militancy and Christian holiness. tle" tle

He

and

is

a spiritual father, prophet,

and

exorcist;

directs a quest for the earthly paradise

cohorts in The Tain and Beowulf.

of the Rood.

The theme of exile

Compare

but he also does "spiritual bat-

by a travelling band similar to batthis to similar effects in

as a desired state invites contrast

The Dream

with the miseries

of exile and solitude in the Anglo-Saxon elegies and the Rood. This is a useful place to note the great (if rarely clear) continuities among a number of Celtic and other European genres, like travel, hagiography and romance. Compare The Voyage of Saint Brendan and another story probably of Celtic derivation, Marie de France's Lanval. Finally, The Voyage offers a

look back and challenge

Contents,

like

some of

the too-easy opposition of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon

Norman Conquest. Here and in Marie, elaborated largely on its own terms.

"rupture" of the

but conserved,

Sir The

good moment

to

the divides imposed by the logic of Tables of styles,

a native culture

is

or the

adapted

John Mandeville

Travels of Sir John Mandeville

have been the object of fine studies in recent years,

Mary Campbell, The

Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel

especially Writing,

400-1600, (1988), chapter

4,

and now the groundbreaking study of

Iain

Higgins, Writing East: The "Travels" of Sir John Mandeville, (1997).

Mandeville's Travels emerge from a highly synthetic and creative reading of others' reports,

ranging from the biblical

Pliny, to travel narratives

places

and

Book of

Revelation, to the

of the fourteenth century. For

all

Roman

writer

on

exotic

the emphasis

their marvels, though, the Travels are a story of the preoccupations of

John Mandeville

Sir

the author and his audience: the its

of salvation in a world

and

paradoxical believability, derives from

its

and mundane

of mankind, the lost earthly paradise, the limmoving beyond the limits of Catholic Christendom, from kingship to marital sexuality. Much of the book's fall

fast

the organization of society appeal,

practices like travel routes

several popular genres. If The Voyage of

voyage and

77

its mix of religious fantasy and trade sources. Mandeville draws on

Brendan combined genres of wondrous

St.

of hermit saints, Mandeville synthesizes

lives

counts, romances of Alexander the Great, merchants'

and beyond. The European

others: pilgrim ac-

still

and

missionaries' stories of

India

readership of the mid-fourteenth century was in a complex

uation in regard to exotic lands. The crusades had taken

much

sit-

of the wonder out

of the parts of Asia bordering the eastern Mediterranean, and imagined realms of the marvellous were pressed ever eastward toward India and China. At the same time, the loss of the Crusader states

Islam

meant

that contact with

much

and the imagined overlapped sometimes playful

shifts

and much of the eastern Mediterranean to of the once-known east declined. The known

to a degree, a situation reflected in Mandeville's

from the uncanny

to the

mundane.

The narrator "Sir John Mandeville" attracts credence to his story through a number of strategies, most prominently intimate addresses to the reader, and the simple assurance of his personal presence, experiencing by sight,

and sound even the most extraordinary

with claims of reticence: "Believe

much more than

I

it

really

for truly

saw

I

was

as

it

own senses

in

some

seemed, or was merely

"as

much

as

I

have heard." But this

for

with

my own

eyes,

and

settings like the Vale of Devils

illusion,

at the furthest reach of geography, the earthly paradise,

nundrums,

it

touch,

have told you." The narrator also performs a kind of candor in

asserting the unreliability of his

("whether

all this,

taste, scent,

combines sometimes

events. This

he also

says "there

is

is

I

do not know"). And

he claims only to report

one of Mandeville's probably intentional

no way

into

it."

Whose

co-

reports then does he

transmit?

Mandeville uses the more distant realms past Jerusalem to investigate the nature and limits of civilized mankind and mankind's faith. Along with his repeated encounters with secular plenitude-gold, gems, and vast territory-Mandeville evinces a yearning for widespread salvation, mentioning with tolerant approval the if they do not have all the arof Prester John, however, empire the Within ticles of faith as clearly as we do." such as horned men and human, the of Mandeville also experiences boundaries

Christian practices in the land of Prester John "even

speaking birds.

imagined realm of wealth and salvation, Mandeville also portrays but also rather backa social order particularly suited to his own knightly class, from a specifically stems ward-looking and nostalgic. Prester John's empire Khan of Cathay the of militancy, in contrast to the mercantile wealth

Within

this

Christian

with

whom

he

is

both

allied

and contrasted. His land

is

organized along tradi-

serve him combine saeven archaic feudal lines; and the bishop-kings who month only, then return homecred and secular power. His sub-kings serve for a tional,

a

model

and bureaucratic courts of that expunges the increasingly professional

78

Sir

John Mandeville

fourteenth-century Europe. Prester John himself combines the ideal royal virtues

of

and sexual moderation. Mandeville slows

faith, humility,

where

justice

is

he murders, he too order,

one island

(like

If

This imagined social world extends to the domestic

will die.

and includes both models

boundaries

to describe

practiced without regard to social position, including the king's.

John's continence) and terrifying

(like Prester

the fools of despair).

Beyond the land of

Prester John, Mandeville

moves into

a

more

spiritual ge-

ography that also defines mankind in relation to the broadest categories of fall and

and the earthly paradise. Mandeville hedges his contact with both, by making the one a matter of possible illusion and the other mediated by reports. Both spaces replicate elements of Prester John's empire, especially through gold and gems, but place these materials in settings of Satanic

salvation: the Vale Perilous

temptation or tain senses

lost

Edenic plenitude. At these extremes, working from his uncer-

and from pure

of the reader,

report, Mandeville

who cannot

quite

know what

the report of "trustworthy authorities"

s

own

experience neatly reflects that

in the text

who may

is

mere

illusion

and what

never have been there.

Margery Kempe If

one measure of

literary

achievement

ate response, positive or negative,

the capacity o{ a text to arouse passion-

is

then Margery Kempe produced a great book;

and the public expressions of her religious attainments that preceded that book for same measure, had a similar greatness. No other single me-

decades, judged by the

dieval text has enjoyed a level of engaged appropriation

and reaction in the second

half of the twentieth century equal to The Book of Margery Kempe.

Both

generated strikingly similar

woman

Lynn and in twentieth-century scholarship, Kempe and similarly polar reactions. Is she a genuine holy

in fifteenth-century

(however eccentric), or

judgments— to favor the tended

she a megalomaniac, almost a self-deceiving

is

fraud? Students of mysticism have

tended— more

latter position;

more

in their tone

and position (however

the highly patriarchal hierarchies of the late medieval to focus

explicit

have

accept Kempe's claims of religious experience at face value, and

at least to

celebrate her achievement of a female voice

seemed

than their

recently, feminist scholars

more on

exegesis

clerisy.

limited) within

Either view has

and judgment of Kempe's personality than of

her book. But recent readers have tried to move past these dichotomies and the pattern of dismissal or celebration. Instead, they see her

book

as the

complex and

divided product of a setting in which competitive secular ambition and religious

accomplishment, bodily experience and mystical knowing, disruptive expression

and

clerical approval,

cannot be disembedded one from the other. Particularly

triguing instances of such Identity, Culture,

and

an approach are found

Society in Late

in-

in Sarah Beckwith, Christ's Body:

Medieval Writings, (1993), chapter 4, and in

Nicholas Watson, "The Middle English Mystics," in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (forthcoming, 1999).

As we have seen already

in Brendan

and

Mandeville, the distinction

between

Margery Kempe

travel

and

religious quest

rediscovery of her

book

is

unstable and permeable in medieval culture. Since the

in 1934,

Margery Kempe has usually been studied in the

context of the Middle English mystics

Kempe

clearly

79

sought the kinds of

ferings of Christ seen in Richard Rolle

The mode by which she pursued

(a

category that

is

direct, affective contact

and the

itself

rather recent).

with the love and

initial visions

suf-

of Julian of Norwich.

these ends, though, was markedly different from

Rolle or Julian; far from the persistent inwardness of private prayer and medita-

Kempe

tion,

exercised several kinds of mobility. She

negotiating with her

husband and with

within the hierarchies of marriage and

bility

expended tremendous energy

ecclesiastical authorities to achieve a clerisy,

mo-

seeking abstention from the

conjugal debt of sex and from certain foods, and requesting to wear special clothes

and

receive weekly Eucharist.

But she

particularly enacted her religious quest

through mobility of place. Kempe repeated her contacts with the Passion by engaging in pilgrimage, visiting both the

site

of

its

original occurrence

and

sites

of

its

imitation by vision and martyrdom.

The

late

medieval clergy was increasingly threatened by the extent of unsuper-

vised religious quest, unregulated lay preaching,

speculation within

its

own

ranks.

It

reacted in a

and unorthodox or heterodox range of manners, from open-

Kempe occasionally encounters) to repressive hostility (probably more widespread). One result of this was Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions of 1409, which made illegal any theological speculation in the

spirited negotiation (which

vernacular.

What produced (and,

it

perhaps the most trouble for Kempe, though, was her need

appears, choice) to express her links with the Passion in highly public fash-

ion, through her tears and sobbing roars, long before that expression painstakingly took the form of her book. (Even that book can be viewed as a crucial site of negotiated mobility, from oral expression to written, through protracted dealings

with two priest

scribes.)

Where

the

site

of Julian's speculation was the internal

of her early vision of Christ's body, the principal site of Kempe's religious contact was her own mobile and usually public body. Kempe's intensely somatic religious experience was not unique in her time.

memory

Her

theatricalizing extends but

dramas of

late

medieval

is

not wholly different from the public ritual and which she lived: costume, role playing,

civic culture, in

emotive experience of the joys of the Virgin or sufferings of Christ. Public religious rituals especially

developed around the

feast

of Corpus Christi, a holiday that com-

memorates the last supper and Eucharist with which Kempe's religious expression weeping reaction to a Corpus Christi prois so closely identified. She describes her events of public recession in a chapter not included here (chapter 45). Many such and John at Margery of scene great the ligious ritual come into the book, such as

York, and thus probably Bridlington as they return from Corpus Christi day at would witness a melding Kempe having seen the mystery plays there. In such plays own unresolved mixher to of secular class strife and divine visitation comparable are found in The themes world. Such ture of life in and beyond the mundane

Second Play of the Shepherds in this anthology.

What was

radical in

Kempe's relation

to these public, emotive,

and somatic

ex-

Margery Kempe

80

pressions of faith was her persistent denial of a line between herself as audience

and

as actor. Repeatedly, in local ecclesiastical events or

pressivity

makes

herself the object of the public gaze

on

and

pilgrimage, Kempe's ex(to a

degree that never

her hopes) of public veneration. This behavior also radically inverts the

satisfies

usual role of the traveller. Rather than seeking in the foreign place (or the local

holy

site)

makes

some experience of marvel or the uncanny, Margery Kempe

herself the object of that

registers

and

wondering

(or repelled) gaze. If her

replicates the sufferings of Christ,

it

also

seems

to

repeatedly

body

at times

absorb and per-

form the holy marvels of exotic place. The theatricality and persistence of her religious expression enraged many in Margery Kempe's own time, and their reactions in turn are folded into elements of betrayal, mockery, and abandonment that underwrite her program of imitation of Christ. Kempe's mobility extends even to selfhood. (She

is

also dressed as a fool

and mocked—a scene often enacted in passion plays; she rides into Jerusalem on a donkey; finally she stretches her arms wide and writhes on Calvary.) So intense is her identification with the life and sufferings of Christ, so easily is it triggered by place, memory, or analogy, that Kempe's very body moves past imitation and virtually becomes Christ's body. As the Book progresses, the line between representation and literal presence of Christ to her senses, or even between analogy and literal presence (as in the infants and young boys over whom she weeps in Rome) is ever

more permeable.

Yet

it is

exactly the will to such expression that gave

power, clear in her

own

time and

little

Kempe her

disruptive

diminished today. The actual content of

orthodox and very much in the tradition of such whose work Kempe names in the Book. If Julian's safety lay in her stable enclosure and rhetoric of humility, Kempe lay in her doctrinal conservatism and the detail with which she could, when pressed, articulate it under clerical scrutiny. Notwithstanding the spectacle of her piety and her insistence that she communicated directly with Christ, Kempe eagerly sought approval and authority from persons within the ecclesiastical establishment: from bishops and archbishops, mystical friars, and Julian of Norwich herself. Nevertheless, that very approval was sought by repeatedly travelling beyond the her visions and meditations

is

predecessors as Richard Rolle,

traditional geography of clerical authority, the parish.

often gained thereby provided just as

Kempe with an even

And

the acceptance she

greater tool of disruption (or,

unnerving, a greater alternative) to priestly religion, the authority of her

in-

timate, direct "dalliance" with the three persons of the Trinity, especially the Son.

Middle English Lyrics The many languages spoken and written in the British Isles from the thirteenth century on introduced a wealth of poetic traditions, and inspired a linguistic selfconsciousness and a taste for word play that greatly enriched the Middle English lyric. The intricate rhyme schemes, alliteration, consonance, and assonance of

Middle English

Lyrics

81

two of the Harley lyrics included here, Spring and Alisoun, are thought to have been influenced by the highly sophisticated technique of medieval Welsh poets, since the Harley manuscript was compiled in Hereford, near the Welsh border. (See G. L Brook's introduction to The Harley Lyrics, [1956], 1-26). Students might

want

to

compare the poems of Dafydd ap Gwilym, whose

modern

vey these features in

Middle English for

word

play,

itself is

so rich in

homonyms

that

it

provides an opportunity

whether sacred or profane. The famous

praises the Virgin

Mary

translator tries to con-

English.

as being

lyric

I

Sing of a Maiden

"makeles"-which can be translated

as "spotless"

(from the Latin macula), "matchless," or "without a mate" (both from the Old English ge-maca, "equal" or "mate"). Far from being seen as frivolous, in the Middle

Ages such punning was thought to reveal profound spiritual correspondences between word and thing, as Walter Ong has shown. (See Stephen Manning, "On 'I sing of a

maiden/"

Hoffman,

in Middle English Lyrics, ed.

Maxwell

S.

Luria and Richard L.

[1974], 331).

Ambiguous language is also used for humorous purposes in several of the lyrics. Church Latin or Greek— priestly code languages which the laity could not understand—are often shown as being used to deceive women. In the satirical Abuse of Women, a series of stanzas in mock praise of women— osten-

Middle English

sibly

denying the negative stereotypes familiar from Chaucer's Wife of Bath's

whose Latin portion reveals the speaker's be best: / Cuius contrarium verum est." Liturgical Greek is used for the purpose of seduction in a more dramatic situation in Joly Jankin, by a clerk whose refrain— Kryrie Eleison— the female speaker takes to refer to her own name, Alison. Only at the end of the lyric does she reveal her pregnancy, and with it a new understanding of the refrain— "Lord have mercy upon us." Such love of word play, whether spiritual or humorous, recalls Prologue— are punctuated by a

real assessment:

"Of all

Langland's play

on

refrain

women

creatures

the names "Piers" and "Will," as well as Chaucer's flattering

interpretation of Eve's guilt— mulier

and

his

puns on "hende" and

est

hominis confusio—in the Nun's Priest's Tale

"privitee" in the Miller's Tale.

Secular Love Lyrics

Middle English

lyrics play

with generic as well as verbal ambiguity. The imagery

shared between the secular and religious

between them ventional,

is

lyrics is

so pervasive that the distinction

often considered arbitrary. Both genres, in

and of interest

for the

way they manipulate

fact, are

highly con-

traditional motifs.

The

love

Virgin Mary to the lyrics' application of language appropriate to the worship of the The love comtone. sensual than rather idealistic generally a earthly lady give them plaint Alisoun, for instance, to love his lady

from hevene

is

hardly a seduction

("An hendy hap

it is

listen to his plea:

me

sent"),

ich

habbe

and only

("Herkne to

my

in his address to his lady, for the

poem

in the

ihent!"), asserts

at the

end makes

its

manner being

a timid request for her to

roun!"). In Spring, the speaker

most

able

divine origin ("Ichot

is

even

less

direct

part celebrating the burgeoning of nature-

Middle English

82

meadow and

the flowering of the trasting

it

Lyrics

the mating of animals—and only at the end con-

with the disdainful behavior of women:

Wormes woweth under

cloude,

Wimmen waxeth wounder [Worms woo under

the

proude.

soil,

Women grow wondrously proud.] While it has been suggested that the reference to the worms' wooing is a subtle reminder to the lady of the inevitable decay of her own flesh (Manning, 271), it

"worms

hardly has the coercive force of the graphic virginity" in Marvell's To his

seventeenth-century

poems

Coy

shall try that long-preserved

the most famous of the Renaissance and

Mistress,

diem" rhetoric of the Ovidian love

to revive the "carpe

tradition.

Women's Songs Greater cynicism

is

to

be found, surprisingly, in the Middle English "women's

songs" that express a female perspective

pointed to learn that such

male idea of a woman's lyrics,

more often

is

as the authors

English and in

feelings.

on

were most

They tend

courtship. Students

may be

be more narrative than male-voiced

to

woman—desertion and

pregnancy.

frequent

its

The response

these lyrics

ironic than sympathetic, suggesting that the audience as well

were male (See John

F.

European Backgrounds,"

Plummer, "Woman's Song in Middle F.

Medieval Woman's Song, [1981], 135-54). This

is

Plummer, Vox Feminae:

John

its

disap-

by men, and project a

likely written

perhaps because they describe not the anticipation of sex, but

consequences for the invite

lyrics

ed.

Studies

women's

particularly true of

songs in which the seducers are clerics—a group well-known for their cleverness

and immorality. The speaker who laments her pregnancy

in The Wily Clerk

is

im-

pressed by her seducer's "gramery," translated as "magic", but carrying echoes of grammatica> one of the arts of the trivium which lay people found arcane. In the lyric Joly

Jankin discussed above, both the clerk's play

speaker's

name and

poem

the witty tone of the

schame me

tion in her cry, "Christ fro

schilde,

entire narrative has a tone of the fabliau, ticular:

the stock country

and

woman's name

on

Kyrie eleison as the

in general tend to distance the

/

.

recalls

.

.

alas,

I

emo-

go with childe!" The

Chaucer's Miller's Tale in par-

(Alison),

the courtship in church

(Absolon), the successful clerical seducer (Nicholas). Such overtones suggest that these laments are not to be taken seriously, but ironically, at the

woman's expense.

Religious Lyrics In Middle English, the religious lyric

is

can hardly be understood apart from

it.

closely

Most

connected to the secular

obviously, as

we

shall see,

lyric, it

and

employs

Middle English

the language and imagery of courtly love poetry. But beyond that,

Lyrics

83

poems

in praise

of Mary can be seen as inversely related to antifeminist lyrics and, occasionally, parodic of women's songs. Mariolatry-the worship of Mary as the one virtuous woman-reflects implicitly on all other women. In Adam lay ihounden, the assertion that the fall was fortunate rests on the assumption that Eve's fault was repaired by Mary's excellence in bearing the son of God:

Ne hadde The

the appil take ben,

appil taken ben,

Ne hadde

never our lady

A ben hevene quen. Like the writings of Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, and the author of The

Cbud

of Unknowing,

Clairvaux,

Marian

indebted to the mysticism of Bernard of

lyrics are

who worshipped Mary

with the allegorized language of the Song of

woman

Songs. In praise of Mary states that no other so bright," and begs Mary, "swete Levedy,

guage that

recalls courtly lovers

.

.

.

is

"so

fair,

so shene, so rudy,

have mercy of thine knight" in lan-

appealing to their ladies' mercy for more physical

Arguably the best of the poems to Mary in Middle English,

favors.

I

Sing of a

Maiden describes the Incarnation in terms of Christ's courtship of her:He to have

approached her "bower," and she to have graciously "chosen" him

poem then

son. This nativity

concludes with the

classic

is

said

as her

paradox of Mary

as

"moder and maiden." Yet another it

poem

in praise of

plays with the idea that

Mary

is

Mary almost

just

The male speaker tells of overhearing

crosses the line into

another pregnant a

maiden

girl,

confess, "I

blasphemy

as

explaining her plight.

am with child

this tide,"

we soon learn that this is "ghostly" and embraced her

leading us to expect a lament such as The Wily Clerk. But a different situation altogether: the child's father

"without dispit or mock." The maiden frain, "Nowel! nowel! nowel!"

tells

is

is

rejoicing in her condition,

us that this

is

a nativity

poem.

parody might be compared to the similar treatment of the

Its

and the

re-

use of sacred

nativity in The Second

Play of the Shepherds.

in praise of Christ use the language of the secular love lyric as much as those to Mary. The fact that Sweet Jesus, King of Bliss is preserved in the Harley manuscript, in the company of the love songs Spring and Alisoun, underscores

Poems

the fact that the same audience might enjoy both genres. The speaker confesses that he is happily in bondage ("How swete beth thy love-bonde") and begs Jesus to

draw him with

Jesus,

cross,

My

his "love-cordes."

More

poignantly, in the shorter love song,

Sweet Lover, the speaker identifies with Christ in his suffering on the love be fixed as firmly in his heart "As was the sphere

and asks that His

into thine herte,

/

Whon

thou soffredest deth

for

me." The imagery

is

almost

Sonnet 10, Batter my masochistic, suggesting comparison with Donne's Holy show students that can together two the (Teaching God. Heart, three-persomd

Donne's

erotic imagery

dieval mysticism).

is

not so unusual

as

might appear, but has roots

in

me-

Middle English

84

One

Lyrics

final religious lyric takes a different tack,

turning from love of

that shows only passing regret for the worldly pleasures

quished.

The speaker

gloats that those

"the riche levedies in here bour,

/

who

Mary or

ubi sunt

poem

which must be

relin-

Christ to the repellent subject of death. Contempt of the World

is

an

enjoyed wealth and pleasure on earth,

that wereden gold in here tressour," will suffer

eternal damnation:

Here paradis hy nomen here,

And now The

fuir

they lien in helle

it

His grim moral to the reader

ascetic

is

to suffer pain

on earth

so as to earn the rewards of

poem, because, in sermon fashion, it urges rejection of worldly goods. (See Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious

heaven. Students are likely to

an

ifere;

brennes evere.

Lyric in the

Middle Ages,

[

resist this

1968]). It poses

problems similar to those of Chaucer's

Parsons Prologue and Retraction to the Canterbury

Tales,

with their ascetic

rejec-

tion of poetry.

Taught in survey courses covering the Middle Ages through the eighteenth cen-

Middle English

tury,

can be used to

lyrics

illustrate

major

shifts in the attitudes

of

women, love, and religion. One approach poems from the anonymous Middle English

the English with regard to the status of

would be to lyrics

trace male-voiced love

through Dafydd, Shakespeare, Donne, and Marvell.

A

study of woman's

songs comparing Wulf and Eadwacer and The Wife's Lament with poems in Middle English would demonstrate the uniqueness of the

poems

in a

woman's

voice,

and contrast

first

two

as

Old English

love

their dignity with the banality of the

Middle English pregnancy laments. Furthermore, the difference between such

anonymous women's songs and poems actually written by women—Mary Wroth, Aphra Behn, and Anne Finch, for instance—would be promising to explore. In addition, one might read pairs of male and female-voiced lyrics in Middle Englishsuch as M> lefe is faren in a londe and Alisoun with A Forsaken Maid's Lament and TKe Wily Clerk—as backdrop to a famous matched pair, written by two men: Marlowe's Passionate Shepherd to His Love and Raleigh's 'Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd. Insight into attitudes toward sex and word play in two different periods can be gained from comparing two double-entendre poems: the Old English "Onion/Penis" riddle, and the Middle English 1 have a Noble Cock. Religious poetry has a it

much

longer tradition in English than love poetry, and

too has seen historical change. Since the

twelfth century this

volume

and waned

are primarily

Christ, however, have a

after the

worship of Mary developed only in the

Reformation, the Marian

much

longer tradition.

imagined splendidly in The Dream of the Rood,

Donne

is

a Battell,

7 last night. ), all

lyrics

included in

from the Middle English period. Poems devoted

The

Now

Crucifixion, in particular,

is

Goeth Sun under Wood, Dunbar's

and Donne's Holy Sonnet 9 (What

in ways reflective of their time.

to

if this present

were the world's

The

The Tale of The Tak of

Taliesin

is

from

a passage

Elis

Grufydd's world chronicle. Written in the

uscript in the National Library of Wales, but

One

part of the

tale's

85

Taliesin

mid-sixteenth century, the text translated here

century.

Tale of Taliesin

fascination

it

is

is

was

from still

a seventeenth-century

man-

being copied in the eighteenth

the way

it

invites us to rethink divi-

sions in the cultural history of the British Isles that have largely been constructed

from

a specifically English perspective. In the setting of

King Maelgwn's court, in

the concept of the poet, and a range of mythic references, the tale reaches back to Celtic traditions thriving before the arrival of the Angles

of the poems continue practices that are pre-Norman. retold with obvious relish

(if

and Saxons. The forms

And yet

the story was being

with some rationalist doubt) long into the Early

Modern era. It enacts the extraordinary continuity of texts and traditions in Wales, which has telling parallels in Ireland. The tradition is not ossified or archaic, though. Grufydd brings his Taliesin very much into his own time, not least by repeated assertions of a written source—a gesture by which he creates a useful distance from any narrative elements that challenge his sense of reason or orthodoxy.

Myth and Tradition The figure of Gwion Bach/Taliesin comes from very Welsh tradition, and reflects Celtic notions of poets as inheritors of priestly functions and keepers both of ethnic history and arcane mysteries. This can be compared to the prophetic poets Fergus and Feidelm in The Tain. As Patrick Ford writes, "The practice of poetry among the Celts had explicitly magical overtones, and the poet was understood to have supernatural and divinatory powers." (Ford provides a fine survey of the background of Celtic belief and the role of priestpoets, in the introduction to his edition, Ystoria Taliesin [1992].) As holder of his culture's whole learning and prophet of its future, the poet transcends time and

Celtic early

place,

and

is

Taliesin thus

ment), and

heir or reincarnation of other great prophet-poets such as Merlin.

knows simultaneous

when he

events in other places (like Elphin's imprison-

reveals himself to

sent from the Creation onward and

King Maelgwn, he claims to have been prebut also to an-

links himself not just to poets

gels.

Taliesin's magical birth,

from

a womb-like leather basket carried by the sea,

similar to stories of Merlin. His reincarnation

from Gwion Bach draws upon

is

a se-

wisdom, the of images of magical knowledge in Celtic myth: the salmon of other modes reincarnates three drops of knowledge, the magical cauldron. Taliesin a hen, and through of being as well as other poets: he has been a seed, is reborn

ries

(even allegorizsea in place of salmon. This is a way of literalizing pre-Christian Celtic beliefs in the transing) the poet's learning, but also relates to that emerge in the tale desouls. Other aspects of the poet-prophet

comes from the migration of rive

from a

belief in the magical

power of words, which can be exercised but must

obscurity. Taliesin's song looses Elphin's also be protected by habits of riddling and gesith wonders about in Bede's story the that spell fetters-just the sort of loosing verbal magic into an explicitly moves Bede how of Imma. One might compare

Christian context.

The

86

The

Tale of Taliesin

poet's

gin of the

power with words has

human

race, in a

specific social functions. Taliesin sings the ori-

performance that

of origin in Beowulf, and Bede's story of

mere

invites

comparison to the

Caedmon. His

scop's

song

praises of the king are

not

reports; they actually help call royal glory into being. Yet panegyric has a flip

side in satire. ally silence

The

poet's attack

can undo the pride of a king

or, in this tale, liter-

unworthy competing bards.

Synthesis with Other

Myths and Cultures As imagined

in this tale, Taliesins

reach goes far past the echo of ancient Celtic tradition, and links the Welsh to an extraordinary range of other peoples and cultures. This reproduces within the narrative the synthetic processes by

remain

vital across centuries,

which Welsh culture

in particular

even under great economic and

managed

to

political pressures.

an explicitly polylingual culture, calling on poets and heralds work in Latin, French, Welsh, and English. He expands the learning he demands of the bard to encompass the traditions that have by now infiltrated Welsh culture. His claim to knowledge beyond the bounds of place and time carefully enfolds the Christian universe and its quasi-magical figures (John the Prophet, the Cherubim), and classical heroes like Alexander the Great. His song of human origins links the Welsh to the survivors of Troy, an idea that had spread widely through the influence of another Welshman, Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Taliesin operates in to

Current Issues of Court Life and Money For all his enactment of magic and learning, Grufydd's Taliesin moves in a court full of piquantly realistic detail. Consider his first poem, Elphin's Consolation. Taliesin begins to unwrap his wondrous powers, but score."

careful too to promise Elphin "Riches better

is

The frame of

the whole tale

is

being cut off financially by his father, a provincial squire. The situation in

than three

Elphin's impoverishment by court

Marie de France's Lanval. (Other developments—the return

is

life

and

like that

to court favor

through wealth, the dangerous boast, magical protection— can also be compared to Lanval.) ters

The salmon

here

strictly as

weir later links to the magical salmon of Celtic myth, but en-

an

issue of

economics, supporting Elphin's aristocratic ambi-

Does the praise of Maelgwn by his courtiers derive from the world of panegyric, or is it empty flattery? Elphin's certainty that the finger with his ring tion at court.

is

not his wife's borrows from very old

class as reflected in

tales,

but

is

also a careful articulation of

even the smallest part of the body.

king's bards at just the

moment when

Finally, Taliesin silences

the

they present themselves for largess, and thus

takes away their financial reward too.

Dafydd ap Gwilym Writing in Welsh from the Celtic Fringe of the British

Isles,

Dafydd ap Gwilym

is

fellow to William Dunbar and Robert Henryson, although they wrote in the

Northern English the early

dialect of

Welsh poet

Middle

Scots.

He

also looks back to the tradition of

Taliesin, represented in the fictional Tale of Taliesin

Grufydd's world chronicle. In

this,

Dafydd

is

heir to

an

from

Elis

exalted, almost sacred con-

Dafydd Ap Gwilym

cept of the role of the poet. (See Patrick Sims-Williams, "Dafydd ap

87

Gwilym and

Celtic Literature," Medieval Literature: The European Inheritance, ed. Boris Ford, 11983], 313.)

Dafydd in

fact domesticates this tradition, retaining its exacting stan-

dards of craftsmanship, but substituting an ironic poetic persona for the bardic

For while Taliesin was a figure from the oral

voice.

past,

Dafydd was formed by

a

highly literate European lyric tradition. (See Helen Fulton, Dafydd ap Gwilym and the

European Context, 1989]). Strangely enough, the poet to [

often compared, his near-contemporary Geoffrey Chaucer, all,

nor

Middle English poetry

is

whom is

Dafydd

is

most

not an influence at

Resemblances are due primarily to

in general.

shared European influences. Lyric genres

models

from the continental European tradition provided Dafydd with

to play with

and

to personalize through reference to his

stance, in Aubade, he takes the traditional

parting,

and

invests

humor

into

it

song, in

own

which the

life.

lovers

For

in-

lament

with the man's indifference to getting caught.

After spending the night with his lover

Something

dawn

Gwen, he observes

that

started going wrong.

The edge of dawn's despotic veil Showed at the eastern window-pale

And there it was, the morning light! Gwen was seized with a fearful fright, Became an

apparition, cried

"Get up, go now with God, go hide! His contribution to the aubade in

Welsh

as dyfalu,

is

his use of elaborate poetic

such as "dawn's despotic

poetic conceits, such as his figuring the sun as

one of the

finest aubades in English. For

comparisons known

These resemble John Donne's an old busybody in The Sun Rising,

veil."

more on

this

form, see Jonathan Saville,

The Medieval Erotic Alba: Structure as Meaning, (1972). Dafydd rings changes on other lyric genres as well. In Winter, he inverts the reverdie,

or spring poem, investing

it

with local significance:

Across North Wales

The snowflakes wander, A swarm of white bees.

And

meaning to the ubi sunt poem with the memhouse, the speaker says, abandoned an

in The Ruin, he gives personal

ory of a

tryst.

Looking

at

Nothing but a hovel now Between moorland and meadow, Once the owners saw in you

A comely cottage, Even while making an recall

bright, new.

elegiac observation

moments of love:

about the transience of

life,

he stops

to

Dafydd Ap Gwilym

88

Life

illusion

is

A tile whirls Or

and

grief;

off, as a leaf

a lath goes sailing, high

In the keening of

Could

it

Sturdily

The topos of the ruin has

be,

kite-kill cry.

our couch once stood

under that wood?

a long tradition in Celtic, as well as

Old and Middle

English poetry; students might want to contrast Dafydd's palpable love of this

world with the asceticism in the Old English The Wanderer. The

Girls of

Llanbadarn personalizes not so

Roman literature that persists in later young women in a public place. Ovid ater as a

promising

locale; for

Dafydd

much

a genre as a topos

from

Christian European poetry—the pursuit of in his Art of Love suggests the it is

his local

Roman

the-

church in Llanbadarn, a town

outside Aberystwyth:

Every single Sunday,

Llanbadarn can

Go

to

I,

testify,

my

church and take

stand

With my plumed hat in my hand, Make my reverence to the altar, Find the right page in

my

psalter,

Turn my back on holy God, Face the girls, and wink, and nod. In contrast to is

to

some of his boasting poems,

be laughed

at.

the whole, Dafydd

this

one confesses that

his only

His lack of guilt about pursuing love in church is

less moralistic

is

reward

striking;

on

than Dunbar and Henryson, and even than

Chaucer. Dafydd's personal touch

is

also seen in

One

Saving Place,

which describes

his

search through Wales to find his beloved Morvith:

There For

at last

I

made

the bed

my Morvith, my moon-maid,

Underneath the dark

leaf-cloak

Woven by

an oak.

saplings of

The Morvith (Morfudd) who is frequently named in his love poems was a real woman; her husband, "the little hunchback" mentioned in a document of the time, is the "Hateful Husband" in the poem of that name (Sims-Williams, 306). Though Dafydd excoriates him in terms he could have borrowed from Ovid, he places him in a contemporary Welsh setting. The husband is a spoil-sport, who fails

to

respond to love or to the pleasures of spring:

Dafydd Ap Gwilym

89

I know he hates play: The greenwood in May, The birds' roundelay

Are not

for him.

The cuckoo,

1

know,

He'd never allow

To

Dafydd alludes

on his bough, on his limb.

sing

Light

to the cuckoo, traditional harbinger of spring (see the

English Cuckoo song, Sumer

is

icumen

in),

Finally, in the Tale of a Wayside Inn,

the fabliau. first

He

to refer to his

own

Dafydd experiments with

a narrative genre,

departs from the usual format, however, in telling the story in the

person, and thus creating a comic persona for himself.

fated assignation in the inn,

Englishmen

Middle

adulterous situation.

in the

He

describes

an

ill-

where instead of the young woman, he finds three

bedroom: For, by

some outrageous

What

got was not a

I

miss,

kiss,

But a stubble-whiskered cheek

And

a triple whiskey-reek,

Not one Englishman, but (What a Holy Trinity!)

three,

Diccon, 'Enry, Jerk-off Jack,

Each one pillowed on

As he ing

his pack.

clumsily makes his retreat, he prays to Christ to save

little

concern

him from harm, show-

for the sinful intent of his enterprise:

So

I

clasped

my crucifix,

Jesu, Jesu, ]esu dear,

Don't

Though he

let

people catch

expresses regret that he

me

herel

had "only God's"

love that night, the speaker

humorously prays that He will help "mend my wicked ways." Teaching Dafydd in English translation, while it entails a

loss,

has the advan-

linguistic hurdles. He can tage of allowing students to sample his oeuvre without those focusing on particularly above, mentioned contexts the in easily be presented

Celtic

background and

literary genre.

Though he wrote

in the fourteenth century,

seventeenth-century English Dafydd has certain resemblances to Elizabethan and identity than most Middle poetic of sense developed poets, who had a more been sharpened by the have may self-consciousness English ones. His literary some ways resembles in which Einion, Welsh treatise on poetry of Father

Dafydd Ap Gwilym

90

Renaissance English arts of poetry (Sims-Williams, 307). In a course with an emphasis

on form, Dafydd's

dyfalu

can be compared with Donne's conceits and the

metaphors in Shakespeare's sonnets.

William Dunbar Like the Scottish Henryson

and the Welsh Dafydd ap Gwilym, Dunbar worked

the so-called Celtic Fringe, the northern and western edges of the British

which were

less

Anglicized than other parts. Unlike Dafydd, however, both

and Henryson wrote

in a language—Middle Scots—which

northern dialect of Middle English. fluence

on Middle

Scots,

but

(It

this has

has been suggested that Gaelic was an

students often find Dunbar's language difficult, his poetry

colloquial

it

allows

them

Dunbar

was not Celtic, but a in-

not been proven, and the Scots poets of the

time refer to their language as "Inglis" so as to distinguish

original, for

in

Isles

it

is

from

Gaelic.)

While

worth teaching in the

to experience his virtuoso style first-hand.

Dunbar has

Middle Scots diction which he augments with ornamental

a

alliteration,

and against which he plays off liturgical Latin, as in his refrains to The Lament for the Makers and Done is a Battell, with a musical and often onomatopoetic effect. (For a helpful analysis of Dunbar's poetics, see Denton Fox, "The Scottish Chaucerians," Chaucer and Chaucerians, ed. D. In the Lament

on the

for the

Makers,

Dunbar

S.

Brewer, [1967], 179-87.)

takes the traditional genre of complaint

transience of earthly things and infuses

it

with a new sense of self-con-

sciousness about poetic identity. After speaking about Death's implacability to people in general—he spares

"no lord

for his piscence,

/ na

clerk for his intelligence"—

he moves on to his primary subject, poets:

I

among

se that makaris

the

laif

Playis heir ther pageant, syne gois to graif;

Sparit

is

nocht ther

faculte:

Timor mortis conturbat me.

He a

balances the conventional warning against pride typical of the ubi sunt

sense of affection for the poets he admires, past and present. First

noble Chaucer of makaris

flour,"

whom

on the

poem with list is

"the

he and the other Scottish Chaucerians

revered for bringing continental rhetorical sophistication into English poetry.

and Gower as well as homage to his northern English and Middle Scots precursors, many of them unknown to us today. Some of these, like the Clerk of Tranent, author of the Anteris of Gawane, may have written in the alliterative style which flourIn addition to three southern English poets (Lydgate

Chaucer), Dunbar pays

and in Scotland long after it had died out in the Dunbar proved himself a master, with his bawdy tour de force, Wemen and the Wedo. (See Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative 115-21.) Dunbar's inclusion of twenty northern and Scottish poets

ished in the north of England

south, and in which the Tua Mariit Revival, [1977],

suggests a self-conscious regional,

and even national

pride, especially in the case of

William Dunbar

91

the two authors of epics recounting resistance against England, John Barbour (the Bruce, ca. 1376) and Blind Harry (Wallace, ca. 1475). If the Latin refrain of Lament for the Makers, (Timor mortis conturbat me), from the Office of the Dead, underscores the somber message of the poem, that of Done is a Batell, (Surrexit dominus de sepulchro), from the liturgy for Easter morning,

conveys a contrasting mood of joy. It draws from the account in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus of the harrowing of hell-Christ's freeing of the Old Testament souls to go to heaven-in portraying a triumphant Christ as military

hero victorious over Satan. The ornamental alliteration

from The Dream of Morte Arthure, to Piers Plowman tradition,

alliterative Alliterative

Christ as a knight jousting against Satan for

the

recalls heroic

poetry in the

Rood, to the fourteenth-century

B-text passus 18, with

human

its

account of

souls:

Dungin is the deidly dragon Lucifer, The crewall serpent with the mortall stang, The auld kene tegir with his teith on char.

One

is to group them thematically and poems like The Wanderer, Contempt of Makers, and Dafydd's The Ruin, with a series

strategy for teaching religious lyrics

chronologically, matching a series of ubi sunt

Dunbar's The Lament

the World,

on the

for the

Crucifixion and Resurrection, like The Dream of the Rood, Done

and metaphysical poems from the Renaissance 9 and Herbert's Easter).

(like

is

a

Battell,

Donne's Holy Sonnets 6 and

Proving Dunbar's extraordinary range of genres and modes, In

Secreit Place this

Hyndir Nycht takes a 180-degree turn from the preceding two poems, being a bawdy satire in the

much an

manner of Chaucer's

fabliaux.

One

influence in satire and parody as in the

that he explicitly acknowledges. In this

continental

lyric

suspects that he found

more

Chaucer

as

respectable area o( "rhetoric"

poem Dunbar

own purposes He parodies the

adapts to his

genres which Chaucer had already naturalized.

chanson d'aventure, in which the speaker overhears a lament or a conversation between

two

lovers,

soon becomes

clear

from the

white neck makes his not courtly at a

more

man complaining

opening in courtly fashion with the

aloofness: "I can of you get confort

all.

attractive,

gests that there

nane / how lang

lover's ugly

"quhillelillie" rise),

will

about the woman's

you with danger

dell?" It

appearance, his explicit language (her lovely

and the woman's

willingness, that they are

We are reminded of Nicholas and Alison in Chaucer's Miller's Tale, but equally speedy, couple. (Dunbar's woman's giggle- "Tehe"-sug-

may have been

actual influence

from the

tale.)

Secreit Place

In addition to the chanson d'aventure, In

parodies the genre of

woman's song within the dialogue. In analyzing Dunbar's more extensive account of woman's voice in the Tua Mariit

Dunbar's

Wemen and

the

Wedo, Maureen Fries argues that

treatment of sexually willing or voracious

for the purposes of satire ("The 'Other' Voice:

Transcendence in Late Medieval British Medieval Women's Song, ed. John F. Plummer,

women was

Woman's Song,

Literature,"

antifeminist, used

and

its

Vox Feminae: Studies

in

[1981], 164).

its

Satire,

Robert Henryson

92

Robert Henryson Robene and Makyne Henryson earns

his reputation as a "Scottish

Chaucerian" in Robene and Makyne

by parodying courtly modes and genres. The discussion of courtly love sentiments

by

rustics resembles the use

Tale

poem

(a

to

Fable, The Cock love,

of courtly language by chickens in the Nun's

which Henryson was indebted and

the Fox).

When Makyne

in his adaptation of the

Robene the "ABCs" of

teach

tries to

Priest's

Aesopian

she echoes the conventional attributes of the courtly lover in Pertelote's

structions to her

henpecked husband Chauntecleer

Be heynd, courtas and Wyse, hardy and

fair

feir,

deir,

dre,

.

.

.

Chaucer's use of courtly language for parodic purposes

recalls

in the Miller's Tale.

of

in-

women want:

fre;

So that no denger do the Quhat dule in dern thow Be patient and previe. This wording also

what

as to

The

"heynd"

adjectives

the epithets applied in that

humorous by the speed of

work

(gentle)

and

"previe" (discreet) echo

to Nicholas as a courtly lover,

And Makyne 's

his courtship.

she doesn't gain Robene 's love—"Dowtless but dreid

which are made

claim that she will die 1

if

de"—echoes Nicholas's

protestation to Alison.

In addition to courtly language generally, Robene and Makyne parodies a

ber of

lyric genres.

As

Dunbar's In

in

Secreit Place this

Hyndir N?cht,

it

num-

follows the

pattern of the chanson d'aventure in which the narrator recounts a conversation

overheard between two lovers. in

which

a

man

More

significantly,

of higher status or education

or without success.

The

effects are

versed in the seduction, with

amusing

shepherd Robene, and second because the

and troubadour

poetry,

is

recasts the genre

first

because the genders are

/

quhill

we

re-

the bashful and uncomprehending

pastourelle, well

represented in Goliardic

When Makyne

and local twist through allusions makes her suggestion, Robene is too

worried that his sheep will wander off to respond: "Peraventure besyd

of pastourelle,

seduce a shepherdess, with

given a contemporary

wool industry.

to the British

here,

Makyne pursuing

it

tries to

my scheip ma gang

haif liggit full neir." In an update of Andreas Capellanus's

twelfth-century observation that love

is

unsuited to peasants because they lack

Henryson seems to be poking fun at the work ethic of his middle-class audience. Students might want to compare this treatment with the satirical reflection of the sheep-raising economy in The Second Play of the Shepherds, where the shepleisure,

herds visiting the infant Christ are rendered in contemporary fifteenth-century English terms. Finally,

Makyne's strong voice in the dialogue suggests

of woman's song. But although students

woman who all haill,/

eik

may be drawn

affinities

with the genre

to her portrayal as a strong

and her virginity ("and thow sail haif my hairt and my madinheid"), they should consider that Henryson may actu-

boldly offers her love

Robert Henryson

ally

be antifeminist,

satirizing

Women and Chaucer's Wife

Makyne

in the

93

manner of poems like The Abuse of Maureen Fries in Vox Feminae,

of Bath's Prologue. (See

164.)

In addition to the

poems mentioned above, Robene and Makyne can be taught

with a famous matched pair highly indebted to the Passionate Shepherd to his Love,

and

pastourelle tradition,

Raleigh's Nymph's

Marlowe's

Reply to the Shepherd. Further,

Henryson's depiction of a bashful male shrinking from a sexually forward

can be contrasted with a

woman

The Disappointment. This could be an occasion for voice in male- and female-authored poetry.

woman

Aphra Behn's discussing the issue of woman's

poet's depiction of a similar topic,

The

Early

Modern

gO

**H

Period

l—»

John Skelton Philip

Sparrow

A clerical education and even the act of taking orders did not cause a writer to lose his (or her) sense of

humor,

love of wordplay,

the death of a sparrow combines piety, as

God's providential care of tentiousness.

all

The young Jane

ousness in the face of death,

it

of fun. Skelton's

poem on

recalls the scriptural figure

denoting

and

spirit

mockery of an innocent

pre-

very hard to attain an adult

seri-

creatures, with gentle

Scrope, is

who

tries

also appealingly childish. Eventually Skelton puts

himself in the picture, in effect asking the reader to look at humankind as inherently both foolish

and

and not

tender, sincere

The management of tone

is

a

little

given to

artifice.

important to understanding the poem.

Discussion can begin with the idea of a literary work that departs from

by intentially mocking

its

genre: the fact that this

is

a

"mock

elegy"

its

may

norm

prove a

mockery in More's Utopia, Gascoigne's Woodmanship, and Sidney's Astrophil and Stella. What does an author gain by mocking his characters and even himself? Mockery often engages irony, the turning of sentiment from sincerity to implied critique. What lines in Philip Sparrow ask to be read as ironic; what lines permit an interpretation that allows for both sincerity and useful introduction to the

irony?

Students might be asked to consider whether there is a special edge to mockery of a young girl. The nature and extent of her education would

Skelton's

have been limited by customary attitudes toward the roles of women in society: in theory Jane should be chaste, silent, and obedient as Vives recommends in his treatise (see Perspectives:

Government and Self-Government). Does she seem Why does Skelton make her so lively, so

likely to develop into such a person?

of course, a persona of the poet as well as the figure of his beloved young friend; if students have discussed the creation of a persona in The General Prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, they will have a point of naively charming?

comparison with dies

some of the

She

its

is,

function in Philip Sparrow. In this case, Skelton's Jane paro-

attributes of the

humanist poet. She mourns

for her

sparrow in

fragments of literature drawn from a hodgepodge of sources: classical, medieval, and religious and secular. But her mistakes, while indications of an imperfect learning, also illustrate the inventive powers of the imagination

from tradition and the

past.

and an escape

96

John Skelton

A serious side of the poem

is

when

apparent

it is

considered as history. Skelton

wrote shortly before Henry VIII caused the church in England to become Protestant;

it

was supposed that reformed churches would

and

tolic practices

reject those that

revive the purity of apos-

were condemned as idolatrous and venal.

How

does Skelton treat the subject of idolatry? Considered in light of church moral doctrine,

son.

Jane

on him beyond all reacondemned, however; is the poet's love students may want to compare Skelton's Jane

certainly overfond of her sparrow: she dotes

is

Her doting

celebrated rather than

is

for her similarly regarded? Interested

with her archetype, the Beatrice of Dante's The

Sir

New

Life.

Thomas Wyatt

The power of Wyatt 's verse is, in some degree, a borrowed and reflected one: there are very few of his poems that do not gain immediacy, verve, and a certain argumentative brilliance when compared with those of Francesco Petrarca, known to English /readers simply as Petrarch. Equally true hibits his /

that

unique

when

gift

set beside

is

that almost every line of Wyatt's poetry ex-

of meter and imagery: they make a virtue of a certain roughness the

work of later

poets, such as

John Donne, would become the

^antithesis of a polished^ style. Yet Wyatt's sturdy lines: "But

all is

turned through

my

/ and I have leave to go of her goodness, / And she also to use new fangledness," stand up well beside Donne's elegant wit: "I can love both fair and brown, / Her whom abundance melts, and her whom want betrays. / I can love her, and her, and you, and you, / I can love any, so she not The difference betweenthese poets sho^ild-remind students that Wyatt, be true." true to his career as cou rtier a nd diplomat, wrote Occasional poetry, designed almost by necessity to serve the exigencies of the moment. As StephenGreenblatt's study on the "self-fashioned" poeTshows, Wyatt exemplified a common habit of mind in this gentleness

/

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

.

.

.

respect. (Renaissance Self-Fashioning:

The samples of way of

From More

to

Shakespeare [1980]).

Petrarch's verse included here as

assessing Wyatt's diction.

Where

companion

pieces provide a

Petrarch says he will "stay with his lord

(i.e., love) until the last hour," Wyatt says he will go "into the field with him to live and die"—a locution that preserves the martial imagery of the poem's opening.' Sometimes Wyatt's English text works punning wonders that cannot be achieved

in Italian.

Where

Petrarch writes of a beloved "cerva" (deer), Wyatt describes his

pursuit of a "deer" I

"heart/hart,"

-

and

who

is

also, obviously, a dear.

becomes commonplace

The pun, with

its

companion

in later English lyric.

Robert Durling's edition of Petrarch's verse notes tough passages in the poems

its

briefly

dolce

stil

runs through questions of nuovo or "sweet

new

style"

Petrarch transformed

style:

what was

called

by addressing his lady in terms that suggest

her divine nature (which Dante had done before him) but also imply his idolatry.

By

contrast,

both Wyatt and

his lady are represented as typically

human. Disgusted

weathered and old," complaining

by her fickleness, Wyatt rejoices that she will

"lie

to the only thing that will listen to her, the

moon. This toughmindedness defies compared with

the

conventions

of Renaissance

love

poetry— it can be

Henry Howard,

Earl of Surrey

97

Shakespeare's sonnets repudiating his so-called Dark Lady as well as his bittersweet lines to the beloved young man who betrayed him. Students need to notice in

Wyatt's poems the popular and related themes often referred to in Latin: tempus or "time flies," carpe diem or "seize the day." These themes were so endlessly

fugit

reworked they frequently became the pretext for satire, as here in Wyatt. But Wyatt's moral voice needs also to be recognized. In addition to the short lyric Lucks,

my

fair falcon,

Wyatt's imposing verse

poet's capacity for a stoic resignation

when

letter to

John Poins conveys the

faced with misfortune. Like so

many

other poets whose principal work was to serve at court, Wyatt-accepting his exile from the center of power—turns to the poetry praising the virtues of simple country

Jonson's To Penshurst, and Marvell's

life.

Own

parisons with Wyatt's Mine

On

John Poins:

all

make useful compoems echo sentiments in

Appleton House these

Horace's verses to his Sabine farm.

Henry Howard, Surrey was a courtier-poet, at twenty-eight, he

and

Wyatt before him and Sidney

had neither chance to mature,

did Sidney. His verse

favor, as

compared plet)

like

Earl of Surrey after

him. Executed

Wyatt; nor to recover royal

brilliant nonetheless. Surrey's sonnets

is

form

to Wyatt's for their

as did

to those of later poets for

(octet

/

sestet as

which they

should be

opposed to quatrains and cou-

establish the form.

Why is

Surrey's

solution better for English poets?

Surrey found

many

of his subjects in history and politics: TK' Assyrians' King,

describing the suicide of a

imagine one

who

is just.

Self-Government to see century. Politics

London;

his

weak and effeminate

how

the idea of a good governor took shape later in the

becomes personal

poem on

king, implicitly asks readers to

Students can look ahead to Perspectives: Government and

when he

for Surrey

is

imprisoned for rioting in

the occasion becomes a lament for past happiness, lost

youth, and the death of the king's son and his companion, Henry Fitzroy. Their friendship exemplifies what has been termed a homosocial bonding, illustrated

and conventionally by Chaucer's pairing of Palamon and Arcite in The and later with radical shifts of character and intention by Sidney's and Musidorus in The Arcadia. Pyrocles cousins Surrey's elegy to Wyatt probably overstates his connection to the older poet; earlier

Knight's Tale,

there

is

no

indication that the two were very close.

celebration of Wyatt as the

emphasizes Surrey's

new

British poet

skill as a satirist

who

and thus

Its

importance

is

rather in

can replace Chaucer. The

as a social reformer.

its

poem

This was not an

unusual stance for a poet of his time. Sidney's Apology for Poetry and other contemporary treatises on poetry can point up the importance of the poet as moralist.

Surrey's

demns

own

the city for

on London-London Thou Hast Accused Me-harshly conhypocrisy and vice. It can be compared with another critique

satire its

of London, the gently witty In

can

reflect

on the

the

Manner

of her Will by Isabella

poet's status (Surrey a

Whitney probably of the "middling

sort") as

nobleman from an index

Whitney. Students a

powerful family,

to his or her point of view;

Henry Howard,

98

Earl of Surrey

can become an opportunity to discuss

this

how the

reader's status affects his or her

interpretation of the text.

Thomas More

Sir

Utopia More's longest and best-known prose work needs to be understood as an example of a typically humanist

style

erature of courtiership that

know more about works

knownjisjserious

play" or serio ludere,

became so popular

in the early

and of the

in this style, students can go to Erasmus's Praise of Folly;

of his society— the monar-

in the Praise, as in (Jtopja 2jli^ajjdiojr_cjritic^

chy, the church, the professions—but in the persona, a fictive narrator, of

is£io^ntirely_reliable. Morels Utopia

Moxe^who

N either

can be identified

Erasmus pointed out in The

Praise of Folly,

[

jf

whether

why

so

and (Hythlodaeuj) who

as representing

an entirely credible

is

a

posi-

Hythlodaeus means ^e arned in nonsensg^^Morey

Greek. Students will need to be ready c ide

one who

in effect a(dmJojgu^ tafc^eeii^wo speakers:

although bot h speak_a good dea l of sense from time to^mfcJIlieJTnamesjue-

tion,

gest they are e^ch_a type of foqfc as

is

takes the riart of a practical sta tesman^,

philosop her^

v^

lit-

modern pe riod. To

either, neither or

when

stands fo r^fofly) as folly

is

rnoTia in'

reading and discussing this text to de-

both of the speakers

is

being foolish or sensible an d/

.

A good way to begi n analyzin g Utopia is to distinguish thedrfferenc^Jbejtween Books I and II. Book II was actjjally-Wj-itten before Book I and represents the form of soc ietydiatjthe speakexfighlg daeus regards as^dea L In this respect, the state 1

—

of Utopia resembles other ideal commonwealths, notably Plato's Republic.

name means

It is

and therefnrej^ needs to be examined for assumptions it not justif y.! Students should ask what Hythlodae us does 2 -^7 doe s not recognize about human beings when he describes an entirely rational also just

an

ideal

(its

"jnowhere")

Why does Hythlodaeus equate polit cal rationali ty with an ab se nce of private property Why do es he see a rational gov-

state

,

inhabited by e ntirely rational peo ple.

i-

?

ernment a s one that lacks any kind of inherited office (a monarchy or nobility, for example), and actually gives little importance to personal taste and even to family ties? Is this folly? If it is folly, is it to

be credited, as

[Students should confront the so-called "Cretan I

\

liar

it is

a fool

who

speaks

paradox"— "All Cretans

lie

Cretan speaks this"— as the conceptual basis for the language and description

government It is

in

Book

3

II.

also important to try to search for

what might be

called the inferential co n-

some discussion of the historical setting and context in which Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia. Students should know that Sir Thomas More (to Ro man Catholics also St. Thomas Mo re) eve ntually (much after writing Utopia) op posed his faith as a Christian to what h e tent

saw

i

n Hythlodaeus 's accoun t. This search

as the

ungod ly

rule of his king,

Henry

will require

VIII,

who

sought to separate the English

cKurch trom the papacy. Alastair Fox's biography, Thomas More: History and Providence (1983) has disturbed More's pious image, but not without evidence. More's history

Sir

Thomas More

99

Jiejacrthatas Lord Chancellor he dealt cruelly with heretics, doubtless from the same principles that led

him to defy His kin g. QiscussiorTfen the government of Utopia can begin by testing the assumption

that sustains Hythlodaeus's pol itics: the belief that majikind

-p

rire ly

reasonable, rational,

and

free

is o r can become en from gre ed.CT o Christians^ his position was


>

Students can assess these positions in light of their

how

appreciate r eadings

More's

first

own

readers might have reactecQThe

politics ancTalso to

d ifference betwee n

up the question of personal autonomy and freedom Were the sub\

brings

.

of Henry VIII free to do what they thought was right, to act on principle? If \ they were the king's servants, hrwvjriitlifijl rrmlH rhpy Kp, given h' s immense au- J

jects

ority ? Treatises

on the conduct of rulers and

subjects often

assumed that a head

of state would appreciate the advice of his servants; quite a few hinted that he

would

^ome

not.

Perspectives:

of the issues implicit in Book Government and Self-Government. )

I

are raised again by texts in

— ^—

with a frame that is only partly fictiona The More did go to Antwerp with a diplomat and friend called Peter Giles. He was on the king's service, and both abroad and at home a man of much business. How and where does the writer More begin to represent himself as a fiction, More the speaker? Clues abound early in Book I: Utopia is literally "No Place," and its physical features are non-existent. The writer More's representation of a nowhere Finally, Utopia presents the reader

l.

writer

land implicated in t hat

in the

first

its

irony

and extravagance the whole genre of

travel literatu re

quarter of the sixteenth c entury stirred the ambition of Europe an

reader s. Piqued by stories of great wealth, armchair explorers imagined

might improve themselves were they adventurers saw the Americas

lowing Sir Walter Raleigh's

—*N3ut

the fact that Utopia

island with

its

is

New

World.

how

they

How some

real

represented in extracts from their accounts

treatise

is

to travel to the

on Guiana

(see

fol-

"The Discovery in Context").

pictured as vaguely similar to England in being an

principal city near a river warns readers against imagining that any-

thing they could encounter in the

New World would

be

really

new

to

them./

Hythlodaeus's account of his discovery suggests that wherever explorers go, they see

what they have brought with them,

some

at least to

degree.

Perspectives

Government and Self-Government This section

we hope,

intended to complement the study of government in Utopia, which,

is

will

seem

less

curious

when compared

to the variety of opinion

subject by other writers of the century. For readers cellent surveys

may be

Sixteenth Century (1928)

Modern

Political

useful: J.W. Allen,

remains a

Thought (1978)

but excellent account

is

to be

is

classic;

A

new to

in

on

and Quentin Skinner, The Foundations

Quentin Skinner,

to the subject. "Political

Philosophy" in

erary history usually like discussing the political implications of early their doing so often gives

period to

life.

them

a stake in the

of

A briefer

The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Schmitt (1988). Students of

and

the

couple of ex-

History of Political Thought in the

an indispensable guide

found

this area, a

modern

lit-

texts

outcome that brings the whole

Government and Self-Govemment

A

101

beginning can be quite simple. To assume that because England was ruled

by a monarchy

it

had no appreciation

the Bible declared that a

she had

no chance

for the welfare of subjects; or that because

woman should be

in subjection to her father or

husband,

to express herself entirely misrepresents the situation.

As the

few examples in this section suggest, some opted for an absolute and authoritarian

government but others did

not. Students can identify

and

test

the assumptions

supporting various positions. Tyndale thought that absolute government was tified

by God,

who spoke of rule

in scripture; Elyot

saw that

it

jus-

corresponded to the

order of nature, as illustrated by such social creatures as bees. Others feared that to depart

from

this rule

and order

invited chaos.

By

contrast, those

who,

like

Ponet, saw merit only in a government that caused the governed to prosper, were fearful of too

much power

in the

hands of one person. He stressed not the anar-

chy of no rule but the tyranny of a rule designed to profit only the ruler. Especially is Ponet's insistence on property rights; here his argument needs to be compared to the comprehensive view of the "rights of man" which emerged during the Romantic period. In every case, it should be understood that just as the literature of our own period makes sense in relation to ideas of how society should

striking

function— ideas that are so

common

as

not to need stating—so also was the

ture of earlier periods understood in light of assumptions

mained

and

litera-

beliefs that re-

implicit rather than expressed.

Because the order of the household was thought to be the basis for the order of the

state,

domestic government was studied almost

ment. As Robert Cleaver noted, the household

which the husband

is

"cheeP and

Household Government, 1598).

The

last

is

as

a

much

"little

as political govern-

commonwealth"

in

his wife a "fellowhelper" (A Godly Form of

ten years of studies

on

early

modern women

debate. Students interested in the rep-

have turned up a wealth of information and resentation of women in literature should go to Linda Woodbridge, English Renaissance (1987); for

woman's nature

an introduction

to theoretical

Women and

the

arguments about

see Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and

Models (1990). Class discussion can begin by considering the conventionally constituted doubleness of the female character who was both mans equal and inferior, his soulPolitical

mate and

his servant.

And

then there was Elizabeth: Elyot, paying attention to the woman in his lifetime, claimed

possibility that England might be governed by a

that history supplied

many

exceptional examples to the general rule of female sub-

would be more astonishing than he imagined. Students servience. But the to the interested in the terms of Elyot's defense of women can skip ahead womof nature the on conversation the how see Wollstonecraft controversy to reality

ankind developed into a

full-fledged defense of their rights.

with much Religion, because administered by the church, a social institution Here government. of kind best the on wealth and power, also elicited statements

sometimes with bloody too writers tended to focus either on the right to dissent, without justification not consequences (as Foxe did); or on the duty to conform, irrespective of kind together in natural law, the law which binds all human beings suits his vision: that Hooker did). In each case, the writer resorts to language (as

Government and Self-Government

102

Foxe

is

dramatic, while

from Hooker

is

Hooker tends

origins of government are in the

Hobbes would

law.

Embedded

to abstractions.

the germ of what would

become

human need

in the passages

a theory of social contract: the

to congregate in

communities under

elaborate the point in Leviathan.

almost all commentary on government returned to a consideration The formidable scope of a teacher's duties has recently been assessed by Rebecca Bushnell, A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and

But

finally

of education.

Practice

(1996)—an excellent study of the topic.

so important? Because

it

Why was

was only with a self-governed

could function and become prosperous. Castiglione's cally to

a teacher supposed to be

citizenry that a civil society treatise

is

directed specifi-

the situation of the courtier and addresses the need to avoid affectation,

an unattractive excess of fashion and display of self-worth. The

practical

comments

of Ascham and Mulcaster

the "quick study," and close-

mindedness or prejudice

as especially relevant to their

own

on corporal punishment, may strike today's students

experiences in the classroom. Discussion of what Mulcaster understood by

how

prejudice can lead students to an appreciation of intellectual inquiry in this period; the point

Bacon and

Sir

suspect were

some kinds of

can be made again when reading

Thomas Browne.

George Gascoigne The poems of Gascoigne exemplify

man who

sought preferment

the precarious situation of the Tudor gentle-

at court.

Students should be aware that Gascoigne's

rank mattered; he was not the privileged character that the noble Surrey was, or

Wyatt was. The difference points to the emergence one who saw himself primarily as a man of words. The politics involved in the creation of this class of writer were complex but they are usefully presented in a recent study of the booktrade: Cyndia Susan even of the status of knight,

as

in this period of the professional writer,

Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (1997). For whether or not a writer

was good

at his

work, as Gascoigne certainly was, he had to find ways to ingratiate

himself with a powerful and rich patron for various services

publish

it

and help him

who would

give him a stipend in return work from press pirates seeking to Neville and Woodmanship, Gascoigne

to protect his

without authorization. In Sonnets

to

represents his public career as a stunning failure. (As Clegg shows, his publishing

more vexed.) But he does so in terms why and how he made his mistakes.

career was even

derstand

that allow his reader to un-

Students can analyze Gascoigne's candid self-portrait for ing his

own

ambition, and warning others of

and power obscure the hard that

is

realities

how

Gascoigne's

poems

quality Castiglione

termed

liberate effects that

was supposed

his Sonnets

it is

its

way of both blam-

to let

dreams of plenty

of getting ahead in the world, especially one

notoriously given to corruption, as was the

plicit moralizing,

easy

Tudor

court.

But

for all their im-

are wonderfully light-hearted; they

sprezzatura in his

Book

of the Courtier: a

to characterize the truly

Gascoigne transforms one truism— "if

it

show the

disdain for de-

accomplished man. In

be done,

let

it

be done

Edmund

Spenser

103

quickly"-into another, "haste makes waste," cleverly linking the sequence by repeating the last line of one sonnet as the first line of the next: the effect is to make the poet's descent into poverty appear to be the result of his cumulative decisions.

Woodmanship suggests that that

to

is

it is

not so

much

the poet but rather his courtly society

to blame.

But are we to interpret without irony the "amendment" Gascoigne is supposed want and expects to achieve? Is he to be seen as rejecting or capitulating to the

The class might discuss how a sincere moralist, More's Hythlodaeus for example, would deal with the poet's dilemma. In any case, Gascoigne presents his reader with some of the choices many young men of the temptations of ambition?

period faced: should they spend the resources they have at tunes in the

city?

Should they compromise

Edmund

home

to seek their for-

their values for the sake of

promotion?

Spenser

Spenser fashioned his poetic career in direct imitation of the poet his age considered the greatest, Virgil,

who began

his

work with

pastoral, the Eclogues,

and ended

with epic, the Aeneid. The belief pervasive among early modern writers that history can repeat

itself,

at least as far as general patterns are

Spenser's conscious sense that his mission decessor,

he

is

is

like that

to celebrate a national identity.

As

Milton's sense of his mission as well.

concerned,

is

illustrated

of Virgil—like his

With important

Roman

by

pre-

differences, this

is

a habit of thought, such desire for imita-

tion contrasts with twentieth-century ideas of authorship, which gains power to the

extent that nality. its

By

it is

highly individualistic

contrast, early

traditional

wisdom, a love

could not do was leave It

may be

Queene, but the

bat. It is

modern

true, as

it is

it

and an index of the supreme value of

writers felt a kinship with the past, the

for

subjects

its

alone; they

had

origi-

burden of

and forms of expression. What they

to revive

it

albeit in their

own

way.

C.S.Lewis has said, that no one ever stopped liking The Faerie

probably just as well to admit that very few have liked

therefore

worth spending time coming

cult diction. In the Calendar

it is

it

right off

to grips with Spenser's diffi-

deliberately archaic, as

if

Spenser were reaching

to the past to find a means of making his verse memorable; in The Faerie Queene, it is densely allegorical, a way of allowing his verse to develop in a dynamic way the various meanings that collect around its powerful images. Both texts confront

readers with major difficulties in their interpretation, The Faerie Queene perhaps

supremely

so,

and students need

to be encouraged to persevere in their efforts to

understand them. Fortunately, there

is

excellent criticism available. For a compre-

hensive view to the poem, see James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of the Faerie Queene (1976); and since 1990 readers have consulted the massive The Spenser Encyclopedia, edited by A.C. Hamilton, which identifies features of style

and idiom, and includes

Enthusiasm for Spenser has flagged

work

Spenser's characters,

on various

are

on

under

comments on

generic questions.

poems

are so

the poet's politics, especially

when

periodically, in part because the

complex; but recently interest has focussed the nationalistic aspects of his

all

mini-essays

review.

Edmund

104

Spenser

The Shepheardes Calendar The "Tenth Aeglog" is about the value of poetry, what it can and should do to make its readers members of civil society. In this sense, it is a kind of metacriticism; it reflects on its own means of persuasion. It is also pervaded with irony and a disbelief in

its

own

mission:

it

can teach readers what poetry

them how hard it is The poem itself illustrates how dialogue expressing points of view. Cuddie claims

how

to write and, indeed,

is

it

also tells

poorly their age encourages poets.

creates perspective, with his

but

moral verse

is

both shepherds

misunderstood and

his

heroic verse lacks proper subjects; Piers suggests that Colin might be the one to

succeed because he

is

in love

and

love causes the spirit to ascend to see things in

an "immortal mirror." Students can compare foreconceit of the

work from which

all its

Cuddie counters by saying that Colin's an accusation that hints

The image tion with

achieve

all

inspiration

is

(see

The Apology

in fact

narrow and earthbound

for Poetry).

no more than wine,

limits

of pastoral vision.

an epic

inten-

the high seriousness that this entails, he cannot imagine the way to

This eclogue resonates with

it.

image with Sidney's "idea," the

suggests that although the shepherd can gesture toward

more

Virgil's

between two shepherds.

sents a competition

Spenser's

at the

this

power derives

seventh eclogue, which also repre-

Virgil's

work

is

perhaps more subtle;

directly keyed to passionate convictions.

The

Faerie

Queene

The "Letter to Raleigh" states Spenser's intention in writing The Faerie Queene. Comparing the project described in the "Letter"—the composition of a poem consisting of twelve books—with the actual text of The Faerie Queene, students will notice how much the poet failed to accomplish. By not writing more than six books, prompted readers to seek for signs of and disappointment in the work as it stands. In a general way, they may be implicit in the very program of the poem, particularly in its first two books, entitled "The Legend of Holiness" and "The Legend of Temperance." Spenser's Protestantism is obvious in his attack on such stock figures as the wily Abbess Corceca, and the duplicitous and lavishly dressed Duessa, a figure of the plus two cantos of a seventh, Spenser has

frustration

doubleness of the

Roman

Catholic Church. Because Spenser's hero, Redcrosse,

may think that the poet's conscience is clear; he achieved But at a more profound level Protestantism is also registered in

defeats Duessa, readers

what he intended.

the poet's doubts about the very stuff of poetry: its

its

language,

its

imagery,

its

music,

engagement with the senses and with the pleasures of the imagination.

Patricia

Romance

[1979]),

Parker's interpretation of the figure of "dilation" (in Inescapable

the continuous amplification of a subject in an attempt to represent

an attempt which an established

meaning—

never wholly successful— has opened up the rhetorical com-

is

plexity of Spenser's

its

poem. To read

mode

of

its

it

as a reflection

upon

poetic language

is

now

criticism.

Students can be encouraged to discover the varied but powerful meanings sociated with Spenser's

most malevolent

character,

Archimago.

as-

Literally "the chief

Edmund

of

images," the magician signals the deceptive potential of

all

Spenser

signs

all

105

and

there-

fore of all systems of signification. True, by foiling his intrigues Spenser's Redcrosse

Knight shows that

it is

possible to read signs correctly—if the reader has the right

moral stance toward the as

But Redcrosse

text.

by words and the histories people

tell.

is

also often deceived, visually as well

Late sixteenth-century English Protestants

sought to discriminate between signs of truth and falsehood, the

latter

for iconoclastic destruction, the former for reverent preservation.

But the task was

a rigorous one. Spenser shows

when

stantly veiled except

can also hide,

she

how hard is

it is:

he represents Una, the truth,

simply in nature. Language, as a

mask, and give

candidates

veil,

How

as con-

can obscure

but

it

tell

us whether his characters are understanding their situations correctly?

distort,

false indications.

part of his technique to defer such disclosures for later

does Spenser

Or

is

and more dramatic

revelations?

Allegory

is,

of course, a rhetorical trope that exploits the nature of language

precisely as Una's veiling signifies

Unlike

much

it;

what

allegory says stands for

medieval allegory, in which the writer actually

means— "the

a particular image

tells

what

implies.

it

the reader what

black crow was the devil," a poet might say-

Spenser requires that the reader make up his mind as to the meaning of his ures.

As Milton would

from

illusion, deception, falsehood;

of Spenser's allegory,

later insist, in Areopagitica, the

its

figures

it

does not come of its own.

and images, changes

textually, by assessing the situation each character

too.

And

fig-

wrested

is

the meaning

Readers need to read

con-

is in.

program and what 1— "The Legend of Holiness"—addresses the difficulty memorable. Book

Contextual reading

makes

knowledge of truth

it

is

at the center of Spenser's semiotic

Book

II—

maintaining a moral

dis-

of finding spiritual truth in the phenomenal world of time and history;

"The Legend of Temperance"—deals with the challenge

to

cipline in the natural world replete with sensuous pleasure, especially the pleasure

produced by pleases

is

art. Just as

not always

legory as a

mode

what seems

is

of representation

like the

meanings of

history,

it

Book

(Allegorical

Spenser's allegory, what he refers to as

is in Book I, so what at first Rosemond Tuve's work on alImagery [1966)) made readers see that

not always what

lastingly pleasurable in

its

II.

"darke conceit," was essentially dynamic;

changes with time and place. Students may be

helped by being asked to visualize the poem's narrative form. tuated by iconic

moments of a

highly pictorial character;

it is

Its

allegory

is

punc-

moved along by

terlaced plot lines that entail explanatory accounts of action, character,

and

in-

dra-

matic setting. These two modes exist in a constant and almost perfect balance; readers have to appreciate both in order to interpret Spenser's allegory. Spenser's verse

read

it

is

also intensely musical

aloud, both to themselves

without emphasizing time as poetry.

An

dimension of the

its

and

and students should be prepared

in class.

A useful

rhymes and rhythms, that

is,

exercise

as prose;

is

to

to read a stanza

and then

a

second

ideal reading should avoid a sing-song beat yet convey the aural

verse. Spenser's stanza

form (known

built

on

hexameter or

six

as "Spenserian")

is

eight pentameter or five beat lines, rhyming ababcdcd, and a final beat line (known as alexandrine), ending in another c rhyme. Its effect is elegant and dynamic; it is also unusual. Influenced by the principal stanza form of Italian

Edmund

106

Spenser

epic, the ottava rima (abababcc),

Spenser intended his

of the English language; despite

comparably dense and harmonious

poem

very different sounds,

its

verse.

to

it

show the

versatility

too could produce a

A brief consideration of the quality of the more

English language reveals that his task was incomparably

than that

difficult

confronting his Italian counterparts (Boiardo, Ariosto and Tasso, for example);

many more words

English has far fewer possibilities for rhyme and

long or heavy accents which tend to slow

and dramatic

verse, did

not get

by Shakespeare.

poetry, the

much representation before Marlowe and was made

A quick comparison of Spenser's

quintessentially English blank verse of Milton

popular only

neo-Italianate prosody with the

makes the point. Students

Spenser's prosody can be referred to the excellent article

in

ested

consisting of two

a poetic line than does Italian.

what would become the standard form of English unrhymed pentameter line known as blank

useful to point out that

It is

narrative

down

inter-

on

the

Spenserian stanza in The Spenser Encyclopedia.

The

comments on each canto, though in no way exhaustive, are dediscussion on questions of theme, imagery, and historical

following

signed to

facilitate

setting.

Book

I

—"The Legend

of Holiness"

Spenser uses the word "seems"

Canto

Students should notice

1

when he could have used

the word

how often

"is"; this alerts

readers to the problem of illusionistic deception that Redcrosse constantly confronts. is

He

quite easily overcomes Error, the dragon of the dark wood,

when Una

beside him: "add faith to your force" she says, and with that he skewers the beast.

can be compared with Redcrosse 's conquest of Duessa's dragon

Later, this victory

What

in canto 11.

The

Canto 2 nothing

is

what

is

the difference between the two conquests?

plot thickens rapidly about figures of mistaken identity; suddenly

seems. Archimago dresses as Redcrosse and fools Una:

it

know

Spenser's image of truth

the truth?

why can't

The example of another

person's

trouble— Fradubio's imprisonment—doesn't seem to help Redcrosse understand his

own

to learn

the

Here

plight.

an instance of Spenser's complex

is

from Fradubio

is

motivated at two

company of Duessa can

"wide West" to

is

like his

will reveal that

Una whose

know

the truth of his condition or realize that

own. Duessa's account of her parents she

is

and

Canto 3 she

is.

truth

when

rience

it?

opposed

7).

unveils in nature; a creature in nature, the lion, understands

who

does Spenser make the natural world so hospitable a place for the

the social world of

gest that nature retains

Adam and

as

and West and hence govnow imprisoned by a dragon of hell

parents, she will relate, were rulers of East

Una

Why

as rulers of the

an exponent of the Roman church,

erned the Universal church, although they are (cantos 5

as Redcrosse in

see only falsehood; second dramatically, as Redcrosse

seeing only falsehood cannot

Fradubio's history

allegory; Redcrosse's failure

levels: first iconically,

its

human

beings finds her so doubtful? Does this sug-

original purity

when

there

is

no human being

to expe-

Consider, for a comparison, Milton's description of paradise before

Eve sinned.

Edmund

Spenser

107

The House of Pride is one of the great set pieces of the poem. Students it is built on sand (it recalls the house of the foolish man in Scripture); why it is surmounted by a clock may be intended to illustrate the irrelevance of worldly accomplishment in achieving holiness. The old-fashioned and

Canto 4

can recognize why

rather static allegory of Lucifera

and her

six counsellors,

the seven deadly sins, serves to point up, by contrast, the

who

together represent

drama of Redcrosse's

en-

counter with Sansjoy.

Canto 5 Sansfoy has been killed, Sansloy is still abroad, and Sansjoy resides in the House of Pride: what aspects of human history do their situations reveal? It's appropriate to discuss passages in which meaning seems indeterminate in such a way as to open up rather than close off interpretation. Perhaps the aspects of

human

history Spenser symbolizes here are

first,

that the historical fact of

Christianity dispelled the absolute possibility of existing without faith; second, that social order nevertheless remains threatened by lawlessness;

pride will always suggestive

is

uncertainty

condemn

the sinner to a

not an indication that the is

justified.

without

life

text has

joy.

and

finally that

Consensus in cases so

been understood; sometimes some

For instance, although the canto represents a stock feature

of epic, a descent to the underworld,

it

does so in the guise of demonic parody.

may want to compare Duessa's descent into the underworld with another Spenser knew well: Aeneas's descent to Hades in Book 6 of the Aeneid.

Students descent

Particularly interesting Virgil's

trine denies that

Spenser's treatment of the doctor Aesclepius. Unlike

human beings,

after death. Sansjoy

poem

least as

the

healing

work and

daze.

is

philosophy of metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls, Christian docunited in soul and body, can return to earthly

poem

does not in fact reappear in Spenser's here in

exists today); nevertheless,

readers see that Sansjoy

Where would Spenser have ended

is

Book

1

at

any point

life

(at

Aesclepius begins his

not quite dead but rather in a cloudy

this story?

Canto 6 Redcrosse leaves the House of Pride regretting that he has lost Fidessa / Duessa, and blaming Una for deserting him. Spenser proceeds to illustrate how Redcrosse's correction of one mistake does not mean that he eliminates the possibility

of making others.

A comparison of Lucifera with Orgoglio, who

attack Redcrosse, indicates further depths to Redcrosse's sin.

ments of each kind of pride? Spenser's beasts are usually

iconic.

What

is

Here the Lion sym-

bolizes the purity in nature before truth; yet the Salvage nation of fauns

have quite a different response to

and

Una. Why?

culture, as incarnate in Satyrane,

Finally,

how does

waiting to

are the ele-

and

satyrs

a hybrid of nature

respond to truth?

Canto 7 Redcrosse's pride in courting and making love to Fidessa / Duessa becomes manifest as Orgoglio, whose description conveys the psychology of pride, the dreadlogically linked to falsehood and together with falsehood constitutive of ful

prison into which Redcrosse

been is

is

thrown. Redcrosse's rescuer, Prince Arthur, has he

identified as the knight of magnificence in Spenser's "Letter to Raleigh":

powerful through his deployment of

or enlightenment. His power

differs

light, virtually

always a sign of knowledge

from and complements Una's sunny essence:

Edmund

108

Spenser

she who incarnates the truth itself who directs truth against falsehood

is

incapable of acting against Archimago; he

can defy the magician and his works. Prince

Arthur projects Spenser's narrative into the world of Arthuriana, familiar to English readers chiefly through Malory's Morte Darthur and ideologically important to the

Tudor monarchs because of its association with a British identity (assowhere the Tudors were supposed to have originated) rather than

ciated with Wales,

an Anglo-Saxon one. Prince Arthur

Queen

is

traveling to Cleopolis, Gloriana's city,

London. Students can admire the deft way

Elizabeth's

fies historically discrete

dragon of

Canto

hell;

how

history

is

states that

are they distinguished

4? Spenser alludes to

the structures of papal

i.e.,

imagery uni-

elements of English cultural experience: Arthurian Britain,

Tudor Wales, and Protestant London. Una a

all this

what he considers the

Rome; by

her parents are prisoners of

from Duessa's parents, described in captivity of the true

contrast, the false

church

is

church in

Rome and

papal

its

merely specious.

Canto 8 Prince Arthur conquers in Orgoglio

who

Arthur's shield

is

decisive.

is

pride, different elements of which are incarnate

also, nevertheless, paradoxically insubstantial.

Redcrosse

is

The power of

freed from Orgoglio's palace

with Una. But Prince Arthur and Redcrosse

Duessa go

let

free.

Here

and reunited is

another

in-

stance in which students can recognize Spenser's Protestantism: he requires that

good be secured

in a battle with evil;

Duessa

is

essential to the education of a

Christian.

Canto 9 its is

Prince Arthur's history motivates his presence in Faerieland: he seeks

queen, Gloriana,

both

whom he has seen in what might be called a living dream. She

a figment of his imagination and a corporeal being

who

leaves a

mark on

the grass where she slept. Here Spenser gestures toward the truth of premonition;

he makes the reader see that our aspirations, in being experienced in time and tory,

can be realized there too.

the temptation of suicide.

He

It is is

especially appropriate that Redcrosse

at the lowest point of his self-esteem.

has been freed from pride, however, the truth does not desert

him

as

now

his-

face

Because he

Una tells him

of God's infinite mercy and grace.

Dame

Canto 10 haven that explicit;

Caelia's

house provides the

religious, moral,

will allow for Redcrosse's rehabilitation.

The poem's

the iconic figures of the three theological virtues

who

and psychological allegory becomes house

live in this

speak for themselves. Only the hermit Contemplation, turning Redcrosse away

from

his eventual

narrative

home

in the

is

two

distinct

in time

interjects a

by counseling Redcrosse to face the

Contemplation's rationale live in

New Jerusalem,

cities

is

from the heavenly

but

inherently Augustinian:

simultaneously, the city of

really

city)

and the

man city

dramatic element to the

challenges

on

earth, Christians

(here Cleopolis,

of God, which

experienced only in eternity.

It is

of earthly

is

which

life.

must

reflects

but

mystically present

appropriate that at this point

Spenser identifies what for him was the historicity of Redcrosse. Only apparently a faery,

Redcrosse

is

actually St. George, the patron saint of England. His

Saxon

inheritance complements Prince Arthur's British provenance: Spenser makes com-

Edmund

Spenser

109

plementary the two principal elements in English national history. Redcrosse is also understood to have been translated from the world of dream, a theoretical projection of the ideal, to the world of history, the record of an actual past.

Inasmuch as "The Legend of Holiness" apologizes for the creation of a Protestant church, Spenser's historicization of Redcrosse makes the sixteenth-century reformation of the church

England an event that was actually present, in some sense,

in

much earlier in its history. In effect, it takes the novelty out of Henry VIII's divorce from Rome (always rather shocking in its motivation) and makes that event part of a providential unfolding of events in salvation history.

Canto 1 1 The rescue of Una's parents follows the rehabilitation of Redcrosse. The sequence of conquests by which Spenser imagines Redcrosse's progress toward a perfect faith

entirely logical. If Prince

is

Arthur conquers Redcrosse's pride,

Redcrosse restores what Una's parents stand for—the apostolic church reconstructed in Protestant England. Students should notice the scriptural cal

symbolism of Redcrosse's

and

struggle

its

two

fight

with Duessa and her dragon,

restorative agents: the water of

and the

life

its

and

liturgi-

three days of

tree of

life.

These

are intended to familiarize readers with the universal nature of Redcrosse's victory:

both water and

Canto 12 her

tree are constantly present in the

Redcrosse

is

now

free to

life

of the faithful Christian.

be betrothed to Una;

Yet he cannot marry her any more than he can

veil.

tory to live in the

New Jerusalem. A certain

now

she can take off

move out of time and

threat remains:

it is

his-

comprised in the

duo Duessa and Archimago and is consistent with the terms of earthly life. Their weapon and medium continue to be semiotic, the systems of communication by which human beings understand themselves and instanced in Duessa's lying

letter.

Here their perversion

others.

This pseudo-pledge

is

the books and papers that Error has vomited in Canto

is

obviously comparable to

1.

What

has "The Legend

of Holiness" revealed about interpreting signs, language, story?

Book

—"The Legend

II

Temperance" Canto 12 The action of this canto is Book 10; ambitious students can compare the allegory is again explicit—at least until he puts Guyon on of

generally reflective of the Odyssey,

two

stories. Spenser's

Acrasia's island.

Tiand,

On

Its

features have always challenged interpretation.

On

the one ^\

an iconoclast: he destroys objectS-of gre at art. / he^eesVerdant from the constraints imposed upon him by cannot therefore bejjne'quivocally great. What's wrong with it? What

Guyon

is

deliberately styled as

the other hand,

this art. It

are the assumptions sustaining Spenser^sa esthetics? His theory of art case, to be divorced from m ^ral for Poetry, art

educa tes society in

pro1el*TiimJrom~T^

^

civil

it

not, in any

behavio r. Guyon's virtue of temperance must

pleasures of a merely sensuous art His mission

must incapable of moral indignati on, and

is^in a sense7 had been the cover for deep er meanings

[

and the

thai^a ddressed morals

1

^-universally accepted.

spiritual

But

life.

his

argument was by no means

Stephen Gosson's The School of Abuse

the counter-

illustrates

ase.

^ttenham's The Art of

on

teenth-century treatises sive discussion

ing to learn

English Poesie

was perhaps the best-known of the

the subject, in part because

of the figures of rhetoric and

how

to

produce "copy"—that

it

it

could thus be used by writers wish-

arguments that are

is,

six-

contains a comprehen-

as fully

developed

or "amplified" as the subject requires. In the portion of his treatise printed here are ideas

on how

to justify poetry as a

means

to a civil society:

many of these

ideas

echoed by Sidney.

are

Gascoigne's Certain Notes of Instruction

on diction—the

cusses

which

come first

English, as

is

an eminently

actual language a poet should use.

opposed

practical

all

that fo-

the extent to

was seen

as having be-

to Latin or the other vernaculars,

a language fully capable of expressing

work

It illustrates

kinds of thought.

It is

perhaps the

instance of an overt nationalism with respect to language. Gascoigne urges

writers to use

words of a

one

and

syllable"

writers

major preoccupation

is

single syllable because

who

use

them

will

"most ancient English words

are of

seem "the truer Englishman." But

with the virtues of simplicity and

Like Puttenham and Gascoigne, Daniel's

A

his

clarity.

Defence of Rhyme

is

concerned with

the craft of the poet. His sense of a national identity as the product of particular uses of language includes a consideration of tivism.

he

He

rejects a

insists, evolves

what might be

called historical rela-

blanket endorsement of "antiquity" as authoritative. Each age,

the authorities appropriate to

its

culture:

"we

[i.e.,

the English

people] are not so placed out of the way of judgment but that the same sun of dis-

upon us" as upon the writers of the past. Students interested in debates on the values of what is sometimes termed "the canon" and of up-

cretion shineth today's

to-minute literature from writers whose works constitute a multicultural

field

can

appreciate Daniel's approach to the problem of authority.

Isabella Not

until students encounter the

Whitney

work of Aphra Behn

have a chance to assess writing that

relies

in the next century will they

so completely

on

self-taught skills.

Both

Aemilia Lanyer and Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, benefited from

in-

Mary

struction in the most sophisticated

Herbert, Countess of Pembroke

1

17

modes of expression and conduct. Whitney

probably had no more than a dame-school education. She would have been taught to read scripture, write

reserved for men),

an italic script (the more complicated secretary hand was and perhaps do simple arithmetic. She would not have been

taught Latin, history, rhetoric, moral philosophy, theology. Her acquaintance with classical literature

was therefore acquired on her own. Students should compare

her deployment of

its

with Skelton's ventriloquistic parody of

figures

learning in Philip Sparrow;: are there any points of similarity in

women— one

entirely

fictional

(Whitney herself )—treat the legacy of a does each

fect

poem

Scrope),

(Skelton's Jane

classical past?

More

how

classical

these

young

the other historical particularly, to

what

ef-

use the figure of amplification, what Puttenham called "the

heaping figure"?

Whitney's that she

had

a

poem

to

London

bad time in the

is

city;

remarkable for she speaks of

its

its

control of tone. She writes

"cruelness." Yet she

is

able to

and even anger by recourse to irony. She conwhat she has lacked in London, by imagining it as in (and to) London. There is further wit in the poem:

lighten her disappointment, grief,

veys her experience of poverty, a

kind of wealth, what

it is

she leaves

her will in two senses of the word.

First, it is

a testament distributing her

wealth (her non-existent property standing for her prudent wisdom) to her descendants, those other

second,

it is

women who

a record of her choice

will venture to try their luck in the city;

to leave

and

a place that has not treated her well (an

in-

dication of her moral fortitude). In other words, she wrestles from defeat a kind of victory.

Whitney's plight needs to be understood in both gendered and social terms.

Her work provides readers with an excellent opportunity to assess the extent to which conditions of class and rank qualify strongly the determinant of sex. In many respects, Whitney is closer in spirit to men of the "middling sort" like Defoe than she is to aristocrats like Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke. Slight as it is, Whitney's work introduces to British

literature

on her own in the world—whose and (much later) Charlotte Bronte and George

an important figure— the

future incarnations appear in the Eliot.

Mary Herbert, Countess It is

a

doubtful whether Mary Herbert,

mark

in British literature

had

it

sister

not been

woman

work of Behn

of Pembroke

of Sir Philip Sidney, would have for her brother's early death.

then known

made

Her

final

The Countess of

arrangement of the material in The Arcadia, Pembroke's Arcadia, and her completion of the translation of the Psalms were as much a tribute to Sir Philip's death as her own literary project. In any case, she is as

often described as in his shadow, devoted to his work and memory. This picture may be overly conservative. The antiquarian John Aubrey in his collection of biographies, Brief Lives child she was "very yeare,

when

(first

published in 1813,

salacious": "she

had

a

much

bowdlerized), recalls that as a

Contrivance that in the Spring of the

the Stallions were to leape the Mares, they were to be brought before

Mary

1 1

such

a part

of the house, where she had a

on them and spirit

Herbert, Countess of Pembroke

vidette (a

hole to peepe out

at) to

looke

please herselfe with their Sport." But nothing of Herbert's saucy

poem

emerges in her dedicatory

to Elizabeth

I

or her elegy to Sir Philip, both

of which are models of a devoted propriety and a suitably gendered deference to authority

and command.

Herbert's rhetoric care tropes sibilities

remarkably practiced and deserves attention. Even now

is

throughout

or "care," which

is

offset

pliment to the queen. The notion of "daring" tribute to her brother's service to England,

queen has

ful "care" the

that

on the image of Elizabeth's heavy responby what the poet herself "dares" by way of com-

eleven stanzas

its

further registered in Herbert's

is

which

is

also attributed to the power-

"moving

for her country, her

all,

herself

unmoved."

Students should notice Herbert's recourse to figures from scripture, her attribution to Elizabeth of the

the same time

it

life

of King David; this compliments the queen while at

avoids a reference to King David's role as founder of a "house" or

dynasty— in short, to a role Elizabeth

I

was supposed but unlikely ever to

play.

Richard Helgerson and Claire McEachern have recently drawn attention to the

emergence of a concept of nationhood during the

last

quarter of the sixteenth cen-

tury (in Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England [1995]

1590-1612 [1997]

English Nationhood:

on

respectively).

Herbert's references to England as a nation

Students

and

and

Poetics of

may want to comment

a people in Even

now

that care-

evincing a nationalism almost certainly created not by the queen but by the

ory of her brother's

realm in her

life

and death—by contrast

elegy.

Herbert's translations permit several kinds of comparison; translations of the

first,

with the prose

same psalm by Miles Coverdale; second, with the very somber

verse translations of Boethius' Consolation by Elizabeth deft

and sometimes ingenious, her meters occasionally

it is

therefore a

good idea

to have students read her

ciate their curiously effective use

A

mem-

to her invocation of a transcendent

I.

Herbert's rhymes are always

irregular but

poems aloud

not unmusical-

in order to appre-

of the sounds and tones of the English language.

comparison with Whitney ought to be instructive but not invidious: while

Whitney's verse

is

often sing-song, Herbert's rhythms are generally quite subtle.

Whether or not The Doleful Lay of Clorinda is Herbert's poem, it performed the cultural work required by the death of a national hero. The figuration of the dead poet as shepherd

is

conventional in pastoral elegy;

poet-speaker a chance to reflect life

in

faith).

both poetry

an example

(as

in

to the future)

it

practically always allows the

which the dead

and

are given

an

it

die" recalls the very imposing terms in

Edward King,

after-

in heaven (as a reward for their

Herbert's invocation of her brother as the "shepherds' hope" which

dead, nor can scribe

on the terms

which Milton

"is

not

will later de-

in Lycidas.

Elizabeth The poems and speeches of go about interpreting

Elizabeth

literature.

I

I

will allow students to assess the

ways they

Most of what they read from periods other than

Elizabeth

the present they will understand by relying ahistorical:

whether a poem or a narrative

on

istic

is

personal and moves or persuades one they have known. What

criteria that are largely

fiction

them, or presents a social problem that seems their interpretations often lack

is

interesting,

like

a sense of literary context: the generic

factors shaping the literary work;

119

I

and of

and

styl-

historical setting-the social, eco-

nomic, and political world for which the literary work was originally intended. Considering the works of Elizabeth I, students can be encouraged to realize how

much

a

Elizabeth

knowledge of context and I's

poems provide an

setting

good

especially

influences

response"; their interpretation will almost certainly

predates the experience of reading them.

been derived (movies, novels, Students

their

What

that information

books, pictures),

plays, history

understanding.

what critics call "reader depend on information that

test case for

how

is,

may want to reflect on the nature of history itself: on facts, or does it depend on what a particular society needs to know in order to establish its own cultural norms?

tory always based

thinks

it

it

has

worth discussing. is what we know of hisis

or age

Poems The Woodstock poems Elizabeth

she thought safe to disclose to the world.

as

ences to fortune as blameworthy and to

God

as the

power who

The

Mary

of universal meaning and importance; by refusing to make accusations,

of

refer-

will vindicate

revenge her wrongs makes Elizabeth's situation as the prisoner of

tects

much

are intentionally enigmatic; they convey only as

Tudor 's anxiety

and

I

a matter

it

also pro-

the speaker.

The Doubt of Future Foes expresses a resolution absent from the Woodstock

poems.

It is

overtly political; in a sense

does our knowing that

it is

it is

a

written by a ruling

standing of the meaning of such terms as

poem about

affairs

monarch contribute

How

of

state.

to

our under-

"exiles," "subjects," "seditious sects,"

"peace"? These words not only have referents in the general sense of the term,

moment. On

they also indicate features and elements of a particular historical Monsieur's Departure

is

a frankly occasional

poem

that conveys the distress associ-

ated with maintaining a public persona in a time of personal anguish.

or not Elizabeth

I's

Duke d'Alencon was

infatuation with the

ploy to distract her courtiers from other important affairs matters it

prompted her

to write

on

poem's Petrarchan conceits poets,

a

problem

("I freeze,

and consider whether there

I

is

Whether

sincere or a less

mere

than that

in statecraft. Students can identify the

burn,"

etc.),

heretofore a resource for male

anything here to identify the writer as a

woman. As

a historical

document, the poem

raises the

vexed question of Elizabeth's

marriage, a topic she discusses in her speech to Parliament. Here an excursion into the literature of contemporary political thought

may be

profitable.

The concept of

the monarch's "body politic"— her person as at one with that of the state and

powers and representatives— is

supremely authoritative. But what would happen to

and married

a

husband

all its

central to the poem's meaning. This "body" was

whom custom and

it if

the

monarch were female

religious doctrine said she

had

to obey?

120

Elizabeth

Would ity

I

the obedience required of her "body natural" not compromise the author-

of her "body

the heart

is

politic"?

The

between reasons of state and the

conflict

dictates of

sometimes supposed to be the reason for Elizabeth's refusal to marry.

from the Psalms and The Consolation

Elizabeth's translations

tainly reveal her interest in language

and

literature,

of Philosophy cer-

but they also suggest

states

of

mind. Each addresses ways to deal with different kinds of challenge or misfortune;

we may think

in this respect,

Boethius, although a

state.

that they are especially suited to advise a head of

Christian,

much

wrote very

a

as

philosopher.

Discussion can focus on the most obvious concepts: a person's "earthly flaws" rob

him

(or her) of the joy of

knowledge, the discovery of the "sundry causes of hid-

den nature"; the prudent course is to cultivate a steady and virtually passionless state— "Chase joys," etc.; and, knowing that nature is constantly changing, be prepared for "sliding" in one's these philosophical

them? Does the

poems

own

poet's tone of regret

essentially so critical— limited her

Does the knowledge that Elizabeth wrote end of her life contribute to the way we read seem sharper because the terms of her life

life.

at the very

time for peaceful recreation? Compare this tone

with the strained but confident assertions of the Woodstock poems.

Speeches

On

Marriage needs to be read in conjunction with

though

it

was written

ple;

on two

much

earlier time:

topics primarily:

first,

that her

and second, that the kingdom would not

God's help to tion to

make

fulfill

the Departure of Monsieur, al-

to resolve the

commitment was

a decision

on the

would bear

matter,

much

minds of her

entirely to her peo-

lack for an heir. Cleverly, she calls

the latter claim; this suggests that she herself

ting married (understood to

ing married,

On

both speech and poem defend the po-

queen regnant. Elizabeth was obliged

sition of a virgin

subjects

at a

as if

is

on

not in a posi-

she were speaking not about

get-

be a personal decision), but whether or not she, hav-

a child (traditionally considered

Elizabeth was adept at such rhetorical sleights of hand.

an act of providence).

They often featured

of thought called a "concession," a point raised in order that

it

a figure

be rejected. In

this

case, she

intended that her subjects both consider her marriage but also understand

that she

had

set

it

aside for

good and appropriate

Students can appreciate Elizabeth's

skill as a

reasons.

writer in her speeches dealing with

Queen of Scots, which date from 1586. In one after another turn of phrase— "were we but as two milk-maids, with pails upon our arms"; "I have had good experience and trial of this world"; "we Princes, I tell you, are set on stages, in the sight and view of all the world duly observed"; "among my subjects I never knew a difference of person"; "accept my thankfulness, excuse my doubtfulthe subject of Mary,

ness,

and take

in

good part my answer-answerless"—she

an experienced writer and a

brilliant thinker.

exhibits the technique of

The matter

at issue was,

of course, a

very grave one. A knowledge of history is key to understanding why Elizabeth had to be so subtle and circuitous in her argument. The questions she had to answer were two: whether Mary was guilty of treason; and, if guilty of treason, whether she

should be executed. Mary, having been accused of the murder of her husband,

Aemilia Lanyer

Henry

Lord Darnley

Stuart,

Scotland (and jects in

later to

June of 1567. She

years.

I

an English

Evidence suggests that during

one such conspiracy,

conclusively.

She was

led by

remained Elizabeth's prisoner for sixteen

this

time she plotted to be released or to

last,

es-

Anthony Babington, seemed to implicate her and condemned. Faced with commanding

tried for treason

the execution of a queen and her cousin, Elizabeth at

warrant; at

body did not find

tribunal. This judicial

guilty as accused; nevertheless, she

cape. But

of her son, James VI of

of England), was defeated by her rebellious sub-

England in 1568 where Elizabeth persuaded her

fled to

to present her case before

Mary

after abdicating in favor

be James

121

first

refused to sign the death

however, convinced by her counselors of Mary's

guilt,

she did what

The two speeches reprinted here illustrate how subtly Elizabeth point when the issue she confronted was ambiguous. Her contem-

the law required.

could make a

which they meant a style demands of circumstance and contingency

poraries called this style of government "policy"—by suited to

government according

to the

rather than principle.

In times of

crisis,

Elizabeth could be forthright

Tilbury or her Golden Speech indicates.

speeches to her council

on

A

and open,

as

her speech at

comparison between her very

the subject of

Mary and her

essentially

political

popular

speeches to her subjects can be the basis for yet another consideration of "reader response."

What

are the different rhetorical strategies that each situation calls for?

Aemilia Lanyer Poems Lanyer

may be considered among

the

first

generation of English

written from a point of view not only clearly dependent

woman

to have

upon her experience

as a

but also frankly engaged in pro-woman argument. The genre has obvious antecedents in what was called "the woman question" (or in France the querelle des

woman

femmes) and had produced a very considerable body of literature in France and Italy, some of it by women. The most notable work was that of Christine de Pisan,

whose important

treatise Le Livre de la Cite des

English by Brian Ansley in 1521.

Dames (1405) was translated

The terms of the debate were

instance from scripture in which the nature of

woman

is

derived in the

into first

described both as the

same as and also inferior to that of man (following accounts in Genesis); much pro-woman argument therefore focuses, as does Lanyer's, on the figure of Eve. Lanyer's treatment of Eve, expressed by Pilate's wife in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, is remarkable for its insistence on Eve's rational powers and its claim that she ac-

cepted Satan's temptation because she did not and could not know what would redisobesult. In effect, this replaces the meaning of the Fall as an index of sin and

an exponent of reason and as such she can be and was misled. This change has the effect of establishing Eve as at least dience with something

charged: Eve

is

not his superior; in Lanyer's account, it is Adam exhibits passion and unreason when he follows Eve's example even after he

equal to

who

less

Adam

knows what

will

intellectually

happen.

if

122

Aemilia Lanyer

The obvious comparison event (Paradise

Lost, 9).

make here

to

is

with Milton's account of the same

Students will notice that

like Lanyer,

although to a

differ-

ent end, Milton gives Eve rational powers: she takes what the serpent offers because he

her he has eaten and

tells

still lives.

In other words, she reasons from ex-

made before by womankind underscores the be-

ample. This feature of Lanyer's pro-woman argument had not been

an English

writer; her insistence

on

a reasonable

ginnings of a feminist consciousness during this period. Other features of Lanyer's defense of women follow established strategies: to the charge that ferior, writers

women

as

Lanyer does in her

very tough

is

in-

letter

"To the Reader." Yet these examples are coun-

commendable.

tered by others less

Lanyer

women were

often countered with examples of powerful, courageous and brilliant

on women who study

to be beautiful, pointing out

often in history beauty has led to misery, disaster, and even death.

how

Her position

is

more critical than that often taken against privileging beauty as transient, earthly, and a distraction from moral and spiritual life. At the same time, Lanyer extols the virtues in Clifford that are conventionally reserved for

women who

occupy an

ex-

To a degree, therefore, her pro-woman argument wavers between two approaches: one that reflects a traditional emphasis on the subordination of women, and the other that presents the

clusively

domestic

role: piety,

motherhood,

generosity.

who

case for a reformation of these attitudes. Students

overview of literature in English on "the

on

Perspectives: Tracts

most

Lanyer's

Women

woman

move ahead

to

burgeoning feminist consciousness

is,

and Gender.

brilliant expression of a

however, not polemical but deeply personal. In her

Cookham she

testifies to

what might be

pendent of masculine influence. She

poem The

Description of

called a feminine sensibility quite inde-

locates her experience of this in a past that

allowed her contact with Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland tured as both a genius

loci,

an

are interested in

question" can

who

is

fea-

the spirit of a place, and as a spiritual mentor. In this

way, Lanyer combines the trope of description, usually restricted to objects such as

houses, gardens, or landscapes with the history of a conversion, her ing to the

life

of the soul. As

Description she did Sir

eye

Robert Sidney, is

not have in mind To a

how

Lanyer a

and

it

wrote The

the estate of

especially revealing. Lanyer's

in the conventional terms of pastoral

difference of

it is

mood

and

can be gauged by compar-

a testimony to friendship infused with a kind of sanctity; for

and character of

poem

a

Finally,

elegy, a

cannot return; by contrast, Jonson writes what that

tells

Jonson

it

although the two poets both celebrate the

country house, Lanyer writes an

is

poem of a

generically

a present readership of a better past that remains,

and remarkably, in a landscape of needs an old-fashioned virtue.

fully

poem on

Lanyer and Jonson build meaning around the image of the oak. For

ter past that

a

sees

A particularly acute

marker of dynastic power.

virtues

tle,

Penshurst, Jonson's

comparison of the two may prove

takes in a varied landscape

is

own awaken-

virtually impossible that as Lanyer

constantly informed by her sense of the presence of Clifford; Jonson's eye

georgic poetry. ing

it is

a

an

betepis-

wonder-

modernity that lacks and desperately

Sir

Walter Raleigh

123

Walter Raleigh

Sir

Poems poems

Raleigh's

roughly into two categories: erotic and elegiac. As categories,

fall

they are not always distinct; love and the loss of love and even the poet weaves together in

temporary, Elizabeth

bedded

I,

much

Raleigh's

life

themes that

are

of his verse. Like the literary output of his con-

poems come

to the twentieth-century reader

em-

in associations; these will condition a reader's response to the work, the

more so if that work is obviously occasional. To get a sense of Raleigh's tone, his blend of romantic

lyricism with

an almost

philosophical realism, the class can begin with his reply to Marlowe's pastoral The Passionate

Shepherd,

Marlowe

writes in a

printed here in our selection of Marlowe's work. While

manner

entirely typical of pastoral— the adventurous student

can skip ahead and read other examples of the genre in Barnneld— Raleigh recontextualizes the tropes suggestive of a

meaning

ironic

Maytime

carelessness so that they gain

in light of the passage of seasonal time, as

This retrospectively transforms Marlowe's celebration of youth so that the prelude to a meditation

on

Considered

age.

mine content,

as in

is

poems plaint

ironic.

As You Came from the Holy Land, and Milk, though in these poems the edge given to re-

sharper and more personal. Students should notice

pilgrim's consolation (such as

time and presage for

all

lovers

its

how

the

first

of these

of the pilgrim and the lover; the lover's com-

treats antiphonally the voices

and the

offer

generic conventions both deter-

also shapes the content of

Nature that Washed Her Hands in alism

becomes

it

poems can

Marlowe's poem, and also create a certain conceptual space in

which such conventional content can be made Ambivalence

as a pair, these

how

students yet another opportunity to discover

an

May becomes December.

situate love in the landscape of

it is)

inevitable loss.

The second poem

is

similarly

charged with pathos, this time deliberately generated by the poet's representation of cause and

the third stanza the poet suggests that his love will die be-

effect: in

much a fantasied lady she is); but in human but rather time itself. The

cause of the hard heart of his lady (however the succeeding stanzas the causal agent

reader is

is left

whether the

to determine

not actually a pretext to celebrate

ment. For Raleigh, the sess the

loss to

scope of pastoral

the genre:

what

lover's classic

life,

be feared

now

not

is

even

is

life

complaint of the

that

the loss of

is

life.

loss

of love

charged with disappointStudents

who want

to as-

have a good chance to entertain a retrospective of

are the salient differences between the pastoral of Spenser, of

Marlowe, of Raleigh?

How do

these

poems compare with the

pastoral as repre-

sented in Sidney's Arcadia Interested students can be encouraged to read Virgil's 7 .

Eclogues for insight into the function of pastoral as political

cent study of the genre

is

Paul Alpers,

What

In this selection, the subject of death the poet's

own

is

is

commentary.

A fine re-

Pastoral 7 (1996).

On the Life of Man and summed up in his con-

represented by

epitaph, but his general view of

it is

best

clusion of his unfinished History of the World (1614), and written during his second

long imprisonment at the order of James

worth quoting because

it

I.

The

passage, often anthologized,

not only epitomizes Raleigh's

is

own end with an almost

124

Sir

Walter Raleigh

prophetic canniness but also the

mood

of an age that had grown tired of

am-

its

bitious optimism:

O eloquent just and mightie

Death!

Whom

none could

world hath

flattered,

thou only hast

thou hast drawne together crueltie,

words,

Death

whom

the

all

out of the world and despised;

the farre stretched greatnesse,

and ambition of man, and covered

it

all

the pride,

over with these two narrow

hie iacet.

for Raleigh

was not, however, simply a matter of the body.

accurate to say that insofar as his

from

all

cast

thou hast

advise,

perswuaded; what none hath dared, thou has done; and

life

was the

politics

his sovereign's favor. Students can begin

It

might be more

of court, death was his exile

with the overtly

flirtatious To the

Queen, remembering that Elizabeth had determined that the norms of courtiership should be those of courtship. is

not, in fact,

ponder Raleigh's recourse

By

serve."

own

What

thought reveal that

figures of

to a beloved lady but rather to a sovereign? Students to such terms as "a saint ...

contrast, To Cynthia

bitter experience.

is

Although

a

all

poem

may want

desire but

none

closely keyed to the terms of Raleigh's

it

could as well be seen as a reflection of a sov-

A comparison

of Raleigh's language of reproach

with Elizabeth's eloquent embrace of her subjects' desires in her Golden Speech

how

suggest ety

very broadly the queen imposed her protean personality

and people she

to

de-

reports his disappointment at Elizabeth's in-

it

difference to his accomplishments, ereign's disdain for her subjects.

poem

As

this

on

will

the soci-

ruled.

The Discovery of Guiana The

discovery of the pioneering scholarship of historians

European explorations of the

New

World, increasingly known

contact," has provided students of literature with a

new

the

investigating

as "the history of

perspective in

which

to

and consider such writing as Raleigh's account of his encounter with the land and peoples of the Americas. The work of Anthony Pagden, John Elliott, and Tzevan Todorov indicates how profoundly different European explorers found all aspects of the New World— how different and yet also how quickly they sought to place

understand their experiences in the terms they were familiar with, that

European terms. The

literature

of "contact" should be read both for

of what

many

which

could represent novelty as familiar.

it

explorers saw as "wonders"

Raleigh's dedication to Sir Charles

conditions of his voyage; remarkable

who

Howard and his

need

to

Sir

is,

in

registration

also for the ways in

Robert Cecil outlines the

defend himself from detractors

apparently had claimed that he had not in fact gone to Guiana, and that he

had enriched himself easy

is

and "marvels," but

its

it

was to concoct

and mysterious desire to

know

expense of the

fictions

upon

state.

The dedication

illustrates

how

the bare suggestion of a trip to such distant

And Raleigh's address "To the Reader" reminds us that the New World was almost invariably coupled with the expectation

places.

the

at the

Sir

The

of gaining wealth. tual city of El

125

most vividly expressed in the concept of an

lure of gold,

Dorado, drove Europeans to the

with which they pursued their

Walter Raleigh

mad dreams

limits of sanity.

of wealth in the

by Raleigh's precise account of discovering gold ore:

el

Some

New World

madre

ac-

of the fervour

del oro.

is

implied

Not gold

it-

but the vast and hopeful promise of it. There was, of course, the presumption that the possession of gold meant control of the known world. As Raleigh says of

self,

Philip

II,

king of Spain:

It is

his Indian gold that

Europe,

bound

endangereth and disturbeth

all

the nations of

purchaseth intelligence, creepeth into councils, and setteth

it

loyalty at liberty in the greatest

on the power of gold

Raleigh's fixation

monarchies of Europe.

calls to

mind More's

Utopian economy, in which only the smallest children find

illustration

of the

attractive this in itself

quite useless metal. For further discussion of the ideology of conquest that moti-

vated both colonial powers, students could be asked to read the brief but very pithy attack

on Spanish

rule in

New Spain by Bartolome de las Casas entitled (in English

translation) The Devastation of the Indies,

ing;

first

published in 1552. Clearly,

how

con-

methods were regarded was not entirely a function of national feelthere were practices that persons from all quarters could feel were reprehensi-

quest and

its

ble.

Much of Raleigh's text registers a triangulated contest for power: Spanish who had been operating in the region for decades, Raleigh and his English cohorts, and finally the Indians who actually possessed and had dominion over the agents,

region. Raleigh

denounces Spanish

rule,

arguing that the English can win the

al-

legiance of the Indians by cooperative dealings; he also— inconsistently— claims that

the English can overcome the poorly defended Indians and whatever Spanish sistance develops to

But Raleigh

become

also takes

re-

lords of the territory.

an inconsistent view of the Indians. He

sees

them

as

and allies, often mixing fact and way he illustrates the European tendency to see the strangeness of the New World as the basis for making associative connections. The account he gives of the fiction in a single narrative or description.

aliens

In this

life of the Amazons, the warrior women of classical mythology, is largely derived from accounts in the Geographica of the Greek historian Strabo (c. 63 B.C.- 19 A.D.)

and

in the glossator Servius's

commentary

to Aeneid 11. His respectful description

of the King of Aromai represents this tribal chief as a gifted elder statesman, the sort of character

who could have wandered to Europe from Utopia or some other And he is clearly fascinated by customs he observes in his trav-

hypothetical realm.

els—they allow

him

to recognize the civility of peoples

he would otherwise regard

as entirely foreign.

Raleigh's conclusion,

was

which so

optimistically points to a conquest of

designed to convince Elizabeth that he, Raleigh, deserved praise

Students can be asked to reflect

on other

so clearly represented and also thwarted.

commonplace representation

in the

texts of the period in

The

Guiana,

and reward.

which ambition

trope of ambition checked finds

wheel of Fortune but

it

is

its

also lends itself to

126

Walter Raleigh

Sir

ironic, moralized,

and even

tragic treatment.

made with Gascoigne's youthful wish

and the

lusions of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus,

Here useful comparisons can be

to climb the social ladder, the destructive

il-

cruel manipulations of Shakespeare's

lago.

"The Discovery"

Something of the shock Europeans received

in Context

saw and landed in the

New World

is

summed up

by

Bill

M. Donovan

as they

in his in-

troduction to Las Casas's history of Spanish conquest, The Devastation of the Indies (see Raleigh,

comes

"The Discovery of Guiana.") In many ways,

to readers

when

was the shock that

it

they encounter their subject in the flesh:

Sixteenth-century Europeans sailed out into the world

edge from the ancients, above

all Aristotle;

armed with knowl-

with a long tradition of exotic

European travel literature filled with strange people, fantastic geography, and mythic creatures; and with the Bible. From these texts, Europeans had constructed a complete cosmology, one that explained how the world had begun, how it would end, the types of people—good and evil—who had once inhabited the world, and the types of people still in it. Nowhere in that system did space exist for the variety of life they encountered in the Americas. Class discussion of the texts included here can focus

edge and ignorance, fact and their representations of the

fiction, reality

New World.

It is

very early contact, such as Arthur Barlow's, friendly

and

essentially

without

guile.

would

He was

receive

important to

North America

in a cultural inventory.

would

result in

huge

profits: for trinkets

much as

sales pitch.

a real estate agent selling proplater

accounts take care

how important were records oijact

y

life

of

often item-

A look ahead to Othello's speech on the marvels

he encountered in his journeys (Othello

between what might be called

as

characteristics almost certainly sug-

weapons, dwelling places, and manner of

the Indians; students should notice if

many of

accounts of

stress that

natives of

newly developed neighborhood might be. His and

to describe in detail the clothing,

ized as

play between knowl-

goods of great value. Barlow was, in a sense, doing a

also interested in descriptive detail,

erty in a

on the

illusion that structures

show the

These

gested to readers that trade with natives

they

and

"tales

1.3),

can

alert the class to the difference

of voyagers" and "colonial reporting."

The two

genres coalesce in places, to be sure, but they are nevertheless conceptually different, the first designed to intrigue

armchair readers and the second to stimulate ad-

venturesome entrepreneurs. Beyond these designs, students should be encouraged to

find

expressions of a genuine though perhaps unsophisticated sense of

ethnography.

Laudonniere wants to explain by what systems of belief the Indians lived and

how

they communicated with each other. Hariot's account

terest in technology; obviously,

English will

manage

he

is

is

looking forward to the

to control a people

who remain

remarkable for

its

in-

means by which the

defenseless before the guns

comments on disease and the devastation it caused to native populations which had acquired no immunity to the microbes the English carried with them have been considered by Stephen Greenblatt in an essay and powder of the

colonists. His

Richard Barnfield

127

entitled "Invisible Bullets" in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social

Energy in Renaissance England (1988); the essay

is

particularly useful for

of the cultural importance of such technological expertise. servations

There

is

is

that of Michel de Montaigne,

no doubt

The most

analysis

its

astute of ob-

who

that he intends to challenge

never went to the New World. European presumptions of civility

by comparing their social and political practices with those of Brazilian natives, whose habits he learns by hearsay. But students might also be asked whether Montaigne does not also imply a supra-cultural critique of all practices that ritualvengeance, and a bloodthirsty delight in pain. Taken together, these

ize cruelty,

account of Guiana with a context in the beginnings of comparative ethnography. Further comparison with representations of the exotic texts will provide Raleigh's

in Othello

and

contexts can focus student attention

its

ideas about the "Other"

had

on the

vast interest that

for inhabitants of the British isles during this period.

Richard Barnfield Poems poems

Barnfield's

exploit the figures of pastoral that were so often a resource for

modern

poets of erotic and especially homoerotic verse in the early practice

began with the Hellenistic poet Theocritus (third century

idyllic fictions

of the

life

and

period.

The

who wrote

B.C.)

loves of shepherds, occasionally punctuated with sex-

naif—the

ually explicit passages. His characters establish the type of "pastoral

young shepherd lover who courts his beloved with the humble gifts of the countryside and imagines settling down to modest rural contentment. The type is presented in order to be mocked—gently and with sympathy for its untroubled dreams of happiness.

poems

in nature

life

It persists

illustrate is

simple and uncomplicated. Marvell's vision of pastoral

made problematic by

its

association with another

and

a literature devoted to the illustration of country

gic,

whose Mower on thinking that a

in pastoral through the poetry of Marvell,

the satisfaction as well as the danger attendant

Marvell's mowers, while they celebrate nature

and

its

of course

is

essentially alien genre: geor-

life

as the scene

bounty

as

of rural labor.

opposed

to

human

their experience of

on the land. Some might argue that work should have taught them to know better than to trust to

By contrast,

Barnfield's shepherds live without material care: their interests

art

and

nature.

its

products, are nevertheless workers

and include not only sex but

are dictated by a desire for pleasure

all

the pleasures

of the senses. Discussion needs to identify the triangle of lovers in The Complaint of Daphnis for

Ganimede and what the speaker

to that of love

love

between a

man and

him not Queen Guendolin,

divine,"

he

is

is

a

human

relations that derives

literature of Hellenic Greece, especially in

Symposium. Students

who

men

urging

is

superior

Ganimede

to

states for a fact that: "I love thee for thy qualities

invoking a model of

thority from the

claiming: that love between

woman. When Daphnis,

such

its

cultural au-

texts as Plato's

have worked through Marlowe's Hero and Leander and

have some acquaintance with Shakespeare's sonnets will already have a sense of

Richard Barnfield

128

how to

look at early

tory. It

is

modern

and

its

cultural his-

important that they keep in mind the considerable difference between

modern notions of

early

expressions of homoerotic feeling

self or herself

is

sexuality

and our own: the former do not engage ques-

much as morality. What is

tions of identity as

important to a person's sense of him-

not sexual identity but rather the control of his or her passions by

and the intervention of grace. Poems of the kind Barnfield moment, such questions as the prospect damnation) usually pose in deference to a need to play. But their

the operation of reason

writes have the effect of setting aside, for a

of salvation (or

implied reference

is

nonetheless to the possibility of enjoying a

licit

passion, how-

ever this can be realized.

The Second Day's Lamentation of the Affectionate Shepherd is a continuation of in The Complaint ofDaphnis. Once again, the poet pic-

many of the themes voiced

tures his beloved in images

common to

love poetry of the

period—less Petrarchan

perhaps than evoking the medieval blazon of beauty. Again, the speaker tempts

with

his beloved

gifts

that are suited to such rural activities as

piping, fishing, trapping.

It is

remarkable for

the poetry of heterosexual love.

"Remember

age," to "trust

knees) both day in

Cynthia render in a pastoral.

Like

its

a

life

of ease:

common

in

Affectionate Shepherd urges his beloved to

moral directives that all lovers need to keep and with what little apology Barnfield's hoplace in contemporary culture. The sonnets from

how

moerotic message finds

fit

recourse to tropes

not to beauty's wings," and to "Serve Jove (upon thy

and night"—these

mind. They indicate

in

The

its

are

easily

more formal manner the sentiments Barnfield Shakespeare's

Shakespeare's sonnets, they are predicated

also expresses

they profess eternal love;

sonnets,

on the hope of

fidelity

unlike

not the expe-

rience of betrayal.

Christopher Marlowe Hero and Leander is the Greek poet Musaeus Grammaticus, who wrote the story of Hero and Leander toward the end of the fifth century A.D. Marlowe's tale is unfinished; according to Musaeus, the story ends with Leander drowned in a storm while swimming the Hellespont and Hero a suicide, having jumped from her tower

Marlowe's source

in Sestos.

But the

spirit

of Marlowe's

poem owes much

to Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Fascinated by the idea of the transformation of material creation, Marlowe, like

Ovid, creates images of

be

essentially

is

what

is.

life

in

which what

ploits deliberately conflated categories

and

a

is

only seems to be, and what seems to

Students should notice

how

the imagery of the

of existence. Hero's costume

is

poem

ex-

both a dress

Of hollow pearl and gold"

perch on The effect of these images is to creone Guyon destroyed in Book 2 of The Faerie

kind of living work of art: "sparrows ...

her boots of coral, and "chirrup" as she walks. ate a fictive

world very similar to the

Queene. In each case,

it is

art that

is

called into question, art

the creativity of God. The obvious homoeroticism of the poem needs

and the power of the

artist to rival

to

be discussed in frank terms.

Christopher Marlowe

Yes, Marlowe's pen, for all

men"

"loves of

and

for

such he

as

makes

figures,

men

disclaimers,

its

as well as for

will attract the attention

Leander

love to

as

is

29

engaged in describing the

actually

women. Leander

1

is

simply a beautiful youth,

of the sea-god Neptune who, in allusive

he swims to meet Hero. Students puzzled

(or

troubled) by these images and what they signify can be directed to a wealth of current scholarship on sexuality in this period: an excellent study is Bruce Smith,

Homosexual Desire

in Shakespeare's England:

fines the scope of his subject

is

A Cultural Poetics (1991). How Smith de-

especially useful, as

the understanding of sexuality in the early

it

modern

establishes

how different was

period:

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sexuality was not, as the starting place for anyone's self-definition.

now

edge that impinged on what we would ask a as

man who had

.

.

.

call

The

it is

for us,

structures of knowl-

"homosexuality" did not

sexual relations with another

man

to think of himself

fundamentally different from his peers. Just the opposite was true.

Prevailing ideas asked

depravity to which

all

him to castigate himself mankind is subject.

for falling into the general

In other words, Marlowe's representation of Neptune's encounter with Leander,

which

is

and

desire for any creature

and was understood to be Marlowe was going to finish warning to

reer constitutes a

was a sign of a

offensive to

God. Thus on the one hand, assuming

poem according to Musaeus's model, Leander's cathose who tend to lose their self-control. On the other

his

For most of the poem, Leander

who

is

sexuality.

a sexual innocent, a "novice" in Marlowe's

merely "dallying with Hero

after

or other were neglected."

The experience

.

.

.

Some amorous rites and matures him is figured

Suspected /

that educates

in Neptune's watery embrace; the pattern of his education into sexuality

and

derived, as

between

men

Marlowe almost

in

Greek

as part of friendship;

enjoined to treat

certainly knew,

antiquity.

Then,

from the

men and

as bearers

literature

is

ancient

on friendship

boys were expected to share sex

upon maturity and reaching

women

pas-

into sin, a loss of rationality,

fall

hand, of course, his career also exemplifies an education into words,

whom

so suggestive of their sexuality, was written for an audience for

sion, lust,

a marriageable age,

men

were

of children and guarantors of family and dy-

nasty. Typically, at least as recorded in literature, a boy's relations

with

women

fol-

lowed his experience with men.

But ity?

just

how

serious

is

Marlowe being

in any of his representations of sexual-

may be able to bring to light a certain farcical element in deof foreplay, as when Hero, to avoid Leander, dives into her bedcovers:

Class discussion

scriptions

With both her hands she made the bed a tent, And in her own mind thought herself secure, O'ercast with dim and darksome coverture. Her downward movement recalls Leander's own earlier descent toils of the sea-god Neptune and reminds readers that the sea place where the most profound transformations occur. Marlowe

into the sea in the is

traditionally the

celebrates the

initi-

Christopher Marlowe

130

ation into sexuality as such a transformation even as he makes light of

poem

Marlowe

illustrates

human

it.

The more

Roman

poet,

experience as comprising sequences of change,

some

imposing phenomenology of the

remains Ovidian:

like the

foreseen and deliberate, others mysterious and unaccountable. Art and nature coalesce,

then become

distinct:

human

life is

Neptune's oceanic body.

as "sliding" as

Dr. Faustus

A play-text

is

not a play-in-performance and most students

out being told— instructors

who

them to read scenes aloud to an impromptu stage in order text they are teaching

the

class,

or better

yet, actually

to present a scene or

immediately comes to

ever amateurishly performed.

will recognize this with-

exploit the talent of their student actors by asking

And

two

The

life.

use the classroom as

will discover that the play-

play-text

becomes a

two (outside

after a rehearsal or

play,

how-

class),

student

some background. In the

case of

readings usually improve a good deal. as well to begin with a discussion of

It's

Marlowe's

Dr. Faustus,

an account of the legendary scholar who had acquired an

impressive erudition and yet sought a power that give students a

no education could provide

chance to identify the principal themes of the

play.

An

initial

will

focus

on what the early modern period thought were the proper limits of knowledge is a good way to introduce the choice that Faustus makes. Students should know that although some kinds of knowledge were forbidden, the beginnings of a postCopernican science were even tion. Speculation

and

what price

at

can center it is

at this early date calling

such strictures into ques-

on the question of authority, whose it is, the case that at some level Marlowe is rep-

specifically

purchased.

Is it

resenting in the career of Dr. Faustus one that he himself idealized yet at the same

time could not but condemn?

much

A very

different set of considerations will

emerge

science (or

and thinkers of the Victorian age debate the relationship of knowledge) and religious faith and morals. Interested students can

jump ahead

to

writers

later, as

The Debate on Science and

Religion in the Victorian section of the

anthology.

Students can prepare for

in-class

dramatic readings by reviewing the text in

re-

lation to the particular roles being played. Stanislowski's questions for actors pro-

vide an excellent way to open

up

and development over the

a character's nature

course of the play. Students can imagine themselves playing a particular role and

"Who am I?" (that is, the "I" of the role), "What do I want?", my way?", "What am I willing to do to get it?", "What do I do if I do

ask of themselves

"What's in or

do not

get

it?"

These questions

but they will transform ity

and

human

a motivation,

its

and

beings in conflict.

character's nature

will

words into

literary aspects

of the play

endow them with

a personal-

not address the

living speech,

create for the class a stage "society," a representation of It's

helpful

and development

if

students refrain from intellectualizing a

especially at

unless they can see for themselves why, at a

first;

human

the play will not

level,

they do. Thereafter, the refinements of meaning that

come

to

characters behave the

come from an

life

way

investigation

of images, themes, allusions, and word play will enrich but not obscure what

is

Christopher Marlowe

an encounter with

basic to theater: self

more

real

than the

reality

a virtual reality that has the

our daily

can

lives

power

131

make

to

it-

offer.

A few points to focus on in each of the acts: Act

The

1

status of

magic was vexed in Marlowe's day. Some thinkers believed an allowable white magic, which simply sought

that there was a difference between

by natural yet powerful means (precious stones and metals, charms and signs) to alter the elements of life so that they became useful to man, and a forbidden black

magic which sought by diabolical aid actually to create a second nature and therefore to rival clear. is

God. Marlowe constructs

his first scene so that these distinctions are

thou on earth as Jove But when Faustus seeks the assistance of Valdes and Cornelius, he ambition and they understand that he will pursue a study that is reclicit. They mention books and authors who were well-known to stu-

Faustus

in love with power; his evil angel states: "Be

is

in the sky."

masks

this

ognized as

dents (though not necessarily practitioners) of white magic: Agrippa, Bacon,

Albanus. From that point on, the action of the play forbidden

he buys

art,

it

at the price of his

is

immortal

predictable: Faustus seeks a soul,

and he cannot repent

of this choice even on the brink of death.

The

Act 2

temptation. I

out of

character of Mephistophilis

On the one hand,

he

identifies

is

central to understanding Faustus's

where he

is

(or exists) as "hell,

a reflection that Milton's Satan will later echo. Hell

it" (1.3),

is,

nor

am

in other

words, not a place but a state of mind, one presumably so inflated with ambition, pride,

and

self-love

Mephistophilis

is

that

the structure of the world

powerful that

it

(2.1).

passes for

it

denies

all

other creation.

On

the other hand,

He knows the elements of creation, knows how to create an illusion of life so

also a fount of knowledge.

life:

He

also

in this respect, he

and

his pupil Faustus

appear

divine.

Act 3 Mephistophilis has the power to transform Faustus into a heavenly creature, one who flies about the earth in a magic chariot, a kind of parodic angel. The reference to "Saxon Bruno" and his defiance of the Pope in favor of the Apostle Peter signals Marlowe's depiction of Faustus as diabolically irreligious. Bruno not only defies the Pope and is therefore on the side of the Protestants; but he is also a Lollard

and therefore

to be considered a heretic even by Protestants (at least after

Bruno suggests a complete rejection of the authority of religion: Faustus is at once an ally of Bruno against the Pope, both heretical by English Protestant standards, and a damned necromancer who uses diabolical means to further his ends, whether Protestant or not. The act ends with a 1401). Faustus's part in supporting

comic scene in which characters

who would

usually have

counter Mephistophilis. Students can consider the tragedy of Faustus's

life,

how

been termed "clowns" en-

this scene effectively

which appears more and more

debases

to engage trivia as the

action of the play progresses.

Act 4

Faustus loses status rapidly in the aftermath of his triumph over the

Emperor.

He sees

his

own end

is

near; his magic

becomes cheap,

like that

of a com-

Christopher Marlowe

132

mon

street magician.

Marlowe

effect,

more than

This deterioration mirrors his soul's growing degeneracy. In

what sometimes passed

reveals that

a sleight of hand;

its

depends

credit

magic was nothing

for black

entirely

on the extent to which it and curious students will

modern magic are plentiful, benefit from reading Wayne Schumaker's introduction to his edition of Renaissance treatises on magic: Natural Magic and Modern Science: Four Treatises, is

believed. Studies of early

1590-1657(1989).

Act 5

Faustus

What

saved?

is

damned but up

element in tragedy

to is

what point could he have repented and been

represented by the scholars' decision to give

As one of the damned Faustus does not deserve such respect. Marlowe hinting that sheer intellectual power and love of learning, however much they are perverted, need to be noticed and admired? That they are neverFaustus "due burial"?

But

is

theless the only avenues to true greatness that

human

and

intellectual

it is

pride

is

a big if—Marlowe's play

denouncing

beings can aspire to?

ambition

also a play that celebrates this ambition as utterly

human. And because God

as a

so—

If

form of

and not despicably

created humanity, such ambition, even after the Fall,

cannot go entirely despised and unrecorded.

There are two

texts

of this

play,

A text,

the

published in 1616. The text used here

is

published in 1604, and the

primarily the

B

text,

B

text,

with portions of the

A text included.

William Shakespeare The Sonnets The language of Shakespeare's sonnets

is

prismatic; like a crystal that separates

white light into a spectrum of colors from purple to red,

opens up to multiple

it

meanings. WTiich ones a reader chooses to focus on depends, to a degree, on his or her interest and point of view. In that sense, the sonnets provide a kind of mirror of the self—not Shakespeare's self but that of the reader.

It's

important to allow

students to experience the reflexive quality of these poems. Although students

not be

satisfied that they

clusive way, they

may

have understood what Shakespeare meant in any con-

can be confident that second, third, and even fourth readings

continue to engage their interest and ingenuity. The

class

will

can discuss how and why

and instead gets its power from suggestion, allusion, association and— most important—from puns. Shakespeare was a master-punster and nowhere more so than in the sonnets. poetic language avoids being denotative

Their most acute readings are registered in the definitive edition by Stephen

Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets (1977), which has the added advantage of providing a facsimile of the 1609 quarto

on

be alerted to the

of editing an early

modern

difficulties

facing pages. (Students

editions, including this one,

is

a version of

partly the work of the printer or compositor

from

a

manuscript which may

itself

who

modern

go to

text:

this edition will

what appears

an original which may

who was

in all

itself

be

responsible for setting type

have been more or

less readable.) Especially

William Shakespeare

useful in

133

discovery of ambiguity, often generated by Shakespeare's recourse to

its

puns, Booth's exhaustive and detailed commentary ity

illustrates the dense complexof Shakespeare's language. Looking at one or two sonnets in detail is a practi-

cal necessity.

Particularly rewarding

is

the magnificent pair (numbers 123 and 124 in the

quence), "No, Time, thou shalt not boast that

were but the child of time with the ways

do change," and

"If

my

se-

dear love

Here Shakespeare juxtaposes themes and images of have devised to arrest its passage and destructive

human beings

The poems

changes.

state."

I

build their assertions of timelessness

the young man's betrayal of faith.

They claim

will survive all material structures, all strategies (that

designed to cope with contingency. This

is

on

the poet's reaction to

that the poet's love is,

is

eternal, that

"policy") that have

a treatment of the image of

it

been

Time and

temporality quite different from that seen earlier in Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe and

Some

Raleigh.

of this difference can be gauged by exploring questions of tone,

es-

pecially irony.

The sonnets can order

is

also

be read

to, are clearly expressive

dramatic sequence, despite the fact that their

as a

probably not Shakespeare's.

The

poet's

own voice,

the characters he refers

of particular personalities: the young man,

who

causes the

and at last profound disappointment; the rival poet, who insinuates himself into the young man's affection; and the poet's lady friend, evidently a woman with whom he has easy and rather unsatisfactory sexual relations. It is difficult not to read the sonnets as a set of cues for what could be, in a larger and more capacious setting, a drama of romance, conflict, and even poet at

first

to feel intense affection

tragedy.

The

class

like that

particularly lady."

may need

poem

His

to

be reminded of the work

it

did on Hero and Leander, for

Shakespeare's sonnets express erotic love between men. Students,

women

vitriolic

students,

may be dismayed by

the poet's disdain for his "dark

denunciations of her diseased condition (probably syphilis) are

especially remarkable; they stand

out by comparison with the gentle forbearance

the poet expresses in the face of the young man's

infidelity. Lifted

out of their place

on the "dark lady" can be seen to exemplify a certain misogyny that was perhaps more a feature of early modern culture than it was specifically an attitude of the poet. Feminist scholarship has now documented the most important elements of early modern misogyny and its origins in classical philosophy and Christian theology. For a study of early modern literature on and about women, see Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance (1984); for contemporary doctrine on the nature of woman, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman (1980); and for analysis of the debate on the woman in the sequence, the sonnets

question, see Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and

Political

Models (1990) and Margaret R. Sommerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes Towards

Women

in Early

Modern

Society (1995).

William Shakespeare

134

Othello (Quarto 1621,

First Folio

1623)

The first known performance of Othello was on "Hallamas," or All Saint's Day, November 1, 1604, when the King's Majesty's players acted in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. Presumably James 1 was in the audience for this play attributed to "Shaxberd." The text here is based on the Folio, and supplemented with readings from the slightly shorter Quarto, which may have been based on Shakespeare's working manuscript. Shakespeare's source, a story in Cinthio's

and murder, as is Othello. But the tragedy is By pointing out the difference between the ending of Cinthio's story—the murder of Desdemona by Othello and Iago, who knock down the plaster to make the deed look like an accident, and the moral that a Venetian girl should not marry a Moor—and the ending of Othello, you can inHecatomithi,

is

a tale of sexual jealousy

dramatically different from the novella.

dicate

how Shakespeare

race, gender,

and

has transformed his source.

The

simplistic treatment of

sexuality in the Italian source are a far cry

from the problemati-

zation of these issues in Shakespeare's tragedy.

Recent criticism of Othello has focused on these three issues—race, gender and

"The Improvisation of Power" by where he generated the "improvisation" or "the ability both to capitalize

sexuality—to a large extent as a response to

Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance idea of identity as vulnerable to

on the unforeseen and

Self-Fashioning (1980),

to transform given materials into one's

own

scenario."

Greenblatt emphasized Iago's manipulation of Othello's sense of jealousy as

dence of rity as

Iago's

evi-

powers of improvisation and of Othello's sense of cultural insecu-

an outsider in Venice and

his sense of sexual insecurity as a

highlighted the way in which the play

on marriage and

is

implicated in the early

man. Greenblatt

modern

discourse

sexual morality, according to which adultery could be punished

(as the writing of such Protestant authors as George Jove and William and the commentary on Deuteronomy in the Geneva Bible indicate). This sense of the danger of women's infidelity can be well-illustrated by such misogynist texts in Perspectives: Tracts on Women and Gender as those by Barnabe Riche and Joseph Swetnam.

by death Perkins

More recently, criticism on the play's representation of gender has attempted show the complex ways in which it intersects with the representation of race. On the one hand, Othello's sexuality is referred to throughout as "black" and Desdemona's beauty is referred to as "white," while on the other hand Othello's character is viewed as transcending his blackness and Desdemona's supposed infidelity makes her "black." There are what Patricia Parker (Women, "Race," and to

Writing, [1994]) has called "powerful chiastic splittings" in the representation of

gender and

race,

whereby the cultural and

jealous Venetian husband,

black/ As [Othello's] own

racial outsider

Othello becomes the

and the chaste Desdemona becomes "begrimed and on early modern notions

face." (3.3.387-88). Iago plays

about the fabled sexual licentiousness of Venetian

women

in his persuading

Othello that his wife seeks sexual diversion with Cassio. By the same token, Shakespeare's knowledge of Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa (see

William Shakespeare

135

Othello in Context) also presents the possibility that the portrayal of Othello's jeal-

ousy draws on the ethnographic description of African

men who "will by no means match themselves unto a harlot" and who "by reason of jealousy" are "the death and destruction of another" ("On the Customs of the African People in Libya").

both repeats and challenges

If Othello

as implicated in the early

a discussion of race

modern

and gender

them and moral beauty. In Aphra Behn's Oronooko and Othello Kim Hall racial stereotypes,

discourse

in

on both

y

despite his blackness, while Othello

Iago's

power

also presents

physical

has pointed out, quoting one of her students: "Oronooko tiful

it

is

is

represented as beau-

not beautiful because of

it."

to transform "another's reality into a manipulable fiction" can

illustrated in his ability

not only to play on Othello's vulnerability

as a black

be

man

in a white culture but also to convince Othello of

Desdemona's infidelity through proof (3.3.376) of her handkerchief, planted on Cassio after Emilia's retrieval of it. The role of Iago as master manipulator opens the possibility of comparison with the trickster Mosca in Jonson's Volpone, and with the courtier of Castiglione's conduct book who must appear honest in order to curry favor with the prince. In the world of court and of power politics, it is important to conceal one's motives and feelings. As Iago says in 1.1.67, "I am not what I am." Indeed, the view of human nature that Iago espouses—that all women are whores and all men knaves or dupes—squares with the cynical view of human nature held by the English stage Machiavel, other examples of which would be Jonson's Volpone, and the "ocular

Shakespeare's Richard

The

III.

creation of powerful fictions in Othello can also be observed in Othello's

wooing of Desdemona

how to tale

tell

("if

my story, / And

of his winning of

I

had a friend that loved her, / I should but tell him would woo her" [1.3.167-168]). Othello retells the

that

Desdemona

in order to rebut another powerful fiction put

forward by her father Brabantio—that Othello this

coupling

is

is

a witch. Brabantio's notion that

"[a]gainst all rules of nature" (1.3.103)

draws on the bestial and

racist

imagery that Iago has used to describe the couple from the

black

ram

is

start ("an old

tupping your white ewe" and "you'll have your daughter covered with

As Michael Neill (Shakespeare Quarterly [Winter and Karen Newman (ELR 10 [1980]) have noted, the play turns around a morbid fascination with the hidden and with the monstrous which cannot be shown. The construction of African peoples as monstrosities taken from Pliny's a Barbary horse" (1.1.91, 114). 1989])

Natural History appears in Othello's recital of

how he wooed Desdemona with

the

Throughout the tragedy, there is obscene and monstrous object the also the construction of the married couple as of Iago's voyeuristic imagination. The only time in the play that we see Othello and tale of his adventures. (See Othello in Context.)

Desdemona Parker)

is

in their

bedroom

at the very

Throughout the

play,

(in stark contrast

with the film directed by Oliver

end of the play where the bed becomes the however, Iago refers to

Desdemona

site

of murder.

as a sexual object

and

up several triangles of sexual jealousy-including Roderigo, Othello, and Desdemona; Othello, Cassio, and Desdemona; and even Iago, Othello, Desdemona, since Iago claims that he will cuckold the Moor in order to seek re-

sets

William Shakespeare

136

venge upon his supposed sleeping with Emilia. See Rene Girard's chapter on Othello in The Theatre of Envy to explore the larger ramifications of the triangle of desire.

Students often want to answer the question of why Iago hates Othello. portant to get them to see that Iago's

moting the

less

initial

It is

im-

motivation, the slight of Othello's pro-

experienced Cassio to the position of lieutenant,

Iago has staged the scene of Cassio's drunken brawl (2.3)

and

is

removed once

raised Othello's rage

false tale of how Cassio spoke of lying with Desdemona in his dream At 3.4.493, Othello proclaims to Iago, "Now art thou my lieutenant." But Iago, achieving what he wanted, now schemes further to destroy Othello, going so far as to suggest the means to kill Desdemona, "Strangle her in bed, even the bed

with the (3.4).

she hath contaminated" (4.1.296-97). In contrast to the sexually paranoid and misogynist language of Iago, which he

manages to prime

get Othello to internalize (see for

as goats as

Emilia,

who

hot

as

monkeys"

example Othello's echo of

[3.3.419] at 4.1.268)

is

"who would not make her husband

questions,

monarch?" (4.3.78-79). Emilia's speech

Iago's "as

more worldly view of cuckold to make him a

the a

of Act 4 questions the double

at the close

standard of female chastity and male promiscuity in ways that can profitably be com-

pared with Moll's proclamation of her independence in The Roaring Girl and Salome's defense of woman's right to divorce in The Tragedy of Mariam. Indeed,

once there were either Othello guage of love and Iago there are

now

critics

critics

who

who championed

chafed

at

the sentimentality of the Othello

growing number of Emilia

a

critics,

if

his all-consuming poetic lancritics,

such as Carol Neely and

Marguerite Waller ("Academic Tootsie: the Denial of Difference and the Difference

Makes,"

It

Diacritics 17.1 [19871),

who

have challenged the emphasis on the Iago-

Othello dynamic in the play to the exclusion of women characters' perspectives.

Among the earliest Iago critics of the "Why was not this call'd the Tragedy of the

tragedy was

Thomas Rymer who

asked,

Handkerchief" Lynda Boose's "Othello's

Handkerchief: 'The Recognizance and Pledge of Love'" (ELR 5 [1975], 360-74) a

good place

You can

is

to turn in order to see the symbolic significance of the handkerchief.

explain to students

to Cinthio's handkerchief as

how its

the playwright has added such significant details

strawberry embroidery, associated with the Virgin,

and how the handkerchief functions as an emblem of Desdemona's virginity, and as a talisman with the magical power to ensure the husband's faithfulness (see 3.4.56-60). The origins of the handkerchief in Egypt link it with the whole discourse of exoticism in the tragedy whereby Othello

calls

himself a "base Indian"

Judean" 5.2.357) and Desdemona's singing the

(Folio, "base

tragic

song of the

Barbary" whose lover "proved mad / And did forsake her" (4.3.28-29). You can point out how stage props were rare in Shakespeare's day and how the two major props—the handkerchief and the bed—both emphasize the play's preoccupation with sexual passion, the proof of fidelity, and the suspicion

"maid

of

called

infidelity:

"Thy bed,

lust stained, shall

with thy blood be spotted"

(5.1.36).

Students are often perplexed by Desdemona's obedience to Othello and ask

why she does not faithful wife, she

stop

is

him from murdering

her.

While Desdemona

is

clearly a

hardly a conventionally obedient daughter. She defies her

fa-

William Shakespeare

ther in her secret marriage with Othello,

137

and Brabantio underscores her

trans-

gression in his parting remark to the pair as they leave for Cyprus, "She has deceived her father,

and may thee"

overwhelming a passion

(1.3.296).

More

importantly,

Desdemona has

as

Adding to the convincing portrayal of their passion is a change that Shakespeare makes from his Italian source: in the source Othello and Desdemona have been married for some time, while in the tragedy they are just newly married and in the heated flush of new love. The language of love that Othello and Desdemona express in giving witness before Brabantio, the Duke, and the Senators of Venice in Act 1 reaches its zenith at their reunion in Act 2 where Othello proclaims, "My soul hath her content so absolute / That not another comfort like to this / Succeeds in unknown fate," and Desdemona responds, "The heavens forbid / But that our loves and comforts should increase / Even as our days do grow!" (2.1.190-94). John Bayley's essay on "Love and Identity" (The Characters of Love, 1960) in which he argues that Othello and Desdemona each cling to an identity in love that makes it impossible for either truly to

know

discourses

he has for

her.

the other can be used as a contrast to the notion of identity as

endlessly manipulatable.

modern

for Othello, as

on

A knowledge of all of the interconnections with the early

race, gender,

and

cultural identity can

add enormously

the students' understanding of the play's complexity. Ultimately, the play

is

to

a

and in order to work as such must win the reader's sympathy for both Othello and Desdemona as both magnificent and yet blind in their love. tragedy

It is

important for students to understand that tragedy as a dramatic genre

neither merely a fatal accident nor the deserved result of

some

is

flaw of character.

In the Middle Ages, tragedy was represented in a narrative genre that entailed a

from prosperity to

mere

fall

One

of the significant generic innovations of early

destitution, as in Lydgate's Fall of Princes

based on the classical Senecan model, with logical pathos.

students to

The tendency

want

all its

1431-9).

(c.

modern drama was

rhetorical intensity

tragedy,

and psycho-

to rationalize the psychology of tragedy often leads

to simplify the concept of the tragic hero's "flaw," a notion that

some students come across in high school without really understanding that it is a contested term. You can point out to them that this notion of a "flaw" comes from a

French neo-classical interpretation of

concept of hamartia in his

Aristotle's

which was rediscovered and widely commented on by Italian Renaissance humanists, whose work influenced Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry. You can also point out that hamartia can mean both an error in judgment and a moral flaw. From this perspective, the tragic mistake Herod makes in believing the false charges against Mariam in Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam can be Poetics,

a text

compared with Othello's Desdemona. In Othello's

tragic error in believing Iago's false evidence against

suicide,

which comes

he chooses to take revenge upon himself. His tary

and

political

enemy

("a

just

final

seconds before the tragedy's end, apostrophe of himself

the portrayals of the cultural other throughout the play,

of cultural otherness. At the same time, his very

upon

a kiss"

echo

his

have wakened death!

moment / ...

as his mili-

malignant Turk/ Beat and traduced the state")

If

last

of greatest happiness,

it

were

now

to die,

recalls all

and Othello's internalization

words, "Killing myself, to die

"May

/ 'Twere

the winds blow

now

to be

till

they

most happy"

William Shakespeare

138

At the end of the tragedy, there is little sense of reconciliation. Lodovico, who must relate the story back in Venice, is left "with

(2.1.185, 188-9).

The audience,

like

heavy heart" at this "heavy

act."

Othello in Context: Ethnography in the Literature of Travel and Colonization

The

excerpts

from the

texts in this section are

designed to give students a sampling

of the varieties of writing about "ethnos," Greek for nation or group of people, in the early modern period, with an eye towards answering the question, "What would Shakespeare's audience have thought of the description of Othello as 'the

Moor'?"

A good

place to start for a general overview of writing

to Shakespeare's contemporaries

is

on

Africa

known

Eldred D. Jones's The Elizabethan Image of Africa

(1971).

Peter Martyr, Decades of the

New World

The

(1555)

from the

passage,

first

ac-

count of Thomas Windham's voyage to Guinea in 1553, can be used to indicate that for an English audience the terms

"Moor" and "black" were synonymous, and

that while the text acknowledges a certain level of civilization,

it

also presents the

notion that the king's subjects treat him in an idolatrous manner. In the second passage,

you can point out that Richard Eden uses the terms "Moors" and

"Negroes" interchangeably and presupposes an early

where the author appears

to analyze

where he appears

to rely

to rely

on contemporary

reports.

This

is

one of the

The

woven together

sun").

What are

stylistic

of conveying these different kinds of information? ferent kinds of information being

climatic theory of

Ask your students on mythical or ancient sources and

information conveyed? Are there rhetorical or

Pliny the Elder,

modern

and vexed with the heat of the

skin color ("so scorched

the different kinds of

differences in the

What are into the

manner

the effects of these

same

dif-

text?

History of the World (trans, Philemon Holland, 1601)

earliest

exemplars of the discourse on the African as monstrous,

from which Shakespeare took the

list

of fabulous creatures in Othello's speech at

You can ask the students to look for traces of this mythical discourse in the contemporary sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel accounts, such as those of Eden, Sir Thomas Smith, and even Leo Africanus. This would provide the 1.3.146-47.

occasion to point out the persistence of inherited ideas as well as the weight of classical texts, a feature

ism—for

of early

modern humanism, and its emphasis on

the great contribution of

all

the implication of

human-

man—in

the dignity of

the

discourse of colonialism and proto-racism.

Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa (trans. John Pory, 1600) Beginning with Eden's biography of the author Leo Africanus, you can turn to Jones (1971),

who

points out such connections between the author and the character

Othello, such as their

date

on

Jones's

common status

analysis

is

as Africans, travellers,

Rosalind Johnson's

Shakespearean Drama: Historical

Parallels

Africanus" {Journal of African Civilizations

both Othello and Leo had been made History

and

Othello, "there

is

soldiers.

A useful up-

"The African Presence

in

between Othello and the Historical Leo

12

slaves

and

[1985], 276-287).

Johnson

and more importantly that

stresses that

in

both Leo's

an intense struggle between the European Christian and

William Shakespeare

139

the African infidel." Jones and Johnson both point out that Leo's account is an important corrective to the inherited discourse of the African as monstrous.

A fascinating connection with the language of Othello and that of Leo's History made by

Patricia Parker who comments, "The presentation of Leo Africanus to an English audience is also marked throughout by this emphas is on the ocular, and its substitutes. The text of John Pory's translation, in 1600, of A Geographical is

Historie of Africa Written in Arabicke

and

Italian by lohn Leo

a More

experience of unfolding and exposing to the eye, including as tory materials a

map

of Africa folded and closed

up, brings before the reader's sexuality

upon

enacts the

does in

its

prefa-

which when opened gaze the land of monsters, of Amazons, of prodigious

and of peoples who expose those

parts

itself,

which should be

to demonstrate to the students that Leo's discourse, like Sir

literally

it

hid." You need Windham's, Eden's, and

John Smith's, relies on eyewitness observation and a vocabulary of seeing, exand voyeurism and thus invites comparison with similar symbolic action

posure,

You can cite the scenes in which Iago observes Cassio payDesdemona, and in which Othello and Iago observe Cassio talkBianca. You can also point to those scenes that are not observed but are

and language

in Othello.

ing courtesies to ing to

imaginatively constructed by Iago, such as Cassio's dream,

and the sexual union of

Cassio and Desdemona. In both ethnographic writing and in Othello, the power to

produce and disseminate knowledge means power; the difference in

Shakespeare's Othello

constructed as

Edmund

fact,

Spenser,

that the audience

is

can be not only

A View of the

printed edition 1633)

The most

false

is

allowed to see that knowledge, while

but also

fatal.

Present State of Ireland (written

c.

1596,

first

recent edition of this text edited by Hadfield and

is a reprint of the 1633 edition and contains an index of all the pason the Old English contained in the manuscripts but deleted from the first printed edition. The first excerpt here illustrates the construction of the Irish in English ethnography as "pagans and infidels" as well as African in origin. The Irish themselves were proud of what they believed were their African and Spanish origins and this myth of origins is recorded in the Lebhar gabhdla (Book of Invasions), which was an important influence on Irish literature in both Irish and English— including James Joyce's Ulysses. The second excerpt gives a powerful portrayal of the linguisti-

Maley ( 1997) sages

cally

conditioned character of

reality.

tween the Old English and the evil race")

Tragedy of

Irish

Spenser's complaint against intermarriage be-

("how can such matching but bring forth an

can be connected with the topic of miscegenation in both Othello and The

Mariam. The

critic

most responsible for connecting Spenser's Faerie is Stephen Greenblatt, whose chapter on

Queene with the discourse on colonialism

Spenser in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) drew attention to the connections between the poet's View and his epic poem. For a more recent treatment of the connection between these two

texts, see

Race, and the Cultural and

Political

Clare Carroll, "The Construction of Gender,

Other

in The Faerie

Queene 5 and

A

View of

the

Present State of Ireland" (Criticism 32.2 [Spring 1990], 163-192).

Sir

John Smith, The Qeneral History of Virginia, New England, and the From the point of view of the language of race, the use of Isles (1624)

Summer

William Shakespeare

140

the term "Molata" indicates "the offspring of a European and a Negro" (OED), the use of which

first

centrates

most

in Drakes Voyage (1595). For the

is

part, Smith's text con-

much more on describing the riches of the place than on the people. The

depiction of former greatness and present decay presents the picture of a place of

enormous

European trade and conquest. The

potential waiting to be exploited by

greatest part of the wealth in gold

said to be located in "those rich mines" in

is

"those interior parts,"—another example of the hidden character of knowledge that

connects with the language of the hidden in Othello. This early seventeenth-cen-

much

tury text exhibits tion,

which

on myth and much more on

less reliance

physical descrip-

evidence of the decline of an older symbolic form of representation

is

Emblem,

that emphasizes similitude (see Perspectives:

Style,

Metaphor) and the

emergence of a more modern kind of representation that emphasizes identity and

The Development of English

difference (see

Prose).

Elizabeth Cary The Tragedy of Mariam, The The

Fair

on

best place to start for background

Queen of Jewry (1613)

this play

is

the superb edition of

Margaret Ferguson and Gary Waller, which contains a thorough introduction to the author's the

life,

the sources of the tragedy, and the

of The Lady Falkland: Her

full text

Life,

text.

This edition also contains

which

part of

is

printed here in

Perspectives: Spiritual Self Reckonings.

The genre of the to

tragedy,

Senecan

be read but not performed. The

closet

style

drama, means that the play was meant

of the language

is

highly rhetorical—for

its

frequent use of apostrophe, mythological allusion, and impassioned repetition.

Some essay

of the

on

first

English tragedies were translations from Seneca, and the classic

this topic

tragic style,

which

by is

T S. Eliot

is

excellent

background

for explaining the

Senecan

characterized by intensity of emotion, stichomythia (repetition

of language from one line to the next of dialogue), and the portrayal of the hero as a divided self. Indeed,

and obedience

resistance to his tyranny

Madam's

Mariam

is

such a divided hero—torn between her love for

to her husband, on the one hand, and her alienation from him and

first line

on the

other.

draws attention to the issue of speech—specifically a woman's

speech, which throughout the play

is

associated with chastity. Mariam's chastity

is

put into question by her outspoken and rebellious behavior, for which the chorus criticizes her.

Many

critics (see Beilin

1980, Travitsky 1987, Ferguson 1991) have

connected the ambivalence of the tragedy about women's speech with the author's

own ambivalence about initials "E.

publishing her play, which

Rosalind Jones on Veronica Franco

public speech

is

tantamount

and obedience

ings of

Barnabe Riche

only attributed to her by the

An

excellent article by

Ann

(in Rewriting the Renaissance, [1987]) gives

merous examples from contemporary conduct books lence,

is

C." which follow the dedicatory sonnet.

to promiscuity. This

for the virtuous Renaissance (see Perspectives: Tracts

on

for

nu-

women about how women's

same demand

woman

for the chastity,

si-

can be found in the writ-

Women and

Gender). Alexandra's

Tracts

Mariam not

exhortation to

on

Women

and Gender

wrongs that Herod has done to her

to forget the

\4\

family,

Salome's defiant critique of divorce as the sole privilege of men, and Doris's complaint against Herod for divorcing her to marry Mariam adumbrate this concern with speech and women's autonomy. Paradoxically, the nearly silent and childlike

Graphina

is

given a

Dymphna

name which

derives

from the Greek verb

graphein, to write.

Callaghan (1994) has cautioned against reading the tragedy solely as

a reflection of the author's biography

and

stressed the

need to analyze how the

rep-

resentation of gender intersects with the representation of religion and race. For

background on the position of the Jews, who were exiled from England in 1290 and not readmitted until 1655, see David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews into England

of the

play, Palestine,

of the

infidel,"

is

1603-1655 (1982). Callaghan points out how the location "at once the displaced center of Christianity and the home

and how the

and Madam's

issue of Herod's identity as a "base

identity as a descendant of the royal Jewish line

similar to the interracial

Edomite" (1.2.89)

make

their match match of Othello and Desdemona. Furthermore, refer-

When Herod berates and virtue, he uses racist language: "You are to her a sun-burnt blackamoor" (4.7.1734). Another complication in the representation of gender is that of class. The comparison of Mariam to a milkmaid (1.1.59-64) is similar to the comparison of Cleopatra to a milkmaid (Antony and ences to Cleopatra as a dark African seductress are frequent.

Salome

as

Mariam's

inferior in beauty

Cleopatra 4.15.74-5).

mony with

The

lower-class

woman

is

idealized as being in perfect har-

her gender position as subject to the male, whereas these royal female

characters betray the conflict between their class privilege

and

their sexual subjec-

tion in the attempt to deny their difference from working-class

women.

Comparisons between Othello and Mariam in terms of the representation of gender and race make excellent paper topics, for which students can be asked to do collateral research in the texts in Othello in Context and Perspectives: Tracts on Women and Gender. The close connections in the language of the two plays also bear thorough discussion; see, for example, Mariam 1.1.62 and Othello 5.2.41;

Mariam

1.4.32

and

Othello 1.3.97-98;

Mariam

1.4.45,

and

Othello 4.3.95-106.

Students can also be asked to consi der the similarities and differences between

Desdemona and Mariam, between Othello and Herod, and between Iago and Salome, both of whom play the role of villainous Machiavel. The fundamental question that you need to ask your students is: "What difference does it make that this tragedy

is

told

from the woman's point of view?"

Perspectives

Tracts on

Women

and Gender

Desiderius Erasmus In

Two

Laude and

Praise of

Matrimony

(trans.

Richard Tavernour,

1

534)

sources for contextualizing Erasmus's text and the other texts in this section

are Linda Woodbridge's

Women and

the English

Renaissance: Literature and the

142

Tracts

on

Women

Nature of Womankind,

and Gender

1540-1620 (1986) and Constance Jordan's Renaissance

Feminism: Literary Texts and

on

discourse

the Rights of

nist

is

the nature of

Women

(see

women

Volume

before

Mary

A

Wollstonecraft's

Vindication of

The Romantics and Their Contemporaries)

2:

discussed by Denise Riley in

from Desdemona's

The question of whether or not

Models (1990).

Political

"Am

line in Othello). It

is

/

That 'Name?"

book which

(a

is

takes

femi-

its title

important for students to understand that

the whole notion of companionate marriage

is

a middle-class

and an

early

modern

innovation. While Lawrence Stone has stressed the greater value given to marriage in Protestant culture, early

modern Catholic authors such

concerned with marriage. You can ask your students how

Erasmus were

as

closely Erasmus's

also

view

toward marriage resembles that of the many texts from the early modern period which focus on marriage— including Spenser's Epithalamion, Milton's Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's Othello, Cary's Mariam, and Dekker's and Middleton's The Roaring Girl A further topic for discussion would be to compare and contrast the point of view of Chaucer's Wife of Bath with Erasmus's view in

moral

this

essay.

Barnabe Riche

My Lady's This book

Castiglione's Book of the Courtier.

genre;

most

Looking-Glass (1616)

into the genre of conduct book,

falls

early

The

title

and so can be compared with

Looking-Glass refers to the Mirror of Princes

modern conduct books presented

their middle-class audiences with

a model for behavior adapted from that of the aristocratic court.

that the lady should stay at

home

rather than gad about

The requirement

town can be applied

reading of the female characters in Dekker's and Middleton's The Roaring

Girl,

to a

where

not only Moll Cutpurse but even the shopkeepers' wives do not conform to the

strict

code of the quiet, stay-at-home, hard-working housewife. The Protestant trope of the Catholic Church as the

Whore

of Babylon can be compared with the construction

of Catholicism as pagan in Spenser's

A View of the Present State of Ireland. Riche's com-

plaint against idolatry needs to be explained in terms of Protestant destruction of im-

ages in churches. See

Eamon

Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars (1992).

Margaret Tyler Preface to

The

First Part

of the Mirror of Princely Deeds

(1

578)

This argument in favor of women's writing and education can be compared to Juan Luis Vives's

comments on women's education

For a Spanish woman's defense of female letter (translated

ing to note that both Tyler

was

it

allowed

women

less

common

for

is

Woman.

la

Cruz's

interest-

in Catholic circles.

women— perhaps

adventuresome than original work. At the same time, translation

to display not only their ability to write but also their

comments on

Tyler in The Paradise of

three texts need to be considered as a group: Joseph

Arraignment of Lewd,

Mu^le

and Elizabeth Cary moved

Press). It

endeavor for educated early modern

languages. See Betty Travits ley's

The next

Sor Juana Inez de

by Alan Trueblood, University of Oklahoma

Translation was a

because

in Instruction of a Christian

literacy, see

Idle,

Forward, and Unconstant

Women

(1615);

Melastomous (1617); Ester Sowernam, Ester Hath

knowledge of

Women

(1981).

Swetnam, The

Rachel Speght,

Hangd Haman

A

(1617).

Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton

143

Swetnam's comic diatribe was interpreted as a serious slander against women by both Rachel Speght and the pseudonymous Esther Sowernam. Barbara Lewalski's chapter on Speght in Writing Women in Jacobean England (1993) and her edition of

A Muzzle in

Polemics

ground on Speght.

and Poems of Rachel Speght (1996) are the best sources for back-

Ann Jones's

"Counterattacks on 'the Bayter of Women': Three Pamphleteers of the Early Seventeenth Century" (Hazelcorn and Travitsky, eds. The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print [1990]) gives insight into the more secular

view of Ester Sowernam. The notion of marriage as an economic market as portrayed in The Roaring Girl—for example, Sir Alexander's demand that his son marry

Sowernam (see Megan Matchinske's article ELR 1994). For Speght and Sowernam, also see the introductions to their texts by Simon Shepherd (1985). a wealthy girl— can be connected with in

Hie Mulier and Haec-Vir (1620) These two

texts

parodying the outspokenness of the masculine

man

foppishness of the feminine

might be taken by students

woman and

the

as purely fantastical.

Mary Frith, upon whom the Moll Cutpurse of The many other examples of female transvestitism in modern England, notably among such aristocrats, such as James I's cousin

In addition to the historical

Roaring Girl was based, there were early

Arabella Stuart. Also, the issue of dress suitable to one's gender was a serious issue for Protestant authors

such

as

and what

woman

Philip Stubbes who wrote in The man soever weareth woman's apparel is accursed,

John Calvin and

Anatomie of Abuses (1583): "What

weareth man's apparel

Chamberlain of 1620 recounts how the

ment from the King

to will

them

is

to inveigh

A

accursed also."

clergy of

London "had

letter

express

by John

command-

vehemently against the insolency of

our women, and their wearing of broad-brimmed

hats,

cut short or shorn." (See Valerie Lucas, "Hie Mulier:

pointed doublets, their hair

The Female

Transvestite in

Modern England," Renaissance and Reformation. 24.1, [1988], 65-84). Woman's dress was viewed in the early modern period as an expression of woman's Early

subordinate status to man. Hie Mulier's argument in Haec Vir that customs of dress change

from place to place

is

no

less

than an attack on the notion of gender

difference as ordained by the law of natural reason. These texts can be used to get

the students to focus

on

dress as a discourse not only of sexuality but also of class.

Students need to be informed of the sumptuary laws that restricted the use of the

most expensive from Thomas dle-class

fabrics to the nobility. Deloney's story of

of Reading (see

Simon

the Weaver's wife

Girl in Context: City Life) displays a

The Roaring

mid-

preoccupation with acquiring costly apparel similar to the fascination

with lavish dress in Hie Mulier and Haec

Vir.

Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton The Roaring

Girl, or

Moll Cut-Purse (1611)

Since students sometimes find the double plot of Sebastian Wengrave's

mock

courting of Moll Cutpurse and the complicated intrigues between Mistresses

144

Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton

Gallipot

and Openwork and

need to take some time

their seducers

Laxton and Goshawk confusing, you not just what

at the outset to explain

plot but the relation between the two plots.

A

going on in each

is

helpful article

on

this topic

is

Viviana Comensoli's "Play-Making, Domestic Conduct, and the Multiple Plot in

The Roaring

(Spring 1987), 249-66. You can While Sir Alexander Wengrave is at son marry a young lady who will bring with her

Girl", Studies in English Literature 27.2

explain that both plots are about marriage.

primarily concerned that his

first

a large dowry,

he ends up

marriage prospect

settling for a

who

at least has a sure

feminine gender. His outrage over what he perceives as the monstrosity of Moll

can be connected with the tradesmen's wives' fear that their chastity should be all these marriages, chastity and all the behavior Such comments as Laxton's "money is the aquafortis that eats into many a maidenhead" (2.2), as he is lusting after Moll, further adumbrate the notion of a woman's sexuality as something that can be bought and

questioned by their husbands. In that

it

requires

a value.

is

sold.

Moll's famous speech in which she rebukes Laxton with "thou'rt one of those

/ That thinks each woman

thy fond flexible whore" contests this view as does her

comment

indomitable independence throughout the comedy. Her

women

nothing"

in this

same

hands / Oi an act silent than a bragging back upon the concern of the female characters in The Roaring

speech "Better had reflects

fall

into the

with their public reputations but also upon Cary's Mariam and Shakespeare's

Girl

Desdemona, both of whom sult for the

are the victims of false slander.

examination of Moll's role

A useful article to con-

as iconoclastic social critic

is

Jane Baston's

"Rehabilitating Moll's Subversion in The Roaring Girl" Studies in English Literature 37.2

(Spring

Zimmerman's

1997):

317-335. The

Erotic Politics: Desire

lent source to consult in order to

on

articles

on The

the Renaissance Stage

open up

Roaring Girl

in

(1992) are also

an

Susan excel-

The Roaring Girl for discussion in terms

of the representation of gender and sexuality.

The

Moll can back up her challenge

fact that

myself to a man,

/

I

that can prostitute a

man

to

to

Laxton

("I

scorn to prostitute

me") with a show of arms unites

her with the female warrior Britomart in Spenser's chivalric epic The Faerie Queene.

An

is that Moll moves not in the aristocratic and romance world of Spenser's knights but in the streets of London. Not only must she overpower her opponents but she must constantly outwit them. And it

important difference, however,

sylvan

is

this

common with Mistress who convinces her husband that Laxton is suing her for pre-contract, and Openwork, who persuades her husband to ambush Goshawk. All three

element of cunning improvisation that she shares in

Gallipot,

Mistress

female characters show their power to manipulate the plot.

It

could be argued that

they manipulate the plot for conventional ends—the two tradesmen's wives for the

continuation of their marriages, and Moll for the successful suit of Sebastian

hand of Mary Fitzallard. Students can be asked to question how comedy really is since it promotes marriage, chastity, and the importance of a woman's reputation while it pokes fun at all three. Moll's refusal of marriage at the end of the play makes possible the conventional ending of comedy— the happy marriage of the lovers and their reconciliation with the older

Wengrave

for the

subversive this

Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton

much

generation. Nevertheless,

is

said along the

way

145

to that ending, not only by

Moll, but also by the citizens and their wives to question the sentimental ending.

Perhaps this

city cynicism is nowhere better expressed than in Openwork's "What's whole world but a gilt rotten pill?" Underlying this world-weary wisdom is an optimism about the street smarts of citizens.

this

The Roaring

Qirl in Context: City Life

literature of the city

This section provides a context for the

by presenting some observations on overcrowding,

street

and tobacco smoking. More than this section also give the students an

slang, crime, weaving, shopping, theatre going,

covering these social topics, the selections in

idea of popular writing, as opposed to aristocratic or scholarly humanistic writing.

humorous story, such as those in Greene's A and Thomas Dekker's Lantern and Candlelight or the object of censorious diatribe as in Barnabe Riche's M} Lady's Looking-Glass (1616)

Crime could be the

object of a

Notable Discovery of Cosenage

or even mock-serious invective as in

Thomas Nashe's

broadly

satiric Pierce Penniless

(1592).

All of these readings

and the drama

the city

The Theatrical

which

is

work

is

well with the drama.

David

L.

City: Culture, Theatre,

set in

Smith, Richard

and

Politics in

An

both and David Bevington,

excellent source for

Strier,

London (1995). The Roaring

London, makes frequent references

to

London

low-life

Girl,

and even

uses the canting slang recorded in Dekker's Lantern and Candlelight—especially in

Act

5.

The outrageousness of Moll's smoking

dents with reference to King James

I's

a pipe can best be explained to stu-

A Counterblast to Tobacco (1616), in which stuNew World and commonly The Crown attempted to prohibit the lower

dents can read that tobacco was imported from the

known classes

as a cure for venereal disease.

from using

it.

Volpone also works well with this section. Although the play

is

set in Venice,

the English Sir Politic-Would-Be and his wife provide a spoof of upper-class

Londoners, and the commedia

calls

First

Jonsons conversion

On My

First

Son.

David

Daughter "an exercise in to Catholicism in

October

poems makes for an interesting discustoward death, and the metrical form that conveys

contrast between the two

sion in terms of the attitude

acter of the

walk dead

vein are the two profoundly moving and per-

On M}

[1989])

in four couplets of iambic pentameter

lord,

The

greater metrical complexity, the almost halting char-

read aloud, and the greater use of

be pointed out to students. There

is

enjambment

in the

poem on

an emphasis on the "mother"

poem on his daughter and an emphasis on the "father" in the poem on his The complex association between paternity and writing in the poem on his son make for an interesting analysis of gender in Jonson's writing. You can connect in the

son.

the representation of paternity here with that in the Cary-Morison Ode.

Joseph Lowenstein's Responsive Readings: Versions of Echo Jonsonian Masque (1984)

in Pastoral, Epic

and

the

good place to turn for the explication of Inviting a Friend to Supper and Queen and Huntress from Cynthia's Revels 5.6.1-18. Both can be discussed in relation to the topic of patronage, and Jonsons social position. David Riggs (1989) asks about Inviting a Friend to Supper: "Does Jonson describe a meal that he intends to serve or one that he wishes he could afford to serve?" The line is

a

"we will have no Pooly or Parrot by") suggest the threat of spies, since Robert Poley and Henry Parrot were just that. To Penshurst, first published in The Forest as part of the 1616 Works, is one of Jonson's major poems and since it is in the genre of the country house poem, you can compare it with Marvell's Upon Appleton House and Herrick's The Hock-Cart.

As Raymond Williams

writes in The Country and the City (1973): "These are not, in

any simple sense, pastoral, or neo-pastoral, but they use a particular version of country

life

as a

way of

expressing, in the

owner, certain social and moral values"

form of a compliment

(27).

to a house, or

by negatives" in To Penshurst which reveals that the "forces of pride, greed and culation are evidently active

and

its

Williams points out the "definition

among landowners

as well as

among

city

cal-

merchants

courtiers" (28).

To

the

Memory

of

My

Beloved,

The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare was printed

with the 1623 Folio of Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies,

The

Histories,

publication of the plays was important for Jonson whose

nalled that plays were

performances.

Dryden's

A

meant

provocative

comment

that

it

to be read

way

and

is

and

Tragedies.

1616 Works

sig-

criticized as texts as well as enjoyed as

to begin the discussion of this

poem

is

to cite

was "an insolent, sparing and invidious panegyric."

the praise here so equivocal as not to be praise at

What

own

Jonson saying about

all

Is

but a covert kind of criticism?

literary criticism in this

poem? Notice Jonsons com-

parison of Shakespeare to classical authors and compare this with the importance

Jonson

gives to classical

models

Jonson's Timber in Perspectives:

in his literary criticism. See the selection

Emblem, Metaphor,

Style.

from

John Donne

Another panegyric which

much more than

a simple

Immortal Memory of and Friendship of that Noble

Pair, Sir

Morison (1640),

first

is

poem

149

of praise

is

To

the

Lucius Cary and Sir H.

published in The Underwood. The poems in this collection were

gathered by Jonson in the 1630s but not published until after his death, in the sec-

ond

Kenelm Digby. Lucius Cary was the son of and when Jonson died Cary wrote an elegy for him. Lucius Cary's friend Sir Henry Morison, the nephew of the travel Folio of 1640, overseen by Sir

Elizabeth Cary, author of The Tragedy o/Mariam,

writer Fynes Morison, he died of smallpox at the age of twenty-one. Jonson weaves into this panegyric, the

upon

flection

M}

First

Son.

his

first

imitation of the Pindaric

own writing and on

Jonson

paternity,

Cary

refers to Lucius

Ode

in English, a subtle re-

which may be compared with

as his "son."

points out, the "Ben" at the

end of

poet was referring to his

son Ben." Riggs compares the chiasmus in these

to that in

Jonson

On

first

line

84 might suggest

M31 First Son: "rest in soft peace,

and

On

As David Riggs (1989) to the reader that "the

ask'd, say here

doth

lie

lines

/ Ben

his best piece of poetrie" (315).

Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618) Performed on Twelfth Night, January

6, 1618, this

Masque

celebrated the investi-

ture of James Is son Charles as the Prince of Wales. Apparently Charles was a very straight-laced

young man, unlike his father, who was known for his love of sport, and a general good time. An account of this masque by the

sexual dalliance,

Venetian ambassador

tells

of

how

the King was disappointed that there was not

more dancing and complained, "Why did they make me come here for?" Point out to your students that while twentieth-century critics deem this masque to be great poetry, the original court audience was less than thrilled with

derstood the masque as a criticism of their

masque

as

own

it.

Perhaps they un-

extravagance. Jonson used this

an opportunity to teach the court a lesson about virtue and portrayed

the god Hercules, a Renaissance symbol of the choice of virtue over pleasure, as

triumphing over his It is

rustics

The

own

desires.

interesting to note that at the

second performance of the masque, Welsh

were substituted for the pygmies, and

it

was

retitled For the

Honor of Wales.

portrayal of the pygmies can be connected with the discourse of monstrous

otherness in Othello in Context:

The Discourse of Ethnography. That Jonson

equated the pygmies with the Welsh peasants suggests the similarity between the early

modern view of

and inside the British Isles. The exon some level thought of as analogous to Scots, and Welsh within Britain.

cultural others outside

otic peoples of other continents were

such cultural others

as the Irish,

John Donne Two

of the most useful works for teaching

Donne

are the collection of essays

edited by John Roberts, Essential Articles for the Study of John Donne's Poetry (1975),

and Arthur Marotti, Critical Essays on )ohn Donne (1994). Of the monographs on Donne the most useful for explaining the context in which he wrote his love

John Donne

150

poetry, published with his collected verse in 1633,

Sidney's, were "coterie works, intended for

and family members"

(3).

most sixteenth-century

is

Arthur Marotti's John Donne,

many

a Coterie Poet (1986). Marotti points out that

oi Donne's poems, like

an audience of close

friends, clients,

Noting that the "book was an alien environment" for

poetry, Marotti brings forth such evidence to prove his

point as "the absence of

of Donne's Songs and Sonnets save one

all

.

.

from the im-

.

portant Westmoreland manuscript" as evidence of "the private character of the

The

lyrics" (16).

to

circulation of

Donne's poetry

in

manuscript during

his

life

needs

be impressed upon students. See Alan MacColl, "The Circulation of Donne's

Poems

in Manuscript" (in John Donne: Essays in Celebration, ed. Smith, [1972]).

Most students are unfamiliar with Neo-Platonism which was a considerable influence on Donne. You need to spend time explaining key Platonic concepts such as the perception of beauty in the beloved as a remembrance o( perfect beauty in

An excellent introduction to

the eternal realm (see Plato's Symposium).

Renaissance

and Bruce Merry's

edi-

tion of Tullia d'Aragona's Dialogue on the Infinity of Love (1997). She surveys the

trat-

Neo-Platonism

tati

in the introduction to Rinaldina Russell's

is

on

d'amore, or treatises

in the experience

love,

which discuss the

and perception o{

between soul and body

love.

The Good Morrow, usually taken to be an early courtship of his wife Ann,

relation

from the period oi Donne's

lyric

perhaps Donne's greatest expression of love as a

is

little

world, or microcosm. As A.]. Smith has pointed out in "The Metaphysic of Love"

Frank Kermode, [1962]) the background of

(in Discussions of John Donne, ed.

and many of Donne's other

love lyrics

is

this

the Italian Renaissance treatises of love.

most likely made up not only of Ann but also o{ his male who were familiar with the Neo-Platonic philosophy o{ these treatises, which Donne challenges when he writes: "Love's not so pure, and abstract, as they Part o{ his audience was

friends

use

/ To

say,

which have no

The Good Morrouthe rising o( the sun

This

is

a type of

mistress, but their

as the lovers awake, as are

poem

that

Ovid wrote,

clever concluding couplet to Break of

or negotium,

Day and days,

made up of

aloud.

As is

princes,

in The

Good Morrow, the

present in the I."

The notion

a political

poem

as did the

one-syllable

lovers'

as a

that the

celebrating

medieval Provencal poets. The

a Latin pun whereby business, The muscular syntax of Break of

words

world here

it

is

(for

example: "Nor hours,

an exciting poem to read everything. But the greater

form oi hyperbole: "She

man

poem

Day turns on

the negation o{ otium, or leisure.

strong lines

its

aubade, a

The Sun Rising and Break of Day.

months, which are the rages o{ time") makes

world

is

is

Muse."

in the tradition of the alba or

is

is

to the

woman

is

all states,

as the prince

and

adaptation of Aristotelian metaphysics in which the male principle

form and the female principle as Princes ("Princes

boundaries in

is

matter.

And

yet the next line presents

is

both lovers

us")

and argues towards

a blurring

"Go and

catch a falling star"

is

do but play

all

to his state

is

of gender

love.

The persona of

the Song

a

young man con-

fronted with competition in the world of sex and career. Both the search for a

woman and

the search for professional preferment lead to a sense of disillusion-

ment. The tone of the

poem

is

ironic

and world-weary with more than 7

,

a

touch oi

John Donne

the resentment of a young idealist:

me

honest mind." The line "Teach

poem

by T.

S. Eliot for his

"And

151

/ what winde / Serves to advance an Mermaides singing" was lifted from this

find

to hear

Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Manuscripts of Donne's poetry can be divided into several groups; in the second group, The Undertaking is entitled Platonique Love. Marotti connects this title

with similar

poem

in the poetry of Donne's friend Sir Edward Herbert and sees the Donne's witty teasing of Herbert's Platonism. The poem parodies

titles

in part as

Neo-Platonic conventions through exaggeration, or hyperbole.

The

Indifferent is a

marvelously complex

poem from Donne's

Inns of Court pe-

riod in which the speaker often takes the role of a worldly libertine. Ovid's Amores 2.4

is

ging

the source for the

Don Juan. The

from stanza

first

stanza, in

to stanza—from his

ence that seems

The

a brag-

male comrades in sexual sport, to a female audi-

then singular, to the voice of Venus speaking to

at first plural

three previous audiences in an ironic

poem up

which the speaker portrays himself as

students need to be asked to observe the change of audience

and

self-reflexive

all

commentary on the whole

to this point.

creation of

what Marotti calls "a lively author reader dialectic" in The it with both The Ecstasy and The Undertaking, poems in

Canonization connects

which Donne appeals

to a third party to witness his love. Like The Undertaking,

Canonization employs witty hyperbole. Canonization rely

upon

Not only do The

Going

to

Bed.

The

self-confident

and

The

and The

employ rational argument,

witty conceit, but both

Elegj 19. To His Mistress

Ecstasy

as

does

aggressively seductive

charm of this poem often makes it a favorite with students. Donne imitates Ovid's 1.5 here, but makes some changes that are worth getting your students to

Amores

consider the effects

of.

Donne

uses the present tense; the lady, unlike the scantily

And Donne's speaker, unlike Ovid's, conend of the poem. Ovid is fairly witty to begin with; Donne is even wittier. To do a master comic erotic poet one better is a mark of Donne's achievement. Marotti puts great stress on the social conditions in which such poems as this were written, emphasizing the complex sexual and power relationships between rich city women and struggling ambitious young law students. clad Latin lady,

is

elaborately dressed.

ceals his nudity until the very

The Flea and The Apparition, both seduction poems, enact the speaker's desire for social

and economic

as well as erotic success.

his contemporaries at the Inns of Court

pendence on patronage and

felt

The

real pressure that

Donne and

with respect to their economic de-

their social subservience to

an

aristocratic

code of

Petrarchan love surfaces in these two poems. In The Flea the reference to the lady's

disapproving parents

may

their children's marriages (see Sir

ancee in The Roaring

economic requirements parents had for Alexander's disapproval of his son Sebastian's fi-

allude to the

Girl) as well as their disapproval

Apparition, the speaker begins by

power set

to

wound

the lover a

literal

of Petrarchan conventions.

Petrarchan

lyric

need

The beloved

but an experienced

happy with future

is

not the young donna angelicata of

woman who,

the speaker predicts, will be un-

who will be put out by her excessive sexual demands. You this poem in terms of literary history as the complete reversal

lovers

to contextualize

of premarital sex. In The

making the Petrarchan concept of the lady's death, and then moves on to subvert a whole

John Donne

152

of the conventional Petrarchan and Neo-Platonic pose of male deference to the

and the

lady,

lover to

idealization of her as a thing of transcendental beauty leading the

moral perfection. Another poem in the anti-Petrarchan

Alchemy, which

The Bait

is

is

a

mode

mock

imitation or parody of Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd

His Love. Here the object of Donne's witty send-up

is

flates

to

Donne

the pastoral. Just as

had made fun of and challenged Petrarchan conventions by making them cally real, so in

Loves

is

even more overtly misogynist: "Hope not for mind in woman."

physi-

The Flea the naturalistic representation of the country setting de-

the convention of the pastoral

idyll.

Helen Gardner's "The Argument about The

Ecstasy" (in

Roberts [1975])

sets

out

two conflicting interpretations of the poem and attempts to reconcile them. The view

first

ABC's

who it

is

that the

of Reading)

poem

expresses "Platonism believed" (as

and the second

is

poem

that the

have been playing at Platonic love

.

.

.

Pound wrote

and imagines how they would

pass

to carnal enjoyment" (as Pierre Legouis wrote in Donne the Craftsman).

makes the argument that Donne's poem union, a

common theme

in

much

is

in the

presents "the case of a couple

about the conception of love

from

Gardner mutual

as

of Donne's other love poems, here illuminated

by a reading of Leone Hebreo's Neo-Platonic Dialoghi d'Amore (Dialogues of

Love):

And this, by affection and love, has transformed me into you begetting in me a desire that you may be fused with me, in order that I, your lover, may form but a single person with you, my beloved, and equal love may make of our two souls one, which

The

may

likewise vivify

and inform our two bodies.

sensual element in this desire excites a longing for physical union, that

the union of bodies

may correspond

to the unity of spirits wholly corn-

penetrating each other.

Given the philosophical, is

a

social

and emotional complexity of Donne's

easy to lose sight of his innovations in prosody. Donne's verse

is

lyrics it

characterized by

kind of directness and muscular syntax that owes a great deal to the verse of dra-

matic dialogue; he was surely a play-goer. His intellectual imagery witty Ovidian streak,

which

gives his

erotic knowingness. His verse

sometimes

it is.

But

it is

may

poems

a

at times

is

leavened by a

kind of urbane sophistication and

appear misogynist to students, and

also important to get students to see that there

is

a

self-

consciousness in Donne's verse which entails self-criticism of the speaker as male lover.

And

in his

most mature

lyrics,

which turns on the paradox of union

such

as

The Valediction Forbidding Mourning,

in separation, there

pression of love which transcends the division of lover

the

memorable emblem of the

"stiff

twin compasses," this

with reference to Perspectives: Emblem,

Style,

is

a mutuality in the ex-

and beloved. Containing

poem can be

explained

and Metaphor.

Holy Sonnets (1633) This edition follows the sequencing established by Helen Gardner, according to the earliest manuscripts and the 1633 edition. She argued that the

first

twelve

John Donne

poems of the 1633

153

edition are ordered according to the steps of spiritual medita-

tion as set forth in Saint Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises.

cept her ordering as based

on

solid evidence,

some

While most

critics ac-

disagree with her dividing the

Holy Sonnets into thematic groups—the first group of six sonnets devoted to death, and the second group devoted to love. Douglas Peterson has found evidence in Donne's Sermons that explains his own attitude toward the relation between fear and love as "essential preliminaries to repentance" (see "John Donne's Holy Sonnets

and the Anglican Doctrine of Contrition" in Roberts [1975]). Peterson sees Donne's Holy Sonnets as informed by the Anglican doctrine of salvation that insists upon a love of God which motivates hatred of sin. The theology of Donne's Holy Sonnets enacts direct confession to God and a profound belief in the resurrection of the body. In terms of the representation of gender

and

sexuality,

Donne's

earlier flouting

of male authority figures disappears in the Holy Sonnets, in which the speaker no longer seeks power but submission to a power greater than himself. In a reading which contrasts with that of Peterson's emphasis on love, Arthur Marotti, citing

John Carey's interpretation of the Sermons, puts forward the notion that Donne's God is above all a God of power and wrath. Marotti mentions "Batter my heart three-personed God" as evidence of the speaker's masochism. Marotti more acutely expressed the tension in these religious poems as "the conflict between assertion and submission" (255). The struggle of the speaker throughout these poems bears careful examination. Students could be asked to comment on the erotic and visceral language in which Donne expresses religious devotion.

Devotions

his

Occasions (1624)

"in these

moving and magnificent devotions

to the reader a step-by-step

account of the progress and regress of

As William Mueller [Donne] brings

Upon Emergent

malady—from

observes:

his first awareness of

... to the period of crisis

and

its

approach, to the coming of the physician

sleeplessness, to the tolling of the bells

announcing

the deaths of others, to the successful purging of his poisoned body, to the final

warning to

work of

fortify

himself against a relapse" (John Donne: Preacher, (1962)). As a

spiritual self-examination

Meditation

17 bears

and

as

a

comment on human

mortality,

comparison with the selections in Spiritual Self-Reckonings.

A Sermon

Preached to the Honorable Company of the Virginia Plantation (1622)

Delivered

on November

13, 1622, this

the request of the Virginia

sermon was published

Company. Donne

shortly thereafter at

attempts to persuade his audience

that they should convert the Indians to Christianity. But the aims of the are political as well as religious.

Donne makes an argument

sermon

for the justice of colo-

on what he sees as the lack of full exploitation of the land and the lack of generosity on the part of the Indians towards their neighbors. This sermon can be connected with other writing about Virginia in the early modern period— nization based

John Donne

154

for instance, Heriot's

A

Brief

and True Report of

"The Discovery" in Context.) Donne's

the

sermon can

Newfound Land of Virginia. (See be compared and contrasted

also

with the discourse of colonialism in such works as Spenser's State of Ireland

and Bacon's

essay

On

Plantations.

a very small place in the colonization of Ireland

most

as

an afterthought

to the conquest

and

accounts of Virginia in Haklyut's

territory. In

A

View of

the Present

Spenser actually accords religion

and mentions

civil

prosyletization

al-

organization of the conquered

Principle Voyages

and Navigations the

and natural wealth of the explored territory. In Donne's sermon, the goal of spreading the gospel becomes another purpose and justification for colonization. primary interest

is

in the physical beauty

Lady Mary Wroth Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621) The Mary Wroth's work was Dudley, third Baron North, who wrote in introduction to his first book of poems: "I wish your Ladyship's authority would

This collection contains 103 of the over 200 poems extant by Lady Mary Wroth. first critic

the

of Lady

so abate the price that our poorer abilities might hold trade without straining." His

appeal to her authority here taken in conjunction with his argument in favor of the style

of "good sense and matter elegantly delivered" as opposed to "fancy and ex-

Mary Wroth's many ways hearkens back to her uncle Sir Philip Sidney's. She writes in the Petrarchan manner with all its well-known features of sonnet form, oxymoron, and the persona of the suffering lover. The intellectual conceits and extravagant wit of the metaphysical style that we associate with Donne are not part of her work. However, Mary Wroth's poetry does have some of the melancholy and the worldweariness of early seventeenth-century poetry, and so may be read as a link between travagancy of conceit" shows that he approved entirely of her poetry.

poetry in

the Elizabethan style and that of Jonson,

who was

a great admirer of her verse.

The Pamphilia of the title may refer to the Latin woman poet of the Roman Emperor Nero's reign; none of her poetry has survived. Amphilanthus means "the lover of two," and has usually been taken to refer to Mary Wroth's first cousin, William Herbert. In Urania Wroth identifies Amphilanthus as Pamphilia's first cousin and has Amphilanthus recite a poem elsewhere attributed to Herbert. In some sense the poems in this sequence are autobiographical and document "her own fidelity and his lack of commitment" (Gary Waller, The Sidney Family Romance, [1993], 199).

The sonnet sequence begins with "When night's / and sleep death's image did my senses

darkness prove,

black mantle could most

The speaker dreams The poem contains the

hire."

a vision of Venus placing a "heart flaming" into her breast.

image of "night's black mantle" and "darkness"— colors that recur throughout the

sequence

(for instance, in

number

17) to create a

mood

of melancholy.

The

subtle

and frequent enjambment, the unobtrusive inversions of syntax, and the symbolic climax of the poem occurring at the end of the second quatrain that is a rhymed couplet,

all

make

this a

gorgeous poem.

Robert Herrick

Wroth's use of the Petrarchan

style places

since the speaker of the Petrarchan sonnet

is

155

her in a complex subject position-

masculine and in conflict over the

unwillingness of the lady to return his love. Even acknowledging such desire

through writing

quirement

Women

for

pits

Wroth

women

woman

against her social role as a

and

to be chaste

because of the

The

silent. (See Perspectives:

and Gender.) Josephine Roberts

re-

on

Tracts

in the introduction to her 1983 edition

of The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth has described the position of the speaker of Mary

Wroth's poems, as "a struggle between passionate surrender and self-affirmation." For the female speaker of Wroth's the subjection of love: "Must

poem

we be

sometimes means fleeing

self-affirmation

servile

doing what he

trophized in the masculine gender; the beloved

list?"

(#16).

visual image of the beautiful beloved in the Petrarchan tradition.

world to engage in a dialogue with

herself: "I

Love

is

apos-

absent, unlike the ever-present

is

my

with

spirit talk,

She shuns the and cry" (#26).

As Gary Waller has written, "The poems thus present a fascinating gendered variPamphilia's ation on a common Petrarchan paradox: she is trapped yet free speaking, even to herself, is like Wroth's writing itself, an act of self-assertion the more agency is affirmed, the more she finds that, because she is woman, she must struggle in what the poems repeatedly term 'a labyrinth'" (1993, 204). See .

.

.

.

#77, "In this strange labyrinth

how

shall

I

.

.

turn?"

An excellent poem to focus on in order to show how Mary Wroth appropriates the gaze of the speaker of the Petrarchan sonnet for her

"Take heed mine

eyes,

how you your looks do cast." The

unto your

may

at

of her

selves"

own

subjectivity.

ing in the gaze:

"mine

once

She

is

refer to her

and her

lover

own

purposes

is

#39,

plural "selves" in "be true

and

to the multiple facets

not the object of the gaze here but the one delight-

eyes enjoy full sight of love."

These poems need to be read in conjunction with the excerpt from Urania in

The Development of English

Prose.

The concerns of

constructing female subjec-

evidenced in Wroth's poems can also be compared to that in Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam and Katherine Philips's love poems. In terms of her complex relation to the Petrarchan tradition, Wroth's appropriation of tivity as

Petrarchism can be compared and contrasted with Donne's antagonism to the

Petrarchan role of subservience to the beloved.

Robert Herrick Hesperides (1648) This volume of poems was dedicated to Charles, Prince of Wales. The title refers to the garden of the Hesperides, guarded by the nymphs of the same name. Juno planted the golden apples, given her as a wedding present by the goddess Earth, in this garden. The conceit appears to be that this text is a garden of poetry, as the first

couplet of The Argument of His Book proclaims:

birds,

and bowers / of

April, May, of June,

and

"I

sing of brooks, of blossoms,

July flowers."

The memorable

phrase "times trans-shifting" suggests that Herrick's subject is a world in constant motion, in the state of growing and becoming. This sense of the beauty of things

Robert Herrick

156

in

motion

continued in Delight

is

which concludes on

in Disorder,

a self-reflexive

note in which everything "neglectful," "flow[ing] confusedly," and "tempestuous"

woman's

in the

in

to

mind

such words

[the speaker),

The Ovidian dictum

in every part."

comes

"more bewitch

dress

here.

than when

ars celare artem,

Again in Upon Julias

or the art

Clothes there

as "liquefaction," "brave vibration,"

art

and

/

is

Is

too precise

to conceal art,

a similar delight evident

is

"glittering."

The Hock-Cart, or Harvest Home is part of the pastoral tradition of poetry. Raymond Williams comments on how The Hock-Cart in its directness lays bare the social relations

Hock-Cart]

which Ben Jonson's To

crude in

is

Penshurst

feeling, this early

and

more

subtly mediates: "It [The

kind of man-management,

jollying

which uses metaphors of rain and spring

to see even the drink as a way of getting more labour (and more pain)" (TKe Country and the City, [1973], 33). For a contrasting point of view on Jonson's To Penshurst, see the poet Thorn Gunn's essay in

The Occasions of

Poetry (1982): "It

is

difficult to

when

put oneself into a time

miration for rank was not snobbery, but we have to make the attempt, and

ad-

we do so then we have a chance of understanding the ideas that Jonson is trying to embody in the poem" (109). For Gunn, these ideas include "the responsibilities of rank" and "the admiration of chastity," values which Gunn claims are "genuinely Jonson's." Are these ideas present in Herrick's Hock-Cart, or does this poem, and if

for that matter Jonson's To Penshurst, merely attempt to please the gentry?

Another poem of Herrick's set in a pastoral landscape is To the Virgins, to Make of Time on the theme of tempus fugit, or time flies. This poem can be compared to a much more complex treatment of the same theme by Marvell, To His Coy Mistress, and a much more urban and humorously erotic treatment of the

Much

theme by Donne, To His Mistress Going to Bed. For all Herrick's ration of Ben Jonson, there is an element of English country verse, as in the very local reference to the

Latinity

and admi-

folk culture in his

"whitethorn neatly interwove" in

Corinna's Going A-Maying.

George Herbert The Temple (1633) One

of the best places to look for close readings of Herbert's poetry

The

Vendler's

of George

Poetry

Herbert

(1975).

Her chapter "Emblems and

how

Herbert's metaphors work. For

Allegories" contains sensitive explications of instance,

on The

Altar,

Vendler writes: "The

glance, as Herbert takes pains to elucidate tears,

God

is

the stonemason, the altar

is

it:

'allegory'

the altar

seems too simple is

a heart, the

a place for sacrifice.

begin to examine the terms in their interrelations, mysteries

not

likely to

spend

sociated with tears. is

now

fering,

its

time praising God; neither

We

in the shape of

God's

tears, to re-establish

an

is

a

But

arise.

as

at first

cement

soon

altar" (61-62).

'cutting,'

as

and God

the heart, not in

its

is

we

A hard heart

hard heart one normally

decide that perhaps the heart used to be hard: after

'broken,' presumably by

provoking

Helen

is

is

as-

all, it

has used the tools of sufnatural heart-shape, but

Vendler focuses throughout on the creation of

Emblem,

complex

alternatives of

meaning

Metaphor

Style,

157

in Herbert's deceptively simple creation of poetic

parables.

A

more

Martin

approach to the question of

historicized

metaphor works

in Herbert's poetry can be

found

how

the emblematic

in the very useful article by

"George Herbert's Pattern Poems and the Materiality of Language: Approach to Renaissance Hieroglyphics," ELH 50.2 (1983). Michael Rothberg's "An Emblematic Ideology: Images and Additions in Two Editions of Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans" (ELR, 80-94) contains perceptive comments Elsky,

A New

about the relation between Herbert's and Vaughan's deployment of the emblem places the whole question of emblematic representation in terms of the ideo-

and

between the Anglican approach

logical differences

clasm. Quarles's concept of

explain

how

emblem

to images

as "silent parable"

the visual effects of Herbert's

and Puritan icono-

(Embkmes, 1643) helps to

poems generate meaning. You will want poems as The Altar, Easter Wings,

to pay great attention to the visual effects of such

and The

Pulley.

The continued

interest of

lustrated by reference to

contemporary poets in Herbert's poetry can be

Seamus Heaney's

lecture

on

his

il-

assumption of the Chair

of Poetry at Oxford, The Redress of Poetry (1989). There are perceptive insights into

both The

Pulley

and The the

ical possibilities in

meanings of versal of

'collar,'

emotional

Collar here. title,

both

states

as

Heaney writes of The

the way which the

an

article

from affront

poning stanzaic composure until the enough,' and can be hung out strain of

on

our knowledge of things

poem

Collar:

"The dance of lex-

changes partners with the

of clerical clothing and a

fit

of anger, the

re-

to assuagement, the technical relish of postlast

lines— it

the imaginative

is

all,

as Seferis says, 'strong

arm of the balance

to take the

as they are" (16).

poem by Herbert in this anthology, The Forerunners is perhaps one of The line "Farewell, sweet phrases, lovely metaphors" would aphis most pear to mark this poem as a kind of poetic retraction, a turning away from "Lovely The

final

,

difficult.

enchanting language," just as Chaucer had turned away from secular storytelling the end of the Canterbury Tales. Paradoxically, The Forerunners

such metaphors, with the "harbingers" of the

first line

itself

at

depends on

suggesting both the king's

and by extension God's messengers coming to announce his arrival. The tension in the poem between "sparkling" and "dullness," "brothels" and "Church," "thence" and "thither," "flame" and "bleak paleness," "the door" and what is "within"—all create what Heaney finds to be the great achievement of Herbert's poetry: how it "contains within itself the co-ordinates and contradictions servants,

of experience" (1993,

16).

Perspectives

Emblem, The

Style,

texts in this section offer perspectives

on

Metaphor representation through similitude—

the complex system of resemblances that connected words with the world in the

Emblem,

158

early

modern

Style,

Metaphor

period. Geoffrey Whitney's The Phoenix, taken

Emblemes (1586), can be used to show students the

poem

an

that comprised a typical entry in

from

A

his

early

Choice of

motto, and

tri-partite picture,

modern book of emblems.

Students need to see that such emblems appear frequently in English early mod-

ern poetry.

One

assignment that helps students concretely grasp the concept of

emblem and to see its relationship and difference from metaphor, which Emmanuele Tesauro defines as a kind of visual transference, and allegorical symbol, which is exemplified in Giordano Bruno's chapter on Venus in On the Composition of Images, Signs and Ideas, is to have them read a selection of poems from this section and identify how the emblems in these poems work. Excellent poems for examination of how the emblem generates meaning would include Richard Crashaw's To

the Noblest

and Best of

Donne's

A

Emblem,

or the Seal Milton's L'Allegro

Ladies, the Countess of Denby, John and Katherine Philips 's Friendship in and 11 Penseroso, which contain emblem,

Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,

metaphor, symbol, are also excellent places to turn to get students to engage in

how

close reading of

these different types of resemblance contain compacted

forms of meaning that could not otherwise be expressed. Indeed Milton's sensuous imagery in these two poems hearkens back to Shakespeare and looks forward to the Romantics. Perhaps the best introduction to the mysteries of early

symbolism can be found in the work of Frances Yates—both The Art

of

modern

Memory and

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Broadening the discussion to include the difference between medieval allegory

you can ask students

and

early

modern emblem and metaphor,

to contemplate the difference

between the

biblically

governed

and Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale with the more esoteric symbolism of the emblem. Milton's eschewal of allegory but employment of complex metaphors and similes for his telling of the Genesis story in Paradise Lost would be another example for students to consider in order to understand the dramatic shift from the medieval to the early modern similitude.

symbolism in The Dream

of the Rood

Richard Lovelace Lucasta (1649)

You can have your students read Lovelace's poetry in relation to the texts in Perspectives: The Civil War, since To Lucasta, Going to the Wars was occasioned by his setting off to fight for the royalist cause. The aesthetic of his poetry owes something to the genealogy of Castiglione's Courtier in England, as the cavalier can be

seen as a seventeenth-century embodiment of this type. Sir Walter Raleigh's poetry

would provide an

earlier

point of comparison. Patsy Griffin's The Modest Ambition

of Andrew Marvell (1995) explores the importance of Lovelace

of Marvell.

Anselment's

In "

to the

life

order to contextualize To Althea, from Prison, see

'Stone

Walls'

and 'Iron

Bars':

Conventions of Seventeenth-Century Prison Reformation, 17.1 (Winter 1993): 15-34.

Richard

Lovelace

Literature,"

and work

Raymond and the

Renaissance

and

Andrew Marvell

59

1

Henry Vaughan Silex Scintillans (1650, 1655)

poems published here

All of Vaughan's

Private Ejaculations.

editions

An

from

are

Silex Scintillans, or Sacred

Poems and

excellent article explaining the difference between the

two

Michael Rothberg's "An Emblematic Ideology: Images and Additions in

is

Two Editions of Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans" Rothberg particularly focuses on "The Author's Emblem (of himself)," which was deleted from the 1655 edition. Rothberg sees Vaughan's deletion of the emblem as "an overtly political move which does not signify retreat, but instead a pragmatic intervention in the tumult' of the discursive battles of the 1650s" (87). These battles included the very popular Eikon Basilike, attributed to and written in defense of Charles I, and Milton's Eikonoklastes in which he argued against the idolatry of the King. For these texts, '

see Perspectives:

The

"not merely the

letter

Civil

War. The problem for Vaughan would appear to be

... as opposed to the

ural as opposed to the

literal."

spirit,

but also with the iconic or

fig-

This discussion raises important questions about

the ideological meaning of the interpretation not only of visual emblems but of

metaphors

as

emblems. See Perspectives: Emblem, Metaphor,

poems, one could ask the students to consider

such images

if

Style.

in Regeneration, the "solitary lamp" in Silence and Stealth of Days, miser," in The World function as

emblems.

If so,

how?

Turning to the

as "the pair

If not,

why

strong allusiveness to the All

Gone

into the

New Testament,

much

fearful

not? Vaughan's

imagery would seem to participate in Francis Quarles's definition of "silent parable" (Emblemes, 1643). Indeed,

of scales"

and "the

emblem

as

of Vaughan's imagery displays a

as in the "dazzling darkness" of They Are

World of Light which recalls and extends the Pauline "through a

glass darkly."

Andrew Marvell Miscellaneous Poems (1681)

One

of the best introductions to Marvell

is still

T. S. Eliot's essay in Selected Essays

(1932) reprinted in Marvell: The Critical Heritage, edited by Elizabeth Story (1978). Defining the "wit" of which Marvell's Horatian

Ode

is

Donno

a great example, Eliot

more than a technical accomplishment, or the vocabulary and syntax it is what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace" (363-64). Eliot goes on to explain that if we do not usually associate this wit with Puritan literature, perhaps it is because we mis-

wrote: "It

is

of an epoch;

understand the

who

varieties of Puritans:

"Many of them were gentlemen of

the time

merely believed, with considerable show of reason, that government by a

Parliament of gentlemen was better than government by a Stuart" (364). The historicity of Eliot's analysis separates it from the New Critics, with whom he is so often erroneously lumped, and shows the poet-critic's awareness of the tension maintained in Marvell's work between a French and Latinate poetic wit and a

Republican

politics.

Andrew Marvell

160

You need to get students and the Latinate register of toricize a reading

of this

quest of Ireland in his

to recognize both the Latin

language.

its

poem

Letters,

At the same

in relation to Cromwell's

and the

See Perspectives:

The

Civil

you

will

want

own account

of this conquest

effects

registered in the Irish popular song, Sean O'Dhuibhir the Glenn).

form of the Horatian Ode,

time,

upon

to his-

of his con-

the Irish, as

an Ghleanna (Sean O'Dwyer of

War, or the War of Three Kingdoms.

An ex-

Ode as "a form of political commentary" Civic Crown (1978, 63-68). She concludes:

cellent close reading of Marvell's Horatian is

in

Annabel

Patterson's Marvel and the

somewhat between Eikon Basilike and Eikonoklastes, the Ode mediates not between two political camps but between two interdependent theories (which rhetoric has always recognized as pathos and ethos) of how language works upon the human mind" (68). For these two texts, see Perspectives: The Civil War. Some of Patterson's readings will provoke debate. To what extent does Marvell unironically "shift responsibility for evaluating the Irish campaign to the conquered Irish" (Patterson, 64)? The poem was suppressed after "In taking a position Horatian

its

first

1681 edition until 1776, which, according to David

printing in the

Norbrook, caused readers

to overlook Marvell's republicanism.

Norbrook argues

that Marvell "stresses the ideological, republican elements of the campaign."

Admitting the

possibility of

tains that there

is

some

irony in the presentation of the Irish, he main-

"generic precedent" for the Irish praise of

Cromwell in the con-

quered Hannibal's praise of the Romans in Horace Odes 4.4 English Civil War, ed.

Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday,

Marvell uses the praise of the English republic.

Is

a digression in this

For To His Coy

poem

"is

Roman

and

the

[1990], 160). Thus,

empire as a model for

his praise of the

the sympathy which Marvell evokes for the King's death merely

poem, or does Mistress,

it

qualify the praise of the revolution?

again turn to Eliot

not only combined with, but fused

tural decoration of a serious idea" lines that

(Literature

begin "But at

my back I

/ Then must we

(Donno,

who

explained

into, the

how

the wit of this

imagination ...

[1978], 366). Eliot

it is

struc-

compares the four

always hear" to "But, soone as once set

is

our

lit-

an ever-enduring night" (Catullus 5.5-6). Likening the carpe diem theme to that in poems by Herrick, Donne, Propertius and Ovid, Eliot also cites Ben Jonson's version of this in Volpone: "Cannot we deceive the eyes tle light,

sleep

/ Of a few poor household spies?"

(3.7.176-7).

To further explain the seventeenth-

century concept of wit, turn to Tesauro's deployment of ingenium (Latin), or nio

(Italian)

Perspectives:

in

his

Cannochiale Aristotelico (Through the

Emblem, Metaphor,

Style.

ingeg-

Lens of Aristotle)

in

Looking forward to the Romantics, Eliot

compares the imagination of stanza 97 of Upon Appleton House with Coleridge's definition of imagination in Biographia Literaria

XIV: "This power

.

.

.

reveals itself in

the balance or reconcilement of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea with the image."

In a historicized reading,

Thomas Healy

contrasts Marvell's

Upon Appleton

House with Jonson's To Penhurst as lacking Jonson's control in his praise of an imagined realm to whose values he can confidently assent. Healy sees Marvell's narrator as subtly revealing his misgivings over his patron (Literature

and

the English Civil

Lord

Fairfax's retirement

War, 181-82). For another historically detailed

Katherine Philips

reading of Upon Appleton House in context, see

"Upon Appleton House,

161

to

my Lord

Fairfax" in Michael Wilding's Dragons Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (1987).

Katherine Philips Poems By

the Incomparable, Mrs. K.

P.

(1664)

Katherine Philips's poetry was first published in an unauthorized edition in 1664, the year that she died, and then was re-edited and expanded into the 1667 edition overseen by her literary executor Sir Charles Cotterell. As Harriette Andreadis has written in "The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips," Signs 15.1 (1989), 34-60:

was to appropriate the

"Philips' contribution

cavalier conventions of platonic het-

erosexual love, with their originally platonic and male homoerotic feeling and to

use those conventions and that discourse to describe her relations with (37).

To

M}

Donne's A

Excellent Lucasia on

Valediction: Forbidding

to Lucasia, or Mrs.

Truly Noble

Not only does

Mourning.

Philips use

constancy, but she plays

poem through

Platonism and the eroticism of Donne's

poems

women"

Friendship needs to be read in conjunction with

emblem of

of the compass, as an

ceit

Our

Donne's con-

on the NeoTwo other

this allusion.

Anne Owen— Friendship in Emblem or the Seal, and To the Owen—further adumbrate the poetic representa-

and Obliging Mrs. Anne

tion of this passionate friendship. In the military metaphors of To the Truly Noble

and Obliging Mrs. Anne Owen, Philips appropriates the masculine language of love Breach of Nature's Laws: The Discourse of Denial

as a conquest. In "Excusing the

and Disguise

in Katherine Philips' Friendship Poetry" (Restoration Studies in English

Literary Culture

1660-1700

which the speaker of

[1990]), Celia

world and acknowledges her sees

protects her beloved friend

love's existence in the very

two kinds of tension in

favor of the Neo-Platonic

Easton has analyzed the complex way in

poems both

Philips's

Philips's

and

a

world

it

from the

transcends. Easton

verse—a tendency to repress the physical in

tendency for their transcendent love to be depen-

dent on the vehicle of Orinda's verse. "Friendship discovered in the ideal realm

maintained by

its

verbal celebration"

Two poems on

historical events display Philips's royalist sympathies:

Double Murder of King Charles and

On

is

(5).

Upon

the Third of September 1651. Philips's

the

sympa-

thy with the Stuarts Can be compared to that of such other women authors as Aphra Behn and Lady Margaret Cavendish. As a female poet she denies her concern with politics ("I think not on the state") and claims that such a concern is a transgression of her position as

her poetry, however,

The World

calls to

is

woman

("the breach of nature's laws").

mind Vaughan's poem by

well-versed in Neo-Platonic thought, her rectly

moral and

final celebration

Much

of

indeed concerned with history and the political world.

political

and

less

visionary

of the "uncaged soul"

the same

poem upon

is

title.

the world

While is

Philips

was

much more

di-

and metaphysical than Vaughan's. Her

preceded by a meditation upon the

vi-

cissitudes of "fortune, the "treacherous world," and contains the evocative simile of how "we run from what we hate / like squibs on ropes." The poem's concern

162

Katherine Philips

with the relation between "tyranny" and self-imposed "bondage" can be compared with the state of Milton's devils in Hell. Since the popularity of Philips 's poetry

continued as

a

after her death,

with such readers

as

Dryden,

Philips's poetry

works well

between the Early Modern Period and the Restoration and

transition

Eighteenth Century.

The Development of English

Prose

Francis Bacon Essays (1597, 1625) Reprinted in 1598, 1604, and 1606, the 1597 Essays were revised by Bacon in 1612 and 1625. Not only did he cover a greater variety of topics but he also significantly revised the style or the original essays.

towards greater

clarity

To

illustrate

how Bacon

revised his writing

of thought and greater fluency, you can ask students to do

and the 1625 versions of Of Studies. You can ask them is closer to the terse Senecan style, and which makes greater use of Ciceronian parallelism and variety. In which version do the sentences flow more smoothly from one to the other? An excellent introduction to a close reading of the 1597

which version

to determine

Bacon's rhetoric

is

Brian Vickers's Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose (1968).

Morris Croll's essays

"Attic"

(in

and Baroque

Prose Style,

the Anti-Ciceronian

J. Max Patrick and Robert O. Evans [1966]), provide a useful Bacons "Attic" style as a reaction against the emphasis in sixteenthcentury prose on "words and forms," in favor of "maximal expressivity" and "the process of thinking" (163). As John ]. Miller observes in "Pruning by Study": SelfCultivation in the Essays" (Papers on Language and Literature, 339-361): "Though Of

Movement, edited by analysis of

Studies

is

the

first

essay in the 1597

towards the end of the Essays

.

.

.

group often, in subsequent editions

preface to the rest of the Essays, offering against the misuses of reading,

it

appeared

0/ Studies still appears as a kind of instructions on how to read, warnings

Nevertheless,

and

particular

recommendations regarding the

therapeutic values of reading for various readers" (349-350). In the dedication to the 1625 edition of his Essays,

Bacon commented: "Of all

my other works, [they] have been most current; for that, as it seems, they come home to men's business and bosoms." As a genre the Essays were indeed meant to lives and to impress upon them practical wisdom in memorable form. Towards this end Bacon employs a rhetoric designed to hit home his message. Such rhetorical aspects of Bacon's style as the aphorism, a pithy maxim or sententia, and the syntactical symmetry, or parallelism of his clauses were major innovations in prose style. Point out to students that Bacon adapted these stylistic features from imitation of such Latin writers as Seneca (for concision) and

speak to people in their daily a

Cicero

and pleonasm or elegant restatement). A good example of the argument is summed up by the aphorism: doth ever add pleasure." This aspect of the Senecan style can

(for parallelism

the sententia

is

"A mixture of a

in lie

Of Truth, where

The King James

also be seen in early

Mariam

of

An

modern tragedy-par ticularly

example the

(see for

excellent source for

Jardine's

"The method of Bacon's

of Discourse

(

as

In order to explain

in Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedy

Chorus

Essays' in her Francis Bacon: Discovery

The end of this chapter

1974).

163

at the end of each act). an author of philosophical discourse is Lisa

senteniae of the

Bacon

Bible

and

contains a reading of the essay

Bacons condemnation of dishonesty

here,

to Bacon's advice to politicians to use dissimulation, Jardine

the

Of

Art

Truth.

which runs contrary

comments on Bacon's

distinction between moral

and civil instruction: "Moral instruction on the duty of individuals in a community does not teach policy, but persuades individuals to be-

have so as to uphold the 'bonds of society' " (247).

"The individual

a whole, she observes:

Bacon believed

to

make

Of the method

essays are built

of the Essays as

up out of

devices

which

non-rational appeal, and to sway the reader's imagination

into a 'method of discourse'

which ensures

a favourable reception for the knowl-

edge which they communicate" (248).

Of Marriage and Single Life can be connected with the texts that cover marriage The Tracts on Women and Gender. See Erasmus, Joseph Swetnam, and Rachel Speght. The statement, "Chaste women are often proud and in

Perspectives:

froward ... if

It is

one of the best bonds both of chastity and obedience

she think her husband wise, which she will never do

if

in the wife,

she find him jealous" has

obvious relevance both to Othello and The Tragedy of Mariam.

Sir

a

The skeptical attitude towards religion in Of Superstition can be compared with Thomas Browne's view in Religio Medici. Bacon contrasts atheism which "leaves

man

to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation,

may be

all

which

guides to outward moral virtue, though religion were not" with supersti-

tion "which dismounts

all

these."

Bacon

is

popular belief ("the master of superstition

interested in separating religion is

from

the people") and from tradition. In

Browne has a much more accepting view of custom as a necessary part of culture and of conflicting traditions. Bacon's concern with "the stratagems of prelates for their own ambition and lucre" looks forward to the Puritan

contrast with Bacon,

protests in the English Civil

and The War.

Petition of

War. See the selections from Milton's

Of Plantations can be discussed in relation modern period: Spenser's A View of the

early

Sermon Preached largely

to the

economic:

Eikonoklastes

Gentlewomen and Tradesmen's Wives in Perspectives: The Civil to other texts

on

colonization in the

Present State of Ireland,

and Donne's

Honorable Company of the Virginia Plantation. Bacon's focus

how

to fortify the colony with food

and

supplies,

how

is

to use the

land, and what type of colonists should inhabit the plantation ("rather noblemen and gentlemen, than merchants"). It is interesting to note that the native inhabitants of the territory to be colonized are nowhere mentioned.

The King James Bible (1611) You

will

want

to point out to your students that the English Bible was the

popular text in the early modern period. The

most

interpretation of these two chapters

The King James

164

defines early

modern

Bible

and the discourse on gender. See Joseph Swetnam The Tracts on Women and Gender. The choice of Genesis,

theology,

and Rachel Speght in Chapters 1 and 2, is also dictated by

their relevance to Milton's Paradise Lost.

The

language of the King James Bible echoes throughout Milton's text as the notes to this edition illustrate.

Lady Mary Wroth The Countess of Montgomery s Urania (1621) The

best source for this text

which contains cation

and the

of romance,

it

Queene. Since

is

the superb edition of Josephine Roberts (1995),

a comprehensive introduction to the texts circumstances of publiliterary traditions that

inform

can be compared with such it is

it.

Since this text

texts as Sir

a prose romance, Urania

is

falls

into the genre

Gawain and Spenser's

Faerie

a useful text to look at in terms of

the origins of the novel, both for the trope of the

woman

reader and for the rep-

resentation of the protagonist's introspection. See Perspectives: Spiritual Self-

Reckonings.

Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1651) As Charles Cantalupo comments: "Hobbes' infamous 'state of nature,' in which a person's life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,' is nothing if not a conceit and Hobbes 's own rhetorical elaboration on a philosophical convention found in Thucydides, Lucretius, and Horace." Hobbes 's deployment of the conceit can be connected with the conceit in seventeenth-century poetry. His pessimism

is

rooted

and moral philosophy. The selection from this text, "Chapter 13: Of the Social Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery" can be compared to the texts in Perspectives: Government and Self Government. David Johnston in The Rhetoric of "Leviathan" (1986) stresses both the roots of Hobbes s political thought in Renaissance humanism and the historical dimension of Hobbes's theory of the commonwealth which was based on an evolutionary view of human nature: "The prospects of the commonwealth in his reading of classical history

as

he envisaged

it

were

vitally

dependent upon the outcome of the

struggle be-

tween superstition and enlightenment" (129). See Bacon's essay Of Superstition.

Sir

Thomas Browne

Religio Medici (1643) First

published in the unauthorized edition of 1642, this text was published in an

authorized edition in 1643. While Stanley Fish once disparaged ligious

Brown

for his re-

"middle way," and the introduction to the Norton Anthology of English

Thomas Browne

Sir

Literature

found him wanting

tion of critics

makes

165

not taking sides in the Civil War, a new genera-

for

finding a plasticity in his rhetoric

and a charity in his theology that worth reading. For bibliography, see Andrea Sununu, "Recent Thomas Browne (1970-1986)," ELR (Winter 1990): 118-129.

is

his writing

Studies in Sir

You can begin by

contrasting Browne's curt style with Burton's

dering one. Maurice Croll uses a sentence from

Religio

more mean-

Medici 1.6 as an example of

the periode coupee (the curt period), the characteristics of which are short members,

mode of progression, and deliberate asymmetry of the members of the period: "To see ourselves again, we need not look for Plato's year there was none then, but there hath been some one since that parallels him, and is, as it were his revived a

.

self."

This six-member period

metaphors

is

.

.

described by Croll as follows: "a series of

and paradoxes

flash their lights; or a chain of 'points'

reveals the energy

of a single apprehension in the writer's mind" ("The Baroque Style in Prose," in "Attic"

and Baroque

Prose Style, 218-19). Croll traces this style to the

Seneca and distinguishes the apprehension

is

it

from the parallelism of the Ciceronian

always single

is

open

Theology and

Sir

1990]: 69-105).

At

perceptions, in which a skepti-

its

be held in tandem. See Victoria

cal perspective allows for contradictory views to

(ELR [Winter

model of Whether

to debate, as Victoria Silver's analysis of

Browne's rhetoric argues for the multiplicity of

Silver, "Liberal

style.

Thomas Browne's

'Soft

and

Flexible' Discourse"

times, Browne's sentence structures

do

display a

sonorous parallelism which C. A. Patrides connects with the parallelism of the Bible (see the Introduction to his 1977 edition of Browne's Major Works).

As

on the order of Montaigne's

a kind of autobiography

can be compared and contrasted with the Reckonings. Browne

is

known

Essais, Religio

Medici

texts in Perspectives: Spiritual Self-

for his tolerance

and acceptance of the

difference

of customs in different cultures, as can be seen in Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial. The flexibility

of his viewpoint

is

mirrored in the

Silver (1990) notes: "Verbal contrivance

and

flexibility

excess

disregard for a sense of the reader's improvement:

it

of his

do not

style.

As

Victoria

necessarily indicate a

can express skepticism about

and how we determine and propagate them" (105). This same skepticism characterizes Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646). (Browne revised the initial edition five times; the text here is from the second edition, pubreceived categories of value

lished in 1650.)

oblivion;

and

writes in "To the Reader": "knowledge

As Browne

to purchase a clear

and part with much Scripture in the

first

that

we know." Browne's

chapter

in large part

is

volved truths." As a text

on

He

cautions against "converting

receiving as literal expressions, obscure

interpretation, Pseudodoxia Epidemica can be

Hydriotaphia, Charles

Lamb

wrote of Hydriotaphia:

Browne wrote

his

work

Urn

forget

discussion of the exegesis of

with Milton's Areopagitica and the preface to Bunyan's

speculation."

made by

about the nature of representation,

about the relation between words and the world.

metaphors into properties, and

is

and warrantable body of Truth, we must

and

in-

compared

Pilgrim's Progress.

Burial (1658)

"it is like

a labyrinth of doubt

and withering

in response to the discovery of burial urns at

166

Sir

Thomas Browne

Old Walsingham

in Norfolk.

As

a meditation

upon

death, Hydriotaphia can be com-

pared with Milton's elegy Lycidas. You need to explain the subtle Hydriotaphia to your students.

doxes

nothing

strictly

invisible

Sun within

is

humor

of

distinguished by such wonderful para-

immortal, but immortality; whatever hath no be-

end."

profound appreciation of

a

is

is

may be confident of no

ginning ial

"There

as:

The work

And within

life:

"Life

this discussion

a pure flame,

is

of death and bur-

and we

live

by an

us."

Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy

(1621)

Revised editions of this text were printed at Oxford in 1624 and 1628, and there

were

five

other printings up to 1676. E. Patricia Vacari (The View from Minerva

Tower, 1989) notes that

rather than the

s

Burton uses "the old rhetoric of the spoken language

new rhetoric

for writing that

the invention of printing" (125).

had developed

The speaking

significantly only after

voice of Democritus

principle in this confusing text which contains

is

the uniting

an encyclopedic range of knowl-

which is foreign to the modern reader in its long, meandering senand dizzying allusivity. The "Utopia of Democritus," an excerpt from the lengthy introduction, can be compared with the texts in Perspectives: Government and Self-Government as well as with Thomas More's Utopia. Burton's comment on civility versus barbarism can be connected with the texts in The Discourse of Ethnography, as well as with the excerpt from Florio's translation of Montaigne's Of Cannibals in "The Discovery" in Context. Burton's mention of Sir John Davies's The True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Entirely Subdued draws attention to the early modern portrayal of the Irish as edge and a

style

tence structure

barbarous. Burton's notion that those in Europe were "once as uncivil as they in Virginia"

is

not unlike Spenser's contention in

A

that the English were once as uncivil as the Irish.

that this comparison of the

present

is

View of

the Present State of Ireland

You can

explain to your students

European and English past

to the Irish

an example of what the anthropologist Johanes Fabian

and Amerindian

calls

"the denial of

coevalness." See Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance (1995).

The Division of

the Body,

the body of the text

by dividing

it

is like.

Humours,

Spirits will give

the students a sense of what

Burton attempts to control the multiplicity of the

text

Members, and Subsections, according to the Ramist rhetoric to form a kind of tree of knowledge spread-

into Parts, Sections,

principle of dialect in

from larger branches into smaller shoots. This chapter introduces students humoral theory of the body, the influence of which can be felt in everything from medicine to poetry and drama to political theory and to the discourse on gening out

to the

der.

The

description of the "spirit," or "subtle vapor" can be useful in explaining

Donne's use of "spirit" in such poems suggestive study of

England

Shame

is

as

humoral theory and

The its

Ecstasy.

The most comprehensive and

importance for drama in early modern

Gail Kern Paster's The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Discipline of

in Early

Modern England

(1991).

The

Civil War, or the

War of Three Kingdoms

167

Perspectives

The

War

Civil War, or the

This section

is

intended to give students a way to contextualize the literature of this

period in relation to perhaps the most

momentous event of the

that raged not only in England but also in Scotland torical

and

two

was written

Eikonoklastes (1649)

this text

first

texts

need

to

century: the wars

Ireland. For a solid his-

account, see Martyn Bennett's The Civil Wars

1638-1651 (1997). The

which was

Kingdoms

of Three

in

Britain

and

Ireland

be read in tandem, since Milton's

as a response to the King's Eikon Basilike (1649),

John Gauden. According

actually ghost-written by

Gilman

to Ernest

"sparked an explosion of pity for the martyred king" (konoclasm and Poetry

See Richard Helgerson, "Milton Reads the King's Book: Print, Performance, and the Making of a Bourgeois Idol," Criticism 29.1

in the English Reformation [1986]).

(1987), 1-25. The Petition of Gentlewomen and Tradesmen's Wives (1642) gives

sense of the unrest in

London

in the early

some

1640s— including the economic hard-

ships of the people as well as the complaints against the Bishops. This text also

documents the English outrage

outbreak of rebellion in Ireland, and the

at the

ports of massacres of colonists there. Events in Ireland

had

a great impact

re-

on the

pressure to get rid of the monarchy, since Charles was perceived as a crypto-

Catholic, to

and

a potential ally of papists in Ireland.

produce a petition

in the early

modern

is

That

a striking example of women's

period.

You can point out

women banded

communal

together

political activity

to your students that

women

in

Scotland and Ireland were also involved in the conflict. For comments on this see

Martyn Bennett (1997). To give students a sense of the Cromwell's

Letter of Sept. 17, 16$9.

conflict in Ireland, have

This

letter

reading of Marvell's Horatian Ode. Cromwell's

with Spenser's

A View, which, like many

them read Oliver

can be used to do a symptomatic

letter

can also be read in connection

other English tracts

on

Ireland,

proposed

the military conquest of Ireland that Cromwell carried out. At the time of the confiscations, Spenser's

grandson received

a letter

from Cromwell granting him

his

land and mentioning that Cromwell had actually read his grandfather's writing on

An Irish account of the confiscations, Sean O Duibhir an Ghleanna (John O'Dwyer of the Glenn) (c. 1651) circulated orally from the time of the Cromwell, although it was not published until the nineteenth century. To read other poems by Ireland.

the

many

poets

who

wrote in the

see the anthology edited by

Irish

Thomas

language during the early

Kinsella,

An

modern

period,

Duanaire, Poems of the Dispossessed.

For a sense of the dissent that arose within the republican movement over dislive up to the ideals of the English revolution,

content with Cromwell's failure to see

John Lilburne,

England's

New

Chains Discovered (1648).

Turning to Scotland, where the over the imposition of the

initial religious-ideological conflict

Book of

Common

Prayer,

broke out

the conflicts within

Presbyterian Scotland can be witnessed in The Story of Alexander Agnew, or Jock of

Broad Scotland from the newspaper Mercurius

be publicly tried for atheism.

Finally,

Politicus.

Agnew was

the

first

Scot to

Edward Hyde's "The Death of Montrose"

The

168

Civil War, or the

from The True

some

tion of

War

of Three Kingdoms

Historical Narrative of the Rebellion

(1702-1704) shows the participa-

Scots in the royalist cause, with Montrose figuring as the hero of the

highland Scots' support of the Stuarts. As one of the great English prose

Hyde, usually referred to by his the texts in

stylists,

Clarendon, can be read in connection with

title

The Development of English

Prose.

John Milton L'Allegro

and

Written in 1637, these poems were

Penseroso (1638)

II

published in 1638. As companion poems

first

they intricately mirror one another in their prosody and in their complex inter-

woven

allusions to

one another both by echo and antithesis. Both are written in Both express a whole orientation to the world through the

octosyllabic couplets.

poems

description of place. Both

are highly allusive—particularly to Shakespeare.

Both poems draw upon the conception of humoral psychology Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. Milton's earliest sonnets were written in Italian, so

it is

as discussed in

not surprising that he

and sestet. on a strong

follows the precedent set by Petrarch of dividing the sonnet into octave

The one exception here

To the Lord General Cromwell, which ends

is

English couplet. While this sonnet was not published until 1694, the other sonnets here were published in 1673.

How

Soon Hath Time was

first

printed in 1645.

Milton's sonnet in praise of Cromwell, written in 1652, can be Marvell's Horatian Ode.

makes sense

It

The

troduction to Perspectives: events surrounding

On the New

Civil

compared with

to have the students carefully read the in-

War

in order to

understand the network of

Forcers of Conscience under the

Long Parliament (1673).

Lycidas First

last poem in a collection of poems entitled Justa Edouardo King commemorating the drowning of Milton's Cambridge classmate

published as the

naufrago (1638),

Edward King, guage.

A

Lycidas

this

poem

is

to

argues against the two

"is

Martin Evans's "Lycidas" in The

who

not to be considered the effusion of real passion." Evans

main responses to Johnson: that Milton was not really writat all and that real grief is inarticulate and any poetic ex-

The

first

artificial.

Evans points out that "the verse form

185 lines were modelled

on the

they function as a kind of shifts

call to action.

St. Peter's

holds

form of romance-epic. Thus,

Evans argues that the voice of the speaker

from Milton himself lamenting

of Phoebus at line 76. After

itself

Italian canzone, while the last eight

lines are written in the ottava rima that are the verse

subdy

A controversial

Edward King

pression of grief must be

the key."

is J.

Dennis Danielson (1989).

Milton, edited by

expressed by the eighteenth century critic Dr. Johnson

complained that Lycidas ing about

considered to be one of the great elegies in the English lan-

useful introduction for students

Cambridge Companion

view of

is

his

dead friend

at the outset to

the voice

speech, a chorus of mourners appears. Evans

reads the final dramatic shift at line 186 in autobiographical terms, as

marking

John Milton

own farewell to a

Milton's

169

of "retirement, chastity, and poetry." In order for stu-

life

dents to understand this complex poem, you will have to lead serving these shifts of voice and perspective.

them through

ob-

shows

his

Areopagitica (1644) Milton was one of the greatest prose writers of his writing at

most exciting-both

age,

and

Areopagitica

deployment of metaphor and the innovative diction. The whole issue of freedom of the press can be explicated in relation to the context of the Civil War. This text can also be read in relation to the whole issue of censorship—both self-censorship and state censorship— not only in the its

early

modern period but even

work

as the shift to modernity, in

and judgement

for the striking

today. Francis Barker discusses the context of this

which "the

private citizen

as a self-policing entity" ("In the

power in Milton and Hobbes"

is

constituted in reason

wars of truth: true knowledge and

in Literature and the English Civil War, ed.

Healy and Jonathan Sawday, [1990],

100).

For Barker

it is

the

Thomas move from censorship

prior to publication to censorship after publication through state intervention that is

of greatest interest in Areopagitica. Against the notion of "depoliticized private ut-

terance," Barker sees the image of Truth as a militant warrior, "a figuration of true

discourse not yet willing to surrender

obscurity" (101).

itself to private

Paradise Lost (1674) Prior to the composition of Paradise Lost, the epic

poem, Milton planned to write work in the

a tragedy about the loss of Paradise; there are four drafts outlining this Trinity College

MS. Knowing

that Milton originally intended Paradise Lost to be a

tragedy helps emphasize the tragic element of the

should perhaps be considered a

Paradise Lost, as epic, contains within

it

and

tragic

mode

underlying

form of

all

other tragedies.

Paradise Lost

privileged epic as the highest literary

who

Nothing

excels in every other

is

known about

The most

A

poem

poem

to epic

form because

it

includes

in twelve books.

it is

profitable to re-

all

other genres; only

to write epic.

the order in which the various parts of Paradise Lost

significant textual alteration Paradise host

in ten books to

first

Paradise Lost

This structural change

matic

shift;

is

its

edition version in 1667 of Paradise

the second edition version in 1674 of Paradise

The change from

took in

underwent during Lost.

A

ten books to twelve books involved a redivi-

sion of the ten existing books into twelve books while adding only fifteen lines.

re-

most Renaissance commentators

form can attempt

publication history was the shift from the Lost.

tragedy, pastoral,

forms see Lewalski), the

were written, however, we do know the various textual forms print.

poem

Although

When considering Milton's de-

from tragedy

that while Aristotle exalted tragedy over epic,

the poet

(e.g.,

epic.

warrants special consideration since the loss of Paradise can be

the tragedy

cision to change the call

literary

its

suggests that the

than a pure

a variety of genres

lyric—for a full discussion of Paradise Lost

garded as

work and

tragical epic rather

particularly significant in relation to

the shift from scriptural or prophetic history (based

on

its

new

parallel the-

the Bible's ten

John Milton

170

books narrating the word of God: the Pentateuch along with the four Gospels and on Virgil's Aeneid). Other textual alterations in-

Acts) to political history (based

clude the addition of the following preliminary matter issue of the first edition onward):

argument

single composite

and the

"The Printer

for the entire

poems were added

Amissam summi

In Paradisum

to the Reader"; the

"Argument"

Argument was

The two added poems

offer a specific

considers Paradise Lost a

magnitude and

its

poem

from ten

and A[ndrew]

view of Paradise Lost and of disclosure, declaring

author a national hero; Marvell

prophet (one

who

On

M[arvell]'s

distributed to the beginning of each book.

piety of prophecy, Marvell re-establishes Paradise Lost as as a true

to

to the prefatory matter—S[amuel] B[arrow]'s

it

its

author— Barrow's

an epic of the high-

initially

discounts the no-

tion of Paradise Lost being prophecy, but after proclaiming the trustworthiness

Milton

(a

poem); Milton's note on "The Verse";

poetae }ohannis Miltonz

Paradise Lost—and the

est

included in the fourth

"Errata." Also, in the second edition, along with the change

twelve books, two

poem

(first

and

prophecy and distinguishes

does not use contrivances such as rhyme). The

addition of these poems in 1674 (three years after the publication of Paradise Regained

and Samson Agonistes and

tions about the

poem /

months before Milton's death) raises quesand why the printer, Samuel

a few

author's initial reception

Simmons, or Milton himself would have wanted it modified; who stood from these "authoritative" descriptions of the poem and its author?

From the

very beginning of Paradise Lost, Milton introduces his readers to the

audacity of his enterprise, and of the

announces

Homer and Virgil Book

poem, and sponds

poem

his transgressive claim "to soar

locate their

passing the epics of pect of

to benefit

1

is

itself.

In

/ Above

Book the

Milton

lines 12-16,

Muses) in order to receive his inspiration; thus

Homer and

The

Virgil in the process.

Milton's decision to grant Satan the

to render his defeat to

directly to Milton's

1,

Aonian mount" (where

own

God

state

first

sur-

next transgressive

words spoken

as-

in the

sympathetic. Satan's defeated state corre-

of political defeat; Milton was struggling

with the failure of the English Revolution and the return of monarchy. As John

Carey points out, "Milton's

effort to encapsulate evil in

(Milton, 1969). Satan's "Farewell

sympathetically reflects the

happy

human

fields"

condition;

it is

of agony as well as resilience ever written and

mind

is

Satan was not successful"

speech (lines 249-55), for example,

its

among the most poignant cries emphasis on the power of the

both revolutionary and conciliatory. Thus, Satan forces the question-

perennial in Milton criticism since

Dryden—who

is

the hero of Paradise Lost?

Milton's decision to represent Satan as a Promethean figure in

Book

1

(lines

44-9) further supports Satan's heroic stature— particularly since Satan's ultimate transgression

and

Milton continues in relation

to

Book

2,

advance the notion of Satan's superior struggle and heroism,

to classical figures,

Ulysses's journey,

dangered"

suffering clearly outweigh the trials of Prometheus. In

by contrasting Satan's perilous journey with

and claiming Satan's way

to

be "harder beset /

And more

en-

(lines 1016-7).

In the 1960s Milton critics were preoccupied with the issue of

how

to

account

for Satan's appeal in Paradise Lost. In Surprised by Sin Stanley Fish deploys reader}

response theory to acknowledge and then defuse the problem of Satan's appeal to

John Milton

readers. Fish locates the

poem's meaning not in the structure of the

the structure of the reader's progress through the

text; thus,

171

but in

text,

Fish circumvents the

hermeneutical problem of authorial intention by placing the responsibility for the

meaning

text's

in the reader.

misses narrative context

ough examination and

and

The main drawback

to Fish's reading

is

that

it

dis-

generalizes over individual differences. (For a thor-

rejection of Fish's argument, see the introduction to

John

Rumrich's Milton Unbound).

Another controversial issue in Milton studies centers on the depiction of women. In Suzanne Woods's essay, "How Free are Milton's Women?" (in Milton and the Idea of Woman), Woods concludes that Milton's women are not as free as his men, but that they are responsible for their actions; while Milton's male supremacy may be that of his time, as an author he is in subtle and complex ways moving toward greater liberty for women. It cannot be denied that the depth of subjectivity

Milton grants Eve in

tribution of language, thought

and

history

is

and

allowed to express

tic capabilities.

Paradise Lost

is

certainly progressive for

Among the most compelling aspects of Eve's

well as for Milton).

it

Adam more

(as

the

at-

own

own words and using her own hermeneu-

Joseph Wittreich astutely points out in his

Contradiction,' "that

day

is

Eve has her

intellect to a female character.

in her

its

portrayal

essay, "'Inspir'd

often than any other speaker in the

sponsible for bleaching Eve's story"—Wittreich argues that

Adam

is

poem

with

is

"re-

responsible for

imposing a Gen. 2 or masculinist viewpoint on his account of creation in 8.250ff

which

is

Adam

in 7.519ff—and that these self-aggrandizing attempts

posed

as

a retelling of Raphael's

Gen.

or feminist account of creation told to

1

such by the poem, thus causing "Adam

rather difficult, however, to sustain the view that

It is

Paradise Lost rather

than Eve, particularly in

on Adam's

[to] lose stature,

light

Adam

part are ex-

not Eve." loses stature in

of Eve's controversial, and, ac-

dream in Book 5. The meaning and consequence While Adam tries to comfort Eve by explaining that "[e]vil into the mind of god or man / May come and go, so unapproved, and leave / No spot or blame behind" (5.117-9), this assurance proves to be somewhat inaccurate based on Adam's proffered reason for why Eve should not part from him in Book 9: "For he who tempts, though in vain, at least asperses / The tempted with dishonour foul" (lines 296-7 emphasis added). With the new information divulged by Adam in Book 9, and remembering that prior to Eve havcording to some of Eve's dream

critics,

is

tainting

difficult to assess.

';

ing her dream, Satan was found "squat like a toad" at Eve's ear "[assaying by his devilish art to reach

he

list,

/ The organs of her

fancy,

phantasms and dreams" (4-800-3),

inflicted

by some

it is

and with them forge /

Illusions as

possible that Eve has already

been

tincture of corruption. Further evidence of the induction of

Book 4 is the fact that the only other time tears are shed when Eve sheds a solitary tear after her dream (5.130), is when

Satan's evil into Eve in in heaven, besides

both

Adam and

for tears in

Eve cry about their fallen

both instances.

If

Eve

is

state (9.1121); evil

seems to be the cause

in fact the victim of foul play in the

poem

(be

or Milton), readers of Paradise Lost would benefit by considering what this indicates about the inherent nature of man and woman according to Milton, it

by

God

and/or

his social milieu.

John Milton

172

Numerous Milton

critics, particularly

the so-called Milton apologists, have

ar-

gued that feminist renderings of Milton's writing are a product of anachronistic misreadings of his "progressive" representation of women. While proposing that Milton's depiction of Eve be considered in relation not to

modern conceptions of

feminism and marriage, but rather to Lawrence Stone's notion of the "compan-

and seventeenth-century Puritan marriage doctrine, the apoloJoan Webber, and Diane McColley— tend to overlook the egalitarian portrayals of women's role in marriage in existence during the period and written by members of society outside the realm of dominant culture ionate marriage"

gists—e.g., Barbara Lewalski,

(see the

works of Elizabeth Cary, Rachel Speght, Ester Sowernam, and Mary

Wroth). Contrasting Milton's view of mankind's creation in Speght's

Book 4 of Paradise

Lost

with

A Muzzle for Melastomus may help clarify why feminist critics such as Mary

Nyquist and Christine Froula argue against a feminist sensibility in Milton's thinking

and

writing. Speght argues that

her creator, directly, and not

God

woman was created (like man) to glorify God, man because "in the Image of God were they

in

both created." This "radical" notion of woman's equity in creation immediately calls to

him"

mind

"Hee for God only, shee for God in would be misleading simply to contrast Speght's egali-

Milton's bruisingly misogynous,

However,

(4.299).

it

tarian view of creation with this single

misogynous statement made by the narra-

tor of Paradise Lost—particularly since just a

few

lines earlier this

same narrator

makes the following observation:

Two

of far nobler shape erect and

Godlike

erect,

tall,

with native Honour clad

In naked Majestie seem'd Lords of

A worthie seem'd, for in thir looks The image of thir

glorious

all,

Divine

Maker shon. (4.288-92)

How can one contend with such to Joseph Wittreich, "[t]his

imbrications of competing viewpoints? According

poem maps

patriarchal, misogynous,

and feminist

dis-

courses within a cacophony of competing but not equally authoritative voices, each

of which marks a different state—and stage— of consciousness" ("'Inspir'd with Contradiction'" in Literary Milton, 157) Thus, maintaining a certain degree of

when confronted with any reading of The Miltonic "truth" concealed within the mul-

healthy skepticism and open-mindedness Milton's

poem

is

tiple perspectives

always advisable.

on

creation

and gender provided

in Paradise Lost can potentially

be reached only by allowing the "cacophony of competing voices" in the exist in

poem

to

dialogue with other ideologically relevant, contemporary voices.

Samson Agonistes (1671) The

date of composition of Samson Agonistes

Carey, in the

Longman

is

uncertain and

still

contested.

John

edition of the poem, sides with William Riley Parker's sur-

John Milton

173

mise of 1647-53 as the probable date of composition (Philological Quarterly 28, 1949, and Notes and Queries 5, 1958), as opposed to the traditional dating of 1666-70 proffered by David Masson. In addition to controversy over the actual date of composition, the poem's publication history has

more

recently

become

a

source of critical attention. Samson Agonistes was originally published in 1671 along with Paradise Regained. The title page of the composite 1671 volume-Paradise

Regaind

A

Poem. To which

is

added Samson Agonistes—allows for an interesting

dis-

cussion of why Milton would have selected to pair these two disparate works varying in genre

(poem versus drama),

biblical source text

(New Testament versus Old

Testament), resolution of characters' agon (passive versus

active).

poem was

why

published separately until 1779, the question of

paired together

is

Since neither

these works were

relevant not only with regard to Milton's intention, but also in

relation to the poems' reception for over a century.

The immediate source Milton takes numerous

text of

liberties

terpolations to the Judges story

Samson Agonistes

with his redaction. (all

Interpreting

misogyny—an

Empson's description of Dalila

as "a deeply

identification fostered by

wronged wife"

nativity tale the active role of his mother,

Samson's expectant divine birth (Judges Samson's

father,

Samson's wife which

is

13); instead,

William

(Milton's God).

the parent graced twice by the presence of an angel and, thus,

role of

in-

Samson

treatment of the female characters, thus

raising the issue of Milton's

from Samson's

Judges 13-16; however,

of which can be found in

Agonistes), are those regarding Milton's

excises

is

Among the most criticized

who first

Milton

in Judges

is

informed of

Milton offers an expanded

Manoa. Also, Milton chooses

not the case in Judges. However,

to represent Dalila as

this

seemingly ennobling

on Milton's part is further elaborated with a poignant rejection of Dalila by Samson when she comes to seek forgiveness for her betrayal. This rejection (a scene which does not take place at all in Judges) takes on the significance of diact

vorce in Samson Agonistes since Milton has accorded to Dalila the rights of a wife. elevation of woman's position through marriage (which Lawrence Stone

Thus the

attributes to the rise of Protestantism) in Samson Agonistes needs to be considered

woman's ultimate

in conjunction with

rejection.

Milton's portrayal of divorce in Samson Agonistes can profitably be compared

with his defense of divorce—for

men—in

Milton allows Dalila to articulate her

own

his divorce tracts.

Considering that

defense for betraying her husband,

how

has Milton's view of women's marital role changed since the composition of the divorce tracts?

It

is

also useful to contrast Milton's depiction of divorce with

Elizabeth Cary's in her closet drama, The Tragedy

make of the is

found

fact that

one of the

in the writing of a

Salome?

ofMariam

(1613).

What are we

earliest literary references to divorce in the

woman and

advanced by

to

period

a female (albeit villainous)

there a gendered perception of divorce in the period?

character,

i.e.,

How does

the overall portrayal of women (Mariam, Salome, Dalila) differ in these

two

Is

plays?

According to Jim Swan ("Difference and Silence: John Milton and the Question of Gender" in The (M)other Tongue), the steady negation of women in Samson Agonistes, as well as in Andrew Marvell's The Mower's Song, can be read as

John Milton

174

an attempt to maintain

Mower with

a sense of identity. For

their identity— is threatened

Samson

violation,

Samson and the Mower, solitude—and thus violated by a woman. As a result of this

and ultimately

driven throughout the

is

both Samson and the

a sense of solitude—which provides

poem by

a desire to destroy

all

that

is

contrary in order to reachieve the oneness that affirms identity (note the numerous

poem: Samson's birth

instances of repetition in the

is

foretold twice by the angel,

Samson marries twice and betrays his silence twice, and finally it is "two massy pillars" that Samson must pull down to put an end to all that is contrary). However, since

life

without contrariety

is

impossible in the post-lapsarian world of discourse

(Milton himself writes in Areopagitica that trial is

by what

is

contrary"),

trial purifies

Samson can only

us in our fallenness, "and

ultimately achieve singularity in

death; at which point he becomes like the phoenix, a genus of one.

Samson

after his

death as "a secular bird"

Thorn: Samson's Struggle with the

Woman)

Woman

Within" in Milton and

an androgynous image—uniting the masculine

as

phoenix (Samson

Agonistes,

against the exactions

and

The image of

read by Jackie DiSalvo ("Intestine

is

the Idea of

eagle with the feminine

1695-1705)—which exposes Milton's rebellion

lines

contraries of gender, the psychic costs of patriarchy. (See

Geoffrey Whitney, The Phoenix, in Perspectives: Emblem, Style Metaphor.) Critical debate over

Samson Agonistes has centered on the question of how to per-

an

ceive Samson's final act—i.e., as

act of divine justice or as personal revenge.

Antiregenerationist readings of Samson Agonistes

(e.g.,

Wittreich's) interpret Samson's behavior as vengeful

and unregenerate. Samson's un-

regenerate act

is

understood by such readings

ment of tragedy—"by raising pity, like passions"

fear,

Irene Samuels's, Joseph

as fulfilling the Aristotelian require-

or terror, to purge the

mind of those and such

without having to experience them first-hand. Antiregenerationists

view Samson Agonistes as contrary to a model of imitation. Alternatively, regenerationist readings of

Samson Agonistes find a redeeming quality to Samson's behavior

based on the mimetic nature of Milton's relationship to Samson. According to Mary

Ann tual

Radzinowicz, Samson Agonistes "imitates and concludes Milton's

development;

mind and

Restoration

critical

studies

poems— Paradise

these works.

own

intellec-

demonstrates the necessity of mental labor for tempering of the

control of the passions" (Toward Samson Agonistes,

Finally,

cized

it

Lost

and

Paradise Regained— have generally de-politi-

Milton's experience

Christopher Hill as a retreat

7).

of Samson Agonistes, along with Milton's other of defeat has been interpreted by

from radicalism.

Hill views the Restoration

acknowledging defeat while offering a means of coping with

it;

Samson Agonistes symbolizes the need to prepare for a future

poems

as

thus, for Hill, call

to action.

However, Laura Lunger Knoppers's recent study of Milton's Restoration poetry entitled Historicizing Milton, proffers

an

alternative, politicized

view of Milton's

later

works. She reads Milton's experience of defeat as the writing of poetry under the constraint of censorship, not as an abandoning of contemporary politics. Citing

Foucault, Knoppers notes Milton's use of "oppositional discourse" (particularly in relation to forms of spectacle) as a "competing source of authority" capable of chal-

lenging the reality of political defeat—a possibility which

is

overlooked by

According to Knoppers, Milton's "turn inward does not eschew

politics

Hill.

but evinces

Spiritual Self- Reckonings

a

complex internalization of Puritan

discipline [regarding issues of

conquest, martyrdom, joy and prophecy) that can carry in the very theater of the Stuart monarchy" (12).

175

punishment,

on the Good Old Cause

Perspectives

Spiritual Self-Reckonings Thomas Browne wrote: "Our days become considerable like sums by minute accumulations; where numerous fractions make up but small round numbers; and our days span make not one little finger." This section allows In Hydriotaphia, Sir

petty

students to see quantitative representation of the economic and spiritual side by side in late seventeenth-century writing.

economy along with developments

The

rise

of capitalism and of the market

combine to produce this method of introspection, In some respects it is similar to

in applied science

sense of measured "reckoning." Reckoning functions as a a

way

our

of, as

we

still say,

Ralph

Josselin's Diary

nist in

The

The

"taking stock" of things.

own post-modern penchant Life

and the

for

lists.

See for example the financial accounts of

soul-searching accounts of Daniel Defoe's protago-

and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner

best source to contextualize representation through "reckoning"

Sherman's

Telling Time: Clocks

and Calendars,

Secrecy

and

is

(1719).

Stuart

Self Recording in English

Diurnal Form (1997).

The texts of Lady Falkland's daughter, Anna Trapnel, and John Bunyan focus more on the spiritual and the sense of the person as a self. While the three genres of these works—biography, testimony, and spiritual allegory—are distinct, all three share in the representation of the individual person. You can contrast the sense of inferiority and individuality here with that in a medieval spiritual autobiography, The Book of Margery Kempe, and the intellectual autobiographies of Montaigne and Bacon's Essays. The Lady Falkland: Her Life, by One of Her Daughters (composed 1643-49) is a helpful companion reading to Cary's The Tragedy of Mariam. Alice Thornton's Book of Remembrances (1629-60) gives a realistic portrayal of the difficulties women encountered in childbearing and sickness in the early modern period. Her strong reliance on the Bible as a text through which to interpret her life

and her strong Progress (1678).

John Bunyan's Pilgrim's help explain what was over the nature of woman in the Tracts on Women

belief in salvation link her narrative with

Thornton's, Trapnel's and Cary's texts can

at stake in the controversies

all

and Gender.

You need to explain Anna Trapnel's Report and Plea (1654) with reference to the early modern discourse on witchcraft. You can point out that Sir Thomas Browne actually judged a case of witchcraft. One early modern account of a case of witchEdward Jordan's medical pamphlet Discourse on the Suffocation of the Mother (1605), shows there was at least some attempt to explain that mental disorder was due to physiological and psychological causes rather than to sin or demonic poscraft, in

session. (For discussions of Jordan's

work

see Coppelia

Kahn

in Rewriting the

Spiritual Self- Reckonings

176

and Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearian 'Negotiations.) You can also is accused of witchcraft by Desdemona's father Brabantio The charge of witchcraft could be a way of branding the cultural other—

Renaissance

point out that Othello in Othello.

whether a Moor or a

The legory

fifth

monarchist

final selection in this section,

and so

The Nun's

invites

comparison with

Priest's Tale,

verses are

worth reading

sentation.

They provide

woman

seen as a threat to the social order.

John Bunyan, The

Pilgrim's Progress, is

earlier versions of allegory

and Spenser's The

Faerie Queene.

way

to reflect

as

an

al-

Chaucer's

Bunyan's introductory

carefully as a discussion of exegesis

a useful

such

and

allegorical repre-

back on the entire section—from

Milton's eschewal of allegory in his adaptation of Genesis in Paradise Lost, to Herbert's and Vaughan's deployment of

emblems

and the diswork of Joseph Swetnam and England and in the American colonies as "silent parable,"

putes over the interpretation of scripture in the

Rachel Speght. As the most popular text in for at least a century after

it

was written, Bunyan's

Pilgrim's Progress

looks forward

to the development of the novel, providing a way, for example, of contextualizing

Moll Flanders 's confessional narrative in Defoe's novel. The allegory of Progress

is

also a useful point of

Gulliver's Travels

and Johnson's

comparison for the

Rasselas.

allegorical

Pilgrim's

element in

Swift's

The

Restoration and the

Eighteenth Century

—•—

*•—•

rgtp^ic

Ways

•-

In

Students are apt to find the eighteenth century more alien than the periods on

ei-

ther side. Shakespeare they have heard in high school, tury's presence persists in

and

many

forms: in lingering

innumerable representations of the novels on film and video

celebrity; in

(where the eighteenth century has figured

less often,

courses rarely afford a pause for breath, but this

choose short

and the nineteenth cenRomantic conceptions of art

and

texts

and fared

may be

less well).

Survey

the place for one, to

assign small tasks designed to offer students a

way

in to this

strange, intriguing world.

Some

of the biographical prose (Pepys's accounts of the coronation and of his

marriage; Carleton's Case; Cavendish's True Relation; Boswell's London Journal; Thrale's Family Book) can give students a particularly quick sense of the material

and emotional

textures of lives lived.

"Descriptions," the "Dressing

So can some of

Room") with

immediate and copious of all, perhaps, are the tispiece of the section it

of

show and

women

and above

(how does

it

differ

suggest about the culture

it

Swift's

poems

all

the Rakes

Progress,

which

earlier frontispieces?

depicts?); the

tracks

one

do they

Students will

in

which

if

ture

move more

confidently and perceptively through the literature of

some of the recurrent shapes

writers cast their language: the periodic sentence; the

The

and delayed

writer of a polished period, with resolution,

arrangement, even time

what comes

next,

texts, garb,

surround him.

they learn to recognize (even reproduce)

heroic couplet.

trace?);

fool through eight sites crucial

(home, salon, tavern, square, church, gambling den, Newgate,

artifacts that

the period

what does

century-spanning portraits

Bedlam), and unfolds the story of his ruin in the plethora of people,

and

two

Most

pictures: Bowles's Medley, the fron-

from the

that punctuate the general introduction (what changes

to the culture

(the

their dense catalogues of debris.

itself.

its

running

intricately

style;

the

balanced struc-

performs a pointed mastery over information,

The

though you, the

structure implies a kind of foresight: "I

reader,

may

know

not." Plainer styles—simpler clauses,

Cynthia Wall (University of Virginia) wrote the sections on Behn, Rochester, Etherege, Astell, Defoe, Swift, Pope, Mary Wortley Montagu, "Mind and God," and "Landscape, Pleasure, Power." Steven N. Zwicker (Washington University in

St.

Louis) co-wrote the section

on Dryden. 177

Samuel Pepys

178

either clipped or strung together in long run-ons— embody a different take

on

time:

"The content of this clause has been established, but anything may happen next."

The of

periodic sentence can readily impart that "extensive view" of the world (Vanity

Human

ning

style

Wishes,

I.

1)

which Dryden, Pope, and Johnson often aspired

to.

The run-

often facilitates what Samuel Richardson called writing "to the moment,"

that prose practice

which prompted so many of the period's

literary innovations, in

and novels. Students can get at the pulse of both these modes by reading aloud some specific examples (ask them to "predict" the sentence's end before they get there, or to snap their fingers when newspapers, diaries,

letters, essays, travel narratives,

they hear a clause complete

same shapes: sentences

and by casting some new sentences into these made up and sentences they've "translated" from songs, etc. Some periodic/running pairs for practice:

itself)

they've

other sources— conversation,

Rambler No. 60's global opening sentence (2708) and the particulars from Aubrey's life

of Bacon (2056); the Female Spectators

the

first

passages

from Pepys 's and/or H.

first F.'s

paragraph on Seomanthe (2357) and accounts of the plague (2008, 2304).

this topic is Richard Lanham's chapter on "The Periodic and the Running Style," in his Analyzing Prose [Scribner, 1983].) Imitation and translation are also among the surest ways of initiating students into the structures, challenges, and pleasures of the heroic couplet; for specific suggestions, see the section on Alexander Pope, below. Since hearing poetry always en-

(A useful aid in teaching

Style

hances the reading of

it,

a particularly useful tool for teaching

is

the series of

volume 2 (The Seventeenth Century: Donne to Rochester, ISBN 0140861319) and volume 3 (The Eighteenth Century: Swift to Crabbe, ISBN 0140861327) offer good performances of many of the poems in the Penguin English Verse cassettes:

anthology.

Christopher Fox's collection of essays by many hands, Teaching

Eighteenth-Century Poetry

poems and

(AMS

poetic topics

Press, 1990), includes pieces

(satire,

on many of the major

couplet, landscape). Margaret

Anne Doody's The

Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge UP, 1985) bursts with

origi-

eminently teachable insights on many, many poems.

nal,

For teaching the prose of the period, the resources are more scattered; see the suggestions under individual authors, below. Jeremy Black's Illustrated History of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester

grounds and a The

Intellectual

terrific array

UP, 1996) provides helpful cultural back-

of pictures. James Sambrook's The Eighteenth Century:

and Cultural Context 1700-1789 (Longman, 1990)

most valuable book

to

keep

at

hand. With

clarity

and

grace,

is

perhaps the one

Sambrook

presents a

wealth of detailed information—as well as a superb set of short biographies and bibliographies—useful for teaching nearly every text in this section of the anthology.

Samuel Pepys Students find Pepys's predicaments intriguing, but at prose a

little chilly;

(clipped

and run-on

edy.

One

it

they sometimes think his

them to hear how his reportorial style same time) encodes emotion, anxiety, and (often) comsuch understanding is provided by Kenneth Branagh's

takes a while for

at the

shortcut to

first

Samuel Pepys

recorded reading (Highbridge Audio,

comes through Latham's

and

clear.

What

Illustrated Pepys (Berkeley,

ways in to the

Our

live

diarist's

the voice in the text

Branagh's recording does for sound, Robert

1978) does for sight, providing useful pictorial

world.

distance from this diary

doing in his diary?

ISBN 1565111346):

179

How do his

is

also

worth confronting head-on:

ideas of what a diary

is

for differ

What

is

Pepys

from our own?

One

way of answering these questions is to read Pepys alongside the selections from James Boswell and Hester Piozzi later in the anthology. Their diaries, dealing useful

openly stated and energetically (even psychoanalytically) explored, are of more familiar to present readers, and help to highlight both the different narrative game that Pepys is playing and the cultural changes of the intervening hundred years, where Locke's mapping of the associative mind, and Hume's doubts in passions

a kind

of identity, partly displaced the Puritan and

as to the fixity

tracking that Pepys (and Ralph Josselin

The opening

entries of Pepys's, Crusoe's, Boswell's,

for a particularly fruitful grouping, a

Whether alone or Pepys's first entries are

see Stuart

Sherman,

good

in conjunction with the

Telling

are

self-

working from.

Piozzi's journals

can make

hour of comparisons.

class

worth some discussion

and

models of

fiscal

and Robinson Crusoe)

opening gambits of other

Time [U of Chicago

P,

diarists,

of these entries,

(for a close reading

They provide

1996] 29-76).

a

key to the whole, a chance to identify and explore concerns, motifs, and methods that drive the diary, cropping

up

in almost every entry thereafter.

I'll

highlight a

few of these elements here, and then discuss most of the entries in chronological sequence.

Time and motion

Pepys

subsequent entries in a

But he in

treats these

which time

is

is

fascinated by beginnings

new week, month,

and endings. He commences

and decade, and he frames most neat enclosure that begins with "up" and ends with "to bed."

his diary at the start of a

year,

termini as useful markers for tracking a

both

fluid

and

The

full.

flux

is

of constant motion,

life

conspicuous in the opening para-

graphs, where verb tenses shift from present to past to neutral (as they will through-

out the diary) and where temporal perspectives change swiftly too, reading sometimes like current reportage, sometimes like projected history ("the condition of the

on New Year's Day is rich in imperforms the "fullness of time" by diary his new enterprise: plications for his own full sequence, from done) each day's had reporting (as apparently no diarist before

state

was

wake

to sleep, in

thus").

illusion: in fact

The

biblical text that Pepys quotes

an unbroken

series.

Oi course this

"fullness"

he

a textually

managed

Pepys selects a few incidents, moments, and thoughts from each day,

but by his abundant recurrent connectives (nearly endless all-tf n

However, her logic

in

which

slavery

lack?

McCormack discusses how Eliot's novels enact various aspects of The Woman ("The Sybil and the Hyena: George Eliot's Wollstonecraftian

Kathleen Rights of

Feminism," Dalhousie Review 63 .4 [1983-84], 602-14). She says that these connec-

many of

tions "help explain

the problems

.

.

.

that have led to feminists' percep-

awkward nineteenth-century puzzle piece rather than as a force in the development of feminism. Point for point, Eliot's novels illustrate Wollstonecraft's feminist arguments, possibly most importantly the argument reltion of Eliot as an

evant to

Rosamund

[in Middlemarch]: that

signs for girls ultimately produces not

The male voice els,

in

which

the education that society currently de-

an angel in the house but an

Eliot writes,

both in

this essay

and

in

adulteress."

many of her

nov-

has often been noted. Here, for example, she refers to "our wives," and the

last

sentence presumes a male reader, one likely to be but half-interested in this whole business of women's self

from her

strategy calculated to gests that

men

women,"

for

strong

man

lives.

In adopting a masculine stance,

is

Eliot distancing her-

some critics have claimed? Or is she employing a rhetorical play on the fears of the male audience? For instance, she sug-

sisters, as

"are really in a state of subjection to ignorant

and feeble-minded

weakness always triumphs over strength, "as you may see when a

holds a

little

child by the hand,

how he

is

pulled hither and thither."

George

comparison of women

Eliot cleverly transforms the familiar sexist

Eliot

399

to children into

man will own position by strengthening woman's: better to deal openly with being" who will "yield in trifles" than to be yoked to an "unreasoning

an unsettling image of male

She

vulnerability.

arguing, in essence, that

is

strengthen his a "rational

animal." novels demonstrate her awareness of the debilitating effects of limited

Eliot's

education and opportunities on talented women, such as Maggie Tulliver and

Dorothea Brooke. Even have been better off if

if

and

a vain

had a

she'd

she had had something to do

woman

selfish

real

Rosamund Vincy might

like

education instead of a finishing school, and Eliot

all day.

warns in

this essay that

"men pay

a

heavy price for their reluctance to encourage self-help and independent resources in

women. The

precious meridian years of

in the toil of routine, that

who

understand none of his secret yearnings,

drawing-room

like a

many

man

of genius have to be spent

is fit

for

for a

fate:

an

intelligent

wrecked by his own insistence on having an ornamental wife

to sympathize with his dreams. Eliot's heroines suffer their energy

and

woman who can

nothing but to

sit

in her

doll-Madonna in her shrine." In Middlemarch she would

dramatize this warning in Lydgate's appalling are

a

an 'establishment' may be kept up

abilities,

but

it is

not

here in Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,

who cannot begin

from having no

only the heroines

who

when Woman

suffer: as

is

later

man's ambitions

outlets for

she

insists

debased, then so

is

Man. Yet Eliot was not herself an active champion of women's causes; she refused, for example, to sign the petition for female suffrage that

Parliament in 1866. as

an unmarried

No doubt she

"wife."

served Eliot as a cautionary ture in her

own

life:

J.

S.

Mill presented to

hampered by her own anomalous position McCormack suggests that Wollstonecraft's life would have felt

tale, for

she read The Rights of

"Just back in England

after

Woman

at a critical junc-

her elopement with George Henry

Lewes, she was experiencing constant humiliation and rejection for having pur-

sued precisely the same course that Wollstonecraft had followed." Her strong identification

with Wollstonecraft might, somewhat paradoxically, explain her "adopt-

ing the low feminist profile for

which she

is

often criticized today."

Brother Jacob (1864) Beryl Gray's Afterword (1988) to the Virago Classics edition of Brother Jacob useful place to start. ical

neglect

it

She describes the publication history of the

story,

and the

is

a

crit-

has usually received, despite Henry James's favorable review in 1878.

While agreeing with U. C. Knoepflmacher's assessment that David Faux is "perhaps the most unpleasant character in George Eliot's fiction," Gray admires "the exuberance with which she created such unpleasantness." Although this story appears to have little concern with the urgent economic

and

social issues of Past

and

Present or

A

Christmas Carol Brother ]acob displays an

awareness of the changes taking place in the larger world Cranford). Market-driven forces

tering forever a

way of

life

and

in

capitalist

which

it

(as

does Gaskell's

competition were on the verge of

had been

"a point of

al-

honour" with

400

George

Eliot

Grimsworth's provincial

villagers to

buy sugar and flannel

parents did. Their deep rural conservatism ers bringing in "the

is

at the

spirit

dimly threat-

feel

of the larger market town of Cattleton, where busi-

"done on a system of small

In the industrialized

same shops their newcom-

unsettled at the notion of

system of neck-and-neck trading," for they

ened by the commercial ness

is

profits

and quick

cities, society is essentially

returns."

divided in two: Rich and Poor,

Masters and Men, Employers and Hands. Here, in the rural world of Grimsworth, a sense of finely

drawn

social distinctions

dine with a draper? As farmers on their

The

is

own

maintained: should a confectioner

land, the Palfreys are the highest fam-

on social climbing, which is made possible— or nearly—because David is a stranger: no one can quite place him, and he can deceive people about his origins. Social mobility is a fact of life in more fluid, anonymous ily

in the village.

urban

settings,

order.

The

plot hinges

but here in Grimsworth

social order

may be

sent packing, but the implication

profound changes

will overtake

Compare David Faux greed. Yet these

represents a major threat to established

that

is

it is

when David

Grimsworth.

his

comic

found out and

is

only a matter of time before far more

to Scrooge as exemplars of utilitarianism

economic theory: each turns

minded

it

restored temporarily,

back on his past and on family

and

laissez-faire

out of

ties

portraits of self-interest are very different,

single-

and one

might explore the nature of these differences with students, asking why Scrooge redeemable, but David

much

Like Dickens, Eliot was

influenced by Carlyle. Eliot, too, shows

can't really succeed in cutting yourself off

Human

is

not.

is

from others in

connections will reassert themselves, whether

selfish pursuit

how you of

tragically (the Irish

profit.

widow

proves her sisterhood by spreading typhus) or comically (Jacob bumbles into

The widow and

David's shop crying "bother Zavy!"). witting instrument of ruin of those

In class

may be worth

it

who

the idiot each

become the un-

attempt to disown them.

discussing the tone adopted by the narrator, as

some

students will miss the irony and read the opening paragraphs as sympathetic to David's unfortunate lot in

life.

The

washerwoman's, supposed preference the topic of egotism.

One

names David and Jacob:

is

might

brilliant

for David's linen

also talk

The

about the

is

a

from shepherd

Tibbits's, the

good way

biblical

the protagonist a "faux" David,

imitate the biblical David's spectacular rise

is

comic touch of Mrs.

to introduce

resonance of the

someone who wants

implications of the epigraph from La Fontaine are worth exploring.

Eliot using the fable form, in

How

which animals represent humans? Point out the

vasive animal imagery, particularly in regard to Jacob (and, of course,

One

Faux =

teresting

and

Yarico.

Mary Louise

remarks on Inkle and Yarico in Imperial

Transculturation (1992). Peter Allan Dale calls Inkle

Eyes:

Pratt has Travel

and Yarico

some

Common

in-

Writing and

a story that epito-

mizes "the growing struggle between the ethic of capitalistic self-assertion and ditional Christian charity" ("George Eliot's Brother Jacob: Fables

The

per-

Fox).

could ask students why David wishes to emigrate to the colonies, and

delve further into the story of Inkle

of

to

to king?

tra-

and the Physiology

Life," Philological Quarterly 64.1 [1985]: 17-35).

familiar Eliot

themes of temptation and corruption are manifested in

var-

John Ruskin

401

ious forms in Brother Jacob. David desires to steal his mother's guineas,

and to marry "up" (the commodifkation of desire may be suggested in the name of his conquest being "Penny"); Penny herself is eager to marry a "remarkable" man and is tempted by a pretty name; the veterinarian's wife, who has aspirations "out of

harmony with her circumstances," longs for ready-made baked goods. Students enjoy the comic exaggeration with which Eliot depicts "the growing demoralisation" of Grimsworth, as home baking and household industry give way to commercial "manufacturing." Eliot seems to satirize Macaulay's arguments about the benefits of mechanization setting people free by

freed from labor have nothing special to

do with

showing here that the

women

their time anyway.

For further reading, see Susan de Sola Rodstein's "Sweetness and Dark: George Modern Language Quarterly 52.3 [1991]: 295-317.

Eliot's Brother Jacob,"

John Ruskin Modern

Painters (1843-1860)

The critic John D. Rosenberg has called Modern Painters "perhaps the finest" book on art by an English writer; it is "the last great statement of the English Romantic renovation of

sensibility, as

the Lyrical Ballads

the patterned carpet in the nursery

is

the

upon which

first."

powers of observation (The Genius of John Ruskin, 18). Ask students about Ruskin's definition of painting

more than language"— his point style. He never abandoned this have stated

it

is

He

traces

its

genesis to

the solitary child developed his

and "nothing more than its feel that he may

as a language,

that a painting's subject counts

came

conviction, though he

too categorically, thus encouraging inferior

to

artists to

imagine they

could get away with poor workmanship as long as they chose a noble subject. But

Ruskin wasn't saying that

style doesn't matter:

on the

contrary, he believed that a

thorough mastery of technique was the starting point, not the

Much

ing.

later

he said that while "there are few

composition or dexterities of handling

which compelled

The Art

me

for Art's

much

as

I

.

.

goal, of great paint-

enjoy the mere .

artifices

of

the pictures were noblest

to forget them."

Sake movement rebelled against the privileging of subject-

matter, asserting the centrality of

about the Ruskin-Whistler

and

as

who

trial

form and

color. Students

might

like to

hear

(described briefly in our headnote to Whistler),

from Whistler's "Ten O'Clock" lecture, which argues that "no desire to teach" and deplores people's habit of looking "not at a picbut through it, at some human fact, that shall, or shall not, from a social point

to read the excerpts

art has ture,

of view, better their mental or moral state" (see Perspectives: Aestheticism,

Decadence, and the Fin de

Siecle).

Turner was an enormous influence on Ruskin, and one might bring some reproductions of his work to class. The young Ruskin was inspired to begin Modern Painters as a

defense against accusations that Turner's paintings distorted nature.

Ruskin owned The

Slave Ship for

many years,

eventually selling

it

because he found

the subject "too painful to live with." But in contrast to the definition of greatness

402

John Ruskin

in art, this passage

sheer aestheticism; Ruskin confines mention of the painting's

is

subject—slavery—to a footnote!

about the immorality of

Wilde put

What

Turner are sound or not? his,

so fervid

about

and so

does

it

fiery-coloured in

symphonic music ...

is

on

suffering. But, as

Mr

whether

cares

matter? That mighty

its

work of

Oscar

on

Ruskin's views

and majestic prose of

noble eloquence, so rich in

at least as great a

sunsets that bleach or rot

human

guilt or

"who

in The Critic as Artist,

it

shadow, color, with scarcely a word

It is all light,

slavery,

its

elaborate

any of those wonderful

art as

their corrupted canvases in England's Gallery."

In Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (1982) Elizabeth Helsinger points out the

sheer energy of Ruskin's seeing: describing The Slave Ship, Ruskin puts "figure, story,

and

literary allusion last instead

or at once;

The Painters,

comes

it

excerpt

first

published thirteen years after the

from

a distinct change in tone,

art.

At

but gradually age: in the

.

.

.

meaning does not emerge

to

nous golden landscapes of medieval century

of

come only out of energetic visual on "Modern Landscape" is from the

seems

first

he seems

third

Here he contrasts the lumi-

lyrical to tragic.

art to the cloudy

drab landscapes of nineteenth-

emerges that the characteristics of painting

it

modern

when

period,

volume of Modern

volume; with the passage of time

first

be writing only about different

to

everything

is

easily

exploration" (181).

in flux,

styles

reflect the

of painting,

temper of the

"we are expected

to rejoice in

darkness and triumph in mutability." Ruskin connects the medieval joy in light and color with devotion to the sacred, and equates Victorian dinginess with loss of faith:

"Their

life

was inwoven with white and purple: ours

Condemning

image, Ruskin writes that even

mountain but to

"modern

scenery,

feast,

is

one seamless

stuff of brown."

own age with a wonderfully contemptuous though modern painters seek out sublime wild

the irreverence of his

and

mountains, not to

society in general goes to the

leaves their glaciers covered with chicken-bones

and

fast,

egg-shells"—the

Alps have become the refuge not of fasting monks but of picnicking Cook's

tourists.

Like Carlyle, Pugin, Tennyson, and Morris, Ruskin contributed to the ongoing contrasts the Victorians

made between

own

their

century and the Middle Ages.

Ruskin's angry sarcasm echoes Carlyle's: "whereas the mediaeval never painted a

cloud but with the purpose of placing an angel in

wood without

expecting to meet a god in

it

.

.

are connected with poaching." Ruskin uses art

.

it,

"modern

principles of

The Just as Tennyson's

volumes of The

Idylls

economy and

its

ways.

of the King trace the rise

central

temper" and this theme

is

a

about the wood

a launching pad from which want of solemnity, the ennui,

utility."

Stones of Venice recount the rise

The

Greek never entered

Stones of Venice (1851-53)

and both epics warn Victorian Britain of a

mend

a

now as

to analyze the flaws of the times, the ugliness, the

the dull

and

[o]ur chief ideas

theme

is

and fall of Camelot, so the three and fall of the Venetian empire—

similar fate

most famously expressed

chapter where Ruskin relates "the

Bring in pictures of Gothic

if

this latest

empire doesn't

"the relation of the art of Venice to her moral

life

of the

in

"The Nature of Gothic," the

workman

to his work."

architecture to give students

an idea what Ruskin

John Ruskin

has in

mind when he

403

writes of pointed arches, vaulted roofs, flying buttresses,

and

grotesque sculptures. Also, have students look at our illustration from Pugin's

(though the evangelical Ruskin did not accept Pugin's linking of the

Contrasts

Gothic

revival to a Catholic revival).

The argument of The

Stones of Venice

is

that the

very imperfections of the Gothic style were evidence of a moral society; the

A

Renaissance represented degeneration and corruption.

(from the chapter

"Roman

Renaissance")

is

memorable example on tombs who are

the carved statues

propped up on one elbow, looking about instead of reclining peacefully-the worldly pride and vanity of the sixteenth-century soul "dared not contemplate

body

in

its

death" (one thinks of Browning's bishop ordering his tomb, apparently

imagining that Orders His

he'll still

Tomb

are

be around to enjoy

quoted in the

first

it;

Ruskin's

comments on The

Bishop

footnote).

For the pure pleasure of Ruskin's prose, read aloud the long passage about the bird's-eye

view of Europe as

it flies

north from the Mediterranean to the polar

north. Point out

how even

and geographical

features (lake, promontories, volcano, variegated, lucent) giving

the language gradually modifies, with latinate words

heathy moor, wood, ice drift). The landscape, the and their artistic productions are all inextricably entwined: there is a "look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp." The capacity to appreciate both— the barbaric remnants of the Dark Ages, the ugly blister on the face of the earth—represented an important shift of taste. But more important, for Ruskin, is his conviction that art and architecture are expres-

way

to

Anglo-Saxon ones

human

who

beings

(clefts,

inhabit

it,

sions of religious principle, a kind of visible bodying forth of the inner moral tem-

per of a people.

Thus the very

perfection

and symmetry of ancient Greek

dence that the Greek workman was in

fact a slave.

architecture are evi-

Medieval Christians, however,

did away with this slavery, "Christianity having recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value attests to

goblins

of every soul." The very rudeness of Gothic sculpture

the greater nobility of spirit that lay behind

and monsters of the old cathedral

workman who and Ruskin

it,

"signs of the

struck the stone." This liberty

modern

and Ruskin sees in the and liberty of every

life

industrial

sees the "degradation of the operative into a

Europe has

machine"

as

lost,

one of the

leading causes of nineteenth-century political upheavals, even revolutions.

The argument about Gothic architecture thus segues into an indictment of the Industrial Revolution. Modern Englishmen, like ancient Greeks, desire an inhuman perfection that is nowadays only possible with machines. Compare Ruskin's depiction of a brutalized factory worker with Dickens's description of the monot-

onous

lives

of Coketown "hands" in Hard Times. Ruskin argues that the medieval

craftsman was freer than the nineteenth-century operative: "there might be more

freedom in England, though her feudal .

.

.

than there

is

lords' lightest

words were worth men's

while the animation of her multitudes

is

lives

sent like fuel to feed the

factory smoke." (These words seem to echo Carlyle's about the brass-collared serf, Gurth, and might be a starting point for a discussion about the true nature of liberty, bringing in not only Carlyle but also Mill's On Liberty and Arnold's thoughts

about "Doing

as

One

Likes" in Culture and Anarchy). Ruskin's concerns about both

404

John Ruskin

the value of work and the plight of workers anticipate twentieth-century issues sur-

rounding the nature of work, consumer advocacy, and

human

economy. His indictment of materialist and consumerist society is

men

not that

they

make

are

and therefore look

their bread,

Discuss his claim that "every young lady

.

to wealth as the only .

.

who buys

might draw a contemporary

slave-trade" (one

resonates: "It

but that they have no pleasure in the work by which

fed,

ill

rights in a global still

parallel

glass

means of pleasure."

beads

is

engaged in the

with current efforts to boy-

cott the products of third-world sweatshops).

Ruskin did not invent the Gothic Revival, which began in the century, but he did

Kenneth Clark put Gothic architecture

more it

for

to popularize

in The Gothic Revival (1928; 1962),

eighteenth

even Pugin. As

else,

Ruskin "disinfected"

on many American

over England—and

all

puses—but Ruskin himself was appalled

"I

late

an audience wary of Catholicism. The success of the

can be seen in buildings

own

than anyone

it

revival

college

cam-

unintended consequences of

at the

his

influence; in the preface to the 1874 edition of The Stones of Venice he wrote:

would rather

.

.

.

that

no

architect

had ever condescended

views suggested in this book, than that any should have

made

to

adopt one of the

the partial use of

which has mottled our manufactory chimneys with black and red our banks and draper's shops with Venetian

tracery,

it

brick, dignified

and pinched our parish

churches into dark and slippery arrangements for the advertisement of cheap coloured

glass

and

pantiles."

For more on this topic see Michael Brooks's John

Ruskin and Victorian Architecture (1987).

Modern Manufacture and Design (1859) Invited to address the citizens of Bradford

on

art,

Ruskin instead inveighed against

the horrors of unrestrained industrial development. By this point in his career he

had turned more towards

social criticism

than ever before; the lecture expands on

the themes of The Nature of Gothic and prepares the way for Unto

Ruskin was ahead of

his

this Last

(1860).

time in sounding warnings about the destruction of the

environment, and he was vigorously denounced by a hostile audience; as

Rosenberg explains,

"If the

uproar over Unto

this

Last

now seems

excessive,

we need

only recall that Ruskin attacked every principle held sacred by the economists and industrialists

The

of the age" (The Genius of John Ruskin, 219).

lecture begins with a ghastly futuristic vision of

an England covered from

shore to shore with chimneys, mine shafts, and engines, a landscape so clotted that there

is

no longer "even room

for

roads"—travel takes place on viaducts or in tun-

nels (an unfortunately prescient intuition!). Ruskin contrasts an imaginary seven-

teenth-century cottage with an industrial suburb, the one a pastoral paradise, the

other a fallen wasteland. stream), suggesting

Coketown

The imagery

is

biblical (a blighted garden, a

an Eden transformed into

("the furnaces of the city

Hell, or the

blackened

New Jersalem become

foaming forth perpetual plague of sulphurous

darkness").

Ruskin then creates a gorgeous word-portrait of fourteenth-century Pisa (with "bright river"

and "brighter

palaces"),

another set-piece worth reading aloud for

John Ruskin

the hypnotic

and poetic

(beginning "Above

upon

quality of the prose.

all this

scenery of perfect

clause to evoke a world

where nature incarnated the

where mankind

sacred;

Note the

human

single

life

.

.

405

200-word sentence .")

that piles clause

harmony with nature, and the sentence culminates with the word "God." lived in

In contrast to this fantasy of dazzling medieval splendour Ruskin reminds us of the

"depressing and

monotonous circumstances of English manufacturing

life"—not,

from any hope that Bradford can become another Pisa, but to urge industrialists to "surround your men with happy influences and beautiful things." For, Ruskin argues, "all that gorgeousness of the Middle Ages" was founded he

says,

upon

"the pride of the so-called superior classes."

ported by the

selfish

The

power of the noblesse" but now

fine arts have

it is

"been sup-

time to extend "their

range to the comfort or the relief of the mass of the people"—to bring "the power and charm of art within the reach of the humble and the poor." The lecture closes with a plea not to allow greed and consumerism to destroy the arts, the virtues, and "the manners of your country."

Praeterita Victorian autobiographies have

(1885-1889)

some notable omissions:

out his

just as Mill leaves

mother, so Ruskin never mentions his six-year marriage to his cousin. But he

warns us in the preface that he

no pleasure

will pass over "in total silence things

in reviewing." Praeterita offers

an evangelical childhood, one in which

make an

evangelical clergyman of me."

his

He

which

I

have

one of the most famous depictions of mother had it "deeply in her heart to

describes the tedious Sundays, the long

hours spent memorizing the Bible, and the prohibition on toys or companions.

was a childhood where the "chief resources" consisted of the carpet and the terns Yet,

on

the wall-paper; the greatest misfortune was "that

had nothing

to love."

although Ruskin does not mitigate the errors of his well-intentioned elderly

parents, the If

I

It

pat-

dominant impression

is

somehow one

he was brought up in an Eden where

it

of richness, not of deprivation.

was forbidden

to eat the fruit,

it

was,

and marvellous summer excursions. The passages in which Ruskin recalls his travels might be compared with some of the readings in our Travel and Empire section. Ruskin was no audacious adventurer roughing it in the wilderness; even as an adult he almost always travelled with his parents, and they travelled in style. They carried the comforts and rounonetheless, an Eden, a place of clear streams

tines of

home

with them, for they were seeking neither excitement nor novelity:

more in every pleasure—that it was not new." The Ruskins, who had not been born to wealth, felt a certain social insecurity that led them to keep to themselves, both at home and abroad. Their isolation further reinforced the primacy of Ruskin's pleasure in looking: wishing to be a "pure eye," his "entire de-

we

"rejoiced the

light"

was "observing without being myself noticed." His nostalgic contrast betravel by private carriage and the contemporary system of

tween the old days of

mass

travel

by

rail

echoes Thackeray's remarks (quoted in the headnote to

The Industrial Landscape). "The Grande Chartreuse" Ruskin

Perspectives:

In

traces the "breaking

down

of

my

Puritan

406

John Ruskin

and one might juxtapose

faith,"

account with some of the selections in

this

recollections were not among him pleasure because he begins to digress, as though to postpone the moment when he will reluctantly describe his "unconversion." At the time of writing, he was battling episodes of madness: "He suspended publication for six

and Science. Clearly these

Perspectives: Religion

those which gave

months," Rosenberg writes, then issued the superb chapter, "The Grande Chartreuse," "one of the most exquisitely written passages in it,

all

of Praeterita" In

the lifelong conflict between Evangelicalism and Art sharpens into crisis—first

there

is

made on a Sunday, then the urban pleasures of Turin, and fisermon contrasting so powerfully with the glorious painting of

the drawing

nally the dreary

Paul Veronese. Finally, the arbitrary life-denying restrictions of the evangelical

Sabbath drive him to his

"final apostacy

embrace of the aesthetic

also

"the real year,

new

marked

fact in existence for

me

from Puritan doctrine."

its

decline in his

was that

my

and, in deepest sense, never prospered again."

life,

Students

for his

Yet, ironically, the

Ruskin wrote that

drawings did not prosper that

The

decisive turn

from

art crit-

on some

level

Ruskin

icism to social criticism dates from this period, as though

was atoning

for

unconversion by dedicating himself to duty.

who would

like to

read

more Ruskin, without

Cook and Wedderburn

indexed 39 volumes of the

tackling the brilliantly

edition, should see The Genius

an anthology edited by John D. Rosenberg. For a good introduction somewhat confusing subject of Ruskin's views of earlier painters see Patrick Conner's "Ruskin and the 'Ancient Masters' in Modern Painters (New Approaches to Ruskin, ed. Robert Hewison [1981], 17-32). The same volume contains an essay on "The Nature of Gothic" by John Unrau. A more recent collection, John Ruskin and the Victorian Eye (1993), has readable introductory essays and is lavishly illustrated. of John Ruskin,

to the

1

Florence Nightingale Cassandra (1852) Myra

Stark's introduction to the Feminist Press edition of Cassandra (1979) ad-

dresses the contradiction

between the popular view of Nightingale

type of the saintly nurse"

and the

reality

as "the proto-

of her work as a reformer. Stark situates

Nightingale's writing in the context of contemporary Victorian thinking about

women's closely

lives,

on

and provides interesting biographical background. Stark focuses more general introduction to Nightingale's career, stu-

Cassandra; for a

dents will enjoy the chapter

Women (1981). Many of the illustrate

and Gentlemen perspectives section relate Ellis, Cobbe, and

concern Nightingale. For example,

the social expectations for middle- and upper-class

which Nightingale was Cassandra helps

in Elizabeth Longford's Eminent Victorian

selections in the Ladies

closely to the issues that

Beeton

on her

make

rebelling.

vivid the sort of world in

which Nightingale

ideology of separate spheres and female subordination. social setting, students

may

women against

Reading these three excerpts before turning to lived,

with

its

Without some sense of this

see her passionate complaints as merely neurotic.

Florence Nightingale

Compare,

for example, Nightingale's description of society—"you are not to

who informs us that social "should be short, a stay of from fifteen to twenty minutes being quite suffianything very interesting"—to Mrs. Beeton,

talk of calls

407

cient,"

and the

subjects of conversation "such as

may be

Similarly, the narrator of Cranford observes that "As

readily terminated."

everybody had this rule in

whether they received or paid a call, of course no absorbing subject was ever spoken about. We kept ourselves to short sentences of small talk, and were punctual to our time." No wonder Nightingale felt herself stifled by the their minds,

obligation "to drop a remark" every two minutes, unable "to follow

up anything

systematically."

Cobbe's description of life in a fashionable boarding school illuminates the ficulties

to

some

that even wealthy

girls

practical use; the very notion

life

to be

it

would have been regarded by Cobbe's head-

mistresses as "a deplorable dereliction."

rank of

dif-

faced in acquiring a serious education or putting

was the duty of women in Nightingale's

It

"Ornaments of Society,"

a duty her sister

and mother embraced

without question: as Nightingale wrote scathingly, "The whole occupation of Parthe and

Mama

was to

lie

on two

sofas

and

tell

one another not

to get tired by

putting flowers into water."

In Cassandra Nightingale astutely makes the connection between female

mity and free time: "A married

woman

limb that she might have a

time to herself."

little

aged creatively by some Victorian

infir-

was heard to wish that she could break a It

does seem that

women; think of

illness

an

Isabella Bird,

was maninvalid at

home, an adventurer abroad. Five years after writing Cassandra, Nightingale apparently employed this strategy herself: "Florence took to her 'deathbed' at the age of thirty-seven, and remained there on and off—mostly on—for another fifty-three years" (Longford, 86). She lived to be 90 and performed heroic amounts of work, all

the while maintaining that she was too

frail for

any social engagements. In

Malady (1974) George Pickering argues that her ceptable way to protect herself from her family. Creative

illness

was a

socially ac-

Nightingale wrestles with the question of how the needs of the individual—particularly the

female individual— can be met within the confines of the family.

women

Conventional wisdom urged life,

to sacrifice themselves

but Nightingale likens the inevitable

endured by Chinese

to the foot-binding

on the

altar of family

consequence of psychological repression girls.

Directionless

young

women

that the heroine has "no family

day-

dream over novels, whose secret charm is most invariably no mother)." As if these images were not revealing enough, Nightingale's stinging parable of the lizard and the sheep proclaims her intense alienation

from her

family.

Although both Nightingale's tions,

essay

and her career now serve

as feminist inspira-

she herself was emphatically not a supporter of women's rights. In a

Harriet Martineau in 1861 Nightingale said:

or the rights of

my

ties (al-

sex." Like

male suffrage. "That

women

deeply convinced than

I,"

George

Eliot,

"I

am brutally indifferent to

she refused to sign the petition for

should have the suffrage,

she wrote to

J. S.

letter to

the wrongs

1

Mill; nonetheless, she

lend her influence and prestige to the cause.

fe-

think no one can be more

was reluctant to

Wondering how we can

"place

408

Florence Nightingale

Nightingale in the context of nineteenth-century feminism," Elaine Showalter asks

whether she was "a great leader or merely a great complainer?" ("Florence

Women, Religion, and Suggestions for Thought," Myra Stark suggests that Nightingale was impatient with women who did not work as hard as she did, seeing their failure "as a failure of will." Both Mary Poovey and Nancy Boyd explore how the Nightingale mystique was Nightingale's Feminist Complaint:

Signs 6.3 [1981]).

built

upon powerful gender myths.

Women Who Changed

In Three Victorian

much

that

folk heroes—the British soldier

and

World (1982) Boyd says, "The legend of Florence Nightingale contained

people wanted to hear. ... the

woman who

It

centred

serves him. ...

the ideal relationship between

It

on two

Their

epitomized what the Victorians believed to be

man and woman"

(186-87). In Uneven Developments

(1988) Poovey writes that "the mythic figure of Florence Nightingale had two faces

.

.

the self-denying caretaker [and]

.

.

.

.

the tough-minded administrator.

.

.

.

These two versions of Florence Nightingale most obviously consolidated two narratives

about patriotic service that were culturally available at midcentury—a do-

mestic narrative of maternal nurturing and

and will" (168-69). What was not

individual assertion

Cassandra

itself,

self-sacrifice

and

a military narrative of

available at mid-century

which has given twentieth-century readers new

private despair that

launched the public

was

insights into the

figure.

Perspectives

Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen This section serves as an introduction to some of the debates about gender and

The views of the

no means uniform: one imagines that neither Caroline Norton nor Harriet Martineau would have had much use for Mrs. Ellis and Mrs. Beeton. These passages on women's class in

Victorian culture.

lives interact

married

women

different authors are by

with one another in provocative ways: Norton's description of

women

forfeited virtually all rights

ever agreed to marry; the Brontes' accounts of the miserable lives of gov-

ernesses suggest at least

one answer.

These selections can be paired with other trast

how

might lead students to wonder why

the conventional

conventional

lives led

texts

throughout the anthology: con-

wisdom urged on women by

Ellis

and Beeton

to the un-

by Isabella Bird, Frances Trollope, and Mary Kingsley (Travel

on separate spheres, and Cobbe and Martineau on women's education, provide good preparation for Nightingale's Cassandra, Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and Eliot's Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft. Norton on women's rights makes an excellent companion reading to Mill's Subjection of perspectives). Ellis

Women.

Ellis's

notions of female inferiority counterpoint Gaskell's portrayal of an

all-female society of

Cranford

ladies'

"Amazons," and Beeton's advice about social

standards in context.

Compare

fashionable boarding school in Fortunatus Rex lections of just such a school.

calls sets

the

Nesbit's fanciful description of a

&

Co. with

Cobbe 's

real-life recol-

Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen

409

Juxtapose these readings with the Industrial Landscape perspectives: where the earlier section offers

glimpses of working-class

childhood, and education (or lack of class

we

world. There,

see

how

work the

we

read about

it),

this

women and

lives

and

attitudes towards the family,

one provides

insight into the middle-

children in factories and mines; here,

female inactivity becomes a status symbol. In Mayhew, boys and

streets; here,

girls

they torment governesses and attend expensive schools.

The notion of what

constitutes a "gentleman" or a "lady" was intensely fasci-

What

nating to the Victorians, with their newly expanded middle classes.

Could one

did

it

Only ladies could become governesses, but were governesses still really ladies? Such questions pervade Victorian literature: in Gaskell's North and South Margaret Hale, whose family has sunk into poverty, insists that she is still "a born and bred lady;" in Dickens's Great Expectations the convict Magwitch "makes" both a lady and a gentleman with his money. take to belong?

Inevitably, questions of

lose caste?

rank are linked not merely to birth and money, but to

Women's educations might be trivial, but they were deOne could assemble a unit on Victorian education, read-

occupation and education. signed to ensure status.

ing not only this perspectives section but also chapter

book

2

1

of Mill's Autobiography,

of Aurora Leigh, and the selections from Darwin's and Ruskin's

autobiographies.

Frances Power

Cobbe

[A Fashionable English Boarding School]

The memorable image of the corner

illustrates

how

girls

"in full evening attire" being punished in the

upper-middle

class

women

were educated to serve a largely

"Ornaments of Society." Cobbe

decorative function as

gives a

good picture of the

nature of genteel female "accomplishments": foreign languages, music, dancing

were

essential, while

Cobbe

lous. Yet she's also ties,"

terial

"Morals and Religion" were

writes in a

lively,

humorous

at the

bottom of the girls, "full

of capabili-

lives: "all this fine

human ma-

outraged at the recollection that these

were expected to do nothing useful with their

was deplorably wasted." Compare Cobbe 's amused

passionate anguish in Cassandra:

which she had, in

fact,

scale.

way, for she has a keen sense of the ridicu-

Cobbe was

regret to Nightingale's

writing at the

end of

a long

life

in

accomplished a great deal, while Nightingale wrote before

she had found her vocation.

For an overview of nineteenth-century women's education, see Lee Holcombe's chapter,

"Women and

Education," in Victorian Ladies

at

Work

(1973).

Reviewing

the findings of the Taunton Commission, which investigated the state of middleclass

education in 1867, Holcombe notes that the majority of

girls'

schools were

small boarding schools in converted private houses, that "snobbery was rampant,"

and that since chaperoned walks were the

schoolgirls' only

form of exercise,

"pal-

and crooked spines were supposedly their distinguishing marks" (23-24). Academic achievements were not considered feminine; they might even be a hindrance in the marriage market, for who would care to marry a "bluestocking"? As Joan Burstyn puts it in Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood (1980), "No father wanted to be accused of educating his daughter so as to make her unlor

Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen

410

suited to marriage

and motherhood;

better to ignore the possibility of her re-

maining unmarried and in need of supporting herself than to run the very education

would make her an old maid"

risk that her

(37).

Sarah Stickney Ellis The Women of England (1839) from Charlotte Bronte described her efforts to

my ties

father's advice ...

a

woman

ought

I

to

fulfil,

succeed, for sometimes writing; but

I

try to

live

up

to the feminine ideal: "Following

have endeavored not only attentively to observe

but to

when I'm

deny

myself;

feel

deeply interested in them.

father's

all

the du-

don't always

would rather be reading or approbation amply rewards me

teaching or sewing,

and my

I

I

for the privation" (qtd.

in Joan Burstyn, Victorian Education and the Ideal of

Womanhood

That even so

[1980], 106).

gifted a

woman

as

Bronte should regard

reading as self-indulgence and force herself "to feel deeply interested" in housesuggests how pervasive—and potentially destructive—such attitudes were. Many more women than Bronte and Nightingale must have been led to distrust their own deepest instincts, to wonder what was wrong with them when they

work

couldn't find fulfillment in home-making and self-denial.

Mention the famous title of Coventry Patmore's popular poem, The Angel in the House (1854-63), which has come to serve as shorthand for the domestic ideal promoted by Ellis (T. H. Huxley complained that girls were educated "to be either drudges or toys beneath man, or a sort of angel above him"). Although dated, Walter Houghton's chapter on "Love" (The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1957) and Richard Altick's chapter on "The Weaker Sex" (Victorian People and Ideas, 1973) provide brief introductions to Victorian attitudes concerning middle-class

and the

home. aimed her books

women

sanctity of the

Mrs.

Ellis

at a specific readership: those families

"connected

with trade or manufacture, as well as the wives and daughters of professional of limited incomes." Davidoff and Hall's chapter

Middle Class" (Family

men

on "Domestic Ideology and

the

Fortunes, 1987) devotes several pages to Ellis (180-85); they

point out that while "she addressed herself

first

and foremost

to

women who

did

not need to earn," she herself "clung with some guilt to her financial indepen-

They suggest that "a tension between the notion of women as 'relative creaand a celebratory view of their potential power lies at the heart of Mrs Ellis's writing and helps to explain her popularity." Nonetheless, "the moral panic engendered in the 1840s by the vision of women working in the mines, mills and factories of England was fuelled by the view that women's duty was to care for home and children"—a view that Mrs. Ellis "played a part in rigidifying." dence." tures'

In Nobody's Angels: Middle-Class

Women and

Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture

(1995) Elizabeth Langland analyzes gender ideology in terms of class (71-76). She

notes that tification

Ellis's

"mystifying rhetoric" of ministering angels "effects at once a jus-

of the status quo and a concealment of the class issues as gender ones."

Pointing out that "the myth of the strife

and storms was

home

daily in jeopardy

argues that "supervision and control

as a

harmonious refuge from external

from the discontent of servants," Langland

become

a mistress's

unacknowledged and

Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen

which

mystified agenda,

to reinscribe bourgeois

refuge

4\

accompanied by a rhetoric of concern whose purpose

is

women within a

from the workplace

domestic ideology that posits the

refuses to recognize that

it

home

\

is

as

it is."

Charlotte Bronte from

Letter to

Emily (1839)

Anne Bronte from Agnes Grey Elizabeth Longford

(1

847)

us that "Charlotte was stoned by a small Sidgwick of Stonegappe Hall. Nevertheless, her influence over this child was to develop satisfactorily until he burst out at dinner that he loved her; whereupon Mrs. Sidgwick tells

barked, 'Love the governess,

came the model

for Mrs.

my

Reed

dear!'

"

Bronte got her revenge: Mrs. Sidgwick be-

in Jane Eyre (Eminent Victorian

Bronte returned to the governess in

Shirley (1849),

thought that his niece might become one: "While a governess, Caroline.

I

will

Victorian Governess (1993)

"of the

way

not have

said that

Kathryn Hughes

which middle-class

in

it

women

where I

live,

my

cites this

a

you

niece

Women

man is

[1981], 30).

is

horrified at the

shall

not turn out as

a governess." In The

passage as eloquent testimony

were responsible for reflecting and con-

firming the status of their male relatives" (33-34).

Show students how the details of Richard Redgrave's painting, The Poor Teacher (1844), convey visually many of the same points that the Brontes were making concerning the governess's misery, isolation, and ambiguous social position.

The

Victorians were fascinated and troubled by the governess, although

M.

Jeanne Peterson remarks in "The Victorian Governess" that her suffering "seems pale and singularly undramatic when compared with that of women in factories and mines" (Suffer and Be Still, ed. Martha Vicinus [1973]). (Bronte, however, declared that "I could like to work in a mill. I could feel mental liberty.") The governess's difficulties arose principally because, as a

she

"is

contemporary observer put

it,

not a relation, not a guest, not a mistress, not a servant—but something

made up of all. No one knows

exactly

how to

treat her." Elizabeth Eastlake

denned

the ideal governess: "Take a lady, in every meaning of the word, born and bred,

and

let

more to The

her father pass through the gazette [bankruptcy], and she wants nothing suit

our highest beau

fact that

ideal

of a guide and instructress to our children."

being a governess was an acceptable occupation at

nected with the ideology of separate spheres—at

least

all is

con-

she was working in the home,

engaged in the feminine task of caring for children. The lack of alternatives meant that "for much of the nineteenth century, the supply of governesses far exceeded the

demand" (Hughes,

37). Precisely

because they were easier to replace than good

servants, "employers frequently placed their parlourmaid's

ment above that of the two-a-penny governess" (154). The governess features frequently in Victorian

comfort and content-

novels: after Jane Eyre

one

thinks of Becky Sharp in Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847). In Daniel Deronda (1876)

Gwendolyn marries

a detestable

points out that

one of the

"it is

man

to avoid

becoming

Hughes we know vir-

a governess. Yet

great ironies of Victorian history that

412

Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen

tually

We

nothing about the 25,000

do know, however,

women who

worked

actually

as governesses"

(xi).

that the lunatic asylums were "supplied with a larger pro-

portion of their inmates from the ranks of young governesses than from any other class

of

(Lady Eastlake, qtd. by Hughes, 163). In Uneven Developments (1988)

life"

Mary Poovey has a chapter hne Eyre" (126-163).

"The Anathematized Race: The Governess and

called

John Henry Cardinal fromThe From the

first

sentence,

Newman

Idea of a University (1852)

Newmans

notion of a gentleman contrasts sharply with

the manly, fighting ethos of Hughes, Kingsley, fighter avoid inflicting pain? Further,

how

and Newbolt,

how

for

could a

could soldiers treat an enemy "as

if

he

were one day to be our friend"? Muscular Christians would have seen effeminacy

Newman's

every sentence of

in

Movement). The

(as

Newman

adjectives

they had seen

in

it

the entire Oxford

uses to define a gentleman—tender, gentle,

model Victorian

merciful, patient, forbearing, resigned— could easily apply to the

woman. What

sort of

man

"submits" and rarely "takes the initiative"?

of man can be compared to "an easy chair or a good fire"? While Newman himself hardly disdained a good fight (as

his

What

triumphant

rejoin-

der to Kingsley in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua demonstrates), he clearly endorses a aggressive ideal of male behavior. In Dandies and Desert Saints (1995) writes: "there

is

discipline to be

no question an affront

that

Newman

from the outset understood

to prevalent, broadly aristocratic

1843 sermon, 'Wisdom and Innocence'

(85); "in his

James

the dynamics of Kingsleyan manliness well before

its

.

.

.

Newman's

"is

that character, but

Newman

is

done

his Christian

Newman

cannily anticipates

public manifestation" (99).

a superb, searching definition, feeling

ances of the gentlemanly character. Justice

less

Adams

norms of masculinity"

In The Idea of the Gentleman in the Victorian Novel (1981) Robin that

Eli

sort

its

way

.

to the courtesy

.

Gilmour .

says

into the nu-

and stoicism of

also mercilessly lays bare the pride at the heart of the

gentleman's self-effacement. Behind the seeming selflessness

lies

a real selfishness;

the gentleman will surrender the outworks of his personal convenience in order to preserve the citadel of his self-esteem intact. is

an exquisite vanity

at

work

Newman

acutely perceives that there

in the gentleman's courtesy

which works against deep

commitment or self-surrender. Hence the strikingly negative character of the definition. Newman's gentleman is not a man who does but a man who refrains .

.

.

from doing"

(91).

In The English Gentleman (1987) David Castronovo proposes that the entire definition

is

in fact a parody of extravagant idealizers of the gentleman:

the gentlemanly ideal to absurdity by writing his

own

purple passage, a stretch of

prose that destroys the ideal—for the careful reader—by parodying

and confusion." Castronovo

calls

it

all

surface,

embodying the poverty

pomposity

and the inadequacy of gentlemanly

traits

The gentleman is a hollow man, of worldly values; for Newman, he is "a grand

they are compared to a higher good" (64).

illusion, a

its

"an ironic bravura performance staged to show

the inflated claims of the gentleman

when

"He reduces

marvellous spectacle" (65).

Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen

413

Caroline Norton the Queen (1855)

from A Letter to

Norton's writings are of interest, not merely because they so dramatically portray the legal situation of Victorian married

women, but because of the assumptions The title of an essay by Frances Power

those laws reveal about women's very nature.

Cobbe concerning married women's property

Women, and

Minors:

Is

rights says

the Classification Sound?"

it all:

(Fraser's

"Criminals, Idiots,

Magazine [1868]). In

Uneven Developments (1988) Mary Poovey has a good chapter entitled "Covered but Not Bound: Caroline Norton and the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act." Poovey writes: "The point that Norton makes indirectly is that women's legal incapacities are a function of their social position,

not of natural, biological inferiority"

(65).

Poovey notes that the debates surrounding reform called attention to women's paradoxical "nonexistence" in the eyes of the law, and also, by "acknowledging the fact

of marital unhappiness

.

.

inevitably exposed the limitations of the domestic

.

ideal." Further, "in publicizing the

economic underpinnings of many marital

dis-

putes, the parliamentary debates threatened to reveal the artificiality of separate

spheres" (52). tegrity

If class stability

depended on "the morality of

women and

the in-

of the domestic sphere," then "allowing anyone to petition for divorce

would imperil the social order" (59-60). Although Norton played a central role she did not herself demand

in the debates

about women's

rights,

equality; she merely asked for protection. In this sense,

"her challenge actually reinforced the idealized domesticity she seemed to under-

made

mine." Nonetheless, her story tected in exchange for their

it

clear "that

dependence"

women were

not necessarily pro-

(81).

The story of reform is told by Lee Holcombe in "Victorian Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women's Property Law, 1857-1882" (A Widening Sphere, ed. Martha Vicinus [1977]) and in Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women's Property Law (1983). Although the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act began to improve the legal position of for denying their

women,

until the 1880s they could legally

husbands "conjugal

be sent to prison

rights."

Thomas Hughes fromTom Tom Browns

Brown's School Days (1857)

School Days introduces the

English public school and

American student

to the schoolboy

to the

world of the

code that governed the conduct of the

The whole question of what constituted a "gentleman" was among the Victorians (perhaps most famously in Dickens's Great

Victorian gentleman. hotly contested

was generally agreed that the product of a public school such Eton, Harrow, Winchester or Rugby was a gentleman, no matter what his social

Expectations), as

origins

but

it

might have been.

In The Return

ophy of life "owed

to

Camelot (1981)

much to Carlyle: .

.

.

life

was

observes that Hughes's philos-

a constant fight

between good and

evil;

and even dangerous without strength of character. went far beyond Carlyle in suggesting that the best

strength of intellect was useless

But Tom Browns Schooldays

Mark Girouard

414

Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen

way

to moral prowess

was physical prowess, in actual fighting or in sport"

(166).

Tom, for example, voices his ambitions thus: "I want to be A 1 at cricket and football, and all the other games. ... I want to carry away just as much Latin and Greek as will take me through Oxford respectably. ... 1 want to leave behind me the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy, or turned his back on a big one." Not everybody endorsed this conception of the gentlemanly ideal; in Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte conveyed her disdain by putting a version of it in the mouth of the arrogant and disagreeable Blanche Ingram: "as to the gentlemen, let them be solicitous to possess only strength and valour: let their motto be:—hunt, shoot, and .

fight:

the rest

not worth a

is

Ask students School-house."

.

.

fillip.

to analyze the values implicit in Brooke's speech to "the dear old

Why

would he rather "win two School-house matches running,

than get the Balliol scholarship"? Those interested in learning more about the gentlemanly ideal might turn to Girouard's book; for more

on

the public schools

themselves, see Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's The Public School Phenomenon (1977), J.

R. de S. Honey's

(1977),

J.

Tom Browns

Universe:

A. Mangan's Athleticism

The Development of the English Public School and Edwardian Public School (1981),

in the Victorian

and John Chandos's Boys Together (1984). Instructors may want and Newbolt in conjunction with Hughes.

to teach Kingsley

Harriet Martineau from What Women Are Educated For (1861) In comparison to the frivolity of Cobbe's fashionable boarding school, the

women's

colleges attempted to provide a serious education. Part of their original

mission was to train teachers, particularly governesses. At Queen's College, "any 'lady'

over twelve could attend. There were courses in English, theology, history,

Latin, maths,

modern

languages, science, music, the fine arts

and

lessons

on how

to teach" (The Public School Phenomenon, 236). Yet the notion that girls should re-

ceive the

same education as boys was still highly controversial. In 1868 Sarah it: "The profoundly educated women rarely make good wives

Sewell argued against or mothers.

The

pride of knowledge does not amalgamate well with the every-day

women who have stored their minds with and Greek seldom have much knowledge of pies and puddings."

matter of fact rearing of children, and Latin

Interestingly,

Martineau urges the value of knowledge for

support themselves. In

ter able to

its

own

sake,

but

women might be bet-

doesn't produce the economic argument that better educated

she stresses female modesty to the point of

fact,

claiming that no English maiden "has anything to gain for herself beyond the privileges

leges

of learning and

and

women

"fast

will

young

art."

Martineau's bizarre digressions about American col-

ladies"

seem over-anxious

pendence. The concluding sentence fuss

about "women's

more

able,

to reassure readers that educated

remain conventionally submissive and not

more

founding of a women's

down

to the right to

and more agreeable than ever

like to

look at Tennyson's The

college.

strike

out for female inde-

particularly cautious, suggesting that all the

rights" really boils

useful,

Students might

is

be "more reasonable,

before."

Princess,

which concerns the

Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen

In her chapter,

Holcombe focus

is

"Women and

41

at Work [1973]) Lee and Bedford Colleges. Although her

Education" (Victorian Ladies

describes the founding of Queen's

university rather than secondary education, Rita McWilliams-Tullberg's

"Women and

Degrees at Cambridge University, 1862-1897" surveys attitudes toward female education (A Widening Sphere [1977]). The most comprehensive treatment of the subject is Joan N. Burstyn's Victorian Education and the Ideal of

Womanhood

(1980). For

more of Martineau's

Martineau on Women, ed. Gayle

Graham

essays

on

related topics, see Harriet

Yates (1985).

Isabella

Beeton

from The Book of Household Management (1861)

The growing

popularity of etiquette books beginning around the 1830s attests to

the rise of the middle class

and the

market for books that would

tell

fluidity

of social

women how

vants. Yet in Nobody's Angels (1995) Elizabeth

caste. Clearly there

Langland argues that

misconception that these etiquette manuals helped to individuals

from

an image of the genteel middle

manuals

facilitate

.

.

and commitment

large ser-

a popular

movement of .

consolidated

"The very popularity of the

class" (28).

reveals a pervasive awareness of

"it is

the

a lower to a higher sphere in society. In fact, they

was a

manage

to pay a social call or

etiquette

to the class distinctions

they create and reinforce" (32).

These manuals ners,

and

offer fascinating glimpses of the intricate

social codes that defined middle-class

maze of duties, man-

womanhood. They

also

demon-

despite the carefully constructed impression of cultivated leisure,

strate that,

Victorian middle-class

women were not lounging about;

the

home was a workplace

where genuine labor was done and servants had to be hired, trained, and supervised.

Beeton compares the housewife to the

quette guide

compared her

to the

Commander of an Army;

another

eti-

"captain of a seventy-four" gun warship

(Langland 47). With her emphasis on the housewife's multitude of duties, "Beeton underscores only what

is

management

and household and sermons: the mistress's key

generally accepted in the etiquette guides

manuals, but often mystified in the novels,

tracts,

role" (45).

moral as well as administrative dimension of being a good commander: the housewife must serve as an exemplar for her servants. If she sleeps late, her servants "will surely become sluggards." Beeton reinforces her precepts with an implicit threat: a woman must perform up to snuff or risk losing her man to the rival attractions of clubs and taverns. The suggestion that the feminine domain of the home was in competition with the masculine domain of dininghouses—rather than a refuge from it— is a revealing twist on the ideology of sepaBeeton

stresses the

rate spheres.

Queen Letters

Victoria

and Journal Entries on the Position of Women

Read against the stereotype of the Victorian woman as selfless and uncomplaining, Queen—who supposedly embodied the domestic ideal—are almost

the letters of the

comical. She dwells

on her own

sufferings, she resents the births of her children,

416

Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen

and she grumbles that her husband never sympathizes when she bemoans the lot of women. In one startling epistle, she calls the news of her daughter's first pregnancy "horrid"—and grimly predicts a miscarriage. Nor did her acute awareness of women's trials make the Queen a supporter of efforts to improve their legal and educational position: she terms the suffrage

Queen

Victoria was nothing

match the feminine

quite

doxical,

ideal,

if

movement "mad, wicked

not outspoken. Yet

if

folly."

her character did not

she nonetheless provided a compelling,

image of female power. The competent presence of a

woman

if

para-

at the

head

of an enormous empire seemed to undermine the prevailing orthodoxy about the

home

being the only proper sphere for females—an orthodoxy Victoria herself

seemed roles

all

the more determined to uphold. She was always troubled by her dual

of monarch and matriarch: in 1852, after fifteen years on the throne,

am

more convinced that we women, if we are to be and amiable and domestic, are not fitted to reign." The contradictions that both Victoria and her subjects perceived as inherent in her position make a good starting point for discussions about nineteenth-century domes-

Victoria wrote, "I

good women,

tic

every day

feminine

ideology.

Students interested in Victoria might like Elizabeth Longford's 1964 biography,

which has been

called "the envy

these include Stanley Weintraub (1987)

and despair" of subsequent biographers; and Dorothy Thompson (1990).

Charles Kingsley Letters and Memories

from In Dandies and Desert Saints:

Styles of Victorian

Masculinity (1995) James Eli

Adams

writes that Kingsley 's "ideal of 'muscular Christianity,' formulated largely in an-

tagonism to Newman's

ascetic discipline, has long

shift in Victorian conceptions of masculinity,

been seen

to codify a crucial

through which an

earlier

paradigm

of spiritual discipline gave way to a celebration of unreflective bodily vigor." Interestingly,

Adams

argues that "Kingsley 's 'muscular' ideal of

tured by the very asceticism he insistently attacked" priestly celibacy

.

.

.

(17);

manhood

"Newman's

is

struc-

ideal of

was a standing affront to Kingsley 's celebrations of marital

bliss" (84).

Adams

holding

farflung empire, as well as with the public schools' glorification of "suc-

its

associates Kingsley's popularity with British anxieties

on the playing fields" (109). Mark Girouard suggests that

about up-

cess

Kingsley's obsession with manliness "was proba-

Thomas Hughes" (The Return to Camelot, 136). While the term "muscular Christian" may have struck Hughes and Kingsley as bly inspired by his friendship with

slightly ridiculous,

Girouard points out that

their doctrine. "Emotionally they

it

"caught to perfection" the flavor of

found physical prowess gloriously exciting

.

.

.

they preferred a strong

man

"under

was neurotic, morbid, and liable to would like to have been, not what he heroes were what he

to a clever

one"

(143).

Girouard notes, however, that

his surface aggressiveness [Kingsley]

frequent collapses; his was. There

is

a hysterical edge to his writing that

can be very

distressing."

Girouard adds that "Kingsley's enthusiasm for working men's causes diminished as

he grew

older. ... In 1865,

when Governor

Eyre's

prompt but savage suppres-

Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen

417

sion of disaffection in Jamaica divided the English Establishment into two camps,

Thomas Hughes's

Kingsley supported Eyre, and lost

friendship in consequence"

(144).

For further reading see Muscular Christianity (1994), a collection of essays edited

by Donald E. Hall. Sir

Henry Newbolt

Vitai Larnpada (1897)

poem merges

Newbolt's

the language of the playing fields with the language of the

"Captain"

killing fields: the

is

at

once

a schoolboy

Brooke in Tom Browns School Days, and an schoolboy

who

"rallies

them

strike

men on

like

The

in battle.

the ranks" echoes Brooke's rousing speech to his team-

may shock modern American

mates. Newbolt's glorification of bloodshed

dents—or

heading his rugby team,

officer urging his

as

naive—but

stu-

the logical extension of the credo pro-

it is

claimed forty years earlier in Hughes's novel: "From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly

understood,

When

of every son of man."

an army

career as

and

Tom

is

the business, the

officer in India,

exclaims, "Aye, won't he!

pose soldiers are very

honestest business

in

like boys."

Writing about World

Gathorne-Hardy

real, highest,

Tom Browns School Days chooses a the master says, "He'll make a capital officer," No fellow could handle boys better, and I sup-

one of the boys

War

I

in

The Public School Phenomenon (1977),

says: "Letter after letter

are not to have let school or

from the front

house down.

.

.

.

And

says

how

these themes are echoed again

The public school ethos had gone beyond the grave. your school meant to die well for your country" (199-200). One

in the school obituaries.

To

play well for

.

might think that the horrors of that war put an end to such glamorizations, but late as

Great Scorer comes / To write against your name /

how you

In The Return

to

He marks—not

Camelot (1981)

Mark Girouard

for

performance by Boy Scouts (233-34). Girouard adds:

fields

He

that you

won

reproduces Baden-Powell's 1908 adaptation of Vitai Larnpada

never said anything of the

sort,

widely believed

"It is still

of Wellington said, 'The Battle of Waterloo was

of Eton.'

as

has a chapter called "Playing

Game" where he Duke

.

played the game."

the

that the

.

"when the One

the 1920s the American sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote,

or lost—/ But

J.

glad the writers

won on

but the legend

.

.

.

the playing

had been

tak-

ing shape since the 1850s."

Girouard

traces the rise of sports in the nineteenth century,

and

links the

Victorian code of the sportsman with the concept of gentlemanliness and with chivalry.

Ask students

to reflect

cricket," "the

whole nine

the language.

How do

on how

phrases taken from sports, such as

"it's

not

and so on, became part of metaphors for character and moral

yards," "par for the course,"

sports

come

to serve as

conduct?

For more on the connections between public school sports and the work of empire, see

J.

A. Mangan's The Games Ethic and Imperialism (1986).

Matthew Arnold

41

Matthew Arnold Poetry

Though

poets and

have found fault with the

critics

of Arnold's poetry, they

style

have always taken seriously what he has to say about a central problem of modern life:

the difficulty of achieving true

communion with another

person, or even one-

"Matthew Arnold," in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), T. S. Eliot commented on Arnold's forthrightness: "With all his fastidiousness and superciliousness and officiality, Arnold is more intimate with us than Browning, more intimate than Tennyson ever is, except at moments, as in the passionate

self.

In

flights

of In Memoriam.

.

.

.

His poetry, the best of

it,

is

too honest to employ any

but his genuine feelings of unrest, loneliness and dissatisfaction" (106). Most readers tend to agree with Eliot, cal limitations

and murky

whose

definitions.

essay

is

harsh but

W. H. Auden, on

fair

on Arnold's

the other hand,

Arnold's openly acknowledged difficulty in penetrating his "buried

own

techni-

felt

that

meant him noth-

life"

till it died // And left and face," so that "all rang hollow but the clear denunciation" of his times ("Matthew Arnold," 1940). From early to late, Arnold's poems thus raise a tortured question: if we cannot know ourselves or others, how can we discover and communicate our true feelings about this underlying alienation? The "Marguerite" poems speak with conviction about human longing, the capacity for both self-deception and disillusionment, and the deep-rooted loneliness of each individual. In the second poem Arnold implies, in the face of Donne, that every man is an island. His beautiful concluding line suggests that a sea of tears divides us all, and that, in a kind of abortive genesis, God separated lands and waters without ever continuing on to make an Adam and Eve who could couple to compensate for this estranging process. The poems have provoked keen speculation as to Marguerite's identity. "Marguerite, at best, is a shadowy figure," writes Eliot, "neither very passionately desired nor very closely observed, a mere pretext for lamentation. His personal emotion is indeed most convincing when he deals with an impersonal subject" (107-108). Arnold's biographers and editors, however, such as Hugh Kingsmill, Park Honan, and Miriam Allott, have sought an actual woman as the source of Arnold's poems—a French waitress, a well-educated Englishwoman and family friend named Mary Claude, or "a pious and rather literary, though appealing, young holiday friend," respectively. How important is it that the poems be about

that his

ing but a

inhibitions "thrust his gift in prison

jailer's

voice

a real love affair? Is

it

more important

to see

them

as the self-revelation of the

who need not be Arnold at all? Is Arnold conveying an insight into the nature of human experience, the catalyst for which is relatively insignificant? The "Marguerite" debate, along with the issue of how relevant biographical informa-

speaker,

tion should be to literary interpretation, Bell in the Fall

Dover Beach

is

taken up by Wendell Harris and

one of the great poems of the

rhymes, and stanzas, which seem it is

is

1989 and 1991 issues of The Victorian era,

Bill

Newsletter.

and, with

to echo "the turbid ebb

its

irregular lines,

and flow" of

Arnold's finest foray into modernist poetics. Stefan Collini even

its

subject,

calls

it

"the

Matthew Arnold

major

first

poem

'free-verse'

41

in the language" (Matthew Arnold [1988], 41). Likely

on Arnold's return from his honeymoon, the poem ponders the withdrawing tide of religious faith in a way that links it to Stanzas on the Grande Chartreuse. The overall tenor of the poem has been read variously as a clas-

written in 1851, perhaps

sic

expression of Romantic self-sufficiency, or of Victorian doubt. Note the appar-

ent contradiction of the injunction, "Ah, love, a world that, the speaker claims, has

no

.

as the

The speaker

is

one

stay against

usually

very like him"), although in

assumed

much

which the narrator addresses

poem The

woman

recreation by

as by a

man.

Arnold of what

Wightman? someone at

is it

a heartfelt appeal to ro-

confusion in a brutal post-Darwinian world? to be

Arnold

(or,

in Clough's words,

"someone

attention has been given to the possible situation his "love."

Most notable

is

Anthony Hecht's

satiric

Eugene R. August has argued that the poem

"gender neutral," and that "every line of the a

Or

.

.

a

For

.

all

woman

poem

we know, the poem's speaker may be a Mary Claude? Frances Lucy

(Marguerite?

Or

Kim" ("The Dover Switch,

else?) said to

is

could just as plausibly be spo-

the

New

Sexism

poem

'Dover Beach,'" Victorian Newsletter [Spring 1990]: 36). August says the

should seen as "an expression of a human feeling shared by

women and men alike"

article follows from a lively debate over the poem's meaning by Gerhard Nathan Cervo, and Tom Hayes in The Victorian Newsletter (Spring 1988

His

(37).

Joseph,

and

in

dubious come-on, a

this a

Dover Bitch (The Hard Hours [I960]), which depicts the auditor as an im-

patient prostitute. But recently

ken by

Is

it.

Victorian agnostic's version of To His Coy Mistress 7

mantic love

/ To one another"

us be true

let

love in

Fall 1989).

Whoever

is

speaking, the text

is

haunted by echoes, including much-disputed

possible references to Sophocles in stanza 2 (Antigone 583ff or Trachiniae 112ff),

and

to

Thucydides or Tennyson in the

last line (Peloponnesian

War

7.44 or

"The

Passing of Arthur," lines 90ff). In Matthew Arnold and the Betrayal of Language (1988),

David G. Riede

points out

how

offers a fine overall discussion of the

poem

(196-203).

the poem's opening parallels that of Wordsworth's sonnet

He

It is

a

Beauteous Evening, while there are significant echoes of Milton's Paradise Lost to-

ward the end: "neither

joy,

"the world, which seems

"The world was

all

nor love"

/ To

lie

("On Dover Beach,"

which makes a strong case

poem

what Hell holds

for

Satan (PL 4:509), and

before them" (PL 12.646). Riede also summarizes

Pitman's important article 136),

is

before us" revises the epic's concluding passage

Essays in Criticism

Ruth

23 (1973): 109-

for the insubstantiality of the landscape in the

(due to geological erosion and metaphysical doubt—perhaps picking

up on

section 123 of In Memoriam). Pitman also notes that there are ghosts of two sonnets in the sion.

first

twenty-eight lines,

As Riede puts

about

its

it,

"like

and the eroded

'The Buried

own decomposition"

octet of a third at the conclu-

Life,' it is a

poem

The poem's fame and emotional appeal have caused porary culture as something of a high-art symbol of the nature, or science. There have in

that in subtle ways

is

(196).

been sightings

it

to function in

crisis

contem-

of belief in the

in Pynchon's Gravity's

self,

Rainbow and

cyberpunk novels. See Robin Roberts, "Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach,'

Gender, and Science Fiction," Extrapolation 33.3 (1992): 245-257.

Matthew Arnold

420

Dating from the same period The Buried

Life,

and

nature, ical

self,

and

inside-out-

from

or faith. In postlapsarian Kensington Gardens the poet stresses the phys-

and

contrasts between country

tional

around

a momentary vantage point wherein Arnold, presentan estranged outsider, gains a privileged glimpse into the bosom of

side contrasts, written

ing himself as

(early 1850s), Lines Written in Kensington Gardens,

Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse are built

spiritual opposition

city,

park and

street, in

order to

between nature's peace and the

make an emo-

city's

deathly up-

on Cowper's famous eighteenth-century dictum "God made the country, and man made the town" (alluded to in the penultimate stanza), Arnold uses a sequestered nook in the park to cast himself, Wordsworth-style, into a more vital relationship with himself and his past. But the revealing images of nurse, cradle, child, and broken toy posit not simply a further contrast, but also an underlying connection, between frazzled adult poet and helpless child. Both can only pray that Mother Nature will look after them. roar. In a variation

Life employs Arnold's characteristic river and sea imagery to chanway to his inmost self. It is as if he were a geological formation concealing an underground stream that might, if plumbed, buoy him toward that deeper calm

The Buried

nel

he

its

strains for in Kensington Gardens.

life" is

eral.

For

many

readers, the search for "the buried

the quintessence of Arnold's poetry, and of the

But how do we know when we

ings? (Note

how

little

Arnold

actually tells us

the archeological (or funereal) metaphor the

about

poem

modern condition

his).

is

in gen-

touch with our "true"

are (or aren't) in

Consider the

built on:

how

feel-

validity of

useful or mis-

to value depth over surface? In an essay that and Arnoldian, Philip Davis writes of the centrality of the poem and its sentiment for the whole of nineteenth-century poetry: "in what seem to me the greatest lines written by anyone in the century, Arnold captures what (in retrospect) we can see it would take to turn Thomas Hardy back towards William Wordsworth, when suddenly 'A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast / And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again' " ("Arnold's Gift: The Poet in an Unpoetic Age," Essays and Studies, special Arnold issue, ed. Miriam Allott [1988]: 78). In Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse Arnold situates himself within the famous community of monks, not—he is at pains to point out— "as their friend, or child," but as a fellow seeker who leaves worldly paths "to possess my soul again." Here he

leading is

itself

is

our cultural predisposition

rather lofty

finds himself in the

company of those whose

faith

is

as

out of favor with the world

melancholy introspection; he declares himself ready "to die out with these / Last of the people who believe!" (lines 111-112). In the poem's central stanza, the

as his

speaker presents himself as "Wandering between two worlds, one dead,

/ The

other powerless to be born" (lines 85-86). These lines epitomize the Victorian sense of living in "an age of transition,"

when

Christianity appears to have lost

power to console and guide, and nothing convincing has appeared in

Arnold captures the

feeling of frustrated

postponement and

its

its

stead.

self-division that

wracks Carlyle in Sartor Resartus, Tennyson in In Memoriam, and even Hopkins in his late sonnets. It is

while

typically

still

Arnoldian

feeling that his

to

life is

want

to wait out this period

driven onward "To

life,

somewhere isolated, and to war" (line

to cities,

Matthew Arnold

421

concluding remarks (beginning with line 169) are couched in a

180). Yet his

strange, extended simile in

generation to children

which Arnold compares

who

live in

his Victorian,

an abbey in the

post-Romantic

forest (not mountains). Like

"Of passing troops in the sun's beam" (line charm of "bugle music on the breeze," instead answering that this call has come too late for such "shy recluses" as they. Thus the poem ends by turning Arnold and his fellow orphans into monks after all, perhaps suggesting that even if a new world were to be born soon, they would be unable to inhabit it. Ladies of Shalott, they catch gleams

but they

177),

resist

the

The Scholar Gipsy

(is

the

title

a contradiction in terms?) presents the scholar as

having been spared the disease of

good sense

He

is

monks'

a romantic version of the

life

because centuries ago he had the

our paths, our feverish contact

religiously

the ex-scholar perhaps fatally deluded,

doomed

to

wander enchanted

warp, forever unsatisfied, because of his misguided quest? sies'

magic, rather than the master of

crets to the

it?

fly!"

based renunciation of the world

But the rejection of an Oxford education brings questionable

in Stanzas. is

modern

to anticipate Arnold's advice: "fly

Is

success:

in his time-

he a victim of the

gip-

His professed intention to reveal their

se-

world when he finds them out may have been his undoing. His desire

communicate hidden knowledge is one of the many features in the poem that and may echo Coleridge's promise at the end of Kubla Khan to rebuild the pleasure dome himself if he can "revive within me" the

to

link the gipsy-scholar to the poet,

song of the Abyssinian maid. In his rich, densely descriptive Keatsian stanzas, Arnold seems to be positing a vague, solitary identification with the natural world as an alternative to

angst

and

alienation.

historical locations.

He

The

the seventeenth century

first is

when

when

the scholar joins the gipsies, the

the Hebraism of Puritan England

Hellenistic spirit of the Renaissance (see Culture and Anarchy).

of

civilization's

woes,

modern

also implies that the source of this angst has at least

it is

won

two

moment

in

out over the

The second source

suggested in the complex final simile, can be found in

ancient times, when the "merry," intrusive Greeks first came into Tyrian waters. Thus the "repeated shocks" of change that "wears out the lives of mortal men" are as old as Western culture, and what seem the Victorian poet's particular woes are those of introspective, solitary souls in every era. For more on the way in which Arnold grounds (and ungrounds) his poem historically, see Antony Harrison, "Matthew Arnold's Gipsies: Intertextuality and the New Historicism," Victorian Studies 29 (1991): 365-383; and Alan Grob, "Arnold's 'The Scholar Gipsy': The

Use and Abuse of Thyrsis

is

History," Victorian Poetry 34.2 (1996): 149-174.

unusual

as a pastoral elegy. It relies less

dition of Milton or Shelley than

Arnold

inserts the figure of

on an

Clough

earlier

into the

poem

on the

classical pastoral tra-

of Arnold's own. In Thyrsis

framework of The

Scholar Gipsy,

em-

ploying the same stanza form, and changing the search for the gipsy into the quest

elm" whose existence proves "Our friend, the Gipsywas not dead." Through Arnold's act of poetic will, Clough thus metamorphoses into an already immortal literary character who haunts the Oxford countryside as Clough did in his youth. But the later poem also seems to confirm

for a glimpse of "the signal

Scholar,

the earlier one's warning that contact with

modern

life is fatal; ironically,

what

Matthew Arnold

422

turns

Clough

made

the mistake of leaving Oxford for

into the Gipsy-Scholar

sound." The search for the

tree,

Gipsy did: Clough

his failure to act as the

is

London where

"his piping

triumphantly located at the

last

the poet's quest to believe in his dead friend Thyrsis's continuing

nature or

art.

The

tree functions as a symbol of the

afterlife,

took a troubled

moment, images life,

whether in

but also of lost youth,

and of phallic power or poetic potency (Arnold's perhaps more than Clough's). As in most elegies, the poet uses the task of resuscitating a dead friend as a means of insuring his

own

literary immortality.

The poem ends with

the poet reaffirming

and rededicating himself to the same pursuit, urged on by Thyrsis's otherworldly words. But Arnold wrote no more poetry, and Clough is remembered mostly for his spectral role in this valediction. The tree and the value of the Scholar's search,

Scholar provide the

final, active

images, suggesting that

Corydon and

Thyrsis have

been subsumed by them.

Prose

Clough complaining "how deeply unpoetical the age and Not unprofound, not ungrand, not unmoving;—but unpoetical." Within a few years Arnold all but gave up trying to deal with his "unpoetical" times in verse form. In the literary and social criticism that followed, he In 1849 Arnold wrote to

all

one's surroundings are.

sought to reconcile his high-minded poetic concern for eternal

verities

with the

more down-to-earth demands of timely, topical commentary on the shortcomings of Victorian culture. In his most famous essay, The Function of Criticism at the Present Time> he suggested that, in an era where great creative activity was impossible, criticism could stand in as "a free creative activity," one that could both improve society at large and still satisfy the intellect of the gifted observer. But to have genuine authority, Arnold contends, criticism must preserve its "disinterestedness" or objectivity "by keeping aloof from what is called 'the practiview of things.' "

cal

free play of the

If criticism

mind on

all

vate interests, not the public's.

enable ally is."

critics to

does not pursue "the law of

subjects

Only

which

it

touches,"

it

its

will

own

nature" as "a

end up serving

pri-

non-sectarian, purely intellectual analysis can

pursue their fundamental goal: "to see the object as in

For Arnold, then, criticism has

little

to

itself it re-

do with the prophetic denuncia-

human rights offered by much a toting up of faults and

tions of Ruskin, or even the closely reasoned defense of Mill. Instead,

Arnold

merits as

a continuing process, dedicated to

it is

stresses that criticism

is

not so

producing "a current of true and

fresh ideas."

Arnold's claims for the necessity of critical open-mindedness can be compared to Mill's position regarding the benefits of free speech in asserts that

convention, .

.

.

an unimpeded entertaining of all is

championing of an

play of the

Liberty.

Like Mill he

"an essential provider of elements without which a nation's

must, in the long run, die of inanition."

plicit

On

ideas, including those that challenge

mind on

all

What Arnold

adds to Mill

is

spirit

the ex-

ideal intellectual position—a "disinterested love of a free

subjects, for

its

own sake"—that

sets

the true

critic

above

the fray of political contention, so that he can dedicate himself to pursuing "the

Matthew Arnold

best that

is

known and thought in the world,

irrespective of practice [and] politics."

Claiming that "practical considerations cling to

may be

that his brand of criticism

423

it

and

stifle it,"

Arnold recognizes

"slow and obscure," but contends that such a

careful, collected transcending of the

"inadequate ideas" of the masses

way "that the critic can do the practical man any service." But Arnold's own rhetoric often seems to undermine

is

his argument:

the only

why

is it

ungrounded by examples of what "fresh and true ideas" really are? And don't you have to have an interest in disinterestedness in order to practice it? Moreover, Arnold clearly delights in attacking people by name, attempting to expose fallacious reasoning or uninformed opinions. One might respond that Arnold is proposing a critical method whose benefit lies in its so insistent yet so vague, so repetitious, so

refusal to take sides or to spare anyone, liberal or conservative, bishop or

man. it

It

could also be said of his criticism that,

like his poetry,

cannot reach, and that the perhaps noble aspiration

is

it

sets

working

up standards

more important than the

failed execution.

Arnold himself does not seem calls for is

to question

whether the

critical objectivity

"the object as in

Does he purposefully avoid

itself it really is."

questions because he expects his audience to recognize that

pends, to a greater or lesser extent,

no doubt have vehemently

on some

raising these vexed

all critical

theory de-

sort of universalist claim?

He would

rejected Baudelaire's view that criticism should be "pas-

sionate, partisan, personal." Since current critical sympathies

with Baudelaire than Arnold, out his

is

political rhetoric

laws,

to lay his

its

seem

to

lie

how Arnold

more

carries

most famous passage deals with the news item By contrasting the bombast of self-congratulatory

Arnold attempts life.

respect for

own views

to moderate, in a

double sense, the discourse

Wragg's sad example casts doubt on the country's eco-

aside,

its

landscape, the legitimacy of

women, and even

Arnold

order to "get rid of what in

and truer

just

essay's

health, the fineness of

its

examine

about "our old Anglo-Saxon breed" to the sensational crudity of

of British national

of

interesting to

it is

in custody."

tabloid journalism,

ity

The

difficult task.

ending "Wragg

nomic

he

genuinely possible, just as he does not seem to doubt his ability to see

them

sets

is

the equal-

its

citizens,

its

names. Appearing

the dignity of

one aspect of his culture against another, in and offensive, and to fall into a softer

excessive

key."

The essay therefore provides a good opportunity to ask what the ideals of social commentary ought to be, and if critical "disinterestedness" is a laudable goal or an impossible dream. Eugene Goodheart provides a strenuous defense of the

concept in "Arnold, Critic of Ideology" (New

Literary History

arguing that in "Function," as in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold

develop "the terest."

human

25 [1994]: 415-428), realistically strives to

capacity for the transcendence of narrowly conceived self-in-

Susan Walsh, however, portrays a very different Arnold in her

Arnoldian Wragg: Anarchy Literature

article

"That

as Menstrosity in Victorian Social Criticism" (Victorian

and Culture 20 [1992]: 217-241). Viewing the story of Wragg in the conconnect menstruation, factory work, soiled rags,

text of Victorian tendencies to

and female

biological determinism,

the transformation of

Wragg

Walsh

writes that "it

is

Arnold who completes

into a thing, a tattered cast-off of a

commodity

cul-

Matthew Arnold

424

ture.

.

.

Wragg comes to stand, not for herself, but for an anarchical soeconomy whose factories spawn abominations. While it may apif Arnold means to liberate the working class from Roebuck and Adderley's .

Elizabeth

cial political

pear as

.

.

.

sentimental portrait of the happy non-exploited laborer, he actually works to reestablish Victorian classism with his ugly, jarring portrait of Wragg."

many reasons, among them its conmake up a culture and shape its public discourse; hostility and promote mutual tolerance and political co-

Culture and Anarchy remains relevant for

cern to identify the factors that its

effort to defuse class

operation; self"

is

and

questioning of whether "our worship of freedom in and for

its

not detrimental to the public good. Culture and Anarchy evolved from a

it-

se-

of lectures and articles Arnold wrote in 1867-68, during debates over the

ries

Second Reform

Bill.

Passed in August, 1867, the

doubled the electorate to

bill

in-

among them many members of the working with apprehensions about the direction that modern mass democracy

clude about one-third of adult males, class. Filled

would carry

One

his nation,

Arnold attacked the

central British notion of

"Doing As

Likes"— an anarchical tendency he found throughout society, but especially in

the middle and working classes. His remedy, the cultivation of a trans-class "best self"

based on education and located in the authority of the State, remains as con-

troversial today as

within

its

(1950) and

was during Victorian times. To

initial

Samuel Lipman

On

set

Arnold's social analysis

context, see the complete editions edited by

cludes important

Marcus.

it

new

(1994).

essays

Lipman

J.

Dover Wilson

reprints the original 1869 text,

and

in-

by Gerald Graff, Maurice Cowling, and Steven

Arnold's use of irony,

satire,

and humorous language,

see

Robert

"The Comedy of Culture and Anarchy" in Victorian Perspectives: Six Essays, ed. John Clubbe and Jerome Meckier (1989), 120-144. There is much to grapple with—and argue about— in this text, including the two main structural premises: 1) Arnold's vision of British intellectual and social his-

Altick's

tory as a struggle between an active Puritan "Hebraism"

and

a reflective secular

"Hellenism"; and 2) Arnold's division of society into three warring, self-serving

fac-

and an uneducated workingthat the current predominance of the individu-

tions: aristocratic Barbarians, middle-class Philistines, class

Populace.

alistic

When

Hebraic strand

he suggests is

in fact causing society to unravel, he raises the question of

what can bind

a nation together, particularly in

media? Shared

political or

the "pursuit of perfection,"

denned, and

how

economic values?

If

an increasingly secular

something more

The

such as

how is this "sweetness and light" to be Can genuine culture ever be attained in the ab-

desired, then

is

best promoted?

sence—or in the presence— of individual

liberty? In "Culture

(The Southern Review 29.3 [1993]: 433-452, rpt. in the

Marcus points

age.

uplifting,

to Arnold's foresight regarding the social

and Anarchy Today,"

Lipman edition), Steven ferment and challenges to

tradition that strong group affiliation generate: "Arnold sensed or intuited in the

matrix of nineteenth-century Dissenting British Protestantism a very early precursor of

what nowadays goes by the temporary name of multiculturalism" (434). where Arnold comes under the heaviest attack from both Victorians

Ironically,

and Moderns

is

where he

is

most

idea of class to the idea of the

idealistic, calling

on people

whole community, the

State,

and

"to rise above the to find

our centre

Matthew Arnold

of light and authority there." Even

one were

if

and temporarily

universal education,

past century, the notion that a "disinterested"

smacks too much of

prise successfully

But

states ever since.

Culture and Anarchy

and

as is

second his hopes for enlightened

to

forget the

uneven

of that effort in the

results

government could for

difficult to reject in its entirety.

remain

debate,

Arnold feared would overthrow them: "What Arnold

ture

once again represents

sents a

that class

essential values of the democratic

in itself alienated

a project of transcendence.

permanent contribution

to

not possible for modern humanity. state,

life is

critics),

Education, open-minded

culture

is

totalitarian

many of Arnold's

critical

with historical perspicacity,

direct the enter-

and various

Plato's Republic

Marcus concludes (speaking

social cooperation

425

.

.

.

is

in effect saying,

life,

and hence

cul-

Arnold's culture repre-

an evolving ideal of what may be thinkable .

.

And

.

if

unlike Arnold's biddings about the

has not been either superseded or altogether defeated by historical

it

experience" (449). In The Study of Poetry Arnold seeks, in a sense, to apply his social and critical principles to the activity of reading.

ested" evaluation of

what

ligion or philosophy, has the

nothing

else can." In his

He

proposes what might be called a "disinter-

constitutes "the best poetry," poetry that,

opening paragraphs Arnold thus

lays

show

on poetry

readers

as a "criticism of life" that

how

on

lenge to

Arnold

tries to

if

relativistic

considerations?

not because of its impact on us? Consider

in the Preface to The Renaissance,

response foremost:

"What

is

this

"falla-

historical significance or personal appeal.

But can we read poetry apart from these care about poetry,

immense respon-

can guide humanity, Arnold

they can find the "really" best poetry; they must rule out

cious" estimates of poetic value based

re-

us, as

the groundwork for

the Modernist worship of the religion of Art. Having placed an sibility

more than

"power of forming, sustaining, and delighting

Pater's

Why

do we

famous

chal-

where Pater places the personal

song or picture ... to me?"

Rejecting such subjectivity, Arnold elaborates his famous doctrine of objective

"touchstones"— readers should always have in mind examples of "the truly

excel-

them as a touchstone to many languages, of what he from examples, other poetry." Arnold provides many the major English poets considers the best poetry, and then proceeds to evaluate on the basis of how their work measures up to the "higher truth and higher seriousness" of the very greatest poetry. T. S. Eliot, so harsh on Arnold elsewhere, says lent" lines of "the great masters" so that they can "apply

"you cannot read his essay on The Study of felicity

Poetry

without being convinced by the

of his quotations: to be able to quote as Arnold could

is

the best evidence

John S. Eells noted in 1880 that Arnold favors quotations dealing with pathos, pain, and loss; Eells finds that what Arnold most admires is "contemplation, profoundly earnest, of the grimness and darkness of the of taste."

human

The

Victorian

critic

adventure."

The contemporary student of poetry may well quarrel with this taste, and hence the whole idea of touchstones. Though furnishing concrete examples, Arnold

is still

maddeningly vague, since he never

says

why these are great

lines,

con-

tenting himself with reiterating that they are of "the very highest quality." Refusing to

acknowledge "the

historical estimate,"

Arnold does not consider how time-

Matthew Arnold

426

bound

his

own

Modern

choices are.

sic is its instability:

its

feel that what makes a text classame poem may acquire "touch-

Kermode has remarked

stone" status over the years. Frank that changes

may

readers

very different lines within the

that a classic

Yet one of the things that keeps Arnold's essay interesting it

a

work

is

the way in which

stimulates thought not only about what poetic greatness involves, but also about

how is

is

meaning every generation.

contextually determined any definition— or later response to that definition-

likely to be.

Sensing

this,

Arnold

touchstones have been chosen:

"if

leaves

we

greatness] in the abstract, our answer

ening the question, not clearing

Arnoldian standards of

must

He

it."

taste, to try

it

why his mark and accent [of

to his readers to say (or intuit)

are asked to define this be:

No,

for

we should

thereby be dark-

challenges his readers to grapple with

and appreciate poetry

as

he does, and in the

process to provide for themselves the fresh readings that will, provokingly, keep his

dated essay up to date.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti Symons wrote: As different English poetry would be without Rossetti." While it's

In The Symbolist Movement in Literature (2nd. ed., 1919), Arthur

"What would French a thing

from what

poetry be to-day

it is

as

if

Baudelaire had never existed?

hard to credit such an extravagant claim today,

Symons,

fin-de-siecle poets like

Wilde, and Yeats took Rossetti as a model because he had dedicated himself steadfastly to

the pursuit of Beauty

and Art

for Art's Sake.

Whether one regarded

lurid or laudable, his devotion to idealized images of beautiful

"Aestheticism" to be called "Rossetti-ism" in

from

his Florentine

art, literature,

namesake, but paid

It

early stages.

He

women

caused

took inspiration

heed to the conventions of Victorian

or society.

The Blessed Damozel, his a teenager.

little

its

as

it

earliest

important work, was written while he was

still

can be read not only as the poet's self-dedication to an unworldly, un-

attainable muse, but also as a rejection of the religiously

and

informed

socially

art

of the day. Readers have always been amazed at the sensuous audacity of Rossetti's

conception of heaven, particularly the tangibility of the Damozel's trappings and desires,

and her daring plan

to ask Christ

"Only

to live as

Love,— only to be, / As then awhile, for ever

Meanwhile, her

egotistical earthly lover

be happy without him, even in heaven:

now /

once on earth / With Together,

"I

heard her

and

he."

as well. Rossetti flattens

the religious or symbolic depth of his vision even as he complicates

lilies

and

tears."

But the poem challenges orthodoxy in subtler ways psychologically.

I

cannot conceive that the Damozel could

it

out

formally and

Although they invoke the mystic numbers three and seven, the

stars that

adorn the Damozel seem

less

relevant to her situation than the

weight of her golden hair or the heat of her bosom. (The Woodspurge

is

another

ex-

ample of Rossetti shifting potential religious significance— the "cup of three"— into the realm of visual fact

and concrete observation.) Neither

the Damozel to the reader:

is

the earthly lover,

who

is it

clear

speaks in his

who own

presents

voice in

Dante Gabriel

Rossetti

parentheses, confidently fantasizing about her current position? or

is

427

there an

om-

who describes her and sets her words in ironic juxtaposition with earthbound lover who is just talking to himself?

niscient narrator a bereft,

The

narrative— or

intertwined

is

progress toward a reunion, but death

two independent visions?—seems to

it

and

life,

represented by the gold bar and

its

typographical equivalents, the parentheses, conspire to keep the lovers apart.

Maybe

Rossetti

projecting his

is

own

and poet onto the imWhat would it passive, sequestered woman,

frustrations as lover

prisoned Damozel, as Tennyson does with the Lady of Shalott.

have meant for the Victorian

hemmed

artist to see

himself as a

in by otherworldly expectations about love?

ining future heavenly scenes,

is

the Damozel an

icature of the powerless, lovelorn Victorian

tion

is

With her penchant

artist figure,

maiden? The

and

"I"

for imag-

an

inert car-

of separa-

lovers' sense

reinforced by the well-known painting also titled The Blessed Damozel that

Rossetti did artist, at

much

later.

Begun

in 1871,

it

was not "finished" until 1879 when the

the request of a patron, added a predella depicting the earthly lover gaz-

ing upward.

Those

parentheses of the

interested in poetry/painting comparisons can relate the

poem

to the actual "gold bar" of the painting's frame, noting

the painter's use of embracing couples in the background to visually "narrate" the

Damozel's loneliness.

The to the

brief selections

sonnet

from The House of

as a timely yet timeless

sense of Rossetti's approach

Life give a

work of

art ("a

moment's monument"),

fraught with life-giving emotion. Using the sonnet sequence to enshrine bodily

passion in sacramentally tinged language, Rossetti continues to explore the tensions that animate The Blessed Damozel. in

melding body and

spirit, Rossetti

(The notorious Nuptial tion.) In

The

Sleep,

with

Some may

its

Adamic

Fleshly School of Poetry (1871)

"this protracted

hankering

the "inference that the

after a

body

is

feel that

by investing so

much

has written himself into a sonorous sameness. revelation at the end,

is

an excep-

Robert Buchanan savaged what he called

person of the other

greater than the soul,

sex,"

and complained about

and sound superior

to sense;

must be an intellectual hermaphrodite." Without accepting all Buchanan's objections, one can still see how Rossetti's sense of spiritual sexuality (or vice versa) produced artistic chaland that the

poet, properly to develop his poetic faculty,

lenges for the author as well as his audience.

The Burden of Nineveh shows Rossetti

opening words of the

biblical

at his wittiest.

book of Nahum,

twined meanings of the word "burden."

Taking his

Rossetti plays

First, it refers to

title

from the

on the many

inter-

the sheer bulk of Assyrian

whose awkward entrance into the British Museum prompts the poem. This physical grappling with an outlandish ancient object introduces the idea of the museum as an imperial storehouse, to be stocked by armies and aristocrats, statuary

then culturally raided by the public (Keats 's material for the cal

Ode on a Grecian

Urn).

visits to

weight of empire, both Assyrian and British.

or refrain of a

poem— its

central

the British

But "burden"

theme—and

Then

this

Museum

provided

also refers to the metaphori-

there

meaning

is

the formal "burden"

leads the poet to

end

each stanza with the word "Nineveh." Finally, the dominant biblical meaning "oracle," a

heavy

lot or fate; the

is

King James Bible thus speaks of "the burden of

428

Dante Gabriel

Rossetti

Babylon" in addition to "the burden of Nineveh," since both

cities are

destroyed

by the Lord because of their worldliness.

The

revolving door through

that have brought

low

this fate, for the

Britain.

which the poet passes suggests the

Nineveh low and sent winged bull

its

also

is

cycles of history

remains to London. Britain may

John

fol-

popular caricature of

Bull, the

But Rossetti hints that Nineveh enjoys a certain post-mortem triumph in its mighty icons, and raises the amusing possibility that future ar-

the survival of

chaeologists might conclude that the bull was an idol worshipped by Victorian civilization.

The vision of London

as a ruin to

be viewed nostalgically by a visitor from

the South Pacific would have reminded Victorian readers of Macaulay's cautionary

image of a

New

Zealander coming to sketch the ruins of

of civilization had

moved

London

after the center

further west. Rossetti 's concluding question, suggesting

Britain's misplaced values, anticipates Kipling's doleful

warning in

Recessional

(1897) about the transitory rewards of empire. But the chipper tone of Rossetti's

poem,

brisk rhythms

its

the prospect.

The

and rhymes, implies that the poet

takes

some

incongruity and semantic unruliness of the bull,

its

delight in

imagined

seem to interest him more than dire prophecies about the fall of Victorian London. Rossetti's poems provide a good starting place for discussing the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The original "Brotherhood" included Rossetti and the painters William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and James Collinson; the sculptor Thomas Woolner; and the critics F. G. Stephens and William Michael Rossetti, Dante's brother. Christina Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown were closely allied carousings in the symbolic china-shop of history,

with the group. Later,

expanded

and

as the initial

group grew apart, the term "Pre-Raphaelite"

to cover the highly-colored, medievally inspired

associates.

works done by friends

These included the poets Swinburne, George Meredith, and

Edward Burne-Jones and Arthur Hughes, and painter-poets such as William Morris and William Bell Scott. There is a great deal of Pre-Raphaelite material to be found on the World Wide Web. Jerome McGann's Rossetti Archive at the University of Virginia is useful, along with the Pre-Raphaelite sites at the University of Indiana and the more general information on the Victorian Web at Brown University. There are many good print collections of PRB documents and images; in addition to those listed in the Coventry Patmore, the

Bibliography, the Stryker (1997),

is

new

artists

Anthology of Pre-Raphaelite Writings, ed. Carolyn Hares-

especially rich.

Crammed

with intriguing anecdotes, William

Gaunt's The Pre-Raphaelite Dream (1966) remains the most

lively

introduction to

book is still Timothy Hilton's The Pre-Raphaelites (1970), though the text is somewhat dated. We were unable to include Rossetti's long dramatic monologue Jenny, spoken the group. For illustrations and background, the best inexpensive

by a poet to a prostitute find

it

ulates

who

has fallen asleep in his lap. Students or teachers might

interesting to seek out the

on

recalling

life

The

and

poem

love to a silent/dead

Blessed Damozel,

because the situation— a male speaker spec-

woman—seems

Swinburne's The

Browning's Porphyrias Lover and Andrea

del Sarto.

Leper,

characteristically Victorian,

Arnold's Dover Beach, and

Christina Rossetti

429

grace, a quirky

bemused

Christina Rossetti Stylistically,

Edna

St.

poems have

Christina Rossetti's

intelligence that

may remind

and

a purity

(whom

readers of Emily Dickinson

Vincent Millay (who admired

her).

Her deceptive

she admired) or

simplicity of language

and phrasing make her in many ways the most modern of Victorian poets, and an opening line like "Something this foggy day, a something which" seems right out of

e. e.

her

cummings. But Rossetti was

lyrics

the voice of a slighted or persists

rarely light-hearted in her choice of subjects;

are almost always addressed to

forgotten lover,

an estranged they often

lover-listener.

Speaking in

of a lonely yearning that

tell

even in the grave.

According to her older brother William, Christina position,

spoken because she was

to school

/ Without her

much—that a

'gladiator'

still

gladiator."

would be

upon an emergency." He adds

a

Rossetti's first poetic

com-

too young to write, was: "Cecilia never went

William comments that "She understood

man capable of showing some fight for

this

'Cecilia'

that the euphonious, carefully metered lines fore-

work, "hinting at a certain oddity or whimsicality of combination

cast her future

which (mingled indeed with

qualities of a very different kind)

can be not unfre-

quently traced in verse of her mature years" (The Poetical Works of Christina

Rossetti

[19041, xlix). It

lyric

could be said that, in spite of her whimsy, the mature Rossetti never wrote a

poem without

Whether we

missing that gladiator.

tron saint of music) or "Christina"

(a

call

her "Cecilia" (the pa-

female Christ), the speaker appears vulnera-

must become her own gladiator, providing her own protection against the wounds of love. Her weapons are the subtle ones of wit, irony, self-denial and above all an unsentimental, clear-eyed detachment. Renunciation is in many ways Rossetti's central theme, the tone becoming playful and arch in the few poems where the speaker suggests that others do the renouncing (such as No, Thank You, John and Promises Like Pie-Crust) and painfully resolute when it is she who appears forgotten (cf. When I am dead, my dearest, Remember,

ble

and sinned

After Death, sions,

A

against; she

Pause,

and

Echo). Unrelieved by the bursts of passion, classical allu-

and domestic, nurturing metaphors that

lyrics, Rossetti's

poems have

characterize Barrett Browning's love

a sort of bare lucidity, a "bleak mid-winter" quality;

they seem to be written mostly after, rather than during, the relationships described.

Some of the poems

Death and In

Progress);

meditate on the idea of a

the striking sonnet

Rossetti's paintings (as Christina

subject) suggests that even

fulfillment belongs to

him

when

it

life

it

not

was

a

woman

rather than her.

has a man's

(Dead Before

model

which Christina

full attention,

Though her brother

spirit

for

Dante

Rossetti validated her

William's famous

life

through her

art,

(Ixvii).

Woolf

In an equally influential reckoning, however, Virginia the tugof-war between the keenness of the poet's desires

them

the sense of

of self-postponement"—does not take

does capture an essential part of her poetic approach

stern religious outlook that held

fully lived

like to

did before Elizabeth Siddal became his favorite

assessment— "she was replete with the into account the ways in

on what

astutely

noted

and perceptions and the

in check: "your eye

.

.

.

observed with a sen-

430

Christina Rossetti

must have surprised Christina the Angloowed perhaps the fixity and sadness of your muse. The tremendous faith circles and clamps together these little songs" (" 'I

sual, pre-Raphaelite

intensity that

Catholic. But to her you pressure of a

Am

Christina Rossetti,'" The Second

Common

Reader [1932], 219).

ues, "You were not a pure saint by any means. You pulled

You were

at

war with

drastic, sure

of your

all

humbug and

gift,

pretense.

Modest

as

legs;

Woolf

contin-

you tweaked noses.

you were,

still

you were

convinced of your vision ... in a word, you were an

artist" (220).

In Christina

Rossetti:

ples with the tension

The

Poetry of

Endurance (1986) Dolores Rosenblum grap-

between worldly and religious attitudes in

concluding that "the religious poems

'correct'

Rossetti's poetry,

without cancelling the experiences

of the fallen world rendered in the so-called secular poems, and that Rossetti's rewriting or doubling of her

Romantic

own poems,

literary tradition, contributes to a

as well as the texts of biblical

and

female myth, and ultimately, a female

Those looking for a briefer but still detailed introduction to work might consult Virginia Woolf s famous essay, as well as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's chapter on Rossetti in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and their headnote in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. See also Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology, ed. Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds (1995), a book which provides an excellent overview of its subject, and fine introductions to individual women poets, Rossetti and Browning chief among them. In recent years, probably no Victorian poem has generated more interest than Goblin Market. It is unsurpassed for sheer energy and narrative drive, for accessibility of language and haunting quirkiness of image and action. The first edition aesthetic" (84). Rossetti's

featured line illustrations by Dante Rossetti, intense close-ups of furry-faced gob-

and embracing

lins

questions:

who

is

ligious allegory, a

sisters that

this

did

poem meant

little

to resolve the Victorians'

meditation on rape,

still

and what is it about? Is it a fairy money, or sexual repression?

for?

pertinent tale, a re-

Leighton and Reynolds point out the poem's "transgiessive playfulness" and

how,

"like the

wayward, perverse metres in which

it is

written,

it

constantly slips

own moral framework." They also note some interpretive possibilities: "The goblins' fruit may represent original sin, Eucharistic redemption, sexual desire, its

.

.

.

prostitution, the nurturing south, ity,

economic power, imperial

capitalism, masculin-

or even, as Gilbert and Gubar suggest, language and poetry. All of these are

'marketed' in the poem's extraordinary changes and exchanges of meaning.

The

and the poem about 'shopping'—that new popular pastime for women in the early 1860s" (355). Rosenblum includes a good chapter on Goblin Market, in which she suggests that the "goblin men" might be Christina's brothers, Dante and William Rossetti. She views the poem as built on fruit

may even just be

fruit, literally,

and recovering. Two other thought-provoking arti"Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire: Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market" ELH 58.4 (1991): 903-33 and Dorothy Mermin's "Heroic Sisterhood in Goblin Market" Victorian Poetry 21.1 (1983): a structure of acting, suffering,

cles are: Elizabeth K. Helsinger's

107-18. Teachers can also compare the a poetic narrative of

poem

women's education.

to Barrett-Browning's Aurora Leigh as

William Morris

One

of the most fascinating aspects of the

the conditions of

its

own

poem

to tidy

time, the

it

seeks to control

own

daughters.

The coda appears

gloss over the desperate spiritual or psychosexual struggle of the nar-

by proclaiming

rative

the way

reception via the final stanza, in which Laura relates the

story—and the moral she draws from it— to her

up and

is

431

poem seems

tritely

that "there

is

no

friend like a

sister."

Yet at the same

destined as a cautionary tale for precisely this pre-adolescent

female audience. Pulling no punches,

it

warns vulnerable young misses about the

men with tempting fruits, and the need for sisterly What may be the most unsettling thing about Goblin

dangers of desire and strange solidarity to resist

Market

is its

them.

status as a classic Victorian children's story:

disturbing scenes really fairy-tale itly

do seem

it is

a tale

whose darkly

intended to trouble children's minds, even as the

elements allow "respectable" adults to read

raising the subjects of temptation, transgression,

it

aloud without ever

and

explic-

fall.

Rossetti also wrote strangely affecting short stories. Students looking for paper

may want

topics

to consider Goblin Market or the love lyrics in light of her curious

Commonplace and Other

fables: see especially Nick in

and

Forbidden Journeys: Fairy Tales

Fantasies by Victorian

Short Stories (1870), (rpt.

Women

Auerbach and U.C. Knoepflmacher, 1992). Though quite

A Christmas

comparison with Dickens's acter

is

(1872)

Carol for the

bludgeoned into goodness; see also

and the

way

in

Writers, eds.

Nina

short, Nick bears close

which

its

central char-

Rossetti's collection of nursery

rhymes

children's tale Speaking Likenesses (1874).

William Morris The Defence of Guenevere (1858) and energy

Morris's celebration of Guenevere 's sexuality portrayal in

Idylls

of the

Camelot's ruin. Unlike Tennyson, Morris

One might

proval.

contrasts with Tennyson's

King of a shamed and guilt-ridden queen responsible for

not concerned with moral disap-

is

discuss other Victorian portrayals of "fallen

women," such

as

the bourgeois adulteress in Augustus Egg's trilogy of paintings, Past and Present (1858).

Have students look (1857). Carole Silver

at Morris's painting

comments on how

it

and transcendence of conventional morality. ifest

of Jane Burden as Queen Guenevere

"emphasizes the queen's heroic force .

.

.

The power of

the queen

is

man-

... in the strong vertical lines of her body which almost break through the

Her dignity and calm make us perceive her not as a bed of love" ("Victorian Spellbinders," The Passing of Arthur, eds. Christopher Baswell and William Sharpe, 1988, 253). In The Return to Cameiot (1981) Mark Girouard has a chapter called "The patterns that enclose her. 'fallen'

but as

risen, albeit

.

Return of Arthur," which king. a

.

.

from

details the Victorian reinvention of the legendary

Jonathan Freedman writes that "for Morris, Arthurianism conjured forth

romance-world whose authenticity,

intensity,

and

vitality

stood in vivid con-

the industrial ugliness of Victorian England, and at the same time evoked a privileged heterocosm whose squalor and violence ironically mirrored

trast to

432

William Morris

that of his contemporary world" ("Ideological Battleground," The Passing of Arthur, 236).

Interpretations of The Defence ofGuenevere turn

on

the subtleties of the queen's

argument: she seems to deny having committed adultery, yet her evocation of passionate love seems in

itself

a confession. In The Romance of William Morris (1982)

Carole Silver suggests that "the queen does not she

know whether she

is

morally guilty;

uncertain of the Tightness of her position, certain only of the strength of the

is

love that has placed her in

Guenevere intends

it" (20).

Silver argues that "the

a speech of self-vindication,

suade the reader of her adultery"

poem's

title is ironic.

but her words and actions per-

(24).

and Catherine Barnes Stevenson disagree. They argue in "Morris' Medieval Queen: A Paradox Resolved" that the apparent contradiction can be resolved by seeing Guenevere in the medieval context of courtly love: Virginia S. Hale

Morris portrays a

woman who,

ticated defense, in

same time

"accused of treason, mounts a rhetorically sophis-

which she contemptuously dismisses that charge, while

at the

offering a celebration of her love in the medieval tradition of the 'de-

fense d'amor"' (Victorian Poetry 30.2 [1992]: 171-78).

Freedman maintains, however, that Guenevere's assertion that Gauwaine lies Gauwaine does not, cannot pierce the mystery of the love she and

"is clearly true:

Lancelot share." But he adds that while this flimsy defense; Guenevere's performance

is

is

"a brilliant equivocation,"

it is

by the use of language, of the thrusts of her

a knightly defense, a parrying,

a

in fact "a defense in a different sense: ac-

cusers—a holding action, while she awaits the intervention of Lancelot" (243). Instructors will also

monologue, and to

to call attention to Morris's use of the dramatic

his language. Paul

with each syllable given

slowly,

Read

want

like this,

Thompson writes: "The poems must be

its full

read

value, avoiding any strong rhythmic beat.

odd

the apparently naive defects in the poems, the

deviations from

the normal iambic beat, the unexpected rhymes and the curious overlapping of the

become masterly devices for creating tension, for suggesting a deeper meanMorris had in fact created a new verse form, like stammering direct speech, which parallels the effects of Gerard Manley Hopkins" (The Work of William Morris [1991], 182-83). For more on the art of Morris's language see W. David Shaw's "Arthurian Ghosts: Phantom Art of The Defence ofGuenevere' and Karen Herbert's lines,

ing.

.

.

.

"Dissident Language in The Defence of Guenevere" both in Victorian Poetry 34.3 (1996).

The Haystack The

inspiration for this bleak

poem

in the Floods (1858) lay

not in Malory's Morte Darthur but in the

Chroniques of Jean Froissart, a history of the

Hundred

Years'

War between

France

and England. Cecil Lang calls Morris's poetry a hybrid of Rossetti and Browning: "Browning

can be seen in the dramatic technique (abrupt openings, omitted transitions, harsh meter,

etc.),

Rossetti in the vivid, concrete detail." Morris's

tion "was in the directness, bluntness,

own

contribu-

and violence— the brutality—with which he

William Morris

433

rendered his pictures of the Middle Ages. English poetry had seen nothing

like it"

(The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle [1975], 507-8).

woman's sexuality—and her right to control it herself—forms the crux of an emotional drama that mingles images of violence and passion. In each poem, a woman faces a male accuser who threatens to punish her

As

illicit

in The Defence of Guenevere, a

love affair with death. Yet in each case, the

the point; for example,

it

isn't entirely clear

Jehane (presumably they regard her

kill

why

woman's

as a traitor for

wish to scapegoat her for the recent French

"guilt"

is

really beside

the "Paris folks" are clamoring to

defeat).

having an English

"Jehane, unlike Guenevere, does not reveal the inner workings of her

"her passive strength ...

is

lover,

and

Carole Silver points out that

mind" and

sharply opposed to Guenevere 's histrionic power" (The

Romance of William Morris [1982], 34). The impact of this poem lies in the horrific impasse in which Jehane finds her-

may feel she makes the wrong "choice"—but does she really have one? Would the sadistic Godmar have spared Robert if she had yielded to him? The very Students

self.

betray the outcome, suggesting that the point is not what choice she makes— or even, as Silver proposes, "her ability to stick to it despite the pressure put upon her" (34)—but rather the stark lack of choices she faces. The Haystack in the Floods may be the only significant Victorian poem that offers no redemptive first lines

possiblities whatsoever.

and Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy: Morris' The Haystack in the Floods" writes: "This poem, with its dominant tone of morose in-

In "Cataclysm

Antony Harrison

evitability symbolically reinforced at every turn, austerely depicts for

apocalyptic hour."

life's

He

characters

the sublimated sexuality, the violence and paranoia that are normally relegated

ror,

to nightmares, here alone constitute reality." for

its

notes the poem's surreal quality: "The pervasive hor-

Jehane does not go

mad

at the

end,

"doing so would be an escape that Morris does not allow from his wrenchingly

tragic universe." In the this "attempts to

end, Harrison concludes, Pre-Raphaelite poetry such as

redeem the

tragic

by emphasizing the sensory and sensual" (South

Atlantic Review 47.4 [1982]: 43-51).

The Beauty of Life (1880) Beginning in the

late 1870s,

Morris began lecturing on the decorative

ing to the people his message about the necessity of art ful life.

In

its

concern for the working

classes,

The Beauty of

Morris's decision to join the Socialists several years that only sible.

ing,

and beauty

later, for

arts, bring-

for a

Life

meaning-

foreshadows

he came to believe

under socialism would the renewal of society he envisioned become pos-

Many

of the

essay's

themes—preserving green

spaces, providing decent hous-

reducing air pollution, saving historic buildings—strikingly anticipate twenti-

eth-century preoccupations.

Ruskin's "The Nature of Gothic" (The Stones of Venice, 1853) was a kind of manifesto for

Morris

& Company and the Arts and Crafts movement (Morris called

it

"one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century"). To Ruskin's theories Morris added his

own

years of practical experience as a crafts-

434

William Morris

man and

designer.

Compare

Ruskin's credo in Modern Manufacture and Design

who

(1859)— "Beautiful art can only be produced by people

have beautiful things

look at them"—with Morris's dictum in The Beauty of "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe

about them, and Life:

leisure to

to be beautiful."

Like Ruskin, Morris insists that this

is

not an

lege of bringing the

power and charm of

Ruskin,

elitist project: just as

daining "the selfish power of the noblesse," claims "the

loftier

and

dis-

lovelier privi-

art within the reach of the

humble and

the poor," so Morris argues that "the civilization which does not carry the whole

people with

it is

doomed

to

fall."

Morris wants a Democracy of Art, "Art made by

the people and for the people."

Have students read Nesbit's

own

velopment

Thomson

socialism

as "eating

Nesbit's Fortunatus Rex

and environmentalism

up the green country

&

like

describes Morris's pioneering effects

Co. along with Morris's essay;

led her to satirize

unhindered de-

greedy yellow caterpillars." Paul

on

British

town planning,

particu-

"the restriction of advertising hoardings to towns, the protection of ancient

larly

buildings, the clean air acts

new towns"

and attempts

to control

litter,

and the garden

cities

and

(The Work of William Morris 11991], 73).

Algernon Charles Swinburne Even

cinated

and

necrophiliac

horrified to discover that this tale of unrequited passion

who

with leprosy to

want

monologue, populated by charand murderers, The Leper stands out. Students will be fas-

in the bizarre world of the Victorian dramatic

latans, lechers, lunatics,

begins to satisfy his desires only

resist.

to impersonate

human

The poem

good occasion

offers a

psychology or—since Swinburne's narrator

A

went wrong—/

his beloved

to ask

is

is

told by a

too wasted

why any poet would

such a character: what could he hope to say either about

nature of writing? Toward the end of the love

when

poem

a medieval scribe—about the

is

the scribe muses: "It

may be

all

my

scribe's work writ awry and blurred, / Scrawled after the

blind evensong—/ Spoilt music with ing love to a corpse? Students

no

perfect word."

may be quick

Is

writing a

to see parallels

poem

like

mak-

with the half-crazed

confessional monologues of Browning, especially Porphyrias Lover (which also in-

vokes God's judgment at the end) and

M>

To suggest the extent of woman, remind them of

Last Duchess.

Victorian poetic fetishizing of the dead or inert

Shalott, Dante Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel, and Christina Rossetti's When I Am Dead My Dearest and After Death. But Swinburne goes further than any of these in literalizing the idea of physi-

Tennyson's Mariana and The Lady of

cal love after death.

body has eyelids),

rator

its

own

perverse purity of devotion (he

Swinburne

had

Moreover, while the speaker's hunger for the is

lady's diseased

"maddened" by her worn-off

triangulates this desire by suggesting in stanza 7 that the nar-

earlier also

been enamored of

his rival—the golden-haired knight

who

"shames" the lady sexually and possibly gave her leprosy in the bargain. The knight's hair

and mouth

are

one of the "three thoughts" the speaker takes

"plea-

Algernon Charles Swinburne

sure" in; of the other two "thoughts" ing as a go-between,

The

and the third

the lowly scribe can vice

God

is

the lady's thanking the scribe for act-

an outward sign of her

lady's leprosy functions as

one, including the knight

one

his glad response to her

is

who once

subsequent disease.

secret liaison, so that every-

covered her with

kisses,

now shuns

now

shelter her, performing

how

outrageous this plot was, Swinburne not only

what he

her.

But

cryptically calls "the ser-

forbids."

Perhaps sensing

sixteenth-century French source for his tale (see action by using archaic or

first

awkward formulations

the action vague—by repeating key words

and modern meanings:

sweetness.

The poem's

final

meet," "this was well seen").

and concepts that resonate with

question ("Will not

golden

God do

religious,

hair, kisses, blindness,

right?") attempts to cast

and

the whole situation in a theological light, but right to

Or

a

and aural density—while keeping

service, forbiddeness,

tion a sign of the scribe's craziness?

made up

but also distanced the

note),

("it is

In addition, he generates a great deal of symbolic

feudal,

435

for

whom?

Is

the ques-

of the poet-creator's desire either to mollify

or further scandalize a devout Victorian readership?

The Leper reveals Swinburne's twisted genius for shocking monologues, the

If

oft-recited passage

from The Triumph

of Time,

I

Will

Mother, gives the full flavor of his sonorous style.

Go Back

It is

a

to the

Great Sweet

wonderful piece to read

The dactylic rhythms (long short short) seem to emulate the surge of the The rhyme scheme is a variation of ottava rima, such as Byron used in Don Juan, but with the normally concluding couplet inserted between the second and aloud.

sea.

third

group of ab lines—perhaps to suggest the unconventional or frustrating na-

ture of the speaker's love affair. as the

There

is

more than

a hint of incest in this passage,

speaker seeks to forget his lover by merging with the sea. As a way of getting

into Swinburne's sensibility as well as his class to distinguish

to consider Leper) as

how

method of constructing

a line, ask the

between "the pain of pleasure" and "the pleasure of pain," and

that concept-construction operates in this passage (and in The

an underlying

principle.

John D. Rosenberg notes that Swinburne made

"compulsive use of alliterating antitheses" because he was "obsessed by the mo-

ment when one thing shades Swinburne 152).

perceived in

off into

its

opposite, or

when

contraries fuse.

.

.

.

paradoxes" ("Swinburne," Victorian Studies 11 [1967]: 131-

Two examples from

the last stanza are

"The hopes that hurt and the dreams

and "Thy depths conceal and thy gulfs discover." and at first confusing poem. In the Greek legend Philomela, raped and mutilated by her sister's husband Tereus, turns into a swallow; her sister Procne, who kills their son Itylus in revenge, turns into a nightingale. Latin versions reverse the sisters' fates. The Greek version is perhaps that hover," Itylus is

a beautiful, disturbing,

sounder ornithologically, since the nightingale its

dead

child, while the tongueless

which most English poets

is

thought to sing sweetly to

mourn

swallow merely chatters. But the Latin version,

follow, suggests

how

the deepest

art,

the fullest song,

is

born out of the sexual violence and voicelessness endured by women.

Not till the end does Swinburne specify who is singing, and yet the impact of the poem depends on whether it is Procne (the mother of Itylus) or her sister who mourns. The death of Itylus and the feast where he was eaten by his father are not

Algernon Charles Swinburne

436

mentioned

until the third-to-last stanza.

and the

pestry revealing Tereus's crime,

body" of the boy she has

The penultimate

The only

killed.

stanza alludes to the

result of Procne's seeing

clue as to

which

it:

sister

nightingale haunted by this death and which the forgetful swallow

of the

"O sister,

last stanza:

revelation,

Swinburne seeks

murder, but the raped son.

typical of

It is

sister,

stroys families,

is

the suffering

comes

at the start

By obliquely leading up

to this

to convey not only the lingering horror of the boy's

sister's grief

Swinburne

and

thy first-begotten!"

ta-

"the small slain

that the

to focus

mother who did

on the

it

has

now forgotten her

and

affection that de-

violence of act

also typical that, by giving voice

and body

Philomela, he manages to suggest a surprisingly intense

to Itylus as well as

bond between them.

Because of his licentious topics and flagrant disregard for Christian morality,

Swinburne was often logue

Hymn

death of his

own

mono-

called "pagan" by Victorian critics. In the dramatic

he speaks in the voice of a

to Proserpine

Roman writer who mourns

the

ancient faith as the era of Christianity begins. (The attempt to

view the Christian era from a perspective and time outside

it

anticipates Yeats's

poems The Magi and The Second Coming.) The situation gives Swinburne latitude to compare pagan gods, oriented towards fertility and natural abundance, to a selfdenying Christ and Madonna. The poem's most famous line, "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath," yields victory to the Christians, but in such a way as to suggest that life on these grim terms is not worth

Anapests (short short long) usually create a

living.

light, rapidly tripping

Swinburne manages though word choice and

meter, but here

his long, six-beat

alexandrine line to suggest the world weariness of the pagan poet

nounced an eventual death sentence forever in the

is

a

of Swinburne's childhood anapestic rhythms,

its

home

of East Dene on the

narrative of lost love

opening

lapses opposites to the point of

muddle,

ever" (line 65),

and the

lovers

embedded

But Swinburne's aim seems to be of evoking what

Adam and

Eve,

and

is

(see the Religion

coupling of contrasts

as are the

lines.

Sometimes

as in

"Here death may

at the heart

it

of the

seems Swinburne

col-

deal not again for-

poem

have

far less de-

the Ruins.

to create a sort of anti-Eden, a garden at the

forces have outdistanced theological concerns.

human

all

A mas-

history, are irrelevant:

"Not

a breath of the

time

now soft with a summer to be" (lines 59-60). The cosmic perspective of Thomas Huxley's Evolution and Ethics air

and Science perspectives

that,

measured by the

state

of nature, however

phase of her

supple

Its

gone or to come, Swinburne projects a landscape where

been hovers / In the

poet anticipates the

fleeting

of Wight.

Isle

passion's vulnerability amidst the

than those in a similar poem, Browning's Love Among

end of time where geological

that has

and

Swinburnian,

aggressive liminality of the

ter

who—having pro-

Christian faith— is ready to sleep

postDarwinian fantasy that may derive from memories

fleeting vista of years, are typically

finition

new

Underworld.

The Forsaken Garden

and

for the

liberal scale it

section):

"nothing

is

more

certain than

of time-keeping of the universe, this present

may seem

infinite variety."

to have

gone and

to

go on for

ever,

is

but a

Swinburne's concluding lines gain in power

and shed some of their showy paradox when read as part of a vast natural process. passage of aeons, the world crumbles and in the absence of any animal

With the

Walter Pater

or vegetable

437

now a mere remnant of transitory What Swinburne adds to Darwin and Huxley is a

even Death, born in Eden and

life,

organic epochs, finally perishes.

nostalgia of barrenness, the idea of lifeless places

haunted by imperceptible ghosts

of memory.

Aware of his own reputation

Swinburne was adept

for vagueness,

at locating

it

in other writers. His parody of Tennyson's The Higher Pantheism, called The Higher

Pantheism in a Nutshell, strikes to the heart of Victorian religious confusion;

it is

funny poem to read aloud. But in

poem

makes fun of Swinburne's own in Nephelidia (Little Clouds),

nonsensical parallels and contrasts the

its

first

decline of the

dawn through

Swinburne once

said of his work, "If

all

the way

we

not get

shall

He

style as well.

whose

far."

a

a

parodied himself at greater length

line reads

"From the depth of the dreamy

notable nimbus of nebulous moonshine."

we

insist

on having hard ground under

who wade

But readers

foot

in after him, surfing in the

waves of words, inevitably have a good time.

Walter Pater It

could be argued that the most important word in Walter Pater's work

is

"me."

But far from being an egotist, Pater produced an impressionistic, subjective cism whose emphasis on the

human

solve the

relativity

criti-

of experience and knowledge seems to

dis-

personality along with the absolutes his fugitive consciousness

from High Victorian

challenges. In doing so, Pater helped spark the transition

morality to the Aesthetic creed of "art for

begins his attack im-

art's sake." Pater

mediately at the start of the Preface to The Renaissance. First he questions the underlying project of Ruskin's Modern Painters (and of classical aesthetics) by claiming that attempts to define beauty in the abstract are not very helpful; rather, "the true

student of aesthetics" seeks to define beauty "in the most concrete terms possible,"

because the experience of beauty,

Then in itself

like all

human

experience,

Pater deliberately undercuts Arnold's critical

impression as

it

relative.

by suggesting that the most one can be sure of

really is"

it

is

aim of seeing the object

really is."

is

"one's

"as

own

The "primary data" of aesthetic response, says Pater, exist "What is this song or picture, this engaging peror in a book, to me? WTiat effect does it really produce on

only in relation to the observer: sonality presented in

life

and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence?" For Pater, the critic registers the "pleasurable sensations" that beautiful art produces, and it is important for him to have "a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved me? Does

it

give

me

pleasure?

by the presence of beautiful objects." Pater thus might be said to be the original

embodiment of Wilde's

own

"critic as artist," a

man whose

"sole

aim

is

to chronicle his

impressions."

Students

Academy.

Is

may enjoy— or be outraged by— the danger there such a thing as objective criticism, then?

impossible, should to the text

we have

it

exist as a laudable goal? If a

read and taught, should

Pater If it is

poses

to

the

philosophically

student paper bears

little

we protest— or encourage

relation

the further

438

Walter Pater

Why

cultivation of this creative sensibility?

paper but not

through

Pater's ideas

task of the critic

By

right for students

all

and

is it all

with dazzling logic in The

really

it

home ground

his choice of topic, Pater shifts the

Ages to the Renaissance, countering those such

nounced the Renaissance

concluding that the

Critic as Artist,

"to see the object as in itself

is

daydream on do the same? Wilde works

right for Pater to

art critics to

not."

is

of beauty from the Middle

Ruskin and Morris

as

as too corrupt, sensual, pagan,

and

who

de-

The

materialist.

Victorian prejudice against the Renaissance was so strong that only in the 1860s

did

it

begin to get

thanks to

critical attention,

Pater's efforts; the first entry

on

the

Renaissance in the Encyclopedia Britannica does not appear until 1885. But Pater's the question, what kind of

full title, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, raises

history

is

this?

He

speaks vaguely in the Preface of the "general spirit and charac-

of an age, and of its "aesthetic charm," yet his description of painters and their

ter"

works

is

so intensely idiosyncratic that

of Victorian preciations

taste,

all

the history

it

seems to supply

or maybe just the poetic "history" of Pater's

own

is

a history

evanescent ap-

and imaginings.

In Stones of Venice Ruskin viewed art as an index of morality, the lasting evi-

dence of the

And

spiritual health or sickness of a society.

emphasis on

in Pater's

recreating the experience of art through imaginative prose, he seems to follow

Ruskin: compare Pater's

But

as

Mona

Harold Bloom notes,

theticism of

its

Lisa to Ruskin's description of Turner's Slave Ship.

Pater's "great

moral basis" (Walter

Pater:

achievement was to empty Ruskin's

aes-

Modern

For

Critical Views [1985], xxxi).

Mona of wom-

Ruskin, Turner's painting expresses divine wrath at slavery; for Pater, the Lisa

is

a catalogue of supposedly timeless

and

definitely fantastic notions

anhood, ranging from Greek goddesses to vampires. Compared to Ruskin's moral

humanism, which ior,

sees art as objectively shaping

and responding

humanism implying

Pater offers a hedonistic

apart from our sensations of

human

to

behav-

that art does not exist or matter

it.

In "Arnold and Pater," T. S. Eliot insists that since Pater uses his rhapsodic prose to Eliot,

tell

people

how

"may be none the

to live, Pater

indeed a moralist after

is

less classified as a moralist, if his

all.

"A

moralizing

writer," says is

suspect or

perverse" (Selected Essays [1950], 389). Eliot complains that "the degradation of phi-

losophy and religion, Pater" (388),

skilfully initiated

and he denies

by Arnold,

Pater's aestheticism:

sake was the devotion of Flaubert and

competently continued by

is

"The

Henry James;

right practice of art for art's

Pater

is

not with these men,

but rather with Carlyle and Ruskin and Arnold" (393). Pater did

seem troubled by the impact of his work. He chose not

to reprint the

"Conclusion" to The Renaissance in the second (1877) edition because he thought it

might "mislead" impressionable young men, and though The Renaissance

brought him recognition,

it

also precipitated a crisis in his

own

life.

In 1874

it

ap-

pears that Benjamin Jowett, master of Balliol, blocked Pater's routine promotion to University Proctor because Pater's writing

made

it

impossible for Jowett to

nore Pater's relationship with a Balliol undergraduate. See

"Estrangement and Connection: Water Hardinge" in Pater

in the 1990s, ed.

Pater,

Benjamin

Billie

Jowett,

ig-

Andrew Inman's and William M.

Laurel Brake and Ian Small (1991), 1-20, and

Walter Pater

William

Shuter's

F.

"The 'Outing' of Walter

439

Pater," Nineteenth-Century Literature

48.4 (1994): 480-506. Pater was also satirized as the hedonistic "Mr. Rose" in

New Republic and prevented him from

W.

two events brought pain to

H. Mallock's The

(1877). Together, the

Pater

being considered for Professor of Poetry in 1877.

After 1874, the

theme of victimization and

suffering

becomes pronounced

in his

works.

Despite the homoerotic current to his thought, Pater's attitude toward sexuality

remains notoriously

elusive.

On

Pater

chapter in Dandies and Desert Saints:

More

and "manliness"

Styles of Victorian

directly useful in the classroom

is

see James Eli

Adams's

Masculinity (1995), 183-228.

Herbert Sussman's detailed reading of the

"Conclusion" in Victorian Masculinities (1995), 173-202: "these famous words are wholly self-contained, a

call

not for a particular formal program but for a particu-

on

of regulating male desire. Rather than an essay

practice

lar

'Conclusion'

is

a

sermon on manhood"

(193). After

an

style,

early "trajectory

the

of un-

manning" (196) that deals with the dissolution of the personality ("that strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves"), the essay shifts, says Sussman, to "figures of

.

.

.

structuring, control, agency" culminating in the

burn always with

this hard, gem-like flame, to

maintain

famous phrase, "To

this ecstasy,

is

success in

life."

Sussman comments

that "for Pater as for his predecessors" (such as Carlyle)

"the crucial act in achieving

manhood

lies

in imposing

form on the formlessness

of male desire by a virile act of will." Seeking "tight control of the internal current

of male potency," the image

contained power" (198).

Darwin and Huxley.

is

"not only Pater's but his

One might

age's vision

of manliness as

connect Pater with the "hard" science of

also

a perpetual

mo-

tion"— is the evolutionary principle writ small. Pater applies the concept of the

vari-

Pater's starting

point— "our physical

life is

ability

of species to the individual body and personality, and in a speed-up of bio-

logical

time urges us to grasp fleeting impressions that are in "perpetual

they will never

come

flight," for

again.

Sussman makes an interesting connection to Hopkins's That Nature is a which "also moves along the trajectory of the masculine plot" to end in "immortal diamond," thus outdoing Pater's image for hardness and durability in the face of worldly flux (199). Yet, Sussman concludes, Pater is not merely Heraclitean Fire

appropriating "the vocabulary of normative Victorian [heterosexual] masculinities;" rather,

"Pater subverts this formation by foregrounding the erotics always pre-

sent within the practice of psychic restraint for earlier Victorians" (202). In other

words the flame and the burning are what count most. Point out, however, that Pater concludes by saying that of

what makes

for the fullest

all

passions "the love of art for

its

own

sake"

is

life.

This shading of eroticism into aestheticism, of experience into sensation and perception, continues in The Child in the House. Here Pater probingly explores the

gradual process of places

him

told

he

how we come

and sensations

said,

and the

role played by specific

in that development. According to

Arthur Symons, Pater

to be ourselves,

the story was designed to as

Aurora Leigh does"

show (see

"

'the poetry of

modern

life,'

Gerald Monsman, Walter

something,

Pater's

Art of

440

Walter Pater

Autobiography [1980], his lush,

10).

measured prose

both concerned with

Though

there

something outrageous in Pater likening

is

to Barrett Browning's fitful, bristling pentameter, they are

how visual

to her mother's portrait in

stimuli shape child psychology. Aurora's reaction

Book I not only parallels

Florian's relation to his house,

also a striking anticipation of (and perhaps a source for) Pater's

it is

Mona

dering of the

While the

story has traditionally

been viewed

is

ren-

as a thinly veiled autobiography,

in Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (1995) Denis

reading

famous

Lisa.

"no good" since "Pater never

lived in

Donoghue

writes that such a

such a house, his father didn't die

abroad, the actual moves from Stepney to Enfield and later to Canterbury didn't at all

resemble the move in the story" (181). Noting that

dream

parable,

to recall

Donoghue

Child

is

framed

argues that "the purpose of memory in his fiction

an old experience but

as a

is

not

new one" (182), and he points to the being not so much shaped by a historical causal-

to create a

chain of sensations in the story as ity as

A

by a psychological predisposition, "a kind of tyranny of the senses," in the

memoir has the perhaps some things in the story of by which we are, each one of us, what

narrator's words, that rules over the boy. For Florian, the liberating goal of self-exploration, "the noting ... of his spirit—in that process of brain-building

we

are."

As William

E. Buckler says in Walter Pater:

The

Critic as Artist of Ideas

myth of a man whose mental house is furnished forever in the first twelve years of his life. ... It is the paradise from which his very eagerness to depart visits on him a piercing and eternal sense of (1987), The Child in the House

is

"the poetic

loss" (187).

Tennyson's Ulysses remarks,

titude, a stance, a style. In his essay

his

medium,

inative

am become

"I

a name."

achievements that he became something

Pater's great

his talent,

and

by "the

Style,

Pater seems to

his personal freedom.

power" of prose, and

art" as exemplified

on

calls for special

He

It

much

was one of Walter

less

want

substantial—an

at-

to defend his art,

lauds "the poetry, the imag-

appreciation of "literature as a fine

literature of the imaginative sense

of

fact."

The

essay

is

and elegant nuances, in which he both collapses between poetry and prose. He defines true literature

a juggling act of fine distinctions

and maintains the distinction

in terms of gender (the predominantly masculine

and

world of scholars,

skilled writers,

careful readers), class (these people set against a vulgar public and taste for

"fact"),

and

religion (the author's exemplary dedication to his transformative

redemptive vision). Despite

literature's expressive

power, however, "the true

and

artist

may be best recognised by his tact of omission." Anticipating Eliot's approach to modern poetry, Pater says that "If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable apprehension,

Claiming the greatest possible range

it

will

for his

be in a real sense 'impersonal.'"

medium, he

asserts that prose

is

"the

and privileged artistic faculty of the present day" and "however critics may narrow its scope" it will prove "as varied in its excellence as humanity itself."

special try to

Laurel Brake regards Pater's intense concern with literary craft as something of a smokescreen: given the dangerous critical climate in

ened those

who

in Style of the

which censorship

threat-

challenged mainstream morality and religious belief, "the defence

importance of language and

style in literature

and of

'great' subjects

Gerard Manley Hopkins

is

441

also a denunciation of censorship of the novel" (Walter Pater [1994], 48). See also

Brake's essay "Aesthetics in the Affray: Pater's Appreciations, with an Essay on

Style,"

Stephan Regan [1992], 59-86). Whether one

treats

in The Politics of Pleasure, ed.

Pater formalistically or contextually, his admirer Oscar

when he

tured Pater's ethos

Wilde seems

wrote in The Decay of Lying:

believe in a thing—nothing but

"it is style

to have cap-

that

makes us

style."

Gerard Manley Hopkins If

one wanted to prove the truth of Ruskin's famous pronouncement that "seeing

clearly

poetry, prophecy,

is

be a fine place to

start.

and

religion, all in one," the

work of Hopkins would

His impassioned combination of visual acuity and spiritual

religious poetry, but prophetically opened the sound and image that mark the most innovative poems of the twentieth century. Reading the selections from journals of 1871-73, when Hopkins was silently meditating on his new way of seeing the world and recasting its language, we discover how keenly he observed ordinary objects, and how

intensity not only

way

carefully ity

produced great

for the dazzling leaps of

he sought to convey their exact appearance.

He

captures their particular-

through a combination of minute, objective description and subtle references

to the

human body and

activity—a sky

"frowning," buds

is

on

a branch remind

of a finger tied with string, clouds in motion are like tossed napkins

falling.

him

His de-

interpenetration of human and natural and their infusion with God's beauty and power—themes the poems present even more urgently. Much fuss has been made about the terms "inscape" and "instress." But as the journal entries show— like the wonderfully detailed one on bluebells (May 9, 1871)— Hopkins is simply trying with "inscape" to get at the complex "thisness" of the thing he observes, its look, feel, and structure. In As Kingfishers Catch Fire he scriptive language thus emulates the

worlds,

clearly states his belief in the individuality

of every entity: "Each mortal thing does

one thing and the same: / Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; / Selvesgoes itself; myself it speaks and spells; / Crying What I do is me: for that I came." Often he

is

frustrated that he can't

tention, "that being" that "indoors

more .

.

.

readily bring outside, to everyone's at-

dwells" in each thing.

The

entry

on

the

beautiful roof structure hidden inside the barn (July 19, 1872) might serve as a

metaphor

for his mission as a poet, bringing inscapes to the world's notice. It also

anticipates his

own

lack of

an audience

for this undertaking: "I

beauty of inscape was

unknown and

near at hand

they had eyes to see

it

was

if

thought

how sadly how

buried away from simple people and yet it

and

it

could be called out everywhere

again."

As

for "instress,"

it

projects the uniqueness of the inscape toward the observer,

and attentive— i.e., most likely alone. See the entry Hopkins comments that despite the presence of a friend, "I saw the inscape [of tufts of grass] though freshly, as if my eye were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress canbut only

if

he or she

for Dec. 12, 1872:

is

receptive

Gerard Manley Hopkins

442

not come." As

it

conveys the inscape outward, instress enables the poet's eye to

keep "growing" in maturity and power.

The letter to Bridges clarifies what principles of composition Hopkins had mind when he finally began, in the late 1870s, to arrange these perceptions words and sound.

It is

in in

important to note that he never abandons form; although

he wrenches syntax, makes up words, revises the rules of meter and diction, and violates the

grammatical integrity of the poetic

rhyme

line,

is

always sacred for him.

Moreover, most of his best poems are sonnets, with conventional Petrarchean octets (abbaabba) followed by a sestet (usually cdcdcd, his favorite conclusion) that registers the traditional "turn" in the poet's attitude

toward his topic.

Students will enjoy reading Hopkins aloud, once they have had a chance to

work through each poem and familiarize themselves with the unusual words and constructions. Remind them of what Hopkins says to Bridges about accents in nursery rhymes and the natural rhythms of prose. If we let the stresses fall where they may, then most lines will scan pretty nicely. God's Grandeur is a good introduction to Hopkins's outlook and technique. The internal rhyme in the first stanza augments the bleariness of human toil, as contrasted to the flaming "grandeur of

But

after the turn, the world's

down The

God"

combined

things" burst out irrepressibly

(cf.

that worn-out mortals cannot

inscapes, the "dearest freshness

"What

is all

this juice

and

joy?" in Spring).

break between lines 13 and 14 should be pointed out: Hopkins sep-

startling

arates adjective

and noun

William Carlos Williams attempted

forty years before

In so doing he generates a suspense that

partially resolved in the

is

The Windhover

is

form

But fragmentation

intact).

to shreds ("kingis

inter-

close.

whose airborne

a classic

to rip the sonnet

it.

image of the

brooding dove and then transformed into sheer wonder with the heartfelt jection—one of Hopkins's trademarks—at the

seem

feel.

deep

energy, assonance,

/ dom"

and

alliteration

doesn't survive the

never Hopkins's goal: his

stress

first line

marks on "sheer

make the line scan and emphasize the mundane toil that can wonder of it"—God's grandeur in ordinary, unlooked-for places. He re-

plod," for example,

reveal— "no

assembles the

poem around

beauty of Christ's

sacrifice

their radiant self-rending.

the earthbound realization in the final tercet that the

emulated in the bursting open of soil or embers with

is

What happens

"Buckle" suggests conjunction, battle

Perhaps the Falcon

shows

is

in lines 9-11, however,

"buckler"

is

a shield),

is

and

not

clear:

collapse.

diving toward a sinner, creating a turmoil that, as Hopkins

at length in the later

Compare

(a

dark sonnets,

is

indeed both "lovely" and "dangerous."

this ecstatic Christ-the-Falcon to Yeats 's out-of-control predator in

The

Second Coming. Pied Beauty scriptive

things."

is

a

good poem

in

which

to

The

final lines

love of dense de-

slow the pace to dwell on each adjective. The short

metrically joins the previous two to create a

while visually standing on

unchanging

As

examine Hopkins's

words conveying the multicolored and textured quality of "dappled

its

God who made

befits a

own

to drive

measured

home

six-beat

last line

concluding couplet,

the poem's appreciation of the

this bountifully variegated flux.

season of plenty, Hurrahing

in

Harvest

is

full

of gorgeous language,

Gerard Manley Hopkins

443

such as "has wilder, wilful-wavier / Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across

ends in a way unprecedented in English poetry, with the indefinite

skies?" Line 7

But

article "a."

to

rhyme with

works

it

as a rhyme: the last three

on the double, dynamic

insisting

words are pronounced "gave ya"

The poem

a cultivated British pronunciation of "Saviour."

quality of observation. Nature needs to

gether with a beholder to realize God's greatness— "him" in the

Christ for

whom

Binsey Poplars

closes by

come

last line

to-

can be

the heart hurls (exults).

and

Spring and

Hopkins,

for the "ecological"

Fall: to

who

a young child could be used to build a case

feels

the loss of trees as not simply a blight

on

the landscape but the destruction of their personality— in dying they "unserve,"

robbing the world of their specialness and that of the landscape they inhabited.

Compare a great

pang and

1

wished to die and not

any more." In Spring and

from the fall

on the felling of an ashtree: "I maimed there came at that moment

the final journal entry (April 8, 1873)

heard the sound and looking out and seeing

the

fall."

One

to see the inscapes of the

as

it

does Frost in The Oven

that our grief over calamity in the world

impotence and

Christ that against is

human

beyond us

is

Fall

mixes

experience, claiming

finally grief over

our own

and deathly ways.

Exhausted and lonely creative

of "that other

Bird,

of Hopkins's most moving poems, Spring and

the theological framework of original sin with basic

mortality

world destroyed

the child Margaret's sorrow over the leaves falling

reminds the poet,

trees

we name

Fall

it

him

is

at his final post in Ireland,

Hopkins turned

his sense of

spiritual angst into unforgettable religious poetry.

"lovely in limbs" in

As

Kingfishers

in the "terrible" sonnets.

As

Catch

Fire

now

The

turns a "lionlimb"

Memoriam,

Eliot said of Tennyson's In

it

"the quality of the doubt" that makes these works so compelling. In Carrion

Comfort the opening line renders "Despair" as both engulfing, tortured language to come.

of Shakespeare's The Tempest

(II, ii)

Amid

noun and

avoid thee and

flee."

(See also "Here! creep,

in a whirlwind" in the equally bleak

No

me heaped

there;

God!" that

No

is

God, but what makes

Is

None and

a

fran-

/ Wretch, under a comfort serves Is None). The shattering con-

it

most

vivid

is

and horror

the interjection

at

"my

an acknowledgement, a confession.

also a recognition,

Worst, There

me

Worst, There

clusion evokes Jacob wrestling with the angel, registering confusion

the poet's conflict with

up the

where Caliban and Trinculo cower under

cloak to avoid the coming storm: "in turns of tempest, tic to

verb, setting

the violence of image there are echoes

/

Wake and

Feel the Fell of Dark,

The

Not Day continue

morning of God's Grandeur fails to come: night never ends and day is only redeemed by its death in sleep. In deepest misery, unable to communicate with God, the poet becomes gall, to grapple with the darkness of the soul.

irrepressible

Christ's bitter drink at the crucifixion, galling himself in a bitter parody of those

revelatory

at the end of The Windhover. Bodily, bloody imagery now preHopkins imagines himself scourged like Christ, but all this suffering

embers

dominates

as

only places

him among the damned and

That Nature

is

a Heraclitean

"their sweating selves"— "but worse."

momentary reprieve, its thickly textured Its mid-poem doubts give way to a overall effect is wrenching. The lines are

Fire offers a

description of nature recalling the early poems. final vision

of the resurrection. But the

Gerard Manley Hopkins

444

broken

(like

the poet's

and

into roughly three-beat halves,

spirit?)

after a sonnet-

opening, abbaabba, with no pause for a turn, the sonnet form explodes;

like

comes

a typical sestet, cdcdcd,

then another d rhyme, and

unit with an alternate pattern to conclude:

ccceeefff.

finally a

first

complete new

This desperate search for

clo-

sure parallels the poet's quest for Judgement Day, his desire to turn "This Jack, joke,

poor potsherd" into "immortal diamond."

Thou Art

Indeed, Just,

enemy could wound

Lord seems written to disprove the

as deeply as this

prosper, but not "Time's eunuch,"

who

builds

no

nest

Perhaps Hopkins's most sexually conscious work, the

whose agonized

title,

no

arguing that

heavenly friend. Sinners, plants, and animals

and breeds no

poem

is

lasting

work.

a mini-waste Land

plea for rain generates poetic fertility out of spiritual barrenness.

Despite these harrowing

poems— or maybe

last

Hopkins's dying words were

am

"I

in view of the agony they express—

so happy, so happy."

Rudyard Kipling Without Benefit of Clergy (1890) The

history of colonialism

The most

tresses.

man

which the

home

turn

iprocal,

is

full

of stories of white

familiar scenario

jilts

is

men and

their native mis-

Ameera so jealously predicts, marry a white woman, or simply to

the one

his mistress, either to

to Europe. Here, in contrast, the devotion of the lovers

and the

in re-

entirely rec-

is

story does not moralize about interracial relationships—an un-

usual attitude for the period. Without Benefit of Clergy, then, works against a too-ready labelling of Kipling as a racist imperialist, despite his portrayals elsewhere

of Indians as childlike. Somerset .

.

J.

M.

S.

the centre

Tompkins notes the concentric

is

the native house;

sounds belong Outside ... galow,

open

is

all

called

it

"a beautiful

and pathetic

John Holden's

circles that structure

tale

we

listen to

official life,

the India of swarming

life

facts

and

little

homely

the language of love and

grief.

the Club, the Office, the 'unlovely' bun-

to any visitor, the unsparing short phrases of order

finally the certainty

of the native house.

.

.

.

and

criticism,

Enclosing everything

terrifying epidemics, generating the

menace and

of separation" (The Art of Rudyard Kipling 1959], 115). [

In The Good Kipling: Studies

in the Short Story

(1971) Elliot Gilbert offers a de-

tailed reading of Without Benefit of Clergy, a reading that all

had

the narrative: "At

the pictorial details, the colours, the

to the centre; here

edged with irony by the unseen is

Maugham

the best story Kipling ever wrote."

.

subsequent

critics

to take into account. Gilbert describes Holden's constant visions of death

have

and

and the random, hopeless universe he inhabits. The secrecy of Holden's life with Ameera "testifies to the power of convention. The British, who stand ready at any hour to give their lives for the Indian people, nevertheless balk at accepting them as equals, and drive men like Holden into the pointless subterfuges

disaster,

of a double

life" (25).

hold himself together.

many of the

Yet Holden

He

relies

upon

the rigidity of English customs to

participates in native ceremonies,

and Ameera

learns

English ones, yet finally their "elaborate and hopeful" rituals turn out

Rudyard Kipling

to

be "of no use

like

the British administration Ritual

a

is

is

an

s efforts

to order the violence

mitment

world"— and chaos of India.

form of haggling with the universe, but "nothing can be gained,

he can, postponing nothing"

the Himalayas

central to

is

effort "to achieve order in a chaotic

Kipling points out, from bargains like this. ... fully as

of ritual

at all" (28). Gilbert claims that this failure

the story's meaning, for ritual

445

is

not foolishly

Ameera

is

a man's business ... to live as

Ameera's refusal to go to

willful; rather, "it represents

... to the idea that life ...

Gilbert argues that

It is

(35). In these terms,

is

meaningful only when

"absolutely honest.

.

.

.

She

is

her passionate comit is

not

being lived" (33).

Madame

Butterfly,

on self-deception" (36). In fact, she may be "the shrewdest person" in the story. With the death of her child she realizes "that sorrow is not the ultimate disaster of life" and she is freed "of the drag of ritual with its useless self-sacrifice, free to live without fear" (38). The title thus reinforces the "uselessness of ceremony," and represents "Kipling's approval of the couple, of their life together building her

life

and, perhaps especially, of Ameera's courageous death" (40).

Meyers disagrees, writing that Gilbert "surely misinterprets the

Jeffrey

He contends

their house," are "a fatal retribution for breaking every rule

man's code" ("Thoughts on Without

Benefit 0/ Clergy,"

8-11). Meyers writes that "Kipling

is

neither willing to permit Indians to marry

the sine qua non of his native marriages."

is

"doomed

and law of the white

The Kipling Journal 36 (1969):

whites nor to allow Indians a viable emotional and cultural beating

story."

that the lovers' sufferings, culminating in the "total annihilation of

to destruction, not by fatal fever

and

of their own. Wife-

life

Holden and Ameera

are

cholera, but rather by Kipling's

sanction of the 'colour prejudice' and 'superiority complex' of his age."

Martin Seymour-Smith also takes "has got

the wrong way round:

it

are really being

India

it

it is

with Gilbert's reading of the universe

issue

in this story as hostile, arguing rather that

it is

Holden who

shown, not the universe.

It

may be

like that

does seem so to foreigners; but we are seeing

are seeing

it

is

a pessimist. Gilbert

Holden's perception of the universe that we

it

or

it

may

and

not,

in

through Holden, and we

because he has entered into a socially forbidden love" (Rudyard Kipling

[1989], 97).

unhappy with the dialogue in Without Benefit of Clergy, calling it an "ineffective and unconvincing semi-Biblical English, stilted and poetical, and not at all as vigorous as the words [Kipling] put into the mouths of his private soldiers." Students, too, may find the characters' speech, with its "thee" and "thou" and "my lord," awkward and unreal. Gilbert contends, however, that while the dialogue has misled some critics "into reading the story as a quaint, rather sentimental love idyll," we should see these lines "as translations into English of expressions which, in the original, are completely idiomatic and unselfconscious" Seymour-Smith

is

(36n).

Harold Orel suggests that what marks Kipling's "distinctive contribution short-story genre, at

the

moment

and

his arrival as a literary force to be

that Holden,

awed by

himself."

Quoting

.

.

.

to the

comes

his introduction to the fact of the physical

existence of his son, reaches out to touch the

new about

reckoned with

hand of Tota, and

learns

the passage, Orel writes appreciatively:

something

"The author

446

Rudyard Kipling

who

of that has imagined greatly." For Kipling,

himself until several years the

new

later,

did not marry or have children

accurately captures the tumultuous emotions of

father. "Kipling's best short stories

.

.

.

show

a character in the process of

change, and very frequently of growing in his or her understanding" (The Victorian Short Stor? [1986], 148).

In 'Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (1993) Zohreh Sullivan

lo-

cates Without Benefit of Clergy in "a familiar nineteenth-century colonial discourse

Other

that fetishizes the

woman,

The

as fixed sterotype.

then, are both objects to be recognized

defamiliarized.

.

The

.

.

details of

Ameera's

life,

colonial object and the native and disavowed, appropriated and

background, appearance, and des-

tiny are all charged

with Orientalist anxieties. The native

from her mother

.

who

ages easily

ally dissolves

'wife' has been 'bought' an Orientalist stereotype of the Eastern beauty as one and hideously." The same things happens to Ameera, who "gradu.

.

[who

is]

from beautiful desired body

to a corpse, even as the rain dissolves

and graves" (96-97). "The marginalized and otherwise silent native feand denigrated, given presence and voice, yet finally erased" (94). "Structures of forbidden sexuality and desire, troped in terms of mastery and plea-

walls, roads

male

is

idealized

sure, fetishize the

woman

Instructors might find

erence, with

works. The dents

its

in order to counter male fear of self loss" (96).

Norman

Page's

chronology of Kipling's

Illustrated Kipling (ed.

who would

like to

read

A

life

Kipling

and

its

Companion (1984)

plot

Neil Philip [1987])

more of

is

a useful ref-

summaries of all Kipling's a

good place

to

send

stu-

Kipling.

Just So Stories (1902) Parental love

went on

to

is

one of the themes of Without

be a devoted father of three.

Benefit of Clergy,

He wrote

the Just So

and Kipling himself daughter

Stories for his

Josephine, the "Best Beloved" (who died in 1899 at the age of

six).

A

friend of

them told in Cousin Ruddy's deep unhesiThey are still best read aloud. The charm of the Just So Stories lies in their whimsical humor, and their mingling of the homely details of nursery life with exotic far-off worlds and talking animals. Angus Wilson admired the first seven stories, pointing out that "they are all united by the same little joke," namely "the pleasing little Darwinian send-up"

Josephine's recalled "the fun of hearing

tating voice" (qtd. in The Illustrated Kipling).

(qtd.

Norman

Page, 55). Actually, as Gillian Beer has noted in Darwin's Plots

more of a throwback to Lamarck's theory of evolution comic absurdity seems more the point than any realistic account

(1983), the explanations are (24); ultimately,

of causation. J.

M.

S.

Tompkins

writes:

"They are

fables

see them, the elephant's trunk, the camel's

how things came to be as we hump, the whale's throat, the ar-

about

madillo's scales, the alphabet that children learn."

"Oriental grandiloquences

manners and morals Jacqueline

up the

S.

embedded

She describes the idiom

in colloquial narrative" (58).

as

"There are

in the fables, but they are not at all oppressive" (58-59).

Bratton analyzes the verses at the end of each story: some "take

implicit relationship

between the adult and the child to

whom

he

tells

the

Rudyard Kipling

and bring

fantastical tales

their domestic

An

into focus.

life

cabin portholes are dark and green,' the vignette from the

which appears

ily

at the

end of the

How

story of

example life

Whale Got

the

is

447

'When

the

of a travelling famits

Throat. This do-

mestication of the story by the verse can have a moralizing effect, as in The Camel's

Hump, where the fun of chanting and the relation of the story to the world of the nursery combine to drive home the moral point" ("Kipling's Magic Art," Critical Harold Orel [1989],

Essays on Rudyard Kipling, ed.

58).

on

In Kipling the Poet (1994) Peter Keating remarks

with a youthful audience in

Just So Stories"

main concern

in favour of instruction or entertainment, Kipling's

Students

.

.

who

.

is

to

falls

communi-

rhythms and meanings of words, often revealing a delight in

cate a pleasure in the

nonsense verse

"the subtle air of intimacy

adding that "whether the balance

that demonstrates his deep admiration for Lewis Carroll" (164).

are interested in Victorian children's literature

might

like to

Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense (1846), Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Kipling's Jungle Books (1894, 1895) and Puck of PooWs Hill (1906).

read

(1865),

Poetry In Kipling the Poet (1994) Peter Keating writes that Kipling's poetry "offers an insight into early

modern

Britain,

unique in

its

social range, linguistically adventurous,

emotionally powerful, and deeply personal. Kipling's poetry should not be regarded as

simply an outward chronicle of public events:

it is

more

a record of his personal

on

responses to those events, and of his thoughts and feelings ters,

not

least the art

of poetry"

number

lisingly subtle; quite a

disclose their full

(xiv).

Keating adds:

a range of other mat-

"Many of the poems

are allegorical; others are syntactically

meanings through

literary, Biblical,

Keating notes that the soldier "whose

and

topical allusions" (xv).

tion or tension and,

more

strikingly,

mechanical recitations,

The mood

quiet

is

one of the

is

distinguished by the speaker's linguistic in-

is

opening of Gunga Din, staled by countless

finest

moments

in Barrack-Room Ballads.

and thoughtful, with the opening

terms to express his scorn for those of his listeners ultimate

test.

As the terms

the army training ple

who are

camp

in

flair,

rhyme and an emphatic long

line) that

'gin

who is

and

beer'.

The hero of the

ballad

is,

tells

'white, clear white inside'.

racial

condescension

.

.

.

.

but

.

.

if

his

them

'penny-fights'

audience fixed

as peo-

(with the help of a heavy

sit safely in

necessity,

quarters drinking their

of course, not the speaker, but

proves himself to be brave, loyal, intelligent,

.

find the right

moral values are determined by

and, until they realise that, they might as well

.

he turns Aldershot, the name of

Hampshire, into a verb. With

used to having an easy time of it, he

tries to

.

entirely of

have never experienced the

he makes some up:

are not ready to hand,

with true poetic

who

made up

line

monosyllabic words, and the speaker remains calm as he

for small frontier wars, and,

Gunga Din moments of emo-

so famously saved" by

life is

"speaks in a slightly modified Standard English which thickens at

ventiveness." Keating argues that "the

are tanta-

complex and

Gunga Din,

and even courteous under

fire:

he

Gunga Din has become something of a by-word

for

the speaker comes over as condescending

be-

cause of his determination to assert his

own

inferiority" (72).

it is

Rudyard Kipling

448

Norman

on Kipling's verse ( 161 - 174) in which he observes Widow at Windsor and many of the other poems ... are monologues, there is no attempt to present the speaker as a unique individual: rather he is a representative and communal voice, and in this respect Kipling is closer to the traditional ballad and street-song than to the mainstream of poetic Page has a chapter

that "even though The

tradition in the late Victorian period" (168). Page suggests that in The

Queen

Windsor "the loyal tribute to the quial familiarity with

which Victoria

a hairy [famous, splendid] gold

is

is

undercut in two ways:

referred to ('the

crown on her head';

first

Widow

by the

at

collo-

Widow at Windsor / With

'Missis Victorier's sons'),

and

then by the parenthetical refrain that echoes the tribute with significant variations

Queen

that shift the centre of interest from the

turn a patriotic

poem

into

one that has

as

its

The effect is to theme not monarch or Empire

to her soldiers.

real

.

.

.

unsung common soldier" (167-68). Page proposes that The Widow at Windsor "may in the matter of tone be compared with Housman's '1887' (the opening poem of A Shropshire Lad) later in the same decade, but the sufferings of the

ill-paid,

and contrasted with the unqualified patriotism of Newbolt's poetry

same

in the

pe-

riod" (168).

Keating writes that the tone of The Widow at Windsor

and power of the

British

melancholy refrain recalling the

human

at the extent

Empire that price

stanza extends this echoing discontent to it

contains "an allusion to Psalms 139:9

dwell in the uttermost parts of the

one of a boastfulness

imperialism.

The

criticism." Keating points

take the wings of the

But the

sea').

"is

constantly undercut by a

demanded by

open

('If I

is

biblical

final

out that

morning / And

meaning, that even here

hand will be a guiding influence, is overturned and the soldier transformed into some kind of grotesque wounded bird of prey, 'flopping' directionless around the globe. His guiding light should be the Union Jack, but this becomes merely 'a bloomin' old rag', that, like the Indian sun, is out of reach and impervithe Lord's

ous to the suffering

it

the range of attitudes

bated

among

causes.

It is

poem might

fect this particular

hardly surprising that readers pondered the

have on

Queen

ef-

Victoria, and, taking into account

and points of view presented

in Barrack-Room Ballads, de-

themselves whether the young author from India was a flag-waving

imperialist or a dangerous radical" (75).

added to the confusion; like Bruce Springsteen's Born in poem has found itself at the center of debate about its political

Recessional (1897) only

the USA, Kipling's and patriotic content. Norman Page

calls

it

"one of the ironies of

that Recessional, "actually a warning against the arrogance to is

inevitably prone, should have

perialistic.

come

to be regarded by

literary history"

which

many

a

world power

as jingoistic

and im-

Kipling does not celebrate the imperial idea—and to this extent he was,

of course, distinctly out of line with the public

mood

of 1897—being rather intent

on reminding the mother country of its burden of duty"

(181-82).

In The Good Kipling Elliot Gilbert devotes several pages to this controversial

poem, noting that

critics

have long been offended "by the contempt for dark-

skinned natives" that seems implicit in what has been called Kipling's most notorious line:

"Or

lesser

breeds without the Law." Gilbert quotes George Orwell (who

believed that Kipling was referring to the

Germans, not

to colonized peoples): "It

Rudyard Kipling

is

assumed

picture

is

and

as a matter of course that the lesser breeds' are 'natives,'

449

mental

a

called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a coolie"

("Rudyard Kipling," Essays [1954]). Gilbert reminds us that patriotic celebrants of Victoria's Jubilee "waited in con-

what Kipling would write

siderable suspense" to see

"had become almost synonymous with" Kipling produced shocked admirers and

umph and

its

clear references to the

humility in an uncertain world,

poem

Nevertheless, the lar

tread

imperial destiny. But what

the

critics alike:

title

still

and comfortingly

suggests "not

And

but rather withdrawal, waning, a going-away.

glory,

poem, with

for the occasion, for his voice

Britain's

impermanence of power and surprised

Kipling's

tri-

the rest of the to the

need

for

countrymen" (17-18).

strikes readers as "extraordinarily arrogant." Its "regu-

and

familiar cadences" suggest "the security

self-con-

The discrepancy "beof the poem" jars. Ultimately,

gratulatory clubbiness of a not-very-demanding religion" (19).

tween the announced and the implicit subject Gilbert says,

doesn't matter which race or nation

it

"breeds," for "what

is

dismaying about the line

(19).

intended by the word

poem whose ostensible subject is the arrogance poem is an aesthetic failure because

judge' in the context of a

judgments"

is

inherent act of 'presuming to

is its

In other words, the

of such it

never

achieves artistic wholeness.

Keating points out that Recessional

and echoes.

sions, quotations,

England

a special covenant with

The

principal text,

get—lest

we

... It .

.

is .

is

"virtually a

[but] Recessional points to

from which Kipling took the

forget!")

is

compilation of Biblical

based on the assumption that

Deuteronomy

6:12:

refrain of his

'Then beware

which brought thee forth out of the land of Egypt'"

lest

(116).

its

allu-

God has made

possible collapse.

poem

("Lest

we

for-

thou forget the Lord,

As

for "lesser breeds

without the Law," both Germans and non-white races are outside the Law, "though in different ways.

white races have

The Germans have turned their backs on it deliberately: the nonRecessional to be shown the benefits of living within the law.

still

suggests that even If-,

.

England

which appeared

from the book, and

is

in danger of losing

God's favour"

for a

until

its

and reproduced

.

(117).

book Rewards and Fairies (1910), "escaped while ran about the world" on its own, wrote Kipling in

in the children's

his autobiography, Something of Myself (191). Keating says "it recited,

.

was copied, parodied,

in a variety of ways—needlework samplers being a favourite—

eminently sensible,

skilfully articulated

maxims became

a

byword

for unac-

ceptable cloying moralism" (168). Zohreh Sullivan suggests that "repeated collapse

under excessive pressure bravado of such poems

is,

in a way, the repressed text lying just beneath the surface

as I/"; Kipling's "fascination

with breakdown" was his way

of "internalizing the unacceptable, the terror of annihilation or boundary slippage in the troubling structures of gender, race Finally,

one might compare

and

identity" (79).

empire— and the men and administering—with Stanley

Kipling's attitudes towards

doing the work of colonizing, trading,

fighting,

and Burton (in the Travel and Empire perspectives section). Also, Kipling provides an excellent lead-in for many of the twentieth-century readings in this anthology, including Heart of Darkness and the various perspectives on the Great War (in which Kipling's only son was

killed).

450

and Empire

Travel

Perspectives

Travel and Empire For the middle and upper classes the British empire was, according to the

Robin Gilmour,

"a global playground

where they could enact the

critic

fantasies in-

and become the Romans of the modern world." and Tennyson made Victorians mindful that Britain might soon imitate Rome's decline and fall, images of the glorious sacrifices they were making for their nation, culture, and religion kept the empire-builders going. As Rudyard Kipling wrote, "The idea is a pretty one, and

spired by a classical education,

Though warnings by

men

moralists such as Ruskin

are willing to die for

There was

it."

more individual but

also the

politically

still

important glory of

ploration. Scaling the highest peaks in the Alps during the 1850s

ex-

and 1860s,

mountain climbers used the rhetoric of conquest to recount their perilous ascents. In the 1870s and 1880s, British explorers like Stanley, Speke, and Burton survived

map

daunting adventures to Livingston was the

naming the way

first

the

European

continent;

the

to cross Africa

Victoria Falls in the process. Their exploits for the dividing

Scottish

from coast

up of Africa by European

and

missionary David

to coast, locating

best-selling

and

accounts led

colonizers.

Discuss with students the contradictions and complications of being a trav-

While any outsider remains inevitably "other," some travellers made intense not to be mere spectators, but to participate as fully as possible in the culture they were visiting: Trollope opened a business in Cincinnati, Bird joined in the work of Western settlers, Kingsley set herself up as an African trader, and Burton succeeded in passing himself off as a Muslim pilgrim. From our perspective, these undertakings are hardly unproblematic. But they suggest the comeller.

efforts

encounters— particularly between representatives of the

plexity of cross-cultural

world's most powerful empire,

and members of

its

colonies, former, actual, or

potential.

While many Victorian

explorers, missionaries,

and colonial administrators saw

themselves as bringers of light to dark places, not every traveller fully shared the imperialist ideology of the era or the ity.

At the very

least,

some

Kingsley, in particular,

travellers

assumption of moral and cultural superior-

were more nuanced in their approach. Mary

seems to have approached West Africans with an intriguing

blend of panache and humility: she wrote that "we gradually educated each other,

and

I

had the best of the

a beetle

and

and

affair; for all

fetish hunter,

and so

I

had got

to teach

forth, while they

a very fascinating course of study

I

found

had

them was to teach

Beagle. If lack of

a

I

was only

new

world,

it."

Instructors might teach this entire perspectives section as a unit, different travellers with

that

me

one another, and perhaps

comparing the

also with Darwin's Voyage of the

time makes this impossible, individual excerpts can be taught in

conjunction with other readings in the anthology: Stanley and Heart of Darkness, for example, or

Burton and Kipling. The

junction with the selections

women

travellers

on Ladies and Gentlemen,

can be taught in con-

illustrating that

not

all

Travel

middle-class Victorian

the prevailing

women

and Empire

451

were finding fulfillment in domesticity, whatever

dogma about women and

trast these travellers to distant

as angels in the house.

One might

"exotic" places with the

also con-

more conventional

Continental travel experienced by the Brownings, Arnold, and Ruskin

(see, for ex-

ample, the excerpts from Praeterita evoking the remembered pleasures of Ruskin's

European

tours). British writing exercised

enormous influence throughout the

world, but was influenced in turn, not only by literary currents in Europe, but also

by the

tales

brought back by adventurers further

afield.

Frances Trollope from Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

As

travel writing, Domestic

Manners has never

grouchy persona Mrs. Trollope adopts lively writer,

lost its appeal, in part

thanks to the

Paul Theroux nowadays). She's a

(a bit like

with an ear for dialogue and colloquial speech. She combines the dra-

woman

matic story of a analysis based

on her

venturing into wild territory with domestic and social

two-and-a-half year residence in Cincinnati.

Her method

comparison of England and America, sometimes

volves a constant

direct,

in-

some-

times implied. Trollope's

conveys her

opening description of voyaging upriver into uncharted unease.

initial

It is

territory

an almost apocalyptic scene of desolation. She com-

pares the landscape to Dante's inferno (instructors might look ahead to Conrad's

Heart of Darkness, with

when

its

Trollope meets her

ominous first

trip upriver into a

nightmare landscape). But

Americans, she regains her equilibrium, and her

tone quickly changes from foreboding to

satiric.

Taking comfort in social conde-

mocks both American table manners and the American presumpnew society, everyone professed to be a "lady" or a "gentleman." Students familiar with the readings in Perspectives: Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen will be better able to see why an English gentlewoman like Frances

scension, she

tion of equality: in this

Trollope found such claims preposterous.

At every turn Trollope ation of inflated military

mercilessly exposes

American pretensions: the

prolifer-

the granting of worthless "degrees" after a smat-

titles,

tering of instruction, the boasts of literary scholarship by a

man who

scarcely rec-

most famous English authors. If nineteenth-century American readers were enraged by Domestic Manners, contemporary American students sometimes ognizes the

feel

almost equally insulted.

subjected to the

It

can be uncomfortable to find one's

same patronizing

attitudes that

Western

travellers

own

country

have often

dis-

played abroad. Trollope's opinions, of course,

do about America

in the 1820s.

tell

It's

us as

much about her and

helpful to situate this

drop of both the American Revolution

(hostility

her milieu as they

book

against the back-

towards English paternalism

still

of and Trollope was often treated rudely) and the impending Reform 1832 in Britain. Taking democracy for granted, students find it difficult to see how anyone could have opposed the extension of the franchise. But the British, fearful of mob rule and a levelling of society, felt a mixture of admiration and anxiety as lingered,

they watched the

Bill

American experiment with democracy. Trollope— like Dickens

a

452

Travel

and Empire

decade later— arrived with an idealized image of America that took a beating from the rough-and-tumble

and both authors reacted by painting sour

reality,

portraits

of the young country's flaws.

Americans, in turn, have always had complicated attitudes towards Europe:

Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad (1869), for example, wavers uncertainly between awe towards the monuments of European culture and contempt for effete European traditions. Mrs. Trollope's hilarious conversations

good

of class privilege, are likely to applaud the

attire.

money

girl

as

assertive spirit

astounded

at

provide a

and

folks as

and

you be" must have seemed

her employers

tells

hum-

refusal to

her impudence as at

world in which a servant considers herself "a young

for a silk dress to go to a ball,

grumpy a

A

girl's

would have been

ble herself; English readers

her

with her servant

starting point for a discussion of cultural assumptions: Americans, suspicious

"I

lady,"

wants

never seed such

to Mrs. Trollope's English readers to be

kind of bedlam of misrule.

But Trollope's throughout

women

is

was not purely mean-spirited.

satire

were undervalued by their men, a disregard powerfully symbolized by the

universal habit of spitting

She

felt

One theme running

her concern for the position of women. She believed that American

which made

it

impossible to keep their dresses clean.

that early marriage, lack of education,

demned American women

narrow

to

lives as

and "the servant problem" con-

household drudges.

thus denied their proper role as civilizing and uplifting influences in this light, her remarks

no

"great

about

leisure

development of mind"

(for

seem

less frivolous:

background on these

Women

on

without

it,

society.

were

Seen

there can be

topics, see the readings

about separate spheres and female education in Perspectives: Victorian Ladies and Gentlemen). Trollope deplored the lack of opportunity for cultivated social

life,

not merely

because she herself missed dinner parties, concerts, and the theater, but because

women had

she could see that American

few outlets except church. She detested

the evangelical distrust of pleasure and of the

arts,

which she saw

as largely re-

we do not excerpt, Trollope described a revival meeting; she was horrified by the impropriety and excess she witnessed, particularly the lack of respect for women). Her views on "Amusement" can be compared with evangelical attitudes described in the Religion and Science perspectives section. sponsible for the sad state of society in Cincinnati. (In a passage

Alexander Kinglake from Eothen (1844)

Although Kinglake faced genuine discomforts and even dangers on through the Near

East,

he saw himself not

as

an adventurer but

his jaunt

as a tourist fol-

lowing wellworn paths. Indeed, so self-conscious was he about his predecessors—

both actual and literary—that his

own

territory by

his first

historical, scientific, political,

concern in writing Eothen was

to stake

out

book was not: geographical, antiquarian, or moral. The humor of Kinglake 's approach de-

announcing what

his

pends on our picturing rows of these dusty tomes rather than be discouraged by not being the

first

full

of Useful Knowledge. But

to describe these regions,

he

and Empire

Travel

453

chooses to be liberated. His contribution will not be further instruction, but

own

merely a description of his

sensations: "as

have

I

felt

so

have written."

I

Eothen makes us aware of the ways in which the apparently simple encounter

between the observer and the observed eller sees

is

this process,

my

reading of

rarely so straightforward.

What each trav-

almost always mediated by what he or she has already read. Kinglake

about

explicit

is

informing us that

me bend

childhood which made

of Troy." Books do

more than

it

is

was the "rapturous and earnest

forward so longingly to the plains

inspire travellers, they also shape their perceptions:

Kinglake travels not to meet contemporary Turks or Egyptians but to see the landscapes of the Iliad

and the

appointment when

Bible.

Of course,

watches with "vacant unsatisfied eyes"

Sometimes later,

not seeing for oneself

now that

"I

tery belonging to

am

away from

him

as

is

preferable, he concludes, finding that only

his banks,"

an unseen

prosaic realities of travel: "One's earthly things

sets himself up for disup to his expectations: Kinglake the Homeric waters of "divine Scamander."

by doing so he

doesn't measure

reality

mind

does the river recover "the proper mys-

Memory happily colludes

deity."

dominion over

regains in absence that

which has been shaken by the rude contact." The

in erasing the

traveller's feelings

mountain or a river but, let these and then again the old fanciful notions are restored." Often, Kinglake would rather daydream about home than work himself up

are bruised by "the material presence of a

once pass out of

.

.

.

sight,

into the "right" frame of mind for appreciating "important" places. His reflections on the unpredictable interaction of imagination and landscape suggest some anxiety over not feeling what he thinks he's supposed to feel: "it is only by snatches, and for few moments together, that 1 can really associate a place with its proper history."

Being well-read imposes an uncomfortable obligation to react in particular

ways—he

can't

respond freshly to scenes when he knows so

Kinglake 's consciousness of the

many ways

in

much about

their past.

which the countries he

visited

were already-written inhibited not only his on-the-spot responses but also his

own book. Twice he

when

abil-

Warburton asked for advice was Kinglake finally able to produce Eothen. Writing casually and humorously, as if to his friend, Kinglake composed not what he called "a regular book of travels" but instead "a sadly long strain about Self." His approach set the tone for much travel writing that has come after him: as F. A. Kirkpatrick observed deal less with monin 1916, "the better travel-books of the nineteenth century uments, museums, churches and institutions: they deal more with men and ity

to write his

tried

and

failed;

only

.

women

in relation to their surroundings. Sometimes, this

.

Eliot

.

human

interest lies in

the pleasant egotism of the traveller" (The Cambridge History of English Literature,

240-56). Jan Morris approves, remarking that

vol. 14,

centred book, that

is

half

its

.

.

.

than he

is

Eothen

is

a thoroughly

self-

charm." Edward Said disapproves, complaining in

Orientalism (1979) that Kinglake "is

Orient

u

in seeing

more

what there

interested in is

to

remaking himself and the

be seen."

traveller's usual duty to report back as impartially as problem of describing places that have already been to turn inward, writing less about the places themselves than

But Kinglake declines the possible. His solution to the

much

described

is

about the impression they

made upon him. He acknowledges

that focusing

on

feel-

454

Travel

and Empire

ing rather than fact opens

him

center of each scene,

to the charge of egotism,

and he embraces the

He places himself at the arguing that ultimately we can only know our own sensations.

charge: his very subjectivity will

vouch

for his truthfulness.

Travelling vicariously through his words, seeing through his eyes, the reader—he

claims—may be "slowly and faintly impressed with the (For a

more

of Eastern Travel"

realities

detailed version of this argument, see Heather Henderson's

Travel Writer

and the Text"

Essays on

the

"The

Modern

Michael Kowalewski [1992], 230-48).

Literature of Travel, ed.

Sir

from A Personal

in Temperamental Journeys:

Richard Francis Burton

Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and

Meccah (1855)

book by acknowledging its personal nature: to some, it may appear "mere outpourings of a mind full of self." Yet Burton was a voracious scholar and prolific writer, and his two dozen travel books are crammed with hundreds of pages of cultural detail and scientific information. In the threevolume Pilgrimage to ElMedinah and Meccah Burton recounts how he journeyed to the holy cities of Islam, disguised first as a dervish (a Muslim holy man), then as an Afghan physician. He travelled in a spirit of adventure, longing "to set foot on that mysterious spot which no vacation tourist has yet described," and he claimed that "when entering the penetralia of Moslem life my Eastern origin was never questioned." Had he been discovered, he would probably have been killed. In Rule Like Kinglake, Burton prefaced his

of Darkness: British Literature

notes

how Burton

ambiguity of his various roles" (161, 162).

"revels in the Protean

Burton

is

and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (1988) Patrick Brantlinger

dramatizes "the dangerous role of anthropological spy" and

one of the most famous examples of

a traveller

who

used a disguise

to reach a forbidden destination, but he's hardly alone: during the 1860s,

William

Gifford Palgrave spent a year in Arabia in the guise of a Syrian doctor; in the 1920s the

Frenchwoman Alexandra David-Neel undertook masquerading

(closed to foreigners)

as a

a gruelling trek to Lhasa

Tibetan beggar; in the 1970s a young

Englishwoman, Sarah Hobson, explored Iran dressed an homes, mosques, and their

own

culture,

identities

sometimes

and assume the

a boy, entering people's

motivates travellers to cast off

and manners of another alter the way in others—and oneself? And what ethical dilemmas do such im-

at the risk

which one perceives

What

religious discussions.

clothing, language,

of their

lives?

How

does a disguise

postures present? Clearly, such travellers are attracted by the idea of freeing themselves

codes and customs of "civilization," of shedding their class, religion,

own

from the

nationality, language,

even gender. Think of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's pleasure in

adopting Turkish dress to pass unnoticed through the

streets

of Constantinople in

the early eighteenth century. Brantlinger argues that for Burton "Disguise was a

means of crossing the

gulf between superior

and

inferior races, civilization

barism—a means that led to ethnological knowledge

and

Disguise also allowed Burton to criticize western society while permitting eventually to return to

it"

bar-

as well as to adventure.

him

(163-64).

Disguise offers a temporary liberation from oneself, and also

new perspective on

Travel and Empire

own

one's

privilege: wasting days in a frustrating effort to

obtain a passport in

Alexandria, Burton notes that as an Englishman he would have had

only as an "Asiatic" does he encounter rebuffs and delays.

Cairo he travels third

class,

disguised as a dervish,

On

Afghan clothing on the

went

streets

of

no trouble-

the steamboat to

and the European passengers

avoid him. Nick Danziger, a contemporary travel writer, found ing to wear

London

it

similarly eyeopen-

in the 1980s: "Everywhere

was either shunned or regarded with undisguised suspicion"

I

455

I

(Danziger's

Only her disguise admitted David-Neel into the hovels of poor no foreigner would have glimpsed their interiors. Such experi-

Travels [1987]).

Tibetans; ordinarily,

ences afford genuine insight into the

lives

of others. But doesn't the secret knowl-

edge thus obtained represent a betrayal of trust and a form of cultural aggression?

Burton relished the challenge of creating and sustaining a of his linguistic and acting

skills,

he

invites the reader to

difficult part;

proud

admire his performance.

Yet his disguise raises troubling questions: his quest was a morally dubious undertaking,

an invasion of the privacy and sacred

finally

glimpses Mecca, he thinks,

shrine!"

Of course he

emotion of

means,

sites

of another culture.

When Burton

"how few have looked upon the

celebrated

how few Europeans. And although he shares

his fellow pilgrims,

the deep

he admits that "theirs was the high feeling of

reli-

mine was the ecstasy of gratified pride." Brantlinger points out of Muslim pilgrims Burton remains isolated by his consciousness

gious enthusiasm,

how

"In a sea

.

.

.

of difference, by his sense of personal and racial superiority. Yet the superior has stooped to deception to reach his goal." His gaze

is

man

not that of the "worshipful

pilgrim" but that of western science "prying into the deepest, most sacred mysteries

of every culture" (162-63). Brantlinger argues that disguise

ercise in istic

power and imperial domination:

it

"entails a

of Burton's entire career: contempt for the peoples

and upon

whom

he

is

ultimately an ex-

double arrogance character-

among whom he

travels

spies or anthropologizes" (164). "All of the information

he

gathered ... he viewed as a form of power over nonwestern peoples" (166).

Reading our selection from Burton's Narrative thus gives students not merely a taste

of the popular Victorian genre of swashbuckling travel adventures, but also a

jumping-off point to discuss nineteenth-century attitudes toward nonwestern cultures

and people.

ments;

is

he being

Instructors might invite students to discuss Brantlinger's argufair to

Burton? Have students look, for example,

scription of the contrast between Eastern a glass of water.

to observe the

at Burton's de-

and Western manners, such

as

drinking

How does he portray cultural difference? Some might contend that

ways of others as minutely as Burton argues for a certain

and even respect

for difference; others

of cultural superiority

is

embedded

sensitivity

might point to ways in which a conviction

in the very language

Burton chooses.

Isabella Bird

from A Lady's Travel offered

dents

who

women an

Life in the

Rocky Mountains (1878)

escape from the restrictions of genteel

lives at

home;

have read Nightingale's Cassandra, and our excerpts from Mrs.

Ellis

stu-

and

Mrs. Beeton (Perspectives: Ladies and Gentleman), will have a clearer sense of

what Bird was getting away from. Rejecting domestic comforts and

responsibilities,

456

Travel

and Empire

she preferred to climb mountains, ride through blizzards, round

up

cattle,

and

flirt

with a celebrated outlaw. Bird's invalidism bears

some

discussion.

which

a respectable "excuse" for travelling,

The

search for better health provided

women needed more New

Bird was not simply a hypochondriac; in Across

Women

and their Writings (1990) Shirley Foster explains that "as an adounderwent an operation to remove a tumour on her spine and suffered

Travellers

lescent she

from back trouble

for the rest of

her

life."

Edinburgh Medical Journal: Bird presented

which can hardly be considered

Samson Abroad do not form terpretation as

than men. But

Worlds: Nineteenth-Century

is

hard to avoid:

as

Foster quotes Bird's obituary in the

"many

common.

.

characteristics of a physical type

.

The

.

illness

bought Bird

Home and

Invalid at

a very usual combination" (13).

A psychological

privacy, freedom,

and time

the in-

(just

seems to have done for Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and

it

even Charles Darwin). The advantages of Nightingale,

who remarks

in Cassandra that

ill

health were acutely perceived by

"A married woman was heard

that she could break a limb that she might have a

compare

Instructors might Trollope's depiction of recoils in

life

little

Bird's depiction of

to

wish

time to herself."

life

at the

Chalmers' with

in Cincinnati. In each case, a cultivated

Englishwoman

horror and wry amusement at the narrowness of American horizons:

manners and tedious patriotism, self-righteous religion, devotion to work and money-grubbing, lack of intellectual and artistic pastimes, reduction of wives and daughters to mere drudges. And just as Trollope passed through scenes of ap-

graceless

palling desolation, so Bird's scorching

and dust and blazing

heat,

becomes

Sunday

at the

Chalmers', with

its

snakes

a hellish waste land.

Fortunately for Bird, these infernal horrors are but a prelude to the paradise of

and her depression vanishes in exuberant exclamation points. first experiences of the American West undercut romanticized myths

Park,

Estes

Although her about

life

on

the frontier, she goes

cowboys in the

real

crisp air of the

on

to live a Western dream—driving cattle with Rocky Mountains, acknowledged as one of the

boys by the cattlemen.

These

women

letters

may

surprise those

who

Although she found Estes Park

ideal.

believe that all Victorian middle-class

aspired to be the "Angel in the House." Bird, in

clined to settle

down

there.

dom

for

women's

turned

cooking and chores. traditional

the

Marriage to Mountain Jim—quite apart from his prob-

lem with whiskey—would have meant housekeeping. a job for the winter, she

fact, actively resisted

to be a sublime Shangri-la, she wasn't in-

It

it

down, unwilling

And when to

was a question of independence,

homemaking:

"it

would

suit

Evans offered her

exchange her glorious particularly

free-

from

me better to ride after cattle," she

wrote cheerfully. If

the duties of

home denned most women's

lives,

then travel— leaving

could liberate them in ways unimaginable in Britain. But not

home

in a

wives. All

wife

new

home-

they recreated

land: Bird's letters are full of portraits of hard-working settlers'

Western women, even

worked

if

like a

"ladies,"

worked hard; Bird writes that Evans's

"squaw." She was not about to spoil her exhilarating adventure

by joining their ranks.

Travel

Travel "unsexed" Victorian

women,

in

ways Bird

is

and Empire

both eager

for (she relishes

the fact that the cattleman "had forgotten that a lady was of the party") ious about: early in her

book she adds

as

as riding in

and anx-

a footnote describing her riding costume as

thoroughly feminine and, according to Dorothy Middleton,

London described her

457

when The

Times of

"male habiliments" she told her publisher "that

she had neither father nor brother to defend her reputation, she expected

him

personally to horsewhip the Times correspondent" (Victorian Lady Travellers [1965],

As Maria Frawley

8).

England .

.

.

(

1994),

seemed

writes in

"Women who

A

own

to challenge their

Women

Wider Range: Travel Writing by

flaunted their physical fortitude 'natural' limitations

and

and

in Victorian

vitality

abroad

to invite" portrayals of

themselves as "aggressively sexualized" (113).

Frawley devotes a chapter to "The Social Construction of the Victorian

Adventuress" in which she argues that travellers inary 'wild zone,'

one that enabled them

like

Bird "created a kind of imag-

to accomplish feats of physical

endurance

and courage that would be inconceivable for a middle-class woman in England." At the same time, these writers found ways "to translate adventure into an essentially

womanly

One

activity" (38).

such way was "to position themselves

figures in relation to the natives," as Bird

does

when

as

mother

she deplores "the extinction

of childhood" in the Western States (117-18). Such an analysis posits Victorian

women

Nor did "when

its

from patriarchal authority back home, and

flight

them home unequivocally; Frawley writes that by Isabella Bird Bishop—began to agitate for admittance

the patriarchy welcome

a few

women—led

Royal Geographic Society, the debate took a nasty turn. In a

the editor of The Times the influential ,

the capability of

test in toto

yet

values.

as fellows into the ter to

both in

travellers as

reinscribing

edge. Their sex

and

women

training render

genus of professional globe-trotter

is

MP George

let-

Curzon wrote: 'We con-

to contribute to scientific geographic knowl-

them

equally unfitted for exploration,

one of the horrors of the

later

and the

end of the nine-

teenth century'" (111).

Sir

Henry Morton

Stanley

from Through the Dark Continent (1878) Stanley

is

the only one of the six travellers excerpted here

discovering

new

Transculturation (1992)

of

sites like

could claim to be

Mary Louise

Pratt writes drily that "As a rule the 'discovery'

Lake Tanganyika involved making one's way to the region and asking

the local inhabitants

them

who

terrain or geographical features. In Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and

to take

you

if

knew of any big lakes, etc. in the area, then hiring whereupon with their guidance and support, you pro-

they

there,

ceeded to discover what they already knew" (202). In fairness to Stanley, even the Africans with the

Congo

whom

river led.

claim to be the

and among

whom

he travelled apparently had no idea where

Given the immense obstacles

first

to

descend the entire

Western claims to be "the

first" to

river

his expedition encountered, his is

probably truer than similar

find or view a particular place in

"unknown"

territory.

Stanley writes that the object of his "desperate journey

is

to flash a torch of

Travel and Empire

458

light across the western half of the Dark Continent." In a chapter entitled "The Genealogy of the Myth of the 'Dark Continent' " Patrick Brantlinger examines the

origins

and implications of

imagery (Rule of Darkness:

this

and

British Literature

Imperialism, 1830-1914 [1988]). By envisioning Africa as a dark and savage place,

the Victorians justified their

and

light:

own

name

intervention in the

of bringing civilization

"By the time of the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, which

is

often iden-

the start of the Scramble for Africa, the British tended to see Africa as a

tified as

center of

evil,

demonic darkness or barbarism, and cannibalism, which it was The obverse of the myth of the Dark Continent was that

a part of the world possessed by a

represented above

all

their duty to exorcise.

by .

.

human

slavery, .

of the Promethean and, at

sacrifice,

least in Livingstone's case, saintly

bestower of light"

(179, 180).

Books by Livingston, reading public by storm.

Stanley, Burton, Speke,

.

.

and others "took the Victorian

Although such accounts of African exploration do not

.

an incalculable inand the course of modern history. The great exnonfictional quest romances in which the hero-authors strug-

figure in standard histories of Victorian literature, they exerted

fluence

on

British culture

plorers' writings are gle

.

through enchanted, bedeviled lands toward an ostensible

the Nile's sources, the conversion of the cannibals. thors there

.

.

.

.

.

goal: the discovery of

The humble but

heroic au-

move from adventure to adventure against a dark, infernal backdrop where are no other characters of equal stature, only bewitched or demonic savages"

(180-81).

Stanley

is

one of the possible models

for

Conrad's Kurtz, and instructors plan-

ning to teach Heart of Darkness will certainly want to assign this excerpt from Through

the

Dark Continent. In an autobiographical essay Conrad

recalls his

disillusionment at Stanley Falls in 1890: "A great melancholy descended there was ...

no

newspaper

saic

memory

great haunting

'stunt'

and the

distasteful

that ever disfigured the history of ration." Brantlinger explains that

of Livingstone for the first

New

.

.

.

vilest

"The stunt was

Stanley's 1871 trek ... in search

Conrad saw Congo" (239-40).

York Herald, the scramble for loot that

enormous void

ready mentally peopled rivers, countries,

it,

filled

and tribes—all

well—Africa was already

full

is

it

about to be

tells

with most wonderful pictures of towns,

villages.

Yet—as Stanley knew

Ask students

at

Frank

up." Indeed, Stanley has

filled

in the imagination."

of people and

.

scramble for loot

Stanley repeatedly images Central Africa as a blank white space: he "this

.

conscience and geographical explo-

fyand King Leopold's rapacious private empire in the

Pocock that

.

only the unholy recollection of a pro-

knowledge of the

human

own

on me

"al-

villages,

perfectly

to consider the im-

how does it serve to free the European explorer to write paper? how does it serve to justify European colonial ex-

plications of this imagery;

himself across the blank

pansion?

Elsewhere in the book, Stanley exclaims—apparently without irony— "Think

what

a benefit

our journey

will

be to Africa!"

What

sort of benefits did Stanley

have in mind? Have students look closely at his heroic rhetoric:

with Frank Pocock

really likely to

is

the conversation

have taken place in such elevated language?

Stanley presents himself as a confident, resourceful

commander with

a

grand

vi-

and Empire

Travel

sion and the courage to carry

out; meanwhile, the Africans are irrational

it

bloodthirsty savages. Frightful as they are,

Englishmen but ghouls."

On

may own

Africa

also

There

a disturbing ruthlessness

is

river

of "the

stupendous

life

fame in

on an

epic scale.

about Stanley, and what may most

reader of the entire two volumes of Through, the Dark Continent

of

vulturous

filthy,

efforts to gain

be seen as a lifelong attempt to overcome the poverty and obscu-

origins, to recreate himself

of his

rity

level, Stanley's

and

takes the superior abilities of

it

minutes work" to clear the

"five

more personal

a

459

he was prepared to accept in pursuit of his

is

"Nine

goal:

strike a

the horrifying loss

men

lost in

one

ternoon!" he pauses to lament, before pushing on. Perhaps only Odysseus

turned

home

with fewer of his followers. In Loneliness and Time:

Writing in the Twentieth Century (1992)

Mark Cocker

archetypal travel book, then surely this

Yet

is it.

it

af-

re-

British Travel

writes: "If ever there

were an

contains an account, as Stanley

way down the Congo, of thirty-two battles between the white exand the indigenous Africans—thirty-two episodes in what was, in effect, one long, continuous, private armed conflict" (105). Stanley's private conflicts, however, had international consequences, as—for better or worse—his explorations helped bring Africa to the forefront of European conbludgeoned

his

plorer's Zanzibari retainers

sciousness.

Mary from

Kingsley West Africa (1897)

Travels in

As her famous defense of "the

good thick skirt" indicates, Kingsley on proper female attire as evidence of her own womanliness. Maria Frawley writes that "More than any other adventuress, implications of anomalous sexuality and aberrant womanKingsley bristled at hood. She publicly retaliated against being labeled a 'new woman,' and claimed blessing of a

joined Isabella Bird in insisting

.

.

.

.

.

.

she could not have accomplished anything without help from 'the superior sex'

(A Wider Range: Travel Writing b> This sort of thing makes

it

Women

in Victorian

England [19941, 113-14).

easy to treat Kingsley as a slightly ludicrous figure

poking crocodiles on the nose with her umbrella; Victorian lady travellers in

as

Evan Connell writes of

A Long Desire (1979), "They give the impression of being

mildly batty, these upright, energetic, innocent, valorous, polite, intelligent, prim,

and condescending at first glance,

complex and

British females in long skirts, carrying parasols" (24). Kingsley,

seems to lend herself to

Dorothy Middleton's students

this sort

of caricature, but she was in fact a

elusive personality.

who would

Victorian Lady Travellers (1965)

like to

know more about both

is

a

good

starting place for

Bird and Kingsley.

Though her

book is short on literary analysis, Middleton provides biographical background and she summarizes in detail the works of these and other travel writers. Another good source is the lengthy chapter on Kingsley in Catherine Barnes Stevenson's Victorian

Women

Travel Writers in Africa (1982), particularly useful for details of

Kingsley 's role as a

Kingsley 's tary

life

spokeswoman

for Africa

until the age of thirty

unmarried daughter

at

home; she

once she was back

was the

later

classic story

in Britain.

of the dutiful but

soli-

wrote of "the dreadful gloom of all

my

460

Travel

before

life

and Empire

went

I

West Africa." Biographers always mention her resentment pounds were spent on her ne'er-do-well brother's schooling, all was spent on hers. Those who have read Nightingale's

to

that two thousand

while nothing at

Cassandra might see parallels: a sense of confinement and

longing for

some meaningful work. Stevenson concludes

service

others

to

anonymity"

"fostered

radical

a

sense

"The

never had a

fact

lived in the joys, I

is

am no more

I

human

individual

a

life. I

human

of insignificance bordering

fires

of real

Kingsley was thirty-

being than a gust of wind

sorrows and worries of other people.

human

when

on

Travels,

is.

I

have

have always been the doer of odd jobs—and

have any right to do anything more than

the

coupled with a

her 1976 introduction to the Everyman edition of

(94). In

Elspeth Huxley quotes from a revealing letter written seven:

futility,

that Kingsley's years of

It

never occurs to

now and then

beings." In this letter she also said:

me

that

and warm myself at "I went down to West

sit

Africa to die." Kingsley's jaunty insouciance about heading off for "the white

man's grave" reads rather differently in

was not so

much

light

defying death as courting

it

of these words— the notion that she gives

an unsettling edge to her

jolly

comic send-up. Kingsley's low-key

approach and self-deprecating humor contrast vividly with

and macho swagger, as do her humility and openness to new exCompare her portrayal of cannibals to his: for Stanley, they are ferocious

Stanley's heroics

perience.

whose domestic habits happen to no moral disapproval, merely lively curiosity and willingness to learn. Unlike both Stanley and the missionaries, she doesn't see herself as a cultural superior conferring benefits upon Africans. There is a sense of wonder in her writing that might remind us of Mandeville. Never does she employ Dark Continent imagery, or suggest that she is a bringer of light. The Africans whom she meets are not unknowable and savage Others, but real peoplefellow participants in the absurd drama of life. Furthermore, as Mary Louise Pratt notes in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), "The masculine heroic discourse of discovery is not readily available to women." However, "through irony and inversion, [KingsleyJ builds her primitives, but for Kingsley they are just people

be a

from her

bit different

own meaning-making

own—she

registers

apparatus out of the raw materials of the monarchic male

discourse of domination and intervention. voice that asserts dies

power"

its

own kind

The

result ...

of mastery even as

(213). Pratt notes that "the

it

is

a

monarchic female

denies domination and paro-

domain she chose

to occupy"

was not the

one of male conquest, but the small-scale one of mangrove swamps, through which Kingsley sloshed zestfully, "up to her neck in water and slime." large-scale

Glossing the passage in which Kingsley

down

the

Rembwe"

recalls

those blissful nights "dropping

in a makeshift sailboat, Pratt writes:

"What world could be

more feminized? There shines the moon lighting the way; the boat a combination bedroom and kitchen; Kingsley the domestic goddess keeping watch and savoring the solitude of her night vigil. Kingsley creates value by decisively and rather fiercely rejecting fantasies of dominance and possession." Instead, she foregrounds the workings of her own imagination. "Far from taking possession of what .

.

she sees, she

steals

.

.

past" (214).

.

.

Oscar Wilde

While stitute

Pratt goes

on

own form

"her

to argue that Kingsley 's playfulness

461

and comic irony con-

of mastery," she concludes that Kingsley ultimately "seeks

out a third position that recovers European innocence. Politically she argued for the possibility of

economic expansion without domination and

"bumbling, comic innocence Africa" (215)—a Utopian

mode

one might look

.

exploitation."

that Pratt contrasts to the fearful, threatened

mode

the river in Heart of Darkness.

Women and

at Penelope Voyages:

which Karen Lawrence

Travel in the British

discusses Kingsley 's

Kingsley "deliberately eschews the search for identity thematized in

teenth-century travel literature."

Her "protean

much

nine-

narrative performance" "frustrates

our attempts to chart the narrator or traveler

While

Her

proposes a particular way of being a European in

"complex reand the individualism of adventure." Lawrence observes that

Literary Tradition (1994), in

lation to imperialism

.

on

experienced in night scenes Finally,

.

as a unified psychological 'self.'"

inevitably implicated in colonial discourse, Kingsley sought "to represent

and complex African cultures that were being trampled by" colonialist polpolicies and rhetoric of imperialism practiced by the Belgians and the more ostensibly liberal but still aggressive ethos of the British, who sought to 'civilize the natives.' Although she never the rich icy.

She "opposed both the blatantly aggressive

.

questioned the British presence in Africa, she argued that

.

.

its

Crown

colony ideol-

ogy and practice were both stupid and insensitive" (128-29).

Oscar Wilde Writing a half century after Wilde's death, Jorge Luis Borges claimed to have a discovery: "the provable Fifty years later,

and elementary

fact that

Wilde

is

made

almost always right."

Borges seems right too. Readers today praise Wilde's astuteness as

a critic, his brilliance as a dramatist, his insight as a social analyst, his proleptic ge-

nius as a

one-man media

event,

and

understanding of gender as per-

his theatrical

formance. Wilde was exceptionally versatile as a writer, perhaps more skilful in

more genres than any other author. Our

selections give a sense of the poet, critic,

playwright, political theorist, autobiographer,

want

and public man; students might

incidental journalism.

The

best introductions to the current discourse

are Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde, ed. Regenia

Companion

to

and on Wilde

Gagnier (1991), and the Cambridge

Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (1997). Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde:

Collection of Critical Essays (1969)

to

also

to investigate his novel, stories, fairy tales, lectures, letters, other plays,

remains valuable for

its

A

survey of earlier responses

Wilde, including those of Pater, Yeats, Joyce, Shaw, Auden, Alfred Douglas,

Hart Crane, and Borges. In

some

respects Wilde's

poems

are his shakiest claim to greatness,

elaborate stylistic pastiche of Baudelaire, Swinburne,

nated his three

first

publication, Poems (1881), has troubled critics ever since. But the

poems included here represent

strained in

London.

and the

and Browning that domi-

a different Wilde: simple in diction, re-

manner, they are characteristic of the

Impression du

early

Matin begins with allusions

modernist fascination with

to Whistler's paintings; like the

Oscar Wilde

462

painter,

Wilde

tions of light

of the city and the subtle transforma-

stresses the insubstantiality

and color

as night yields to day. Stanza 3

suddenly changes the

tempo. Compare these bolder images of dawn with a probable source, Tennyson's final lines ulates).

of sections 7 and

his paintings

an

harlot

1

Memoriam (whose stanza form Wilde

19 of In

em-

also

Wilde's lurid final stanza undercuts both Whistler's refusal to moralize in

and Tennyson's presentation of dawn as spiritually uplifting. Is the of this morning impression, or does she

artistically "legitimate" feature

function as a jarring, sensational note that breaks up the "harmony" and emphathe "clang" of early morning?

sizes

Each of the other two poems elaborates an aspect of Symphony

in Yellow

low and green,

and

stasis

is

artificial

(Thames

Impression

du Matin.

an exquisite Whistlerian tone-poem that wavers between

and natural (bus

to butterfly, fog to scarf),

The poem could be regarded

to rod of jade).

as

yel-

and motion an

aesthete's

version of Wordsworth's sonnet Westminster Bridge, Wilde substituting languid,

fashionable details (the trendy color yellow, the allusion to Whistler's butterfly nature, the itually

into

Wildean

silk scarf,

charged wonder; where Wordsworth's sleeping

life,

verses the

seems ready to burst

city

Wilde's urban activity gradually turns to stone. The Harlot's House

emphases of Impression du Matin, exploring the

bringing in the

dawn

sig-

the orientalist taste for jade) for Wordsworth's spir-

in the last stanza. Is the harlot's

harlot's

world

first,

re-

then

house an image of death,

of carnal knowledge, a sort of Goblin Market that entices

all

who

pass by? Wilde's

narrator keeps aloof, but his "love" enters, with mysterious results. Does the dancer's tune turn false for the speaker or for his love?

her arrival that breaks

Is it

up the waltz of the "dead" dancers, bringing relief in the form of silver-sandaled dawn? Or does his lover's defection give the speaker a new perspective that conthe (properly) "frightened

trasts

him

girl"

of

dawn

to the worldly

woman who

has

left

in the night?

In 1891 Walter Pater wrote that "TKe Decay of Lying ...

but unique in

its

half-

humorous, yet wholly convinced, presentment of certain valuable truths of

criti-

cism."

Wilde turns Platonic philosophy on

should be enjoyed for art

is

its

own

head by asserting not only that

sake, regardless of

art

mimetic accuracy, but also that

the original creation and nature merely the belated, inferior imitation. "Life

imitates Art far

more than Art

imitates Life,"

Nature also imitates Art." Therefore its

its

is all

Wilde concludes, and even "external

lying, the refusal to take

Nature or Reality on

own terms, "is the proper aim of Art." Many of Wilde's theories, such as the artist's independence from

moment, and the

foolishness of imitating nature, can be

o'clock" lecture (see the "Aesthetes

and Decadents"

his historical

found in Whistler's "Ten

section),

and Whistler

in fact

charged Wilde with plagiarism. Wilde does acknowledge "the Master," as Whistler liked to be called: contending that

life

imitates art,

Wilde

dinary change that has taken place in the climate of ings of the

Thames. Students might compare the

Whistler's lecture

mous

attributes "the extraor-

London"

style,

to Whistler's paint-

substance,

and imagery of

and Wilde's dialogue (their common source was Gautier's Maupin [1835]).

Preface to Mademoiselle de

fa-

Oscar Wilde

Whatever Wilde's

intellectual debt to Whistler,

and comedic genius.

critical

First

Wilde shocks

463

The Decay of Lying sparkles with

his readers

by assaulting their pre-

conceptions: he doesn't like nature 7 He's going to defend lying7 Then, instead of .

treating

from

"careless habits of accuracy,"

he

re-

he pushes further, charging poets with

and claiming that Hamlet proves his madness when up to nature." And yet, by logical exposition

"Art should hold the mirror

says,

and constant reference portant

it is

to literary history,

Wilde gradually makes us

art the reality," since "a great artist invents a type,

Women

see

how

im-

that life—the raw material of art—be transformed by the artistic process

something more beautiful and expressive. Moreover,

(lying) into

and

.

his attention-getting start,

and

"life is

the mirror,

Life tries to

copy

it."

imitate the Pre-Raphaelite look; frustrated lovers shoot themselves as did

Goethe's Werther; Impressionist paintings create

London

fogs.

How

can

this be?

Because "things are because we see them, and what we see depends on the Arts

Ask students to come up with examples of this phenomenon—have they noticed a kind of landscape, a style of dress, a time of day or

that have influenced us."

type of weather as a result of having

By the

last lines

been taught to see by

of the dialogue, the sympathetic reader

outrageous claim, unthinkable at the

start,

a book, painting, or film? is

ready to entertain the

that nature's "chief use

is

to illustrate

quotations from the poets." In one of the most amusing passages, Wilde provokingly traces

American com-

mercialism (perceived then, as now, to be a major threat to European culture) to

George Washington's

inability to tell a

lie.

Why has the

cherry tree story assumed

mythic status? Has public veneration of "the truth" contributed to the "materialof the U.S. and its indifference to poetry? One could use this passage way into Wilde's theory about lying. Point out that he carefully distinguishes as a lying from the mere "misrepresentation" of politicians and lawyers, who actually try izing spirit"

to convince people of their veracity. For

own

Wilde, lying should be practiced for

its

no pretence of plausibility. Thinking particularly of Zola, he argues that when Fact invades the realm of Fancy and Romance, art becomes vulgar and wearisome. But lying looks to art itself for a model, and can thus produce works of beauty and imagination. Why does Wilde use the word "lying," instead of imagination or creativity, as do the Romantics? In Oscar Wilde (1987) Richard Ellmann suggests that imagination is "too natural" a word—for Wilde, lying is more conscious, sinful, and willful (302). sake, with

The Soul of

Man

under Socialism belongs to the tradition of Victorian social

prophecy that includes Carlyle's Morris's Beauty of stresses the

flourish in

Life.

Past

and

Present,

Ruskin's Nature of Gothic, and

Meditating on "the condition of England," each author

interconnection of aesthetics and politics, and

how

beauty cannot

an ugly, unjust society. But Wilde begins his surprising essay with a chal-

lenge to conventional definitions; instead of calling for collective action, he asserts a startling preference for individualism,

would

relieve us

and the means of achieving it: "Socialism living for others." As he says later,

from that sordid necessity of

individualism "does not try to force people to be good.

good when they are

let

It

alone." Gagnier points out that this

knows is

that people are

"Wilde's best-known

Oscar Wilde

464

work

in the

world

at large"

aesthetics," that ranges

Foucault,

who wondered

work of art"?

and belongs "clearly with a long tradition of socialist Schiller and Marx to Morris, Trotsky, Marcuse, and

from

in a late interview, "couldn't everyone's

become

life

a

(7-9).

human

Reenvisioning both society and

nature,

Wilde combines

a faith in

spontaneous personal development with a bold, deliberately impractical case for abolishing private property; he turns over to machines

the necessary and un-

"all

Wilde offers "A map of the world that does not include Utopia for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity

pleasant work." Anticipating the objection that his views are Utopian,

one of

his brilliant rejoinders:

is

not worth even glancing

is

always landing."

at,

and structure of the essay to Mill's method in On Liberty. work through the vast body of received wisdom surrounding try to their topic, but while Mill carefully debunks common misconceptions, Wilde embraces conventional maxims so that he can turn the cliches inside out and then argue seriously from his apparently thoughtless one-liners. The essay moves rapidly

Compare

the style

Both authors

through a

series

of unexpected insights which constitute almost a line of reason-

ing in themselves: "Charity creates a multitude of sins;" "disobedience

one can

original virtue;" "as for the virtuous poor, sibly

pity

man's

is

them but one cannot

pos-

admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy;" "agitators are

a set of interfering, sary;" "wealthy

meddling people.

people

.

.

That

.

why

is

they are absolutely neces-

than impoverished people;" "there

are, as a class, better

is

nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour." Each of these formulations forces a reconsideration of Victorian social policy

them might spark discussion on how poverty and

and

its

platitudes; any

one of

should be ad-

social inequality

dressed.

At the heart of Wilde's program

is

his claim that private property gets in the

way of individual development, encumbering the

He

poor.

criticizes

privileged even as

the social conditioning that focuses people

it

starves the

on

"gain not

growth," and to end this obsession with ownership he proposes an enlightened self-reliance (he

admired Emerson). Some

lines

experience in Reading Gaol: "Public opinion all,

even in prison a

man

can be quite

now

read ironically in view of his

of no value whatsoever.

is

Most remarkable, though,

free."

.

is

.

.

After

the long

passage reinterpreting the Gospels, where he imagines Jesus saying "You have a

wonderful personality. Develop stantly

it.

Be

yourself."

about the implications of the Gospel

Wilde apparently thought con-

stories, as

many people who

recalled

and Gide, attested. Just as Wilde foresees the limitations of a planned economy ("under an industrial barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any such freedom at all"), in his his conversation, including Yeats

reading of Christianity he anticipates the ego-centered approach of late twentieth-

century psychology and religion.

suming that the road Does

his

Ask

students

to self-realization lies

if

they think Wilde

message seem today to be more personal than

manual than

political manifesto?

that individual

and

Or

is

is

correct in as-

through the shedding of possessions. social,

more

"self-help"

that analysis itself a proof of Wilde's point

political philosophies

need

to converge?

Oscar Wilde

Wilde added the Preface

465

to The Picture of Dorian Gray in angry response to critics

of the novel. For example, "Those

who

corrupt without being charming. That

find ugly meanings in beautiful things are is

a fault." But, as Richard

Ellmann points

out, the Preface provokingly "flaunted the aestheticism" that the book's

moralistic ending indicts ([19871, 315) Indeed,

Preface

would

later

two inflammatory

be used against Wilde during his

"There

trials:

lines

is

own

from the

no such thing

moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That

as a

is

Ellmann comments that "To prevent the book's being treated as immoral, Wilde excluded morality from its province, although it exposed the follies of a false all."

and

excessive aestheticism" (322).

really

Ask students

beyond moral judgment. Can

if

books

literature that

nous, or threatening to public safety be evaluated only style? Is

(or other

appears

works of art) are

racist, sexist, treaso-

on the grounds of

literary

the denunciation of "dangerous" ideas the exclusive province of jittery dic-

"Why Write?"

tators

and intolerant

offers

an unexpected defense of Wilde's position. For

moralists? In his essay

(1949), Jean-Paul Sartre

Sartre, reading requires a vol-

untary collaboration of reader and writer to produce meaning

(cf.

Wilde's

the

"it is

and any attempt on the writer's part to restrict the reader's freedom diminishes the work of art. "Thus," says the moment I feel Sartre, echoing Wilde, "there are only good and bad novels myself a pure freedom [in the process of reading] I can not bear to identify myself with a race of oppressors. ... I'd like to know a single good novel whose express purpose was to serve oppression, a single good novel which has been written spectator,

and not

life,

that art really mirrors"),

.

.

.

against Jews, Negroes, workers, or colonial people."

Wilde's remark about Caliban's rage over seeing (or not seeing) his face in the

mirror raises the question,

our

literature

and

why do we

read?

literary characters to be?

How much

like daily life

do we want

Since, for Wilde, art mirrors the spec-

warning about the dangers of interpretation (going beneath the

tator, his

reading the symbol) acquires a sort of Oedipal urgency. art will tell us

about ourselves. His stance

recalls

We

surface,

have to beware of what

Mark Twain's

"Notice" at the start

of Huckleberry Finn (1884): "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will

be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in

sons attempting to find a plot in plies), art is

it

will

be shot."

If,

as

it

will

be banished; per-

Wilde claims (and Twain im-

not to be put to conventional uses, perhaps

it

serves a different pur-

pose. In Wilde's case, his defiantly amoral attitude functions as a Victorian class

indicator in

its

"gentlemanly" disdain for anything that smacks of business and

trade.

The Importance of Being Earnest can be read as a seriously comic, or comically seriWilde had earlier presented in The Soul of

ous, dramatization of the social theories

Man

Under Socialism (Lady Bracknell denounces land ownership as a nuisance;

Algernon

chastises the lower classes for not providing a

play also explores the aesthetic issues ticularly art.

Wilde had

good moral example). The

raised in The Decay of Lying, par-

the connection between art and lying, and the dictum that

Wilde's characters invent alter egos,

cial roles

with utter

sincerity, ultimately

lie

life

imitates

without hesitation, and play their

confirming the

reality

of their

own

so-

pre-

Oscar Wilde

466

While earnestness

tenses.

who

a vital asset to the talented liars

is

routine into an aesthetically satisfying spectacle, truth

is

transform social

simply irrelevant.

be-

It

longs to the dull realist novel, to Life, not Art. Jack begs Gwendolen's pardon at

the end:

"it is a terrible

thing for a

been speaking nothing but the

What

counts

is

the free-play of wit and imagination; as

"In matters of grave importance, Bracknell says,

man to find out suddenly that all his Can you forgive me?"

style,

not

sincerity,

"We live in an age of surfaces. What more can one desire?" In .

looks everything.

he has

.

is

Gwendolen remarks:

the vital thing." Or, as Lady

Algernon has nothing, but he

such a world, "success in

life,"

to

the outward manifestations of

gender, or character (gestures, etiquette, the rituals of social intercourse); a

class,

substantive, private, inner self

formed you

.

on performance and

use Pater's phrase, depends

life

truth.

will always

nowhere

is

an audience.

as if before

look at

me

When

to be found. Every action

Jack proposes,

just like that, especially

Gwendolen

when

is

to be per-

says, "I

hope

there are other people

present."

Wilde's presentation of such self-consciously creative personas inevitably

re-

own double

life

minds the audience of the

play's

immensely

As

as self-fashioning Bunburyist.

Peter

Raby

to the play, The Importance of Being Earnest:

characters are

all

and Gwendolen's and Algy invent characters

Cecily's

life

and

morality.

young women, begin.

.

.

.

The

.

.

.

play, so far

sion of the play, bills at

life"

Reader's

his

them

Companion (1995), "Wilde's

Chasuble's sermons, Prism's novel,

Lady Bracknell's

fictions allow

and

writes in the best single introduction

A

storytellers:

... to enable

The dual

marriage, suggests that

paid

diaries,

list

of eligible young men. Jack

to escape the restrictions of Victorian

each bachelor to

live a

double

life.

cannot wait to be married so that their double

in contrast,

took the "double

and

scriptwriters

clever author,

from suggesting that the double

it is

when Algy

closer to his

is

own

The can

be dispelled by

life will

permanent and inescapable part of

a

theme

life

it" (89).

Wilde

situation in the earlier four-act ver-

nearly sent to debtor's prison because of Jack's un-

the Savoy hotel; students might wish to compare versions in an anno-

tated edition such as that edited by Russell Jackson (1980).

One

many paradoxes of the play is that self-invention is also a quest for The play culminates with Jack's question, "Would you kindly inform am?" Some critics have compared Earnest with Alice in Wonderland as a

of the

self-discovery.

me who

I

quintessentially Victorian search for self

amid the

elaborate, arbitrary conventions

of society, while others link Wilde with Beckett, Ionesco, and Stoppard as an explorer of the Absurd. Joseph Bristow, for example, writes that in

theater of alienation

European modernism"

artifice,

"Wilde's

Both

is it

can

tell

.

(cited in Raby, 22). Yet

back into the history of Western theater:

"Who

its

rejection of re-

the beginnings of a comedy marks or estrangement which would become a cornerstone of

alism and obsession with

me who

plays deal with heroes

I

am?" was

who

it is

.

equally possible to read Earnest

Jack's question,

first

.

echoing King Lear's

posed by Sophocles in Oedipus Rex.

have "carelessly" lost both parents early in

life,

both are raised in ignorance of their true families, and both feel compelled to establish their genealogy in order to resolve social crises and penetrate the mysteries of identity. Oedipus's discoveries have the effect of forcing

him out of

society,

Oscar Wilde

him

while Jack's bring

further in; Wilde comically rewrites Sophocles to

intolerable doubleness of

Oedipus—his being both son and husband

become an admirable, "brotherly"

social trait that the

467

make

the

to Jocasta—

male leads share: "the

vital

Importance of Being Earnest." Like a cheerful Freud, Wilde presents the Oedipal

human

state as a universal

condition.

Other trappings of Greek tragedy are also revised. Lady Bracknell

is, as Mary McCarthy once remarked, "Olympian" (see Ellmann [1969], 109); she is the dea ex machina whose unshakable observance of social ritual propels the marriage plot.

The

cucumber sandwiches, and form of consumption: "They have been

Aristotelian fatal flaw turns into mild gluttony for

the expiation of sin eating muffins.

baby,

is

also expressed as a

That looks

like repentance."

Wilde focuses on the trappings, not the

Parodying the convention of the lost child:

Miss Prism

is

delighted to have

mind the baby whom she had mistaken for the manuThe Greek Chorus is implicit in the preoccupation with what

her handbag back, never

her novel.

script of

"Society"— represented by the audience (and Lady Bracknell)—will think.

But do the "doubleness" of the characters and selves prevent

what

for Aristotle

their preoccupation with fictive

was a key feature of Greek drama, the audience's

Do we have sympathy with Algy and Jack, with Gwendolen? Is the play too clever to be humanly felt? George Bernard example, was unmoved by it, though he admired Wilde. Or does it strike

involvement with the characters? Cecily and

Shaw, for

too close to to

do with

The

home

in the sense that

self-presentation

the men.

but

it

this

much our

shows how

notions of "self" have

more poland commanding than

play inverts other longstanding social norms: the servants are

ished than their masters; the

world:

it

and performance?

The scene

shift in

Act

deceptively suggests a

country place

women II

are

more

forthright

further emphasizes the topsy-turvyness of this

move from urban

sophistication to rural innocence,

outdoor garden

isn't pastoral at all— the

is

as fully con-

and aesthetic an environment as any interior (books, chairs, tables, tea service). As Lady Bracknell puts it, "A girl with a simple, unspoiled nature, like Gwendolyn, could hardly be expected to reside in the country." structed

Lady Bracknell merits special attention. is

an authoritarian representation "of

and negative

in Victorian society.

herself has manipulated

life

But

all

One

that

of Wilde's greatest creations, she

is

most

obstructive, conservative,

as the play unfolds,

for years" (Raby, 65).

She

is

it

becomes

clear that she

prepared to change the

fashionable side of Belgrave Square, and with a sort of ruthless perspicacity she

pronounces smoking a suitable occupation for a gentleman, recognizes that education poses "a serious danger to the upper classes,"

some

relatives as

soon

to revolution, violence, class privilege.

"When

I

She

as possible" if

and

advises Jack to "acquire

he hopes to marry. Her frequent references

reveal her awareness of the fragility of upper-

and anarchy

assesses social position with the acuteness of a

married Lord Bracknell

I

former bounder:

had no fortune of any kind. But

I

never

dreamed of allowing that to stand in my way." She is pleased with Jack's income and excited about Cecily's fortune: looking out for Algernon and Gwendolyn, she wishes to assure the class status that only

money can

Thus, as Raby comments, the world of the play

buy.

"is a

mixture of the reassuringly

Oscar Wilde

468

and the

stable

offers the

chaotically surreal. Society, led by

its

spokesperson Lady Bracknell,

appearance of respectability, but the respectable has a disconcerting

The inand manner,

habit of vanishing, like the Cheshire Cat, leaving only a grin behind. dividual characters are capable of rapid transformations" in affection

and have none of the

familial or

upon. Lady Bracknell's intent

on

moral

difficult role

is

stability that

"to

.

.

.

Victorian society prided

itself

impose some kind of order on a society

dissolving before her eyes" (81-82). Marriage, the social glue of high so-

and the goal toward which all the characters race, is portrayed as dispiriting and divisive: Lane finds that "in married households the champagne is rarely of a ciety

first-rate

brand," Lord Bracknell's

ill

health

which Lady Bracknell manages her own General Moncrieff was a

may be a Bunburyish Gwendolen is likely

life;

fiction

through

marry

to

often;

man of peace except in his domestic life; and "a man who

marries without knowing Bunbury," Algy remarks, "has a very tedious time of

Does the

play finally challenge or confirm the social conventions that

men and

it

it."

mocks?

"Why

should there be one law for

ously;

but he asks his momentary "mother," Miss Prism, and this misprision

characteristic of

how Wilde

structures inevitably

deliberately ironizes

all

of his serious points.

triumph over individual witticisms, or does the

reinforcement of tradition and hierarchy, in

dermine

another for women?" Jack asks

all

seriis

Do social

clear-sighted

their glorious folly, ultimately un-

Raby points out and empire were at the impermanence, and to the inherited

their credibility? Critics tend toward the latter position.

that although the play was written

when

Britain's prosperity

draw attention to and political structures complacency that cocoons them" (7). Ellmann comments that "In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Wilde had repudiated marriage, the family, and private property; in his play, he repudiated them by pretending they are ineradicable, urging their enforcement with a mad insistence which shows how preposterous they are" their peak, "Wilde's jokes surreptitiously

and

absurdity, of the prevailing social

([1987], 422).

demolition of

And late

Katharine

Worth concludes

that Earnest

is

Wilde's "supreme

nineteenth-century social and moral attitudes, the triumphal

conclusion to his career as revolutionary moralist" (155). In addition to Raby, significant criticism of the play includes Katharine Worth,

Oscar Wilde (1983); Harold Bloom, ed., Modern Critical Interpretations: Oscar Wilde's

The Importance of Being Earnest (1988); and the Earnest section of Gagnier's Essays.

Theatre of the 1890s (1990): "Like said to have lost

its

its

contains a character

'parents'— those forgotten farces that in a real sense gave birth

named Bunbury who

is

Godpapa (1891),

prone to

took revenge on Art: Bunbury was played by an actor

dence used against Wilde during

fictitious

who

later

which

helped collect

skill at

tional cliches into provocative, show-stopping aphorisms.

in 1895,

a play

ailments (127). Life evi-

his trials.

Contemporaries instantly recognized Wilde's uncanny

trivial

the

hero, The Importance of Being Earnest can be

to Wilde's play" (124). Powell's genealogy includes

was a

Critical

For a fascinating contextualization, see Kerry Powell's Oscar Wilde and

turning conversa-

But they also claimed

occupation, something anyone could do. Reviewing

G. B. Shaw wrote: "They laugh angrily

at his epigrams.

An .

.

Ideal .

it

Husband

They

protest

Oscar Wilde

that the trick

obvious, and that such epigrams can be turned out by the score by

is

any one lightminded enough to condescend to such tain,

am

I

Wilde play

the only person in at will" (cited in

Englishman

on

Building

utterly

London who cannot

frivolity. sit

Beckson, Oscar Wilde: The

For Shaw, the key was Wilde's to "the

469

far as

I

can

write

ascer-

an Oscar

Critical Heritage [1970], 176).

an Irishman,

sensitivity, as

As

down and

to English seriousness,

unconscious of his real self" (Beckson

177).

Regenia Gagnier writes that Wildean wit springs from

this insight,

the author's status as "an outsider— Irish, homosexual, artist— to Victorian imperial,

commercial, and polite society." Wilde used the linguistic expose the

filiation to

group

identity.

rituals

of group

af-

of the social structure, and the shallowness of

instability

"His legendary wit consisted in practice of a talent for inverting

Victorian truisms.

.

.

Yet the astonishing thing about his wit

.

word

is

not that he could

word of the platitude, but rather that he knew the platitudes so well to begin with. His mind was stocked with commonplaces, and these seem to have been there for the sole purpose of always

.

.

.

find the right

to substitute for the key

their subversion" (Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde

and

the Victorian Public

[1986], 7-8).

De

Profundis

might have been called "The Soul of

has, according to Gagnier, a vast—and

emotional accuracy in describing prison to his ex-lover,

Wilde

Man Under

growing—readership who life

While the

how he came

It its

([1991], 17). In this undelivered letter

veers between bitter accusation

cusation, trying to understand

Lock and Key."

relate directly to

to

and even more

be in prison, and

bitter self-ac-

how he might live

venting of anger and anguish, it retheme he had addressed more hopefully in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, namely the necessity of self-understanding. Wilde twice repeats his call for painful introspection: "the supreme vice is shallowness. Whatever is realized is right." The line carries with it an echo of Edgar's pronouncement in King Lear in the midst of his distress and desperate soul-sifting, "Ripeness is all." Yet even as he catalogues Bosie's vanities, and proclaims his own arrival at "absolute Humility," Wilde expands on his genius and his achievements: "I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age." Claiming for himself even greater representative status than Byron, Wilde stunningly conducts his own apotheosis, writes his own epitaph: "I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a to get out.

epistle reads at first as a

turns consistently to the

phrase, ity

and

all

existence in an epigram."

Unhumble

as

it

may seem,

could be regarded as in keeping with Wilde's gnostic intent:

izing

what

one's

own

I

am

that

But in

tion, moralizing,

is

to arrest one's

"realizing

what

I

own development.

artistic potential

less

It

my

real-

my

It is

the denial of

per-

important to his quest than the assessment of his

and accomplishment.

age that in

...

sometimes seems that Wilde's

Is it

Faustian dramatization of his talent that leads child of

only by

am," Wilde produces a melange of recrimina-

and self-aggrandizement.

sonal dealings with Bosie are

own

this grandiosis

have found comfort of any kind," he remarks. "To reject

I

experiences

the Soul."

"It

perversity,

and

personal remorse or a sort of

him

to write, "I

was so

for that perversity's sake,

I

typical a

turned the

Oscar Wilde

470

good things of my argue that the

which he

life

letter

is

to evil,

and the

Wilde's

evil things

creates a Satanic Bosie

who

(from public grace), a crucifixion

(at

of

my

life

to good"?

One

could

dramatic work, a biblical melodrama in

last great

tempts Eve/Christ/Oscar, precipitating a

and

after the trials),

and

fall

finally a moral/liter-

ary resurrection.

Companion Reading

When

discussing the transcript of the

trials

(used as the basis of the recent play,

Gross Indecency), debate the issues raised in the cross examination. tified in

Is

Wilde

jus-

dismissing "Philistine" or "illiterate" responses to art? Does the artist bear

may defy main-

any responsibility for the public's (mis)interpretation of a work that stream views? Wilde other man's poison."

commented

Why

in the

second

trial

that "one man's poetry

did Douglas's poems, or Wilde's poetic

is

letters to

an-

him,

seem so disturbing to Wilde's opponents? Any trial is a sort of drama, a morality play in which guilt and innocence are meted out by judge and jury. The series of Wilde's trials came about because Queensbury accused Wilde of "posing" as a sodomite; Carson questioned Wilde about his artistic "pose." Should we read the trials—and Wilde's performance at them—theatrically, as exploring a role that first Wilde, and then British society, had created for the errant artist? See Ed Cohen's Talk on the Wilde Side (1993) for an illuminating reappraisal of the received view of Wilde's "tragic downfall."

Cohen reexamines

newspaper reports on which H. Montgomery Hyde based The

showing how Hyde constructed a version of the by contemporary

trials

Trials of

including Richard Ellmann in his 1987 biography. Rather

critics,

Cohen

Oscar Wilde,

that has been perpetuated

than regarding the story as that of the personal downfall of a genius "fatal mistake,"

the original

situates

it

in a larger social

and

who made

a

political context, elucidat-

ing the underlying assumptions about normative masculinity,

and "Wilde's emer-

gence as a paradigmatic figure for a discernibly nonnormative male sexuality at the

end of the nineteenth century."

Perspectives

Aesthetes and Decadents Closely identified with the idea of "art for

ment of Aestheticism flowered

in

art's sake,"

the literary

and

England during the 1880s and

artistic

move-

early 1890s.

By

then the concept of moral, didactic art had been under attack for several decades

from those who thought that books and pictures should be judged on their own intrinsic merits, rejecting a

any claim to

utility, social

relevance, or the education of

wide audience. Announcing the independence of artists from their times, figures

such

as Whistler,

Wilde, and Symons scorned practicality and progress; hero-

ically—in their eyes— they faced isolation as dandies

and Bohemians

cast

out by a

bourgeois world. Creating amoral art became their sacred mission. Whereas

Aesthetes and Decadents

471

Ruskin had said that apprehension of beauty leads to apprehension of God in the world, Aesthetes argued that perceiving beauty was in

Claiming that "Life

perience.

and of

terribly deficient in form,"

is

itself a religious ex-

Oscar Wilde encour-

aged his readers to devote themselves to the perfections of art rather than questions of conduct: "Aesthetics are higher than ethics.

They belong

to a

more

in the early 1880s,

when

spiritual sphere."

Aesthetic ideas—and the reaction to

them— coalesced

they were parodied in George DuMaurier's cartoons in Punch (1879-81), spoofed in Gilbert and Sullivan's light opera Patience (1881),

and sympathetically appraised in in England (1881). As we learn

Walter Hamilton's book, The Aesthetic Movement

from

W.

S.

Gilberts

If You're

Anxious

for to Shine,

fond of "Queen Anne" architecture, medieval furnishings,

found

and

feathers,

department

of stained

also enjoyed a revival; authors

ceived as the words

upon

it.

Japanese

of their favorite articles could be

store that

had opened in London in 1875.

the "vegetable" motifs Aesthetes sported were sunflowers,

and green carnations, the

glass,

Many

rarified conversation.

at the Liberty

Among

Aesthetes were conspicuously

art, bits

last

invented by Wilde.

demanded

The

lilies,

art of

peacock

book-making

that the page be as thoughtfully con-

Whistler, Wilde, Yeats, Symons, John Gray,

and many and a

others published their works in graceful editions employing distinctive type

maximum

on every page. Thus in books as in interior design, arand illustration, Aesthetes drew on the resources of both Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts Movement to create a taste for elegant simplicity that was diametrically opposed to the usual Victorian clutter. of white space

chitecture,

The

ostentatiousness of Aesthetic beauty-worship signalled to Gilbert that the

Aesthetic

manner was an

who had

elaborate pose designed to draw attention to egotistical

Many commentators have seen in and conversation of Whistler and Wilde the birth of the modern cult of celebrity, of fame as a media event based more on image than accomplishment. George DuMaurier is less cynical than Gilbert, and his clever, detailed cartoons seem designed to present the Aesthetes anthropologically, as if he were a bemused Mayhew chronicling a strange new tribe of Londoners. Against a trendy backdrop of Japanese and Chinese elements, The Six-Mark Tea-Pot features a drooping man and an imposing, sweepingly gowned woman with the long neck and thick hair that characterize Rossetti's portraits of Jane Morris. "Six-mark" blueand-white pottery of Chinese origin was highly prized, and the couple's aspiration to "live up to it" proceeds from one of Aestheticism's central tenets, that Life bounders,

a flair for self-promotion.

the flamboyant gestures

should imitate Art.

But not everybody's

life

Ten O'Clock lecture that art

would be

better off

if

had is

artistic potential.

Whistler makes

it

clear in the

not for the multitude, and that the middle-classes

they ceased to regard art as a fashionable status-symbol or a

source of moral instruction. Divorcing art from history, national culture, and even nature, Whistler asserts the artist's autonomy, his indifference to politics, social organization, or mimetic obligation: "To say to the painter, that nature as

she

is, is

any relation to

its

moment

or context?

is

to be taken

on the piano." Does art then have Students may pick up on the ways in which

to say to the player, that he may

sit

Aesthetes and Decadents

472

Whistler's vision of a universal, eternal art released from Victorian notions of

morality or progress

and

Artist

is

is

in itself quite Victorian. His contradictory gendering of Art

proves

it

to

As the show, the

win the favor of the same time that it

especially interesting; the "Master's" quest to

"cruel jade" of inspiration seems to assert male

be

useless, since

selections fm-de-siecle

supremacy

Art herself will decide

whom

at the

to favor.

from Gilbert, Whistler, DuMaurier, Leverson, and Beerbohm was an era of wit and witticism, in which caricatures and

toons flourished alongside self-absorbed rhapsodies over art and Leverson's short story Suggestion

volvement

and

(in the

values.

fusion,

The

and the

first

nuanced parody not only of Aesthetic its

narrator),

self-in-

but also of upper-class family

life

sentence announces the theme of gender definition and con-

story ends with a

"home." Leverson,

tize,

a

is

person of "Cissy,"

car-

artificiality.

like

word Leverson has done her

best to problema-

her great friend Wilde, delights in exploring contem-

porary social types through the lens of a sophisticated gay consciousness dedicated

and

to cultivating pleasurable impressions

gagingly selfish teen-aged Prospero

who

suggestive appearances. "Cissy"

seeks to arrange his

own

is

an en-

domestic happi-

ness by stage-managing the love lives of his father, his sister Marjorie, Marjorie's friend Laura (representing Victorian patriarchy, the

the Aesthete, respectively). Cissy

is

a

charming but ruthless

and

New Woman, and

egotist, particularly in

the way he disposes of Marjorie, yet he can also be seen as a curiously moral figure whose desire for revenge upon his faithless, self-absorbed father seems motivated

more by

A

aesthetics than by ethics.

public discomfited by male characters like "Cissy" was equally shocked by

"manly" women. Feeling

itself

on the

defensive, British society policed the borders

of hitherto more fluid sexual identities with

new medical and

legal definitions

of

normalcy. Confronted with a growing openness about women's bodies and their desires, doctors lent credibility to the idea,

found in many

fin-de-siecle

works, that

women could become vampiric sexual predators, who endangered the human race when

they cultivated either their intellects or feminist alliances.

Idols of Perversity:

Bram

Dijkstra's

Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Sieck Culture (1986) covers this

ground in fascinating

detail,

and

is

especially strong

on visual images of the femme

fatale.

The emergence of

the

word

"lesbian" at this time conveniently served to

stig-

matize women's friendships that appeared to threaten male power. In Studies in Sexual Inversion (1897), Havelock Ellis, first

culine simplicity,

He

one of the

time a deviant, "lesbian" identity to

and ...

all

first sexologists,

assigned for the

women who "show some

traits

of mas-

a disdain for the petty feminine artifices of the toilet."

also singled out "brusque energetic

movements," and "especially the attitude

towards men, free from any suggestion either of shyness or audacity." But because Parliament did not dare to address female sexuality, declaring less,"

women

"passion-

sexual relationships between females did not undergo any legal definition

and prohibition, as did relationships between men. Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, the aunt and niece who created the composite poet "Michael Field," lived quietly; but though they did not ally themselves

with the attention-getting

tactics

of Wilde, Douglas, Beardsley, or Symons,

Aesthetes and Decadents

poems

their lyric

challenge received

decades of neglect, their reputation

David

see

Women

J.

is

Moriarty, "'Michael Field'

and

their

man

and the complex

issues raised

and

art

desires. After

an overview of

recovering: for

Male

Rhoda

Writers of the English-Speaking World, ed.

lesbianism as a

wisdom about women's

473

their career,

Critics," Nineteenth Century

B.

Nathan

(1986);

by "poems written by two

on

their

women writing

writing as Sappho," see Yopie Prins, "Sappho Doubled: Michael Field,"

Yale Journal of Criticism

8 (1995): 165-86, and "A Metaphorical Field: Katherine

Bradley and Edith Cooper," Victorian Poetry 33.1 (1995): 129-145. In the same issue of Victorian Poetry see also

Holly Laird's "Contradictory Legacies: Michael

and the Feminist Restoration," which argues intriguingly that "there is an uncanny parallel between the archival creativity which was the hallmark of Field's caField

and that of the contemporary feminist scholar/teacher" (112). of DaVinci's La Gioconda follows from Pater's description of her in The Renaissance as predatory and vampiric, but for Bradley and Cooper the keynote becomes the lady's power and self-restraint. In A Pen-Drawing of Leda, they reer

Field's rendition

give Leda, "wild

and

Leda

free,"

who

control over her encounter with the swan,

yields

Readers accustomed (especially from Yeats 's poem) to regarding

to her will (line 7).

as a victim are forced to reconsider.

On

Michael

Field's pictorial strategy in

and other poems, see Kenneth R. Ireland, "Sight and Song: A Study of the Interrelations between Painting and Poetry," Victorian Poetry 15.1 (1977): 9-20.

these

Their

later lyric,

A

Girl,

mingles the descriptive qualities of La Gioconda with the

passionate embrace of Leda. In this "portrait," the poet's apparently detached ren-

dering of her subject collapses in line 10 into a knit"), a

ation.

common

of consummation that momentarily

But the author(s) can

girl will

poem,

moment

still

identity ("our souls so

stalls

"come" into some further relation to "the work begun"—whether

it

if

the

be the

their love, or even a sexual act.

Few

critics

agree

on

just

where Aestheticism— often regarded

ward art—shades over into Decadence, a term frequently used tic style

an

the act of poetic cre-

give birth to a divine poetic "conception"

as

an attitude

to describe

both

to-

artis-

and personal behavior. "Decadence" literally means a "falling away" from Walter Pater used the word in 1873 to praise some poems of Renaissance, and many find the seeds of decadence in his famous conclu-

earlier standard.

the late

sion to The Renaissance, where he spoke yearningly of "any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours,

and curious odors." As

a literary term, "decadence"

gained currency in France during the 1880s to designate the elaborately crafted

works of the Symbolists. Yet by the 1890s, the word, often with ciation intact,

had become

in

England a vague and fashionable

censure and avant-garde respect. tificial,

The decadent

abnormally developed (or thought to be

object or action so,

and unnaturally stimulated by physical disease or ary decadents

had been Latin poets of

late

is

French pronun-

both moral

usually highly ar-

such as an intellectual woman),

spiritual decay.

Roman

English Decadents suggested that the decline and

its

label of

The

antiquity, so the

fall

original

of the British Empire was im-

minent. The various strains of decadence— the spiritual and the sensual, the tic

liter-

emergence of

stylis-

and the behavioral—are summed up

in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

A

Rebours [Against the Grain] (1884), the infa-

when Dorian

reads J.-K. Huysmans's

474

Aesthetes and Decadents

mous

"Bible" of French decadence:

"it

was written

that curious jewelled style,

[in]

and archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of

vivid

and obscure

at once, full of argot

the French school of Symbolistes. There were metaphors in chids.

of

.

.

One

.

some medieval These

dessert,

days,

at times

saint or the

it

as

whether one was reading the

morbid confessions of

when "Decadent

may be

it

knew

hardly

Delight"

a

modern

monstrous

as or-

spiritual ecstasies

sinner."

apt to refer to an extra-rich chocolate

is

useful to ask students to explore contemporary meanings of the

word, and then direct their thoughts toward Arthur Symons's definition of deca-

dence in The Decadent Movement

and moral

a spiritual his

approbation of

moral health? ening of

"an intense self-consciousness

in Literature as

perversity." "Healthy

we cannot

call it,"

is

.

.

.

does

in this

malady—such

Symons

simply an honest response to the times he

artis-

and that the from a genuine

result

world or the "soul" of "things unseen."

effort to capture the truth of the visible

a fairly

implies that

lives in,

two branches of Decadence, Impressionism and Symbolism,

Wouldn't that make Decadence

as a loos-

kind of language— manage to spring from the

literary forms, a fresher

decadence

How

says.

unhealthiness relate to current ideas about bodily and

literary

How do the advantages Symons finds

"over-luxurious" sophistication of the 1890s? Curiously, tic

he

moral

artistic enterprise, after all?

more

Preface to Silhouettes he seems to be arguing for a

tolerant

form of

In his

criticism

would allow room for both natural and artificial pleasures, and both moralisand aesthetic responses to works of art. Perhaps what Symons wants is simply

that tic

freedom

to practice his nocturnal art

poem should

ceived notions of what a

In Pastel his emphasis

is

without fear of moral censure or preconbe.

almost purely

he describes the sudden lighting of a

with a

visual,

cigarette in a vivid

minimum of commentary; way that forecasts the thou-

sands of such scenes that soon became a part of movie history. In White Heliotrope, the equally acute visual details of a one-night stand are presented in order to be

condensed, a

la

Proust, into a sensation that the

Memoriam stanza not

to

mourn

sex for future resurrection. a

hand, a

same perfume may

release at a

Mixing Impressionism and Symbolism, Symons brazenly uses the

later date.

a dead friend, but to package a

Symons 's reduction of the female

ring, a hair-pin also anticipates Eliot's

technique in

memory

In

of casual

object of desire into

Preludes, Prufrock,

and

The Waste Land; the young Eliot assiduously read Symons as an undergraduate at Harvard. Symons:

The

A

best single

book on Symons

The obsession with what Symons versity of matter" artists

is

probably Karl Beckson's Arthur

Life (1987).

such

as

sometimes

slips

elsewhere called "perversity of form and per-

over into deliberate self-parody, with writers and

Wilde, Johnson, Beardsley, and Beerbohm producing works that

tressed the public while

amusing

insiders.

Richard LeGallienne's

London walks a fine line between celebrating

should be compared to Rossetti's The Burden

its

subject

to revel in

London's

is

far

role,

from the

and denouncing it. It poems share an

and

inevitable decline. Yet

dire urgency of Kipling's Recessional;

shared with

dis-

Ballad of

of Nineveh, since the

ironic appreciation of Britain's current imperial status

Le Gallienne's tone

A

Paris, as a blazing gas-lit capital

he seems

of

modern

Aesthetes and Decadents

Babylon, where

six,

lilies

turn to iron, and

There are the seeds of

artificial light.

humans

moths

fatally attracted

by the

social critique, however, in stanzas five

and

the hint of an underground world of the oppressed (as in H. G. Wells's The

Time Machine, published the same port

all this

or Fritz Lang's Metropolis) working to sup-

year,

on the surface. Curiously, the doomed human moths of stanza up all" at the end; they become Time's agents, suggesting that

gaiety

4 return to "eat

human

appetites will bring about their

form of

a desert, will return to reclaim

initial

own

demise. Vanquished nature, in the

London's night,

as the

poem moves from

flower to final blight.

poem A

Lionel Johnson's

Decadent's Lyric joins the author's voice even

closely to the feverish behavior it

into

475

a parody?

Or

he might be condemning.

Is

poem

the

more

sincere?

Is

monologue containing both elements? Parody is a requires the writer to inhabit the very literary body he

a dramatic

treacherous form because

it

Johnson comes so close in this poem to the vocabulary of Douglas (flame/shame) and the technique of Symons (the terse, unrepentant melding of rejects.

steamy sex and musical metaphor) that only the intriguing grotesqueness of the final line suggests the poet's distance

many writers of the

nificant, for like

to recover lost innocence

This tension, with

its

1890s,

and the need

is sig-

Johnson was torn between the longing

to express his sexual desires.

current of repressed homoeroticism, underlies Johnson's

tortured poem, The Dark Angel.

Dark Angel of gay

from the speaker. The choice of subject

Though

the

poem ends with

desire (displaying a bit of the bravado of

a renunciation of the

Donne's Death Be Not

is unmistakable, and the first forty lines show Dark Angel dominating every area of the poet's life. All dreams, thoughts, sights, sounds, and delights are transformed into poisoned desires, and only the rhetoric of otherworldly punishment and salvation in the final stanzas can deliver the poet from the tempting corruption he finds everywhere in nature. As if to con-

Proud), the intensity of the struggle

the

firm the newly conceived "norms" of sexual orientation, such a sexuality

poem shows how

can indeed become the central component of identity—when one

is

"The Poetry of Lionel Johnson," M. G. H. Pittock suggests that the Dark Angel is

thrust into the position of deviant outcast. (In Victorian Poetry

28.3-4 1990], 1

both drink and poetry. See 47-49).

Johnson himself had

Ironically, lier

when he

accused

him

tried to

brand Wilde

this

way a few

in The Destroyer of a Soul of corrupting

years ear-

Lord Alfred

Douglas. Because sonnets traditionally speak of love, this "hate sonnet" gains ad-

from

ditional force

its

Petrarchean form, barely controlling the

the poet. Like The Dark Angel, the

measure of true

life.

poem

focuses

on

venomous

rage of

the health of the soul as the

Johnson's feeling that a "living body"

now

hides the "dead

soul" of his friend not only evokes the vampiric strain of 1890s thought, but also

The Picture of Dorian Gray, which Johnson had lent to Douglas in 1891. Johnson

may have

felt

he had unwittingly helped Wilde create a

physical beauty If Johnson

masked

was tormented by

Douglas seemed determined uses the sonnet

form

real-life

Dorian Gray whose

a deathly spirit. his desires (and those of his friends),

to celebrate his

own

Lord Alfred

passions boldly. In Praise of Shame

to affirm his preference for "sweet"

and

"lovely"

Shame

(note

Aesthetes and Decadents

476

how

the diction and vocabulary of desire echo Swinburne's The Leper). Douglas ex-

Dantesque

plores

deed one might

but his flames seem harmless and unremorseful;

territory,

criticize

the

poem

for the lack of tension in

its

in-

structure, especially

poems of Johnson. Perhaps the poet expects tension to emerge shock that shame merits praise at all. But then shameless approval of shame undo the very meaning of the word? doesn't such Douglas presents the topic more complexly in Two Loves, where the narrator compared

to the

from the

reader's surprise or

hears, as if

he were

sitting in

pale youth of usurping the

judgment, a smiling rosy youth accuse a "sweet" but

name

heterosexual love to insist that he

The

of Love.

The poet

allows the youth

who

sings of

"Love" and to designate the other as "Shame."

is

"Shame" advertises nothing; he speaks of no partners; he simply way that moves the narrator, conceding, "I am the love that dare not name." While Douglas effectively conveys how righteously prescriptive a

figure of

sighs in a

speak

its

heterosexist world can be, he does not try to a natural, everyday sort of thing.

while words

like "bright,"

youth, the second

might ask

if

is

Douglas

them, in order to

is

make

terza

"sweet"

unspoken

love look like

rima suggests Dante's journey, and

"gold," and "roses" describe the first and "wan," associated with serpents and flame. One

"joy," "ivory,"

"pallid"

stress

The

not so

much

challenging conventional views as reiterating

the alluring difference of outlawed desire.

One

could even

read Impression de Nuit: London as an effort to transform the whole of London,

ured as a monstrous woman, into his

and her dark lanes into

towers,

The sire

a brain

fig-

object of desire, turning her breasts into

haunted by stealthy men.

idea of a masculine identity built

upon the dominance of homoerotic

de-

a late Victorian construct, coinciding roughly with the criminalization in

is

1885 of any J.

own

activity suggestive

of male-male desire. Persecution led to activism:

A. Symonds and Edward Carpenter defended the naturalness of homosexual

traction, citing the ancient

at-

Greeks and modern "comradeship." At boarding

schools there continued to be

room

for same-sex

romance under the guise of

friendship—and the single-sex institutions of schools, clubs, and Parliament helped shield active homosexuality

from the public

eye. In the

1890s the

ology sought to naturalize homosexuality and open the way for tion.

But

marking

it

its

new

its

did so by designating male-male love as a pathological

field

of sex-

decriminalizastate,

thereby

"victims" as diseased. Richard Dellamora's Masculine Desire (1990) pro-

vides valuable background

on

efforts to define hetero-

and homosexuality during

the 1890s (see chapter 10, 193-217). It

has been suggested that Olive Custance's scandalous elopement with Lord

Alfred Douglas, in defiance of her father's wishes, was meant to emulate the flight

of the Brownings almost sixty years

earlier.

fatigue in Custance's ergetic

work marks the

Like the Brownings, Custance and

talent,

but the note of frustration and

fin-de-siecle's

distance from the idealized, en-

Douglas each respected the other's poetic

amours of mid-Victorian times. The Masquerade seems intended as a com-

ment on Wilde's The

Harlot's House.

Custance universalizes the dance in her poem

and, unlike Wilde, does not allow her speaker to remain aloof from

it.

Wilde,

guarding his distance, makes his dancers ghostly and grotesque, while she gives her reluctant dancers a weary dignity as they go through their repressed paces.

The

Aesthetes and Decadents

477

same sense of fatigue turns her poem The White Witch from conventional praise of female sexual magnetism into a decadent portrait of love-weariness. The idea of a

woman's imprisonment in empty gestures of love comes through most strongly in Statues, where human passion is unable to awaken a reciprocal longing on the part of deified stone. Because the subject

Custance asking the

poem be

about

art

plural, this

seems

less a love

poem than

herself,

"why

am

I

a Is

always falling in love with gay men?" or should

read more symbolically (and heterosexually) as a revisionary text

and

inspiration, treating the relation

male muse?

elusive

is

complaint about the inaccessibility of sculpted male bodies.

generalized

Why

is

between aspiring female poet and

the speaker unable to achieve the favor of the gods, as

did Hyperion, or Pygmalion?

Aubrey Beardsley's The at least

Ballad of a Barber

is

constructed of elements taken from

two contemporary sources: John Gray's poem The Barber (from

Silverpoints,

"my fingers bled / With wonder as I touched their awful limbs;" and the popular ballad and stage melodrama of Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street, who cut his customers' throats. Jerome Buckley comments in The Victorian Temper ([1951; rpt. 1964], 236) that the barber's slashing of the girl whose coiffure he failed to master with his instruments of artifice is "surely intended to convey a complete allegory of Decadence itself." One might also see the poem as commenting on Beardsley's own situationhe is an artist with a dangerous, self-destructive penchant for cutting attacks on his audience and "customers" (Wilde among them). Like Carrousel, whom "nobody had seen show / A preference for either sex," Beardsley's own sexual identity was deeply ambiguous, and his penchant for scandal spoke of the way in which his own life ruptured the codes and dichotomies of Victorian gender roles. Indeed, ambiguity, androgyny, and a blurring of sexual identities and desires seem to be what Beardsley is all about. As Chris Snodgrass comments, "Beardsley looked on the fragmentation and metaphysical uncertainty of the fin-de-siecle and, with his impish playfulness and his eighteenth-century appreciation of the 1893), whose speaker fondles his female customers until

.

.

.

many

baroque, sought to incorporate, however ironically, as ble.

.

.

.

Beardsley's

cause ...

it

work was so powerfully scandalous

was every

bit as

modern

as

it

possibilities as possi-

to Victorian sensibilities be-

appeared, tending to blur and pervert

and erode centuries of Western logocentric assumptions" ("Decadent Mythmaking: Arthur Symons on Aubrey Beardsley and Salome,"

clear logical categories

Victorian Poetry

28.3-4 [1990]: 102). Careful reading of The Ballad of a Barber bears

this out: Carrousel's sexuality, his motivations, left

enticingly vague, inviting readers to

fill

and even the action he

the gaps with their

own

takes are

all

assumptions.

A "carrousel" was originally a tilting or jousting match, and its Victorian slang meaning of sexual intercourse may derive from the game played on merry-gorounds of trying to catch a brass ring with a stick. But it also suggests a mad whirl that ultimately goes nowhere. "Meridian Street" was slang for the genitalia of either sex,

and

it

may be

that, as

an

artist

who works

in the sexual allure of his clients, Carrousel errs in

to shape but not to participate

making

a definitive sexual

mitment. Stunned by the appearance of the Princess, he reacts

(much

like

the Lady of Shalott glimpsing Sir Lancelot).

He

com-

self-destructively

steps off the carrousel

Aesthetes and Decadents

478

and out of

his protectively androgynous sexual-artistic role (he's handy with both and make-up), and "falls" into the world of action. Unlike the Lady of Shalott, however (and more like Porphyria^ lover, or the protagonist of Wilde's

razors

Reading Gaol), he

"kills

the thing he loves" in order to recover in physical violence

the mastery he has lost by desiring her.

But perhaps Carrousel's Popean toying with the

and

straightens three times,

fully

guarded (closeted?) distance by the Princess's

Princess's lock,

which he

opens into another scenario. Provoked from

ure of normative desire. His action

is

he

hair,

curls

his care-

assaults the fairy-tale

fig-

not a clear declaration of sexual allegiance,

but rather an expression of rage against the heterosexual morality encoded in the of princesses marrying princes.

fairy stories

He kills,

not the object of his

but

desire,

of society's desire, striking out at both her presumed innocence and her implicit sexual signification. In addition, he

keeps

artists

and barbers

Moreover, sexual

if

his value as

economy of

own

human

is

is

to fire

from

up and

"their betters."

yet arbitrate the

without entering directly into

it,

then by

artwork in an ambiguous way, he renounces his

detachment while

affective or political status.

tivation. It

also be assailing the social structure that

an artist/hairdresser

his social superiors,

daring to attack his ual/artistic/class)

may

physically close to but socially distant

still

(sex-

refusing to reveal— or even decide—his

For Carrousel's crime

is

as mysterious as his

not clear whether the poem's climactic action

is

throat-slitting,

momas-

turbation (Victorian slang for which was "breaking the neck" of a bottle), or sex-

which

ual penetration— one

leaves the princess dreamily satisfied. Is

he hung

for

murder, rape, or socio-sexual presumption? For more on the poem's use of Victorian slang and lication in

its

The Savoy

relation to the illustrations that (a

good paper

topic), see

accompanied

Linda Gertner

its first

Zatlin,

pub-

"Aubrey

Beardsley Counts the Ways," Victorian 'Newsletter 67 (Spring 1985): 1-6, and Chris

Snodgrass, Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque (1995), 73-75.

Produced

won him

as a sort of prospectus, Beardsley 's ")'ai baisse ta bouche, lokanaan"

the commission to illustrate Wilde's Salome. Here Salome floats in a

dream-space with the object of her desire, the severed head of John the Baptist.

There

is

a narcissism to Salome's gaze,

oddly echoed in her

own

jection of mirrored desire Baptist, raising

and the disembodiment of her victim

floating posture. Beardsley generates

and sexual

traits

an

by giving Medusa-like hair to the

horns of hair on Salome, and not so much grounding

the whole scene

in

phallic/vulvic flowers

the fluid sexual signification of water

and

tendrils.

lilies

as sinking

and

"Tumult of

Images': Wilde, Beardsley,

L. Gilbert,

and Salome

26 (1983) 133-159; for arguments that the

tions

their

On how the Wilde/Beardsley text/images com-

pliment each other, see Elliot in Victorian Studies

is

eerie cross-pro-

work disruptively against or disjointedly with the

illustra-

text, see, respectively, Jeffrey

Wallen, "Illustrating Salome: Perverting the Text?" Word and Image 8.2 (1992):

124-132, and Robert Schweik, "Congruous Incongruities: The Wilde-Beardsley 'Collaboration,'" English Literature in Transition 37 (1994): 9-26.

Though

the story of Salome might seem to reverse the terms of The Ballad of a

Barber—here a cases

one can

woman commits violence upon a sexually unavailable man— in both read the woman as responsible for a man's execution, expressing the

Aesthetes and Decadents

preoccupation with the castrating,

Nineties'

479

Linking the

predatory female.

Wilde/Beardsley protagonist with Ibsen's threatening female characters,

lately ar-

London stage, the Scottish drama critic William Archer called Salome "an oriental Hedda Gabler." A good overview of the free-thinking "new woman" and the uneasiness she caused even among Aesthetes and Decadents can be found on

rived

the

in Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s (1992)

Bangs, and Bloomers: The

Bicycles,

New Woman

with American as well

fully deals

summed up

the male

artist's

as

129-159, and in

Patricia

British attitudes. In Dorian Gray

pervasive anxiety about feminine beauty:

Marks,

Marks

Popular Press (1990);

in the

use-

Wilde

"Women

in-

spire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying

them

out."

Max Beerbohm Enoch Soames Beerbohm's

and

reflective

self-reflective story

provides both a fitting close to the

1890s and also an excellent transition toward the modernism that was blossoming

when he wrote moved

Beerbohm wrote Enoch Soames

and where he spent the

in 1910

rest

and maintaining

writing verbal sketches,

in Rapallo, Italy,

of his long

fle

sketching caricatures,

S.

N. Berhman in

his Portrait of

(1960).

Even in 1896, when he published

Max

life,

a flow of witty, self-mocking conversa-

tion—most memorably recorded by the playwright

Max

end of "the long ninewhere he had

his retrospective story in 1914, at the very

teenth century."

his collected Works, the twenty-four-year-old

liked to think of himself as a relic of a

outmoded.

I

bygone

era:

"Already

I

feel

myself a

belong to the Beardsley period," he wrote in his prefatory

Diminuendo. Yet he maintained a keen interest in contemporary

life

and

tri-

essay,

literature

throughout the modernist era and beyond, and on his bedroom wall he sketched a portrait of Joseph Conrad, in a

mural of

his favorite

modern

Enoch Soames shares both themes and formal devices, in Darkness, with

which we begin our twentieth-century

section.

complex frame-tales that play up the constructedness of the

and suggest the ways innocent narrator

fiction shades over into reality;

who

with Heart of

Both works involve

societies they portray,

and both

encounters a mysterious character

authors. fact,

involve a relatively

who makes

a pact with

the Devil—literally in Soames's case, only barely metaphorically in the case of Kurtz. Kurtz writer,

a

is

making

his

scend his origins, Preston

Decadent character in

way

much

man" he used

Beerbohm's

in rarified

tale

is,

and

Soames

as

his

own

finally fatal

tries to leave

right—a would-be painter and

venues where he hopes to

behind the

tran-

"plain, unvarnished

to be.

of course, radically different in effect from Conrad's; one

show students how varied the modernism of these and in parody—the sly way he works in the title of Fungoids is a classic moment. He parodies the Faust myth as well, in a way that is still all too apt today: Soames sells his soul

value in the juxtaposition years really was.

not for knowledge or for presciently

is

Beerbohm

to

displays his virtuoso abilities in social satire

sex, like his predecessors,

planned to be

fulfilled in

but for fame: a

the 1990s themselves.

classic

1990s

lust,

Aesthetes and Decadents

480

on the supernaturalism favored in many of the popular stories of the later nineteenth century (as seen in some of the tales in our section on "Popular Short Fiction"), but at the same time he insists on the determining force of everyday realities. His satire is different in kind from the comedy of ideas that Shaw favored, for instance; in a review of one of Shaw's plays, Beerbohm criticized Shaw for creating characters who are "disputative machines," adding that "Mr. Shaw's penetrating eye is of great use to him in satire or in criticism. He is one of

Beerbohm draws

freely

those gifted observers a

man

who can always see through a brick wall. But the very fact that

can see through a brick wall means that he cannot see the brick

absurd futuristic world that Soames encounters

up

self

in the British

Museum

is

when he

gets his

The

wall."

wish to look him-

none other than the world made

in Shaw's image:

everyone dresses "in Jaeger"—Shaw's favorite clothing—and people write an incomprehensible phonetic spelling that parodies Shaw's rationalist agitation for spelling

Beerbohm approached Orwell's vision of the future. that he comes up against a series of brick walls: his inability to claw his way from provincial Preston into the so-

reform. Contemplating Shaw,

Soames 's comic tragedy

own

lack of talent; his

cial circle

of aesthetes

like

is

Rothenstein; the world's refusal to provide any oppo-

nent more glorious than the devil-as-vulgarian— Pater and Wilde's worst nightmare brought to

life.

Enoch Soames was published in Beerbohm's collection Seven that

tells

the stories of only six characters.

The

seventh

is

Men

(1919), a

book

Beerbohm himself, preAt the start of

sent both as narrator and as refracted through his protagonists.

Enoch Soames, Beerbohm Eighteen Nineties;

to find Soames in Holbrook Jackson's The mention that he himself is the subject of an entire

fails initially

he neglects

to

chapter in that history, which

is

also dedicated to

him. Soames 's evanescence may

be Beerbohm's own, or the evanescence of the period that he paradoxically immortalized in verbal and visual sketches alike. According to the story, in exchange for his soul

1997.

On

Soames

gets to visit the British

Museum

reading

room on June

Library. Just after

two

o'clock, a

vague figure in a long cloak rushed

in,

looked

wildly through the "S" section of the card catalogue, uttered a cry of despair, left.

3rd,

that day, Professor Laura Frost of Yale was doing research at the British

"Assuredly," as

Beerbohm

says,

"truth was stranger than fiction."

and

The Twentieth Century —rcflXi— •—•-

553

students should read the screenplay before they view Stephen

Beautiful Laundrette

on video or

and not afterwards,

in class

screenplay preceded the filmmaking-once the images take hold,

it

since the

might seem

that the engaging actors or the compelling milieux simply created themselves ex

Reading the screenplay apart from seeing the movie gives Kureishi's intricate scripting a chance to emerge as a literary document, and when the film is watched, nihilo.

a vibrant discussion can ensue about

how

the language of a screenplay— its dia-

logue, of course, but also the "stage directions," scene setting,

and the

silences

and

of its suggested "cuts"—becomes realized cinematically, or not. Just as a vital technique for teaching drama is the comparison between the text of a play and its ellipses

performance and

on

penetration

comparison of screenplay with finished film en-

staging, so the

riches notions of text

and

film, verbal

and

our culture,

film. Since

visual artistry,

and

like British culture,

mutual interimmersed in the

their is

products of the visual media, the anthology seeks to be true to that reigning while the inclusion of Kureishi's screenplay also announces

acy,

themes of the anthology

at

other

many

liter-

of the

levels.

Kureishi's astute observations of contemporary

M}

immigrant viewpoint; many elements of

London

are the product of

an

Beautiful Laundrette are partially auto-

biographical, especially the insider's view of the Pakistani immigrant community. Kureishi, like his hero, "British"

and

British-born, but

is

still

not, in the ugly epithet of the film

The connotation of "wog" extends

or foreigner.

has to fight to be considered

and of British

life,

a "wog"

to racial difference too,

and the

social

film brilliantly explores the sense of racist exclusion the darker-skinned Pakistani,

on

Indian, Caribbean and African Britishers confront

makes a perfect companion piece tively reverses

to

a daily basis.

The

Conrad's Heart of Darkness, in that

it

film

narra-

the imperial journey outwards, as the postcolonial narrative protag-

and with hope,

onists journey back to the heart of empire, to live there

to prosper.

Pakistan of course, like India, has been an independent nation since 1947; nonetheless, what the film shows

power and

its

colonies persists.

is

how

long the relationship between a colonial

Muslim customs, the Urdu

language,

political struggle against the British separate the Pakistani British at large, yet Pakistan

had been dominated economically and

for so long that there are as at the center of

M>

many

culturally by

ties as there are differences.

Beautiful Laundrette displays all

British,

others, like

and make frequent

Omar and

trips

its

Kureishi's screenplay never romanticizes the Pakistani its

seedy members,

members

as

its

criminals,

does any community.

The

England

family

shown

far

more

Pakistani

back to the place they consider their home;

his father, are British, secular, and, for

without nostalgia for Pakistan, since Britain, whatever has

a fierce

the complicated patterns of

such cultural relationships: some members of the family are

than

and

from the culture

its

entrepreneurs,

Omar somehow has

Omar's part anyway, is their home.

problems,

community

in Britain-it

righteous

and humane

its

to negotiate a white British

which doesn't want him in its midst, and an extended family he must rely from as an autonomous adult. Omar's progress through these many minefields has the narrative form of

society

on

yet nonetheless separate

Bunyan's

Pilgrim's

Progress,

and of any number of bildungsroman, including

Hanif Kureishi

554

Dickens's David Copperfield and Great Expectations, with a multicultural twist.

Braided into the screenplay

another coming-of-age

is

story, that

of Omar's female

who is more tightly clutched by the family and their cultural expectations that women will become wives and mothers. Again with a multicultural twist, this cousin,

narrative goes back to Major Barbara

Own. Her freedom

One's

is

and forward

A

to Virginia Woolf's

Room

of

achieved at the expense of losing the family; Omar,

even with his lover Johnnie in tow, has a

less difficult

time.

The gay love story at the heart of M} Beautiful Laundrette defies racial lines and, maybe even more importantly, class lines, since Johnnie is an impoverished squatter, whose neighborhood pals have become menacing skinheads, their one outlet the violent joy of "Paki-bashing." Johnnie's punkish exuberance in the film, played

by Daniel Day-Lewis, an actor with a strong

literary lineage in Britain

and

Ireland,

demonstrates the allure of disaffected youth culture present in Britain since the Beatles in the 1960s; the music in the film

is

one

layer

of meaning the screenplay

obviously lacks, which could be a fine place to start a class discussion. the star-crossed romance has to confront all

homophobia

fronts— class, race, and sexual orientation;

it

At any

rate,

in society, of course, but

resembles Romeo and

Juliet

on

in the

Omar and Johnnie apart express the divided Omar and Johnnie triumph, though, in an amusingly cap-

sense that the forces trying to keep factions of their society.

Thatcherian fashion: their idea for an upscale laundrette

italist,

cess, rehabilitating

a shot at social status.

two reputable

The forbidden romance

citizens,

screenplay relies

is

a financial suc-

the energies of Omar's family, and giving the destitute Johnnie

on

and

has produced a successful business,

neighborhood improvement. Kureishi's

a definite

ironies like this throughout; fundamentally, a

stead of bitter despair at British society fuels the screenplay as

the disparity between that comic, hopeful tone and the

it

comic irony

in-

does the film. Note

more somber, embittered

coming-of-age story V. S. Naipaul relates. Kureishi's impudent and brilliant irony

extends to the idea of the laundrette as well: one prevailing myth of British imperialism

was that

was bringing

if

"cleanliness

is

civilization to dirty,

next to Godliness," then clean and Godly Britain

ungodly natives

as

its

empire spread.

was the leading brand in Britain in the nineteenth century, and

Pear's

much

of

Soap

its

ad-

on the grotesquely-caricatured black populations in the ad's illustrations, who are shown paralyzed by fear before a mountain of white soap, while British soldiers stand by to take command.

vertising featured the beneficial effects of Pear's soap

That

it

takes

Omar and Johnnie— interracial gay lovers from questionable

class

and

ethnic backgrounds— to bring cleansing soap bubbles to wash and thereby "civilize" their

grimy neighborhood

is

a

comic and wonderful

only happen through verbal— that

A

helpful literary

selections

from

E.

and

M.

is,

historical

Forster,

who

backdrop for the screenplay

his works.

and elsewhere)

His magisterial

A

and

is

come. As a closeted gay

can

found in the

all

struggles of Britain's colonies (in

through

his

life,

and

many of among his

explicitly in

Passage to India best represents this thrust

novels; his essays reflect his sensitive understanding of the multicultural to

it

despite his upper-class white British back-

ground was engaged with the independence Egypt, India, Pakistan

historical revenge:

literary—art.

writer, Forster

championed the

England

anti-colonial cause

and

Margaret Drabble

made

555

oblique connections between that fight and the then-hidden struggle for gay

M>

liberation. In

granted—at

least

Omar and Johnnie's

Beautiful Laundrette

relationship

is

taken for

by them and many of their friends; their homosexual attraction

not a tragedy, not a

is

interesting to imagine Forster's reaction to the on-

crisis. It is

screen kiss between the two actors, symbolizing as

it does the opening of many among others— that his writing had begun to accomplish. Salman Rushdie's essay, Outside the Whale, shows how the filmmaker David Lean completely misunderstood Forster, when Lean made an epic

closet

doors— of race,

class,

and

sexuality

film celebrating British colonial rule in India, his adaptation of Forster's anti-

colonial non-epic,

when

A

The

Passage to India.

essay

is

a strong critique of visual images

they ignore or defy their literary inspiration; as Rushdie shows, Lean's film

was part of a wave of British nostalgia

wave which arose

M31 Beautiful Laundrette, a film

reality.

domination, and whiteness, a

for empire,

was becoming

just as the multicultural future of Britain

Rushdie writes about,

is

made

at the

same time

the very opposite of Lean's mistitled Passage

Kureishi's script doesn't go into the past,

and

a clear

in British culture India.

to

try to resurrect the glories of a lost

empire, and a misplaced sense of British superiority over the inferior and ignorant "wogs." His screenplay inherits E.

and

posites,

Forster's

David Lean got he made,

as

M.

Forster's literary passion for the

famous dictum

Forster's

book

all

for art

and

life:

union of op-

"Only connect" he wrote.

wrong, according to Rushdie and other

Rushdie shows, a fundamentally

and imperial

racist

critics;

diatribe, if a

togenic film, out of a novel that implied exactly the opposite of racism

pho-

and impe-

M> Beautiful Laundrette makes all the connections for which Forster called; through Omar and Johnnie the disparate classes, races, ethnicities and history of Britain "only connect." In that way, My Beautiful and

rialism

British superiority.

Laundrette might be the genuine film adaptation of

A Passage to India, under another

name.

Margaret Drabble The Though

it's

Gifts of War

seemingly a pedestrian question, you may want to begin

class discus-

sion by asking your students what they thought of the story's ending—and, in particular, if

they were surprised.

Most of them,

if

they're honest, will have

been some-

what taken aback by the story's sudden, and inconclusive, conclusion; at that point,

it

may be worth working back through

creates this effect.

the story to

show how Drabble

If you feel like continuing this questioning of your students, you

might ask next about the protagonist's husband, and what their relationship like;

we

(the

husband

learn surprisingly little— never, in fact, learning the is

only the precious son, Kevin,

is

named

certainly

an apt description of the

About

we know about

binges,

all

man

referred to simply as "the

and that he beats

She

is is

name,

name

similar phrases), and means "comely birth"—

and

in Irish,

Kevin has played in his mother's

role

the husband his wife.

(the

in bed"

that he

is

is

of either spouse

somewhat

life).

inclined to drinking

able to live in these terrible surroundings

Margaret Drabble

556

only because she has withdrawn completely from "the instead invested herself emotionally, totally, in the

much

to say that she lives for Kevin ("her

life

.

.

.

man

life

in the bed"

of her son;

it is

had been redeemed

and has not too

for her

by

her child").

The mother's

relationship with Kevin

is

beginning to change, however; she no

longer feels comfortable with the same level of physical intimacy that they used to

and she sees signs in him—though she works hard to repress them—that he may well become another "man in the bed." But the mother will not allow herself to dwell on such possibilities; for tomorrow is Kevin's birthday, and a year's worth of secret savings will be spent on the gift he has his heart set on. Thus, when the well-meaning young couple intervene to prevent her purchase share,

too

at the

department

store, they are stepping into

an emotional, even psychosexual,

more complex than they can imagine. Michael seems quite earnest in his commitment to stopping the war in Vietnam, and in attempting to keep "the gifts of war" out of the hands of impressionable children; and Frances, if not quite as ideologically committed to the cause, at least involves herself with good intentions. Her recollection of Thomas a Beckett in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral may have an ironic function: she remembers him as the man who did the right thing for the wrong reason, and worries that she may be doing the same. More likely, though, it seems that she's doing the wrong thing for the very highest of reasons: though she hopes to make the world a safer place to live by protesting the teachsituation far

ing of violence to our children (and doing so in the

of London), Frances instead left

that

of making her is

her

lot.

own

is

cruelly taking

bearable,

life

and

still

bomb-scarred landscape

away the only means the mother has

in fact surviving the domestic violence

Frances (and perhaps Michael)

mean

well,

but because they cannot

someone like this mother, they make patronizing assumptions and presume to know what is best for her. For them, privileged and innocent, the far-off violence of London during the Blitz, or even the American war in Vietnam, takes priority over the intimate violence from which this mother seeks to escape through the purchase of a toy. What for them is quite literally an understand what

life is like

"academic" question

is

for

our protagonist the very stuff of

for

life.

Philip Larkin Church Going Much

of Larkin's poetry

the death of

God;

houses of worship, built to honor.

The

largely

one which,

in the creation,

empty,

interior

silence; clearly, these

order,

concerned with the creation of a meaningful

is

in Church Going, the speaker

when he does not

a

its

are

meant

he in

is

God

its

life

after

attracted to

they were

emptiness and

to symbolize the death of

an older

shortcomings, did help to explain to people their place

purpose for their

lives.

For the speaker, not just

even "unbelief," has disappeared; both can create sion, that

believe in the

described in terms that emphasize

empty churches

for all

and

is

wonders why he

his agnostic torpor

a

kind of energy,

a

belief,

but

kind of pas-

cannot capture. In the poem's conclusion the

speaker reaffirms the church's importance—which

lies

not in

its fulfilling

the pur-

Philip Larkin

poses for which

it

was originally constructed, but rather serving

cal links in British history

and

557

as discrete, physi-

tradition, another system of belief within

which one

can find one's place and purpose.

High Windows The

curse

word

second

in the

teachers of some students, in

and Kelman bling

line of

some

are by turns vulgar

High Windows may present problems for

parts of the country;

and profane, there

and unexpected about the "f-word" cropping up

as classically disciplined as Larkin's.

there's

And

that,

is

though

texts

from Beckett

something especially trou-

in a

poem,

of course,

is

especially in verse

precisely the point:

nothing adventitious or cheaply sensationalistic about Larkin's "fucking,"

but instead the harsh language suggests the violence of the speaker's reaction to

what he thinks he

is

purely conjectural, borne of his

a perfectly parallel passage,

ing of the

and one which may

way that Larkin

paragraphs of fessor,

important to point out that the speaker's indictment

sees. It's

of this "couple of kids"

Don

is

envy;

here criticizing his speaker, occurs in the opening

DeLillo's novel White Noise,

where a middle-aged

college pro-

envious of his students' monied families and healthy, tanned bodies, imag-

ines luggage full of all kinds of prohibited substances.

and

own prejudices and

give students a better understand-

Larkin's speaker

owe something

Both DeLillo's Jack Gladney

to Eliot's Prufrock, indulging themselves in

and imagining that while the mermaids

"pity parties"

sing each to each, they will

not sing to them.

Thus the

speaker's palpable self-pity

gree, the critique of

modern

is

meant

the speaker, with a disarming honesty, recalls as less strategy

to undercut, at least to

some

de-

poem presents. In the same way the poem closes that this is a time-

sexual mores that the

employed by the older generation against the younger; every genera-

tion of parents have thought their kids' music was too loud, etc.

achieves a fine balance between criticism of contemporary morality

The poem

and

of the nostalgia that helps the older generation sustain the illusion of dancy. Larkin has

little

time for either of these comforting

a critique its

ascen-

illusions.

Talking in Bed This brief and poignant

poem

is

in part

an indictment of sex without love—an

in-

dictment which, unlike that delivered in High Windows, focuses primarily on the speaker's lines,

own

life.

The

where the quest

slippage of values

to

is

suggested economically in the

find and speak words

"at

last

two

once true and kind" devolves to

the depressing attempt only to speak words "not untrue and not unkind."

MCMIV Looking back over the distance of half a century, the speaker considers images of and Georgian life that MCMIV-1914, and World War I-brought suddenly to an end. The closing stanza suggests what many other poets of the War, the Edwardian

Philip Larkin

558

including

W.

B. Yeats,

had proposed—that the Great War marked the end of inlife a pale shadow of Great

nocence for the British Empire, and made post-War another sense, the

Britain's heyday. In

poem can almost be

read as an epitaph for

Larkin himself; born in 1922— traditionally considered the banner year for British

modernism— Larkin here (and much more explicitly in his preface to All What Jazz) suggests that he was born into a world with which he had no sympathy, and longs instead for a pastoral and traditional British culture which had disapLiterary

peared permanently by the time of his birth.

All It is

What Jazz: from

Preface

probably important to adopt two very different strategies toward Larkin's

analysis of

modern

jazz in this piece. First,

it

will

be instructive to

ions of the jazz fans in your classroom; most will find

it

solicit

War

Larkin can dismiss out of hand the entire pantheon of post-World

Monk, Miles

Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Thelonious

and Sonny Rollins— in one sentence. probably not be

will

portantly not about

jazz fans;

jazz,

On

poem

dead with World

What makes frustrating critics

the other hand, most of your students is

most im-

but about aesthetics more generally, and about the confiis.

Remember

this

is

a

the

is

who,

critic

own birth; in the same way, he and out of the same kinds of impulse.

decade before his

War

II,

declares

and so

when

literary

were feverishly debating the post-war aesthetic known

against

in

life

Larkin's criticism (and sometimes poetry) so compelling

precisely this irreverently cranky tone; at a time (1985)

Larkin here refuses to enter the fray by resisting modernism

quo

jazz-

II

John Coltrane,

that precedes this selection, effectively declares British imaginative

dead in 1914, almost jazz

Davis,

they must be reassured that the essay

dence game that Larkin thinks modernism the

the opin-

quite preposterous that

which postmodernism sought

as

postmodernism,

itself,

the

Hence Larkin

to react.

new

is

status

the reac-

tionary's reactionary.

Depending on the

teacher's

own

tastes,

it

may be

interesting to pull in a

of the music that Larkin hates— Davis's Kind of Blue, Coltrane 's

A

little

Love Supreme,

Monk's Round Midnight—to give those of your students not well-versed in modern jazz a sense of just what Larkin is railing against. By the same token, one might want to bring in a representative Picasso or two (Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon, Seated Woman, etc.) and perhaps the opening poem from Ezra Pound's The Cantos (or direct them back to his poems from Blast, printed in the perspectives section on the Great War), so that they can see the larger contours of Larkin's protest against

modernism.

Depending again on the teacher's own interests, there is a strongly racist element to the essay that warrants analysis: Larkin's reference to "conga drums and sambas and all the tawdry trappings of South America, the racket of Middle East bazaars, the cobra-coaxing cacophonies of Calcutta" gests that

modern

jazz is at

is

just the start

of

it.

He

sug-

base an attempt by African-Americans to steal jazz back

from white musicians; he longs

for the days

men," playing on one of the most widespread

when

jazz

was "the music of happy

racial stereotypes,

and goes so

far as

Whose Language?

to claim that

modern jazz

arose

"when the Negro stopped wanting

559

to entertain the

white man." Even his insistent use of the long-outdated word "Negro" suggests at

would be naive to pretend that Larkin didn't his argument here, and in his vocabulary, the American cultural critic who was his near con-

the very least a racial insensitivity.

know

his rhetoric

It

was inflammatory; in

he's every bit as calculating as

who

temporary, Allan Bloom,

than modern

targets rock-and-roll rather

The Closing of the American Mind. More troubling,

surely,

jazz in his

the way that Larkin's

is

ar-

gument here seems to parallel the Nazi's condemnation of "degenerate art" during the late 1930s-a condemnation that included (pre-modern) jazz and Picasso, if not Pound explicitly. Finally, Larkin's strictures here seem to echo, in an interesting way, Arthur Waugh's screed against Eliot, Pound,

companion reading

as a

to Eliot's

Larkin the poet seems to realize dictable

and even

Larkin the

art,

slightly

critic is

& Co.,

in the review included

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Thus, while (in High Windows) that there's something pre-

comical about the fathers chastising the sons for their

not above doing it—and doing

it

in a seemingly unself-

conscious manner.

Perspectives

Whose Language? Seamus Heaney Feeling Into

an enormously

It's

Heaney 's

difficult task to

ever-increasing

body of

is

a kind of

compromise.

evocative discussion of the art of poetry, it;

and

The

in the course of the essay

Diviner, Undine, Bogland,

a representative selection of Seamus and to accomodate the increasing perNobel Prize-winning poet; what we have

poetry,

missions fees to reprint the poetry of a

done, in the event,

Words

make

and

he quotes

all

Feeling Into

specifically

Words

is

or large parts of the

and The Tollund Man, as well

a wonderfully

of Heaney 's approach to

poems

Digging,

as interesting apprentice

and his Lines to Myself. It presents a wonderful opporwork with students through Heaney 's poetic process, and to discuss the role of memory in Heaney 's poetry. The essay can also be linked with other poetic manifestos included in the volume, from Wordsworth's Preface and Shelley's Defence through Pound and Lewis's Vorticist Manifesto and Eliot's Tradition essay. The comparison with Pound/Lewis and Eliot will be especially instructive, since pieces like October Thought

tunity to

Heaney, in many important ways, harks back not to the modernist practice of the first

half of this century, but to the

Romantic

practice of the first half of the nine-

teenth century.

Heaney 's

central

metaphors for the writing of poetry are digging and divinawhere this places him with relation to Eliot and his

tion;

you may wish

strip

of platinum, or the Romantics and their Aeolian harp, for instance. Surely a

statement

like this

to discuss

one, though,

is

pure Romanticism: "You are confirmed by the

Whose Language?

560

poem and threatened by the elusiveness of the next one, and when your mind seems to implode and words and imown accord into the vortex."

visitation of the last

moments

the best

ages rush of their

Teachers

are those

may wish

supplement the poems Heaney includes here with

to

more; those selections will depend upon individual text of Digging

makes

a

a few

of course, but the

full

wonderful introduction to Heaney's work, and a poem

like

taste,

Punishment brings together the mythological and the political, the historical and the contemporary, in a powerful way. For this latter poem, as well as The Tollund

Man, you

will

want

lege libraries; the

hold of

to get

P.

V. Glob's The Bog People, available in most col-

photographs of the preserved bodies are

really quite seductive

and moving.

Medbh McGuckian Mr. McGregors Garden Instead of simplifying her

other

life like

women, the speaker

hers; her "vulgar volatility" mirrors that of Peter Rabbit, like

seeks to complicate

and she

fancies herself,

her totem the rabbit, a trespasser in forbidden realms, especially those realms

of learning and the intellect traditionally off-limits to

Own Woolf pays homage

to

stead that she might be

awakened

speaker of the

an industrious

poem memorizes

early

is

A

Room

of One's

fastened a bell to her bed-

and study Greek;

in a like

manner the

Shakespeare on sleepless nights, tickled, or

spurred on, by the example of Peter Rabbit.

McGregor's garden

women. In

woman who

On

that greatest of all gardens, the

another

level,

then, Mr.

Garden of Eden; and

like

our

mother Eve the speaker, when she spies the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, chooses to eat— to eat and never look back.

great

The Dream-Language of Fergus The dream-language of Fergus guage of like

Tim Finnegan

an amalgam of

taining

all

modern

all

as

does, in

some ways, seem

to resemble the

the world's languages past and present, within

the world's wisdom.

The

critic

lan-

them con-

Roland Barthes has described

post-

writing as "a sanctioned Babel," celebrating, rather than mourning, the

confusion of languages brought about by humankind's threader

dream

rendered by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake: something

/ Of double-stranded

sin;

McGuckian,

"a

words," here seconds that judgment.

Coleridge

poem makes homage to Coleridge as one of the father's of McGuckian's much the same way that Heaney honors his forebears such as

This

imagination— in

Wordsworth,

Frost,

and Hopkins

in various of his essays.

music of his verse—having lived with it

her

own—the

it,

and through

it,

Having internalized the

long enough to have

made

own

expe-

speaker finally gives birth to a poetry conceived of her

rience, but his "gradients," his a place of birth together."

The

"movements"— "they were writing paradoxical conclusion

is

/ The poems

in

that having incorporated

the lessons of this master—and only having done so—frees the poet to write in her

own

voice.

Whose Language?

561

Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill As

for the

Quince

poem partakes of an air of mystery which, as Ni Dhomhnaill exWhy I Write in Irish, may be a unique feature of writing in Irish;

This puzzling

plains in her essay it is

a

mode

that has been employed quite successfully by Paul

poem Why

stance in the

something

human

Brownlee

Such poetry

Left.

Muldoon,

insists, finally,

for in-

that there

is

ineffable, a-rational— mysterious—about experience (and in this case,

behavior and motivation), and that

it is

not the job of the poet to make

mystery comprehensible, but rather to bear articulate witness to

The poem

humorous pop

also has a

it.

culture motif running through

the

it;

brand-name reference (Black 6k Decker), the slangy feel of the language ("left me so zonked"), and the Raymond-Chandleresque tough talk that the "bright young thing" spouts

all give

poem

the

a refreshing colloquial energy.

Feeding a Child

Ni Dhomhnaill here her child

is literally

plays

on

a couple of

meanings of the phrase "feeding

fed at her breast, but

is

the stories of her people and her culture: gests.

In the poem's repeated questions

also, or will

no

less

soon

important food, the

"Do you know

.

.

.

?",

a child":

be, literarily fed

"Of all

poem

on

sug-

these things

you / ignorant?", the mother/poet/speaker paradoxically is able to give voice the stories she fears her child needs to hear. The importance of these stories is

are to

suggested especially in the closing lines, where the speaker insists that the myths

and legends of the

Irish

people are not about other people and other times, but

about themselves. Parthenogenesis

The concept of parthenogenesis— the development of an

egg without fertilization— is

here the concept that links immaculate conception of the Virgin legend, in

its

many variants, of the

childless

woman got with

Standing between these two versions of the same archetypal poet,

is

Yeats's retelling in Leda

to Yeats's

poem

and

the

Swan;

at this point, as well as to the

38) of Mary's visitation by the

Holy

it's

Mary

to the Irish

child by the sea-shadow.

story, at least for

an

Irish

worthwhile to direct students back

account in the Gospel of Luke (1:26

Spirit in the

form of a dove. The

Irish poet Yeats

demonstrates the universal quality of Mary's conception, by comparing

it

to the

Greek myth of Leda and Zeus; Ni Dhomhnaill here allies the myth to a uniquely Irish version. The "sea people" that the poem speaks of— the half-human, half-seal selkies of Celtic

myth—were

the subject of the John Sayles film The Secret of Roan Inish— hardly

required viewing in this context, but a delightful film, and one which evokes quite vividly the rugged beauty of the

West of Ireland, and the Gaeltacht.

Labasheedy (The Silken Bed)

The genre of

this

poem might be made

Marlowe's The Passionate Shepherd in part for the vividness of its

its

to

clear by

His Love; at

comparing

the same

it

time, the

to

Christopher

poem depends

imagery on the Old Testament Song of Solomon, with

rich sensual images translated into

an

Irish landscape

and an

Irish idiom.

Whose Language?

562

Why

Choose

I

Ni Dhomhnaill's to see

to

Write in

essay

is

at

Irish,

real explication. Instead,

hard

it's

you may wish

to lo-

claim— that "minority languages

like Irish" have a "unique world"—and ask your students whether or compelling. Does Ni Dhomhnaill's analogy to biological diversity

cate the essay's central

and unrepeatable way of looking it

up and Talks Back

once so confident and so self-deprecating that

where students might need any

not they find

the Corpse That Sits

at the

seem reasonable?

Nadine Gordimer WTiat Were You Dreaming? Part of what's so engaging about this story

we know what kind of story

we're sure

wrong. The

first

pression of a

somewhat

up

And

we're constantly being proved

to their expectations, telling probable stories rather than the

if

life

and

the passenger suspects that the whites' heads are

narrow a

set

sometimes

situation.

black (and coloured) South Africans, as

is.

"Coloured" hitchhiker, creates the im-

somewhat cunning young African, and the two well-meaning, if who stop for him out of some condescending sense of guilt." The hitchhiker, having summed up his hosts quite quickly,

improbable truth about his

But

this

section, narrated by the

that at several points along the way,

naive, Britons

"white liberal plays

is

we

full

of stereotypes about

quickly learn that he operates out of just

of assumptions about these whites—assumptions which, in the case

to be quite unfounded. She knows who he is, and what he's doing; while the passenger sleeps in the back seat, after the story breaks midway and the narrative point-of-view shifts to third person, we hear both the

of the white

woman, turn out

simplified version of the truth that she

tells

her tourist companion, as well as the

more complex truth that she figures out for herself. She realizes that their passenger isn't what he appears to be; but she also knows that if he's lying, he's doing so in

an attempt to

"translate" the hardship of his

prehensible to English

men and women

South Africa. The only solution, seemingly, English to take the time to

about one another

must concoct well,

live in

companion

is

is

into

for

one another's

first-hand; while she

for her

life

an idiom that will be com-

unfamiliar with the realities of

cultures, to gather

Complicity

is

worm

knowledge

thinking about the half-truths that she

that he might understand better,

if

she thinks, looking at his tourist's sunburned arm: "there

through which the

in

life

both the Africans and the

not perfectly is

the place

he needs to be infected with can find a way into him.

.

.

.

the only understanding."

James Kelman

One

thing that the

overlooks

is

Home for a Couple of Days common comparison of Kelman to

that both Beckett

and Kafka present

both Beckett and Kafka

a vision of

human

despair

undergirded with a fundamental humor; "Don't presume," Beckett would

say,

"one of the thieves was damned; don't despair— one of the thieves was saved." Kelman's

is

an altogether darker

vision;

even

if

his characters don't face the ex-

Whose Language?

treme, even allegorical, misery that Beckett's characters to one's

neck in a

come up

563

against (buried

up

of sand, exposed to the hot sun, watching one's husband

pile

up the pile with a pistol), their options, and their resources, seem if anything more strained. A more apt comparison on this score would be James Joyce, to whose story A Little Cloud Kelman's Home for a Couple of Days bears more than a crawl

surface resemblance.

The

first;

little

aloud, to get a feel for

one develops an inner ear

practice,

There

is

of course an

Eddie leave for London?

Kelman

is

it,

you may want to have students

some dialogue a

may prove something of an obtry their hand (or tongue) at reading Kelman's Glaswegian speech rhythms. With

and Kelman's representation of

dialect,

stacle at

for the writing.

of mystery hanging over

air

Why

careful not to dispel these mysteries,

not to spend too

much

much

come back? Has he

has he

of the story—Why did

been in prison? and students should be encouraged in fact

time on fanciful solutions to problems the story

itself re-

fuses to answer.

Instead,

Kelman seems

world in which to

to

want us

to stay

on the

literal level

men of all ages sit in pubs drinking, waiting for the

come through; where new

of the story: a next dole check

and a friend drinking in a differGlasgow has changed tremendously in

curtains in a pub,

ent establishment, signify that a

city like

Brown

three years. By the story's conclusion, we're apt to believe not that Eddie

has just been released from prison, but that he's just landed back in

it.

Derek Walcott

A Far Cry from Africa Walcott's punning

title

suggests both that the speaker hears,

from

afar,

guished cry of Africa, but also that the Africa of the western imagination u

The poem

the anis

often

and does its work in the space between these two meanings, investigating the ways in which propagandistic language allows us to commit violence against others, and how Walcott's own dual from the

a far cry"

allegiances force

reality

of Africa.

upon him an awareness of this

dwells

hypocrisy.

Wales Describing the Welsh landscape in grammatical and poetic terms, Walcott asserts a similarity falling

into

between the way that language disuse,

is

used in Wales—with

the linguistic situation of Wales

Dhomhnaill describes

in Ireland—while asserting that

u

is

its

similar to

a language

is

Welsh what Ni

native

shared

/

like

bread to the mouth," ultimately holding the people together. This faith is based on the fact that the English-speaking Caribbean, like Wales, will continue to forge

an

identity simultaneously through

its

two

linguistic traditions.

The Fortunate Traveller

The word

"fortunate" of the

title

comes

the poem's end, and not just because Traveller:

the speaker of the

well attended to both by the

poem

is

it

number of ironic resonances by on Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate

to have a plays

"fortunate" in that his creature comforts are

government agencies that support him and by the

for-

eign bodies that attempt to bribe him, but the sharp contrast between the luxuries

Whose Language?

564

he enjoys and the misery he sees

("Tou

especially fortunate.

all

around him makes

are so fortunate,

you

it

difficult for

him to feel / Indeed,

get to see the world—'

have seen the world. / Spray splashes the portholes and the vision

indeed

sirs,

blurs.")

His simple charge

I

to

is

show mercy, or charity,

ing requires; the protagonist realizes, however, that

as the

it is

New Testament teach-

quite possible to dispense

charity (aid, relief) without a spirit of charity undergirding the operation—and in fact,

more

the

and the more

The poem jects

suffering

one

difficult true

brings

throughout

sees, the

more one

deadened

is

to the pain of others,

Christian charity becomes.

up the

false charity that

has propped

up various

history, including the Belgian ivory trade in the

colonial pro-

Congo

that

the

is

subject of Conrad's Heart of Darkness; various of Conrad's pilgrims, too, spoke of charity,

Africa.

but instead robbed the continent blind. "The heart of darkness

/ The

heart of darkness

is

the core of fire

Once Gave

My Daughters,

/

not

is

in the white center of the holo-

caust."

Midsummer: 50

The lie

("I

writing of youth

separate

is

compared

on the sandy bottom; but

rate stones start to

as one's career

as in Walcott's case, those of parents that

Midsummer: 52

Two Conch

dropped into the

and

life

Shells")

sea,

which

progress, those sepa-

form lineaments between themselves—form constellations that

surprisingly resemble those of the tradition

The

Separately,

to separate stones

("I

Heard

one has (unconsciously) inherited,

we have imbibed

Them Marching

invasion of the English language

is

the Leaf-wet Roads of

imagined

or,

at a pre-logical level.

My Head")

as a military invasion,

trampling

mud; Walcott, the poet, declares that his occupation Army of Occupation / are born enemies." Thus the poet with dual lin-

the native language into the

"and the

guistic citizenship, like Walcott,

Far Cry from Africa.

English into his

The

is

own language—to

them bleed and stand

in a difficult position, as he

solution, in this

poem,

is

had explored

in

A

to appropriate the materials of

pin the poppies of English to his blazer, to

let

by, articulating their death.

Midsummer: 54 ("The Midsummer Sea, the Hot Pitch,

this Grass,

These Shacks That Meet Me")

Another poem on the same theme: Walcott's vexed relationship to the English language and to the British literary tradition. The reference to "the sacred wood" in the third line

is,

among other

things, a veiled allusion to T. S. Eliot's criticism,

the way that his critical pronouncements for decades set the fashion, and

and broke reputations, among British poets; his first critical volume was Sacred Wood (and contained the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent).

and

made

called

The

About

the Editors rr$a

»

«

i

David Damrosch is Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of two books, The Narrative Covenant and gether with articles ory.

He was

on

We

Changing

Scholars:

ancient, medieval,

the Culture of the University, to-

and modern

literature

and

on the ancient Mediterranean world and on contemporary

sections

literary the-

a contributing editor to The HarperCollins World Reader, co-editing the

and Chair of English

literature.

He

Christopher Baswell

is

the author of

Medieval England: Figuring the "Aeneid" from the Twelfth Century

Virgil in

Professor

New

Chaucer and co-editor of the The Passing of Arthur:

to

Tradition.

His

articles

have appeared in Speculum,

Barnard College.

at

is

Essays in Arthurian

and elsewhere.

Traditio,

is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative and Director of Irish Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. Co-editor of Richard Beacon's Solon His Follie and author of The Orlando Furioso, A Stoic Comedy, she is the recipient of a Queens College Presidential Research Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Folger Institute.

Clare Carroll Literature

Kevin is

J.

H. Dettmar

the author of The

the Rereading the New:

Clemson

Associate Professor of English at

is

Illicit

A

University.

He

Joyce of Postmodernism: Reading Against the Grain, editor of

Backward Glance at Modernism, and co-editor of Marketing

Modernisms: Canonization, Self-Promotion, Rereading and of Reading Rock

&

Roll:

Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics.

Heather Henderson She

is

is

Associate Professor of English at

the author of The Victorian

articles

Self:

on Victorian autobiography and

the The Dickens Quarterly, she

Endowment

is

is

travel.

Formerly the book review editor of

St.

Andrews

Professor of English at

Author of Renaissance Feminism:

College.

the recipient of fellowships from the National

of the Humanities and the

Constance Jordan

Mount Holyoke

Autobiography and Biblical Narrative as well as

Literary Text

Claremont Graduate

and

Monarchies: Ruler and subject in the Romances, she

Society.

Political

is

the American Council of Learned Societies,

University.

Models and Shakespeare's

the recipient of fellowshs from

National

Endowment

for

the

Humanities, and the Folger Institute Fellowships. Peter J.

He

is

Manning

is

Professor

on English

at the University

of Southern California.

the author of Byron and His Fictions, and of Reading Romantics, as well as nu565

About the

566

merous

aspects of British Romanticism. Co-editor with

on

essays

Editors

of editions of Byron, of Scott, and Praed, Hood, and Beddoes, he

Endowment

of Guggenheim and National the Distinguished Scholar

Anne Howland Wagner

Williams of

articles

Chapman Sharpe

thor of Unreal

Cities:

on the

Keats-Shelley Association.

Naming

and Chair of Humanities Unnamable from

the

the

Dante

at to

Modern

of the

Pearl-poet

Professor of English at Barnard College.

is

Urban Figuration

and co-editor of the The

and Vision

the recipient

and on medieval Latin poetry, she of Woodrow Wilson and Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships.

the recipient

William

Ineffability:

is

Humanities Fellowships, and of

Professor of English

is

College. Co-editor of

and author of

Beckett is

Schotter

Award from the

for the

Susan Wolfson

City:

He

is

the au-

Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot and

in

Passing of Arthur:

New

Essays in Arthurian Tradition

and

Essays in History, Art,

Literature.

A

former

Fulbright Lecturer in France and Mellon Fellow at the Society of Fellows in the

Humanities

Columbia

at

University,

he

is

the recipient of fellowships from the

Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment

Sherman

Stuart

Fordham University. He reAmerican Society for Eighteenth-Century

Associate Professor of English at

is

ceived the Gottschalk Prize from the

book

Studies for his

1660-1785.

He

Telling

Time:

Clocks,

Diaries,

also the recipient of the Quantrell

is

for the Arts.

and English Diurnal Form,

Award

for

Undergraduate

Teaching, as well as fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies

and the Chicago Humanities Cynthia Wall

is

Institute.

Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She

is

the author of The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration and the editor of The

Rape of

the

Lock for Bedford Cultural Editions. Author as well of articles

Pope, Stow's Survey and English auctions, she

from the University of

Virginia, the British

Learned

Societies,

and the American Society

Jennifer

Wicke

Professor of English

is

of Virginia. She Born

to

on Defoe,

the recipient of the fellowships

Academy, the American Council of for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

and American

Literature at the University

editor of Feminism and Postmodernism

and of the forthcoming

Work of Consumption. Her book Advertising Fictions: Advertisement and Social Reading was a finalist for the National Critics

Shop: Modernity and the

Literature,

Book

is

is

Circle

Award

in Criticism. Recipient of

an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty

on aspects of film, on James Joyce.

Fellowship in the Humanities, she has also written extensively cultural criticism,

Susan

J.

Wolfson

and Anglo-American

literature, especially

Professor of English at Princeton University. She

is

of The Questioning Presence: Wordsworth, Keats, and Poetry;

Women era.

Formal Charges: The Shaping of Poetry in the Curriculum;

Co-editor with Peter

and Beddoes, she

is

J.

Manning of

in British

essays

on

the author

is

Mode

in

Romantic

Romanticism; British Literature:

aspects of the British

editions of Byron, Scott,

Romantic

and Praed, Hood

the recipient of research fellowships from the American Council

of Learned Societies, the for the

and numerous

the Interrogative

Humanities.

Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment

Index of Authors*

Arnold, Matthew, 418

Elizabeth

Mary, 207

Astell,

Auden, W.

H.,

539

Anna

Gay, John, 234

Laetitia, 271

Gray, Thomas, 246, 268

Greene, Graham, 538

Barnfield, Richard, 127 Beckett, Samuel,

386

Gaskell, Elizabeth,

Joanna, 279

Barbauld,

118

Gascoigne, George, 102

Bacon, Francis, 162 Baillie,

1,

Etherege, George, 201

549

Hardy, Thomas, 390, 498

Behn, Aphra, 195

Hemans,

Beowulf,

Henryson, Robert, 91

1

Blake, William, 274

Boswell, James,

309

Felicia,

Herbert, George, 156

259

Herbert, Mary, Countess of Pembroke,

Browne, Sir Thomas, 164

Herrick, Robert, 155

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 348

Hobbes, Thomas, 164

Browning, Robert, 375

Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 441

Burton, Robert, 166

Howard, Henry,

Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 297

Johnson, Samuel, 248

Carleton, Mary, 183

Jonson, Ben, 149

Carlyle,

Thomas, 337

Joyce, James, 517

Judith, 8

Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of

Julian of Norwich,

Newcastle, 188

70

Keats, John, 314

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 38

Kempe, Margery, 78

Clare, John, 313

King James

Cloud of Unknowing, The, 69

Kipling, Rudyard,

286

Bible,

Kureishi, Hanif,

The, 163

444

552

Conrad, Joseph, 485

Langland, William, 58

Dafydd ap Gwilym, 86

Lanyer, Aemilia, 121

Darwin, Charles, 360

Larkin, Philip,

Defoe, Daniel, 209

Lawrence, D. H., 531

Dekker, Thomas, 143

Lovelace, Richard, 158

Dickens, Charles, 382

Malory, Sir Thomas, 33

Donne, John, 149 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 393

Marie de France, 25

Drabble, Margaret, 555

Marlowe, Christopher, 128

Dream of the Rood, The, 9

Marvell, Andrew, 159

Dryden, John, 190

Middleton, Thomas, 143

Dunbar, William, 90

556

Mandeville, Sir John, 76

Mill,

John

Stuart,

344

Eliot,

George, 398

Milton, John, 168

Eliot,

T S.,

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 232

*

520

For authors

who

17

Earl of Surrey, 97

Cary, Elizabeth, 140

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor,

1

appear in perspectives sections, see the perspectives entry; for discussions of authors, see the principal author listing with which they appear

Companion and Contexts

567

Index of Authors

568

More,

Sir

Thomas, 98

Philips, Katherine, 161

Morris, William, 431

Naipaul, V.

S.,

Piozzi,

550

Nesbit, Edith, 395

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 123

406

Nightingale, Florence, Pater, Walter,

Robinson, Mary, 277

437

Rolle, Richard,

Pepys, Samuel, 178

and Decadents, 470

Myth

Perspectives: Arthurian

in the

Second Play of the Shepherds, The, 72

Bloomsbury and Modernism,

527

Shakespeare, William, 132

Sharpe, William

Perspectives:

Emblem,

Style,

Metaphor,

Shelley,

and Religious

Government and

Self-

Sir

264

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 434 Tain bo Cuailnge, The, 3

Reading Papers, 210

Tale of Taliesen, The, 85

and Science, 367

The Abolition of Slavery and War, or the

Civil

War

of

The Great War: Confronting

Vaughan, Henry, 159 Voyage of Saint Brendan, The, 75

the Modern, 505 Perspectives:

Thomas, Dylan, 546

Thomson, James, 244

Three Kingdoms, 167 Perspectives:

Taliesin, 14

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 352

the Slave Trade, 276

The

The

Industrial Landscape,

The

Rights of

Wanderer, The, 15

Waugh,

342 Perspectives:

Man

and the

Revolution Controversy, 272 Perspectives:

The Royal

Society and the

Perspectives: Spiritual Self-Reckonings, 175

Gender,

on

Women

and

and Empire, 450

Perspectives: Victorian Ladies

and

Wilde, Oscar, 461

Wodehouse,

P.

G.,

538

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 278

Wordsworth, Dorothy, 285 Wordsworth, William, 280 Wroth, Lady Mary, 154, 164

Gentlemen, 408 Perspectives:

Whose

Perspectives:

World War

Empire, 541

Isabella, 116

Wife's Lament, The, 16

Woolf, Virginia, 523

141

Perspectives: Travel

Evelyn, 537

Whitney,

Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, 199

Science, 184

Perspectives: Tracts

103

Swift, Jonathan, 215

and the

Problems of Authorship, 326

Perspectives:

Edmund,

Spenser,

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 388

Mind and God, 238

Perspective: Popular Prose

Perspectives: Religion

Gawain and the Green Knight, 29

Skelton, John, 95

Perspectives: Landscape, Pleasure, Power,

Perspectives:

300

Sidney, Sir Philip, 111

Government, 100

Perspectives:

Mary, 322

Shelley, Percy Bysshe,

Encounters, 10

Perspectives:

Chapman, xv

Shaw, Bernard, 501

157 Perspectives: Ethnic

Perspectives:

429

Dante Gabriel, 426

Rossetti,

Ruskin, John, 104

History of Britain, 22

New

68

Rossetti, Christina,

Perspectives: Aesthetes

Perspectives:

Hester Salusbury Thrale, 263

Pope, Alexander, 222

Language?, 558 II

and the End of

Wulf and Eadwacer,

16

Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 96 Yeats,

William Butler, 512

y/jrsTiTJm

555j

ISBN D-3E1-D2737-X 90000

780321"027375